Hasta La Gadget!

Engadget reader Martin Schrotz is a man after our own hearts. He’s taken the editors’ choice for best smartphone of 2009 and tricked it out with a handsome new back cover made out of titanium. Not sufficiently pleased with the plastic casing provided by Apple, Martin opened up his favorite CAD program and refashioned his phone into the much hardier and indubitably more awesome machine you see before you. The new backing is built out of a titanium alloy that allows RF waves through and therefore requires no plastic parts to let the wireless communications flow. Check out the gallery for more before hitting the link below to bug Martin to provide you with a video or a price estimate.

iPhone 3GS mod ditches plastic cover in favor of titanium vestment originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The MagicJack is a VoIP dongle that hooks ye olde landline telephone up to the world of tomorrow via a humble computer. By all accounts, it seems to work pretty well and does the job it promises. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like we can say the same about its management team. A post on Boing Boing in April 2008 addressed some pretty concerning aspects of the MagicJack EULA: it demands that you cede your right to sue the company and give it permission to “analyze” the numbers you call, but even more worrying was the fact that no links to said EULA were provided either on the website or at the point of sale. That is to say, every purchaser of the product was agreeing to something he or she hadn’t (and couldn’t have, without tracking the URL down via Google) read. Oh, and apparently the software comes without an uninstaller.

The whole thing could’ve been just a nice warning tale about not getting into contracts without reading the fine print, but MagicJack CEO Dan Borislow, hardly a man who shrinks from controversy, felt so offended by Boing Boing‘s, erm, statement of factual reality that he took them to court, citing that his company was exposed to “hate, ridicule and obloquy” (we had to look that last one up, it’s just another word for ridicule, which makes the whole thing a tautology. Lawyers, eh?). Unsurprisingly, he lost the case, but he did manage to squeeze in one last act of shady behavior prior to his loss by offering to pay for Boing Boing‘s silence regarding the proceedings and costs. After he was turned down, MagicJack’s coffers were still lightened by $54,000 to cover the defendants’ legal fees, whereas its reputation can now be found somewhere in the Monster Cable vicinity of pond scum central. Great job, Boing Boing.

MagicJack sues Boing Boing, gets bounced out of court originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Even DARPA understands that its futuristic bubble shield can be penetrated given the right circumstances, and when it does, the soldier behind it is going to need some serious healing. In a hurry. In the entity’s newest budget, there’s $6.5 million tucked away “for the creation of a scaffold-free tissue engineering platform, which would allow the construction of large, complex tissues in vitro and in vivo.” As you well know, this type of mad science has been around for quite some time, and now it looks as if DARPA is ready for the next best thing: “non-contact forces.” Put simply, this alludes to replacing scaffolds with magnetic fields or dielectrophoresis, which could purportedly “control cell placement in a desired pattern for a sufficient period of time to allow the cells to synthesize their own scaffold.” It’s still too early to say how close we are to being able to instantaneously heal soldiers on the battlefield, but frankly, the public is apt to never know for sure.

DARPA longs for magnetic body healers, crazy respawn camps originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Seeing a Boeing 747 destroy a liquid-fueled ballistic missile with a megawatt-class laser is undoubtedly one of the tech highlights of the year so far. Unfortunately, as impressive as the demonstration was, it’s unlikely to be militarized in its current state. While the Air Force’s chief of staff, General Norton Schwartz, called the demonstration “a magnificent technical achievement,” he has no intention of introducing the fat tub of chemical goo into the theater of war. Solid state lasers are the future “coin of the realm,” according to Schwartz, not Boeing’s chemical laser which he claims, “does not represent something that is operationally viable.” Of course, the chemical core of the laser was just a single component of the ALTB that managed to track, target, and destroy a moving projectile from an airborne platform. And while the technology might not be viable for broad deployment, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be fitted into a special forces AC-130 Gunship for covert operations until solid state lasers (currently limited to about 100kW) achieve megawatt status. Just saying.

US Air Force chief: Boeing laser “not operationally viable” as far as you know originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ah, wireless power. One of those mythical mysteries that are far more likely to remain “something to strive for” rather than “the next big thing.” Oh sure, we’ve got Palm’s Touchstone and the Powermat, but until we can hang a 50-inch plasma from our bedroom ceiling and power it up without a single wire, we’ll remain firmly unsatisfied. Thankfully for those of us in that camp, MIT exists, and a few of the school’s best and brightest are toiling around the clock in order to develop a technology that would power not one, but multiple devices sans cabling. Thanks to the wonders of coupling resonance, we’re told that the “overall power transfer efficiency of the wireless system could be increased by powering multiple devices simultaneously, rather than each device individually.” In theory, the system could be implemented by “embedding a large copper coil in the wall or ceiling of a room,” but there’s obviously no set time frame for release. We’ll be looking for you geeks at CES next year, okay?

MIT jumps straight to wirelessly powering multiple devices originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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