Hasta La Gadget!

Poor Kodak. George Eastman’s once proud company conquered the world, bringing cheap, portable and easy to use cameras into the hands of millions. Now it is reduced to a purveyor of trinkets, a prince turned pauper, hawking tatty tchotchkes just to pay the bills.

There may be no better evidence that Kodak has lost it than the Smile Digital Photo Keychain. At first, the idea of a little photo screen in your pocket is appealing, and you start to think of loading it up with baby photos to make a gift for Grandma. But then the device arrives, you hook it up via USB to you computer, and the nightmare begins.

First, some physical details. The Smile has a small but bright 1.5-inch screen, a mini-USB port, a rechargeable battery with a two-hour life and of course a ring for keys. It is a little bulky, but for people who like to dangle crap from their keychains, perfectly portable. There are also three buttons for accessing menus and flipping between photos.

When you connect to the computer (in this case a Mac running OS X 10.6), the display flashes a question: USB connect? Yes. No. Pick “yes” and a tiny, ~300kb CD mounts on the desktop. Yes, a CD. Upon this you will find driver software and instructions for both Windows and OS X.

Unzip the app, called MacDPFmate, and fire it up. You will be greeted (in Snow Leopard at least) with a box telling you you need to install Rosetta, the framework needed to run legacy PowerPC applications. That’s right. We have had Intel Macs for years, and a brand new Kodak product doesn’t support them. Good work Kodak. Even better, take a look at the software when it is finally running:

That’s not a glitch. It really looks that bad. After a while I managed to make it work, and it will read any picture file that the computer supports, converting it to a bitmap image for display on the device, even RAW. The problem is that you can’t actually navigate to the pictures if they are in your home directory (hint — unless you are a very odd Mac user, they will be here). I assume some permissions have not been set properly. The workaround is to make copies of the photos in a shared or system-level folder, something granny will of course find easy.

It gets worse, but I won’t frustrate you. Actually, I will. See those arrow buttons. They move the picture around in the big black box. But you can also drag the crop-overlay with the mouse (thank the lord), rendering this huge chunk of the window pointless.

Once the pictures are on the keychain, though, everything should be fine, right? Switch on and enjoy the show? Wrong. The display is indeed bright, but it is at a resolution so low that it is impossible to see any detail. I took some snaps to show you, but all you see is a blur.

We don’t know what Kodak was planning to do here. It seems like the R&D department was given this simple brief: “Make the customer hate us”. In this, they achieved outstanding success. From the lightweight, cheap plastic housing to the undersized keyring, awful blocky screen and indescribably poor software, the Smile will make you do nothing but frown.

It’s not all bad, though, and there are two features that slightly mitigate the otherwise total contempt for the customer. One, you get a free USB cable in the box. Two, it’s pretty tough. The Lady and I took turns flinging it at the tiled floor and, while the metal ring loosened, the horribly, blocky slideshow just kept on going. And don’t be fooled by the on-screen photo in the picture at the top of the post. That’s a sticker that comes covering the screen. $30.

Press release [PR Newswire]

Flat-screen televisions are a major upgrade from existing cathode-ray tube TVs, making new high-definition sets one of the hottest-selling items in consumer electronics. But that dazzling picture and bigger screen come with a price: higher energy use.

To individual consumers, a bigger flat-screen TV might mean a noticeable bump in monthly electric bills. But at a national level, the onrush of these new energy-hungry TVs is a growing concern.

On Friday, the California Energy Commission finalized a proposal to regulate energy consumption in TVs sold in California sold after 2011.

The move is significant because California’s stringent efficiency standards in appliances have impacted codes across the country in the past. California’s efficiency measures in big appliances, such as refrigerators, have been credited with keeping the per capita electricity consumption in the state steady since the 1970s.

But not everyone is happy with the California measure, which is expected to pass in November. Industry association the Consumer Electronics Association opposes the proposal, arguing that any efficiency improvements should come from consumer demand rather than regulation.

To unwind some of the issues around energy efficiency and TVs, we offer this FAQ, which draws on the analysis of CNET Reviews’ senior editor David Katzmaier, who has been measuring power consumption in TVs for the past three years. You can see the latest data at CNET’s Energy Efficiency Guide and power ratings of 150 HDTVs.

If I buy a new flat-screen TV, will I be slapped with a huge energy bill?

Not necessarily. The primary reason flat-screen TVs consume more power is because they are bigger. The California Energy Commission estimates that per square inch, LCDs consume a bit more than CRTs, but most people are also upgrading in size, which means significantly more electricity use. That’s one reason why TV product ratings from the likes of CNET and Consumer Reports now include yearly energy consumption estimates.

…

Originally posted at Green Tech

Before they all went pro, one of the big differences between the entry-level unibody MacBook and the next model up was the illuminated keyboard of the better machine. This upgrade cost a few hundred bucks, and I bit, paying the premium for see-in-the-dark keys.

If only I had known about the Dark Keyboard Stickers, from Baron Bob, the tireless Gift Crusader. For a mere $9, I could have added the glowing stickers which are described both as glow-in-the-dark, or as highly reflective, depending on which paragraph you choose to read. Whichever it is, you should be able to see a lot more in dim rooms, and perhaps this would be the perfect compliment to the Laptop Burka, today’s Worst Gadget Award winner.

Product page [Baron Bob via BBG]

Not only is the name in very questionable taste, but the product itself seems useless to anyone with access to a laundry closet. The Laptop Burka is a sheet of “breathable, lightweight fabric” which you drape over both yourself and your computer to cocoon the pair of you in a glare-free, psychologically separate space.

Let’s take a look at some of the “features”.

Laptop Burka lets you work or watch movies in your own portable private space.

If you watch movie under this thing whilst in public, there is only one kind of film that passersby will assume you are watching.

Laptop Burka lets you work and play on your laptop without the glare of sunlight or stares from uninvited strangers.

Clearly wrong. Strangers will actually stare more. You just won’t be able to see them.

No more eye straining or battery draining from glare.

True. But neither will there be any more laptop after somebody sneaks up on you unnoticed, deals you a carefully aimed whack to the head and makes off with the machine. Worse, nobody will approach your unconscious form for fear of, well, for fear of meeting the kind of nutjob who would cover themselves like this in public.

And did we mention that it is called the Laptop Burka? Avoid, and as the Lady suggests, just go indoors. $36.

Product page [Laptop Burka. thanks, Mark!]

The best camera is the one you have with you. And – possibly – the best camera software designer is a photographer. At least, that’s what Chase Jarvis hopes. Chase is the man who proves that, in the right hands, the iPhone can make an awesome camera.

Chase has collaborated on a new iPhone app called “Best Camera” which, as Strobist David Hobby told me this morning, is “like Photoshop lite for the iPhone”. Best Camera grabs pictures from you camera roll and lets you process and then share them. Many other applications do this but, to disagree slightly with David, Best Camera comes across more like a mini-Lightroom.

This is because of its approach to effects, all of which are accessed by a rolling strip of icons at the bottom of the screen. Like Lightroom, there are built-in presets — four of them, which mimic the look of Chase’s own photos. The there are several more “building block” like filters which can be stacked together and, again like Lightroom, saved as presets that can then be shared. Best of all, these filters can be removed and the order rearranged.

The sharing works for the pictures, too, allowing you to send them to Facebook, Twitter, via email and also to Bestcamera.com, a new community site set up to compliment the app. There is also a big fat plug for Jarvis’ new book, The Best Camera. He bills this as the third part of his new project, which is fine, but you don’t need it to use the application. $3.

Product page [The Best Camera]
Product page [iTunes]