Hasta La Gadget!

The Genius Bar horror stories are in. And they are horrible. Geniuses obliterating iMacs, covered in roaches, even stealing customers’ girlfriends. The evil Genius Bar is real, and it’s in your local mall. Update: We’ve added another truly shitty experience.

Click here to see all of the stories on one page, though it might be too much horror at once.

Now, reach down into the bottom of your hearts, and tell us who most deserves that free pizza. (And keep sending in your own horror stories.)

The Gravity Ruler is a low-tech, lightweight solution to overweight luggage, a bungee-cord and weighing scale in one.

Recently, a one-two punch from the airlines has meant that the weight of your carry-on luggage is rather important. First, you need to pay for any checked bags. Second, if your hand-luggage weighs too much, you have to check it. It’s a great way for the budget carriers to scam a few extra bucks out of their already suffering customers.

So you need to keep the carry-on under the limit, but of course you don’t want to carry a scale which just adds more weight to your luggage. Enter the Gravity Ruler, an elastic bungee cord inside a plastic tube. The cord is marked with orange ribbon, and the tube is calibrated in kilos. You thread it through the handle of your suitcase and lift. As the bungee stretches, it lines up with the marks on the non-stretching tube, giving an instant readout of the weight. It weighs almost nothing and is small and bendy enough to slide into even the most overstuffed of bags.

The designer, Marcella Maltese, made a limited run of 35 Gravity Rulers and sold them all in an hour. Here’s hoping that she gets these to a proper manufacturer. Alternatively, you could travel on Europe’s Easyjet, whose in-cabin weight limit is described thus: If you can lift it into the overhead locker, you can bring it on.

Gravity Ruler [Marcella Maltese via Core77]

Despite the incredible realism of the drawing above to the left, we’re probably not looking at iPhone OS 4.0 right here. Instead we’ve got Apple doing what Apple does: applying for a patent for some pretty vague functionality that may or may not end up in a device someday. No harm in that game, but it looks like Google’s already done the “put a contact on the home screen with their picture” thing before Apple got a chance, as demonstrated on the right. There are other little tidbits to Apple’s approach, however. Apple is naturally showing that little numeric badge we know so well, to show what sort of new activity the contact has (hopefully that pulls calls, SMS and email into one pretty little package, like we’ve seen on other modern operating systems), but Apple also mentions that “an icon associated with an entity can be temporarily displayed on the mobile device based on the proximity of the mobile device to the entity.” So, Stalking 2.0. We like it, and hope to see it in some future iPhone software, but between the crazy broad claims in the rest of the patent and Android’s prior art, we’d say Apple’s chances of getting this 2008 submission approved are pretty slim.

Apple tries for ‘adding a contact to a home screen’ patent, but Android beat them to the punch originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Redmond Pie, Being Manan  |  US Patent & Trademark Office  | Email this | Comments

The sometimes-believable, sometimes-not fellows over at DigiTimes are reporting today that Windows Mobile codename “Maldives” is going to break out as version 6.6 (a name we’d previously heard associated with version 7) with native support for capacitive touchscreens next month — a launch window that would line up nicely with Mobile World Congress, where 6.5 was announced a year prior. HTC’s HD2 has already proven that it’s possible to cleanly support capacitive touch on a 6.x-based device, so it’s reasonable to think that this is legit — but what we don’t yet know is how this dovetails with 6.5.3, whether they’re the same thing, and if Microsoft is doing this simply to buy itself a few precious extra months to bake WinMo 7 to a crispy, golden brown perfection. We’d already heard before that 6.x and 7 will have an opportunity to coexist in the marketplace, so it’s entirely possible that 6.6 is the version that’ll carry that torch on the 6.x side of things — but if this gets announced alone without a mention of Robbie’s ground-up rewrite at MWC, we’d wager there’ll be riots in Barcelona.

Windows Mobile 6.6 (aka ‘not Windows Mobile 7’) set for February release? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Slashgear  |  DigiTimes  | Email this | Comments

This is the Miniguru, from Guru Board, and it’s the smartest keyboard we have seen in years. We’re stuck with the keyboard, probably forever, so the Guru Board folks have stripped it to its basics and tried to make it faster and easier to use.

The premise is that you keep your hands in one place, with your fingers always on the home row. To this end, the number pad has been removed, and a nipple has been added just like you’d find on a Thinkpad notebook keyboard, so you can mouse around without a mouse or trackpad. Even the cursor arrows have disappeared, moved to be easier to use.

The Miniguru works like this: two “swirl” keys, on either side of the spacebar, change the mode of the entire keyboard. Pressing one with your thumb, for instance, flips the keys into a navigation mode where the i,j,k and l keys work as cursors, with other oft-used functions close to hand. To free up these thumb-keys, the alt keys have been shifted next to the swirls (in the same place as they are on a Mac keyboard) and the ctrl key has been shifted to replace the useless, almost universally hated Caps Lock key.

If you’re thinking that you’ll need to learn a new way of typing, you’re right. Mac users especially will have a lot of muscle memory baked into the Command key shortcuts they use every day. To this end, Miniguru has a clever approach to reprogramming the keyboard layout. Any changes made using the configuration software (and you can change pretty much everything) are saved to the keyboard’s own firmware. This means that whatever computer you plug it into, it will act just as you set it to.

This keyboard-for-life philosophy continues to the construction. When it is available (in the last quarter of this year), it’ll have proper mechanical keys. The keycaps will come in a choice of “clicky, tactile or linear” responses. You can also customize the colors of the caps, the tray and the nipple, along with a choice of vertical or horizontal “return” key.

How much will it be? We don’t know. The price will be announced when the product is ready to ship. As someone who already has too many keyboards at home, I can’t wait.

Miniguru Product page [Guru Board via the Giz]

See Also:

• Just My Type: Hands-On With the Das Keyboard III
• A Tale Of Two Keyboards: Apple Extended Keyboard II Vs IBM Model M …