Hasta La Gadget!

Is that Coco Chanel cellphone applique you got at the mall starting to look a little… last season? Kent Displays Reflex LCD Electronic Skins may be the perfect partner to your fickle ways, changing colors on demand to suit your every mood and/or outfit. The company first started talking them up late last year and now is finally showing them off, flexible single-pixel displays with an eight-color range and the ability to be layered to form multiple color-changing regions, like logos for your next alternative advertising venture. Despite the demonstration videos below these still don’t seem to be ready for consumer purchase, rather Kent appears to be looking for manufacturing partners. Hurry up and get those production lines working — our corporate Blackberries aren’t getting any more interesting by themselves.

[Via Engadget German]

Continue reading Kent Displays’s Reflex LCD Electronic Skin changes colors to match your shirt, lipstick

Filed under: Cellphones, Displays

Kent Displays’s Reflex LCD Electronic Skin changes colors to match your shirt, lipstick originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You see, there’s not much wiggle room when it comes to netbook pricing. By and large, vendors have priced their machines about as low as they can in order to receive but a sliver of a profit, and there’s certainly no way they could eat another $20 to $30 on each unit and still feel good about themselves. To that end, we’re hearing that many companies may make their Atom N270 and Atom N280-based netbooks ineligible for the Windows 7 upgrade (from the factory, anyway), with those always-mysterious “industry sources” pointing to “increasing costs and low consumer demand.” In essence, these guys feel as if consumers will view Windows XP as sufficient for those underpowered machines, while it’ll be the Atom N450, Atom D410 and Atom D510 machines that’ll be most suited for Win7. ‘Course, we suspect you’ll be able to pony up for whatever upgrade you’d like once it’s in your hands, but we wouldn’t anticipate any handouts to suddenly be attached to existing machines.

[Via GadgetMix]

Filed under: Laptops

Atom N270 / N280-based netbooks may be stuck at Windows XP originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Intel’s jumped into familiar waters this month at Computex when it showed off Braidwood, a flash memory-based accelerator that works by caching I/O from the processor, reportedly enabling applications to launch much faster. Though not directly stated, for all intents and purposes it looks like this is a spiritual successor to Intel’s Robson / Turbo Memory, a similar initiative from the company’s past that didn’t quite meet the commercial or critical success it had hoped. Whether we see better results this time is gonna be a story we revisit in the more distant future: Braidwood’s coming as an option with the Nehalem-based Clarkdale processor, which isn’t ramping up production until late this year.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Intel’s Braidwood looks to take another stab at Turbo Memory originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We reported a while back about Lark’s very interesting and creative tobacco co-branding campaign with Japanese creatives. The packages themselves got the custom treatment, but so did the unique freebie lighters which often ended up on Yahoo Auctions for over $20.

Virginia Slims, the definitive woman’s brand, has done much to feminize its image in the last years. Beyond graphics, the packages themselves for the “Duo” series split nicely in half for convenient purse carrying. This collaboration with Shibuya-girl brand Gamble Fish is similar to the Lark promotion, but goes strictly for fashion and aims for female smokers in their 20’s. Lots of sparkles, stars, glitter, and nice Gamble Fish freebies to go with it. Not sure if this is a coincidence or not, but there are also some “star” overlaps on the packaging and fashion items as well!

We like this concept of a wide variety of packaging to appeal to different market segments. It’s cheaper than ever to customize and print these, and creates a totally different impression than the same-old logo all the time.

Nobody was happy to see digital video standards splinter along the lines of DisplayPort and HDMI back in 2007. Two years on and Dell and Apple seem to be the primary forces behind the standard as the rest of the consumer electronics industry opts for straight-up HDMI. Kind of makes you wonder if DisplayPort is the new Firewire particularly with HDMI 1.4 and minascule Type D HDMI plugs around the corner. At least Eizo’s tossing DisplayPort another bone today with the introduction of its 23-inch FlexScan EV2333W-H in Japan. The 1920×1080 pixel display with 3000:1 contrast, 300nits of brightness, and 7-ms response also packs a DVI-D jack to help ease the transition. It’ll cost ¥54,800 (about $560) when it lands in Japan mid-July. Not exactly a game-changer.

Filed under: Displays

Eizo 23-inch FlexScan EV2333W-H chooses DisplayPort, not HDMI originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Jun 2009 05:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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