Hasta La Gadget!

Mike Haeg is the mayor of Mount Holly, Minnesota*. He also hates talking on the telephone, and to make his point he hacked together this amazing Bluetooth headset. Inside, the guts are that same as you’d find in any other Bluetooth earpiece. Outside, it’s a gun.

Take a call and you look like you’re about to blow your own brains out. I’m totally with Mayor Mike on this: I feel suicidal every time my cellphone rings (unless the called is from my honey-voiced editor Dylan Tweney, in which case I close my eyes, kick back and just let the lilting, mellifluous tones wash over me).

Mike’s headset charges over USB, and works like this: ” I draw the gun out of my pocket, stick the barrel in my ear (the speaker is in the business end), and pull the trigger to answer the call.” Screwing your eyes shut before you pull that trigger is optional but recommended.

The next stage may or may not be a coat of paint to make the orange toy a little more realistic. Mike says “I get equally giddy and frightened by the panic that this could cause should someone not notice that the gun is a fake or should I accidentally take a call while at the bank.”

This is my favorite hack this month. Playful, simple and very funny. I’m thinking of making two. One to use, and a matching water-filled squirt-gun to sneakily swap in when somebody wants to try it out.

Handgun Bluetooth Earpiece Project [Mt. Holly Mayor’s Office via Boing Boing]

*Minnesota’s Smallest Town

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You’d probably assume that Samsung would have a difficult time overshadowing the Galaxy S right now, but all it really takes is a salacious Bluetooth SIG entry that leaves only the most important parts to the imagination. We’ve known for some time now that Sammy would be one of Microsoft’s closest Windows Phone 7 launch partners, and we’ve even taken the time to toy with a prototype earlier in the year. But a new Bluetooth certification is now all-but-confirming a name: Cetus. The SGH-i917 is apt to be North America’s first WP7 device from Samsung, a 4-inch smartphone with an 800 x 480 AMOLED display, 5 megapixel camera, a VGA front-facing camera, an FM radio tuner, inbuilt GPS, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, USB 2.0 and of course, Bluetooth. As for pricing, availability and form factor? “Not yet.”

Samsung’s 4-inch Windows Phone 7 handset gets named: Cetus (SGH-i917) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s oft-leaked multi-touch trackpad is now on sale. The Magic Trackpad is a multi-touch tablet-style pad which is either a bigger version of the trackpad on the MacBook, or a smaller version of the iPad’s screen.

Like every other Apple touch-device, it is made from glass, and the panel is set into an aluminum base. The batteries that power it (the unit is Bluetooth) sit in a tube at the back, and it looks like nothing more than Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard, chopped in half and with the keys removed.

The pad works with swipe and pinch gestures, and even has the “momentum-scrolling” familiar to iOS users as well as owners of the latest MacBooks. It’s not going to replace your Wacom Tablet, as there is no pressure detection, but it will replace a mouse on a desktop Mac. The price? $70, and available now.

Magic Trackpad [Apple]

See Also:

• Apple Files for 'Magic Trackpad' Trademark
• Rumor: Apple Multi-Touch Tablet Photos Leaked
• MacBook Pros Get the Multitouch Magic; But Where's the Redesigned …

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If you’re using both hands to play a musical instrument, the last thing you want to worry about is turning the pages of sheet-music as you play. The traditional solution was to make somebody do it for you, or to quickly reach up and do it yourself.

Tech has helped. These days a laptop with a USB foot-pedal is the way to go, but there have been all manner of spring-loaded and hydraulic contraptions invented to turn actual paper pages. These were, as you might expect, less than reliable.

Airturn, maker of sheet-music-reading software and hardware, has come up with a solution for the iPad. Apple’s tablet would seem to be the perfect device for reading music: it’s big enough to replace a piece of paper, whilst still slim and light enough to put on a music stand. Combined with Airturn’s new Bluetooth foot-switch, it makes a reliable, wire-free and practical solution.

The BT-105, as it is called, has a pair of switches, one to page forward, and one to page back. The switch doesn’t just work with the company’s own software, either. The video demo shows it controlling a third-party app with a zoom feature. In this case, the switch can tell the app to flip half a page at a time or, more accurately, to show the second half of the page before it flips to the next one.

The switch is in development right now, but should be available in the last quarter of this year.

iPad Bluetooth page turner footswitch prototype [Airturn. Thanks, Hugh!]

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It’s the convenience of a Bluetooth headset without something electronic sticking out of your ear. It’s a way of freeing yourself from your cell phone and any possible radiation damage. It’s as fashion-forward as a “Dick Tracy” cartoon. It’s the Bluetooth Wristband Speakerphone, and it’s arrived. Wear it at home, in the garden, or anyplace else where people can’t see you.

The wristband offers audio caller ID, voice activated commands for placing calls and answering the phone, and both vibration and sound alerts. It lets you roam up to 30 feet from your cell phone and even beeps when you go out of range. On one charge, it’s good for up to 4 hours of talk time or 160 hours of standby. You can even use it to stream music. If you’re sold, head over to Atomic9’s Web site where you can get it for $99.99 in black or white.