Concept
art for an Apple touch-screen Netbook.
(Credit: Gizmodo)
If you’ve been following the Apple Netbook gossip along with us the last few months, here’s the latest tidbit, courtesy of Barron’s:
A “veteran analyst,” albeit a very anonymous one, has allegedly seen and touched Apple’s rumored “…
Can a fanny-pack ever be cool? The answer is a resounding “no”, but try telling that to the worldwide tourist throngs that carry their valuables in one easy-to-snatch pouch on their waists. The only good thing about it is the name, which in British English means something quite different.
But the fanny pack is as useful as it is dorky. What if somebody came up with a hipper hip-bag? You’re ahead of me here. Fabric Horse make a whole range, only they’re not fanny packs. They’re utility belts. Like Batman wears. Awesome.
The packs, sorry, belts, are designed for cyclists, and are especially handy in the summer when heavy messenger bags or rucksacks make you sweat. They come in full and half sizes (more or less pockets), have clip or Velcro fastenings, metal loops for clipping carabiners and wrenches. They also have the Lock Holster, a loop at the back designed to carry a Kryptonite Evo Mini, apparently the bike messenger’s lock of choice. The holsters are “made from seat belts pulled from junk yards,” so they’ll last.
Could it be that Fabric Horse has finally made the fanny pack not just acceptable but actually desirable? Maybe. Packs run from $55 up to $120, and a standalone (hang-alone?) lock holster is just $10.
Product page [Fabric Horse. Thanks, Google!]
Oh sure, we’ve seen Samsung’s WinMo-powered Omnia II a time or two before, but this looks to be the first instance of it waltzing in front of a camera after leaving its retail packaging. Not much seems to have changed from those pre-release versions we peeked, and we have to say, that 3.7-inch AMOLED display looks awfully inviting. Of course, you’ll have a hard time procuring one of these critters here in North America without a solid importer over in Singapore, but if you can somehow steal some patience from underneath that couch cushion, you’ll be just fine. Give the read link some love for a few more high-res shots.
Filed under: Cellphones
Samsung’s retail Omnia II smartphone gets hands-on treatment originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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According to the French magazine Chasseur d’Images, a dead-tree publication dedicated to photography, Nikon is readying a camera with a buit-in LED projector, which will throw images of up to 8 x 12 inches onto the wall of a darkened room.
The reason we like this rumor (or leak) is because of the pedigree of the French magazine: Chasseur d’Images, because of the long lead times for printed publications, often gets the scoop early. This was the magazine that broke the Leica Noctilux 50mm ƒ0.95 lens well before its official birth.
Nikon is certainly focusing (ahem) on the more interesting side of photography. Since it dropped out of the megapixel race we have seen some amazing work on low light imaging, an extraordinarily good strobe (the SB 900) and a consumer camera with built in GPS. A camera with a projector inside doesn’t seem so far-fetched now, does it?
Groundbreaking Nikon news = code name Nikon VP650 [Nikon Rumors]
Photo: pedrosimoes7/Flickr
Most of us spend several hours a day peering into a screen. Whether we’re working, gaming, chatting, or entering a semivegetative movie-watching state, we tend to blink about once every five seconds. If we grow bored, drowsy, or just less focused, that rate slows, which puts a serious strain …
Originally posted at News – Health Tech
This hot looking block of metal and circuitry is a high-end home-theater and audio dock for the iPod family. The Onkyo ND-S1 will take the bits stored on the music player and perform its own digital to analog conversion before piping the pristine signal off to the stereo setup of your choice.
Don’t laugh. While processing a crappy MP3 is a waste of time and money, lossless formats or even full-on wav and aiff files can benefit from some 16bit, 48kHz love, and you can fit a decent amount of them onto, say, a 32GB iPod Touch. The dock will also hook up to a computer via USB and allow you to sync your iPod with iTunes, as well as grabbing music from that same iTunes library and performing it’s magic. Hooking this thing up to a Mac Mini as a dedicated music box may be overkill, but hey — we’re talking about audiophiles here, the kind of people who can spend hundreds of dollars on mains cable.
The dock also comes with a remote control, and work’s with any iPod except the iPhone. Price is as yet undecided, but it will be on sale in the fall.
Product page [Onkyo via Akihabara News]
We all know that those ink cartridge refills never really function perfectly as advertised, so rather than paying too much to have a lackluster printing experience, boxlightbox has decided to repurpose his empty Epson boxes into prepossessing lighting instruments. The simple (albeit masterly) lamps maintain the iconic presence of an ink cartridge while still fitting into the overall feel of an art deco home. At $350, the sensational Ink-Cartridge Chandelier shown above certainly isn’t the cheapest of fixtures, but for those who spend entirely too much time at Kinko’s, it’s totally worth the investment. Hit the read link for more ways to spend money that you don’t have — or, you know, to just get a few ideas for scratching that DIY itch.
[Thanks, David]
Filed under: Household
Empty ink cartridges repurposed as glorious lamps originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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After Sony’s unorthodox VAIO P, did you really expect the outfit’s first “real netbook” to burn the house down? With Microsoft’s inane hardware restrictions still firmly in place on Windows XP-based netbooks, there’s only so much differentiating Sony can do, and evidently those subtle tweaks didn’t exactly justify the higher-than-average $499 price tag. Computer Shopper managed to give the unit a spin a few weeks prior to its US release, and while it definitely appreciated the 1,366 x 768 resolution display, the cramped keyboard, painfully lackluster 3-cell battery and commonplace performance didn’t exactly elicit huge grins across the review room. Naturally, the design here is pretty notable, but with ASUS’ Eee Seashell line already lookin’ pretty decent for a lot less cheddar, we’d agree that Sony’s going to have to do better than put a pretty face on a vanilla set of innards to get our next five Benjamins.
Filed under: Laptops
Sony’s VAIO W netbook reviewed: personable and pricey, and that’s pretty much it originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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DailyMail Online: Homemade strawberry jam is very much back in fashion. It’s partly down to budget-conscious and organic consumers, and partly because the summer has been brilliant for fruit-growers.
And there’s one more thing: forget the redoubtable ladies of the WI, the MTV generation are getting in on the act.
After all, the Tefal electric jam maker, the cheat’s route to homemade jam, is the best-selling product at Lakeland, with more than 8,500 of them flying off the shelves this year. Sales of jam-making equipment like jars, lids, thermometers and pots are also through the roof at other retailers.
Will jam-making stick as the cool new thing? [DailyMail Online]
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Michigan and MIT have created glass “leaves” with networks of veiny channels filled with water. The smallest channels extend all the way to the edges of the leaf, where open ends allow water to evaporate, which draws water along the central stem of the leaf — at a rate of about 1.5 centimeters per second. The glass leaves have been wired for electricity by adding metal plates to the walls of the central stems and connecting them to a circuit. Researchers then charge the plates and the water inside the stems creates two conducting layers separated by an insulating layer, which acts as a capacitor. The waterflow is then periodically interrupted with air bubbles, and every time a bubble passes through the plates a small electrical current is generated — about 2 – 5 microvolts per bubble. The team thinks that on a large scale, artificial trees could be use to generate large amounts of energy entirely through evaporation.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Glass leaves sweat to generate electricity, get nervous in public situations originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Aug 2009 04:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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