Hasta La Gadget!

Denon hasn’t released all that many speaker docks over the years, but their latest offering looks quite good. The Cocoon wireless speaker has an interesting shape and is packed with tech to make you consider this as a good option.

The Cocoon comes in two varieties, one for your home, and a smaller portable version with rechargeable batteries that will last 5 hours. DLNA and AirPlay Wi-Fi streaming takes care of all mobile devices on your home network and you can hook it up with the press of a single button.

The docking mechanism looks swanky and the connector retracts when iOS devices aren’t docked. Unfortunately, it’s only got a 30-pin dock connector, so iPhone 5 users will have to connect wirelessly and cannot take advantage of the charging capabilities.

A white-on-black OLED display on the face of the docking tray can display track information, and also functions as a clock. In terms of sound, it has two-way speakers, double-layer woofers, two bass ports, and four 25-watt amplifiers coupled to a nine-band digital equalizer.

The dock also includes a wireless remote control, which tucks neatly into the back of the dock when not in use. The Denon Cocoon Home sells for $599.99 and Cocoon Portable for $499.99, and they’re both available for order over at Amazon now, though they are currently out of stock.

[via designboom]

It looks like all the big companies now have got an 8 megapixel camera in their smartphones, and although I’ve had one for almost a year on my iPhone, I am somewhat disappointed that no one has released a smartphone with a better camera, except that PureView craziness Nokia released. Nevertheless, HTC comes right back at Nokia with their own brightly-colored Windows 8 Phone, complete with 8MP camera.

Ever since HTC admitted that they had way too many phones and that most of them were too big, I had to reconsider my opinion of them. The HTC 8X is the company’s new signature handset, with a 4.3-inch HD LCD screen (720 × 1280), with a Gorilla Glass 2 covering, Beats Audio for be a better headphone experience, a 2.1 MP front facing camera and a 8MP backside-illuminated camera.

The phone has full quad-band support for GSM/GPRS/EDGE and WSPA/WCDMA networks, as well as 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. It’s also got built-in GPS, compass, motion sensors, and is NFC capable. There’s even a dedicated headphone amp, which is kind of an interesting feature. The 1,800 mAh battery isn’t bad, but I would have liked something bigger, given what Samsung puts in their phones these days.

Under the hood, the HTC 8X runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.5GHz dual core processor with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. It will be available this November in blue, black, red and yellow.

[via Uncrate]

Mobile phones are making a lot of things obsolete – payphones, maps, privacy – because of cheap and easy to use apps. A new open source technology might add keys – and keychains, and locksmiths – to the cellphone hit list. Called LibeTech, the system enables QR codes to be used as door keys.

LibeTech was developed by Jeremy Blum and 3 other students from Cornell during their senior year. The system is very simple to use. Say you have a hotel reservation. All you have to do is go to a website, log in and the hotel will send you a QR code.

When you get to your room, just show the QR code to the webcam at the door and you’re in. You don’t even need to own the latest smartphone to do this; any phone or gadget that can store and show the image of the code will suffice.

Of course, the convenience is a double-edged sword: someone could easily take a copy of your code. Imagine keys to entire hotels being shared on torrent sites. After much thought and consultation with fellow nerds, Blum and his colleagues have decided to make their technology open source instead of building a commercial product based around it. If you want to modernize your doors, head to Blum’s website for more details and links to the necessary code.

[via Hack A Day]

If you’re like me, you’ve probably got some tunes playing while you tackle your daily workload. Depending on if you use Last.fm or Spotify, the Skube might be an interesting way to share your music. It has a lot of retro design appeal, and the skewed cube look is pretty neat.

Skube was developed to stream online music, directly from the popular music services Spotify and Last.fm. The music player is supposed to facilitate the decision-making process of picking tracks. Skube has two modes: playlist and discovery. Playlist plays all the tracks on your Skube while discovery looks for similar tracks that will suit your taste. When different Skubes are connected together, they act like one player and shuffle through all playlists.

It’s currently been built into a fully-working prototype that uses an Arduino, Max/MSP and an XBee wireless network. It’s definitely a cool concept and I hope it gets launched into production soon.

[via NOTCOT]

Pretty much anyone who has an iPhone knows that it uses up quite a bit of power. If I’m away from home for most of the day, I absolutely need a juice up. These days, I’ve got a cheap iPhone battery case that does the trick. Everpurse is a more stylish option, with more power but it’s still an external battery.

Everpurse is a small case that has a special pocket into which your iPhone automatically “slides” and hooks itself up to a dock connector. There’s a patent involved, so I’m guessing that this is a pretty unique docking process. Once you’ve done this, your phone starts juicing up. Apparently the battery is enough to charge your iPhone from 0% to 100% twice in one day, so probably something like 3,000 to 5,000 mAh.

Once you get home, you just have to place your Everpurse onto a charging mat. The clutch itself will charge inductively, but it won’t charge your iPhone inductively. It was launched as a Kickstarter campaign and you’ll have to pledge $129 (USD) to get yours. At the time of writing, the project had amassed $127,000, blowing past its $100,000 goal with 25 days left, so it will definitely be produced.

[via Swiss Miss]