Hasta La Gadget!

Blake Bevin’s awesome home-built self-lacing sneakers are headed to a store near you, thanks to an almost too-appropriate effort to fund the production on the Kickstarter site.

You may remember v1.0 of Bevin’s sneakers, an early version of the Nike boots worn by Marty McFly in Back to the Future 2, with an external Arduino-controlled motor that only a geek could love. V2.0 is now ready, and all the components (servos) have been hidden inside for a way cooler shoe. Take a look at the video. The money-shot is at the end:

I know, right? If you’re like me you let out a little moan when you saw the laces tighten. Bevin is using the Kickstarter project to raise money to further develop the invention and take it to market, and hopefully it won’t fall foul of Nike’s patent of the idea (a patent which is clearly invalidated by prior-art: the movie itself). If you want to, ahem, kick-in with some cash, head over to the site and take a look.

Kickstarter project page [Kickstarter. Thanks, Blake!]

See Also:

• Back to the Future: Hacker Makes Self-Lacing Sneakers
• Great Scott! The 2015 McFly Sneakers Are Now (Somewhat) Real …
• McFly 2015s Patented by Nike
• Nike Patents Marty McFly's Self-Lacing Sneaker

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Poor, poor Sony. First PSJailbreak splayed wide the PS3’s security model, now PSGroove has arrived calling itself the “open source PSjailbreak.” The code must first be downloaded and installed onto a $30ish AT90USBkey or a $25ish Teensy++ USB development board. After that, homebrew enthusiasts can then execute unsigned third-party apps and games on their PS3. At the moment, the ability to boot ISO files (read: pirated or “backup” games) is temporarily disabled. But we’re sure that some of the internet’s more nefarious types will find their way around that. Cat, welcome to the world outside of the bag.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

PS3 homebrew jailbreak released into the wilds originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news for UK mobile addicts: Orange’s long-anticipated HD Voice service has officially made it to the Land of Hope and Glory. Starting today, British customers can pick up a HD Voice-enabled handset — including the Nokia 5230, X6, E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro at launch — from Orange, and start buttering their ears with “crystal clear” phone calls while within the carrier’s 3G coverage. Prior to the launch, we were fortunate enough to try out the new service on a couple of Nokia E5 prototypes in Piccadilly Circus, and boy, that was some pretty impressive stuff there — the wider speech bandwidth really added a lot of clarity to the caller’s voice, and additionally, the noisy traffic from the caller’s end was well suppressed at where it’d otherwise crackle over a normal call. Perhaps the easiest way to put it is that this is much like jumping from a bad FM radio broadcast to some sweet CD audio, thus making conversations a lot easier to interpret, even if the recipient is in a noisy environment or has hearing problem (as proven by Orange’s public trial). As always, hearing is believing, so do check out our sample audio clips after the break.

While Orange remains a dominant driving force behind this mobile revolution, the carrier assured us that it expects other companies to pick up this open standard. That said, it’s rather disappointing that current owners of the aforementioned handsets won’t be getitng a software patch for the HD upgrade (we were told that no extra hardware is involved), but we can understand — the manufacturers do need to sell new phones to stay alive in this rapidly changing market. Anyhow, here’s hoping that the forthcoming flagship Android and Windows Phone 7 devices will also get a taste of this crystal clear call quality.

Continue reading Orange HD Voice service and handsets go live in the UK, we go ears-on (video)

Orange HD Voice service and handsets go live in the UK, we go ears-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remeber the Motorola i1? Moto has just added its second rugged(ish) Android handset in the 3.7-inch Gorilla Glass-fronted Defy. It’s dust-, scratch-, impact-, and water-resistant. Matching up to the IP67 durability spec means it’s expected to resist being submersed in up to a meter of water for up to half an hour — making it a pretty awesome option for taking your Android to the beach, 854 x 480 is your screen resolution, backed up by an OMAP 3610 chip running at 800MHz (there had to be some tradeoffs, right?). Android 2.1 is another slight disappointment, we’re not clear on why Froyo had to be left off the table, but at least Motorola has bundled Swype as the default input mechanism. Should be a boon for some, we suppose. The Defy is expected to launch across Europe in Q4 2010.

Update: Hands-on video now available after the break.

Continue reading Motorola Defy: Android 2.1 goes rugged with water, dust and scratch resistance

Motorola Defy: Android 2.1 goes rugged with water, dust and scratch resistance originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been known for some time that Twitter would be moving away from basic authentication to OAuth for third-party apps; in fact, they’d already officially pushed back the drop-dead switchover date once to mid-August before finally pulling the plug this week. Be that as it may, it makes sense that a bunch of lesser-known, less-maintained apps would fall by the wayside once the old security mechanism got shut down — but HTC’s Peep? Really? Sure enough, we’ve been able to confirm on our own Desire that the Twitter app HTC bundles with its Sense UI for Android is no longer working this morning, giving users an “incorrect username or password” error when they try to connect. We’re not sure if they’ll be able to fix this with a Market update across the board or if it’ll take a bunch of firmware updates to get everyone back on the up and up, but either way, something tells us Twitter isn’t going to flip the switch back on for these guys.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

HTC Peep cooked, served a l’orange by Twitter’s new authentication scheme originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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