Hasta La Gadget!

Anyone who travels often knows that sometimes the right pillow can make all the difference between a good night’s sleep and long hours spent tossing and turning. Any mattress or bedding store will tell you that it’s important to get a pillow that’s right for the way you sleep, but The Dream Machine wants to take things a step further and actually manufacture custom pillows to your specifications on demand. The machine includes a built-in sewing machine, a tall container full of down and stuffing, and 280-thread count cotton pillow sleeves.

The Dream Machine also allows you to select whether you sleep on your stomach, back, or side, and will create a pillow to match the way you sleep. It also creates smaller travel pillows for you if you’re planning on taking a trip and want something to rest your head on while in-flight or on a long train ride. You can even ask The Dream Machine to scent your pillow with lavender. The company behind The Dream Machine is targeting the device at mattress and bed/bath stores, and expects the custom pillows (and the experience of having one made just for you) to retail between $129 and $149 per pillow.

[via UberGizmo]

Looking for some innovation to go with your porridge this morning? How about this fan-made flip phone concept that pivots vertically and horizontally? You can use it as a standard old clamshell, with the lower of the two displays acting as your number pad, or you can rotate it down to pair the screens into one snazzy widescreen panel. That’s all there really is to it, but it seems like such an ingenious idea to us — maintaining the slimline dimensions that some think are crucial to phones, while offering the generous screen size that we all want. Hit the source link to see more of this “Sony Ericsson” FH concept.

Continue reading Sony Ericsson concept phone is as clever as it is unreal

Sony Ericsson concept phone is as clever as it is unreal originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already gotten a glimpse at MeeGo’s prerelease stock UI for handsets, but just like Symbian, there’s no guarantee that the experience is going to be consistent across manufacturers — and a new video apparently captured from an online survey makes it seem like Nokia might be looking to go in a slightly different direction. The one minute, twenty-nine seconds of footage walks us through five parts — starting up, the “powerful multitasking UI,” getting connected, the Ovi Store experience, and the music player — and as you might imagine, it’s the Ovi Store portion that has us feeling like this is a thoroughly Nokia-customized experience (not to mention the copyright in the lower left). It generally looks richer and more functional than what we’ve seen before, and parts — like the webOS-esque multitasking — remind us of Maemo 5’s thumbnails, which makes perfect sense considering MeeGo’s roots. Follow the break for the full video.

[Thanks, MTA]

Continue reading Nokia’s treatment of MeeGo smartphone UI revealed?

Nokia’s treatment of MeeGo smartphone UI revealed? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you think Intel chips are just for PCs, take a look at this touchscreen kiosk that the company has created for retailers.

The hulk of metal, plastic and glass looks like a Star Trek prop but it promises to replace the traditional CRT monitors with green-tinted screens that are still at the check out point in most stores.

The kiosk tries to bring the best features of online shopping, such as recommendations, history and easy check-out to retail stores, says Ryan Parker, director of marketing and architecture. We first wrote about this last year but Intel had a polished and slicker-than-ever demo ready Wednesday.

When a customer swipes a card or slides their purchase across the horizontal screen, the display will show the price and payment options –which include the option to pay by cellphone. As you scan the items, the kiosk also makes recommendations on what else you can buy and gives you a quick snapshot of it.

The entire kiosk is powered by Intel’s Core2Duo processors and it uses a solid state drive that helps the overall system work faster and consume less power than existing registers.  The chips also include Intel’s vPro technology, a virtualization technology that Intel builds into the chip itself, to make it secure and easy to manage.

The whole set-up is pretty neat, especially when you compare it to the self-check out counters at a Safeway or Lowes. But I can also see something like this potentially slowing down the check out process and longer lines at exit are not something consumers want.

Intel says it retailers don’t have to buy this whole idea as it is. They can pick the pieces they want and integrate it into their existing stores.

See Also:

• Why Intel Wants to Get into Energy
• Intel Introduces Ultra-Low-Power Processor for Smartphones
• Intel Researchers Turn Counter Tops Into Touchscreens
• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet

Photo: Stefan Armijo/Wired.com

Nokia Kinetic concept offers some ideas Nokia might want to heed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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