Hasta La Gadget!

Zombies are scary. So are ghosts. Especially scary are zombie ghosts–that’s when a zombie dies but still feels it has unresolved zombie work to do on Earth OR when a regular ghost gets bitten by a zombie and spends its time looking for ghost brains to eat.

It’s all almost too scary and complicated to think about.

But if you want really scary this Halloween, I have three words for you: massive debilitating injury. Nothing is scarier than being reminded about the frailty of the human condition. I spend way more time contemplating plane crashes, undiagnosed tumors, and falling branches than I do about the oncoming zombie apocalypse.

And that’s the brilliance of this costume, which actually dates back to 2006. One former A/V club president designed a way to use a simple digital camera and travel DVD player to make it appear as if he has a gaping wound in his abdomen. The digital camera is strapped to his back capturing the action behind him, the image transmits to the DVD screen in the front, creating the gaping hole effect. It’s actually kind of brilliant. And, with the advance of technology in just the last four years, it’s probably a lot easier and cheaper to do in 2010.

Way more frightening than a ghost zombie.

via Make, image via Flickr

The Captain Ahab analogies are proving more and more apt as time goes by. Looks like Apple’s proverbial white whale is being delayed again.

The company issued a statement apologizing for yet another pushback in the device’s launch, writing, “We’re sorry to disappoint customers waiting for the white iPhone yet again, but we’ve decided to delay its release until this spring.”

Apple hasn’t issued much in the way of details surrounding the delay of the phone. Word is that the delay has to do with a slight color mismatch between the phone’s faceplate and the home button–heads would almost certainly role around Cupertino, should such an aesthetic mismatch ever make it into the wild.

This is the third time the white iPhone has been delayed since it was first announced alongside the black iPhone 4, back in June. Shortly after, Apple announced the device’s first delay, stating that the phones, “have proven more challenging to manufacture than expected.”

Steve Jobs recently asked what would happen if “an iPad and a MacBook hooked up.” Apparently hardware hook-ups are all the rage, because Asus has been asking the same thing about the Magic Mouse and the poorly received “puck” that came with the first iMacs.

Of all the Atom-powered, Windows 7 tablets we’ve seen over the last year and a half (and boy have there been a lot!), the 11.6-inch ExoPC has been the one we’ve been waiting on. Sure, its specs are similar to the recently reviewed Tega v2 and CTL 2goPad — it’s also got a capacitive touchscreen, accelerometer, Atom Pinetrail processor and 2GB of RAM — but unlike the others the company has put some serious love into its Windows 7 software layer, which we’ve dubbed the Connect Four UI. ExoPC’s also preloaded the tablet with touch apps, built out its own app store and included a Broadcom Crystal HD accelerator to handle full 1080p video. You can clearly see why we’ve had high hopes for the ExoPC ever since we got to check it out at Computex, but does it live up to the promise and provide the more enhanced and finger-friendly Windows experience we’ve been looking for? And is the software stable and robust enough for the average consumer? We’ve spent the last week with the $599 tablet so read on to find out in our full review.

Continue reading ExoPC Slate review

ExoPC Slate review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Did you know that the word “jumbo” originated from the name of an African elephant famed for being the largest of his kind? HTC will be well familiar with that tag having already rattled off the HD2, EVO 4G, and HD7 in a smartphone-dwarfing 4.3-inch form factor. And while that may not be the largest screen you can have your Android confectionery on today, it’s arguably the upper limit of what we might consider a pocketable device. The HTC Desire HD follows, and seeks to improve upon, its laudable predecessors with an aluminum unibody construction, WVGA (800 x 480) display, 8 megapixel camera with dual LED flash plus 720p video, and a modern 1GHz CPU. That hardware is put at the service of Android’s latest Froyo offering, complemented with an updated Sense that includes a web interface for controlling and discovering your phone remotely. It’s a rich spec sheet, that much is unquestionable, but you’re not just here for tenuous wildlife-related metaphors, you want to know if the whole is equal to, or perhaps even more than, the sum of its parts. Join us after the break for a deeper look at the Desire HD.

Continue reading HTC Desire HD review

HTC Desire HD review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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