Hasta La Gadget!

Say what you like about Adobe’s Creative Suite icons, they’re nothing if not distinctive. When these plain colored boxes with simple letters first showed on the CS4 beta, we thought that the icons were beta versions too. But these elemental logos were the real thing.

Now, you can have a periodic plushie, your favorite CS4 application rendered as a cushion. Better still, even the full suite is cheaper than the real thing, at just $80 instead of over a grand, and individual cushions are a reasonable $15 each — that’s about the same price as an Ikea cushion, only without the stressful visit to the store.

Product page [My Suite Stuff via the Giz]

After a brief period of no news, it’s time to revisit the world of invisible cloaks. Inspired by the ideas of theoretical physicist John Pendry at Imperial College, London, two separate groups of researchers from Cornell University and UC Berkeley claim to have prototyped their own cloaking devices. Both work essentially the same way: the object is hidden by mirrors that look entirely flat thanks to tiny silicon nanopillars that steer reflected light in such a way to create the illusion. It gets a bit technical, sure, but hopefully from at least one of these projects we’ll get a video presentation that’s sure to make us downright giddy.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Wearables

Quest for invisibility cloaks revisited by two research groups originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on November 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

What would you call a PC with a mac-like dock across the bottom of the desktop with icons to Web 2.0 services like Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail, and YouTube? The Google Computer – the one that was rumored to launch back in 2006? Nope, it’s the Everex Green gPC TC2502, a low powered Linux based computer designed for running Web 2.0 applications which will be priced at $198. Where can you get it? Wal-Mart – starting today.

While it seems to be all about Google, it turns out that Google hasn’t even been directly involved with this project. I’m sure you’re asking then, well what does the “g” stand for in the name? My first thought was obviously Google, but it’s not, it supposedly stands for green.There certainly is a lot of Google in this computer, but there are a few non-Google icons on the desktop as well for services like Meebo, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Skype and Gimp are also in the mix.

As mentioned, it starts selling today at Wal-Mart for $198 which is quite the bargain, considering that the One Laptop Per Child computer will cost $400 for a consumer because of the Give 1 Get 1 program. This computer ships with 512 MB of RAM and an 80 GB hard drive. News.com says that the PC in general is a great product with the only criticisms being for the Web apps themselves. They also mentioned that while it’s quite a bit cheaper than many computers, it’s an “almost-as-capable alternative to a regular PC or Mac.”

From the sounds of it, the gPC was designed with lower-income households in mind. While this is great, to make the most out of it, they’ll need to pay for high-speed Internet which could get costly. Regardless, this is a PC that could work great for just about any average user who currently spends the majority of their time on the Internet using Web 2.0 apps.

Look for it in select Wal-Mart locations starting Monday, or go to Wal-Mart.com where they are currently selling them. Also, checkout the gOS website for the company who created the operating system. They haven’t launched the site as of when I’m writing this, but it will be up shortly.

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• Wal-Mart Gives the gPC the Boot
• Wal-Mart Introduces “Bloat-Free” Budget Computer
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• Get 15 Free Blu-Ray Movies with PS3 Purchase at Wal-Mart?

The WSJ reports that Apple is putting together an all-star chip design team, starting with the former CTO of AMD, to work on in-house units for mobile devices. Old habits die hard.

Apple is prone to occasional fits of vertical integration, and has never been terribly reluctant to run counter to the prevailing hardware winds, but this doesn’t sound like some Jobsian act of contrarianism. The report indicates that it’s the iPhone’s unique power and performance demands that are driving this move, at least ostensibly:

Apple could use the internally developed chips to sharply reduce the power consumption of its hit iPhone and iPod touch devices, and possibly add graphics circuitry to help its hardware play realistic game software and high-definition videos, people familiar with its plans say.

Apple already works with Samsung, the manufacturer of the ARM-based processors used in the iPhone and iPod Touch, to design chips suited to their specific needs, and Apple is a large enough company that it doesn’t have trouble coaxing tailor-made hardware out of its suppliers. But totally in-house chip design boasts the huge advantage of secrecy; removing Samsung from the equation ensures that any power-saving, graphics-boosting chip features Apple manages to conjure for their next iWhatever don’t eventually find their way into units available to other industry giants like HTC or RIM.

So don’t confuse Apple’s latest move with an effort to spur innovation—from here, this looks like technology-hoarding, pure and simple; a bid to further insulate their mobile devices from competition by locking down their hardware as hard as they do their software. [WSJ]

We’d kinda gotten used to the cold, hard reality of being teased with the promise of a Cupcake build on our retail G1s out in some distant, nondeterministic future that we may or may not be a part of — but all of a sudden, it looks like we might’ve vaulted right past Cupcake. We’ve now received multiple tips this evening suggesting that T-Mobile may have started distributing Android 1.5 as an over-the-air update to G1 owners, which would bring customizable widgets, messaging enhancements, virtual keyboards, and UI tweaks (among many other goodies) to an eager public. Anyone out there seeing this?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

P.S. – No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you: these are little green pastries baked by T-Mobile. “We heard people wanted cupcakes,” one representative told us.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Android 1.5 already hitting T-Mobile G1s? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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