Hasta La Gadget!

While we knew that Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ had been working on the company’s tablet project, the WSJ says that Steve has already “killed the project twice in recent years.” That’s right. The Apple tablet. Dead. Twice. Why?

The first time, apparently, he killed it for crummy battery life, and then the second time because it had “insufficient memory.” Both of which seem like minor roadbumps, not fatal sins—isn’t that the iPhone 3G nowadays to a T? But it actually kind of makes us happy, that Jobs—and Apple—are being that disciplined about it. Death to the weak models. That’s promising.

The report also reveals that since Jobs came back from medical leave, he has been incredibly involved not just with the development of the “touch screen gadget,” but with the strategy for marketing and advertising as well. Which isn’t surprising, since it’s the tablet and Steve Jobs, but apparently this involvement has been “jarring for some Apple employees who had grown accustomed to a level of freedom over strategy and products” while he was gone, said the WSJ, basing comments on a source who specifically said, “People have had to readjust” to Jobs’ management.

Though the article is ridden with anonymous “people familiar with the situation,” Jobs himself was contacted and responded with a curt, “Much of your information is incorrect.” Hey, if he didn’t specifically deny the existence of an Apple tablet, that’s close enough for our dreams. [The Wall Street Journal]

Theatrical bots “Thomas” and “Janet” — who look complex enough to do non-theatrical work too — have been smacking lips since a December 2008 production of Phantom of the Opera in Taiwan, but only now has video evidence of their deviant activities surfaced on the interwebs. Causing equal measures of dread, horror and subconscious freaky thoughts, it’s a tour de force of science going down a very dark (and probably moist) path. Technically, it’s a fine exhibition of complex multidimensional coordination and intrinsic self-balancing mechanisms, an excuse you’re at liberty to use if someone catches you watching the videos after the break.

Continue reading Video: The first (televised) kiss between robots

Filed under: Robots

Video: The first (televised) kiss between robots originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The folks at Palm may think they’ve learned how to make some creepy commercials, but let’s face it, they’ve got nothing on Sony. The Japanese company has a long history of discomforting, unexplainable advertising that rivals a David Lynch movie — in fact, Lynch even directed his own television spot back in the PlayStation 2 days, itself reminiscent of UNKLE’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” music video from years before. This latest set of videos for the PS3 Slim in Japan is no exception. Turn off all the lights, raise the volume of your speakers, and bow down before the masters of unnerving gadget promotion just after the break — we included the Lynch ad, too, in case you were interested.

Continue reading Video: PS3 Slim’s Japanese commercials likely to cause fear, distress, and confusion

Filed under: Gaming

Video: PS3 Slim’s Japanese commercials likely to cause fear, distress, and confusion originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit chef Wylie Dufresne at his restaurant wd~50, and he showed me his toys and the food that he makes with said toys.

Wylie Dufresne is one of the preeminent experimental chefs in America. He deconstructs the food that we’re familiar with and then, using tools and ingredients that are rarely seen in restaurant kitchens, builds them back up in near-unrecognizable forms. His amazing eggs benedict, for example, features deep fried cubes of hollandaise sauce and a little cylinder of egg yolk the texture of fudge.

So I was clearly excited to see where the magic happened in his kitchen, and I wasn’t disappointed. Over the course of this week I’ll be posting the videos I shot during my kitchen tour, starting with how Wylie uses liquid nitrogen. In it, he shows me how he uses the stuff to create perfectly spherical balls of ice cream surrounded by chocolate cookie crumbs. Because the microphone on the Flip video camera I used is about as good as the mic on a rotary phone, a transcript of the video is below.

What’s getting a lot of sway right now with urban chefs is liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen, much the same way you can a use hot oil to fry things at 375 degrees, with liquid nitrogen you can freeze things at about minus 275 degrees. And you know, people get excited because it’s so cold that when it’s exposed to the air it turns into a gas, which is a very Hollywood or rock and roll sort of thing.

[Pastry chef Alex] takes more or less sort of a cookie, he would kill me if I said this, but not all that far off from sort of an Oreo cookie, purees it, adds some fat to it, purees it into a liquid phase. Then they take ice cream, milk flavored ice cream. They pipe the milk ice cream into a bowl of liquid nitrogen. So it gets super frozen and from there they drop it into the liquid cookie and they roll it after that in cookie crumbs. And what happens is the ice cream is so cold it instantly sets a shell, even though its in a liquid, on the outside and then they can scoop it out and roll it in some crumbs. And then you get, you know, whatever they call those Dibs or Dabs that you get at the movies. This is a much better, much more high end version.

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

We still don’t know what to make of Creative’s Zii EGG and “stem cell computing” but it looks like we’ll be getting our first answers relatively soon — pre-order customers are being charged and told units will ship by the end of the month. As an added bonus, Creative is apparently including a free HD-out cable in these early deliveries, but we don’t know if these are being pre-loaded with Android or that Plazma OS. Anyone else join the early adopter club?

[Thanks, Joe]

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Creative Zii EGG orders being processed, will ship by the end of the month originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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