Hasta La Gadget!

Anyone who has tried their hand at overclocking recognizes just how evil waste heat is, and we’re guessing that one Wataru Kobayashi at Waseda University in Japan understands explicitly. He, along with a few colleagues, has recently devised a new diode that allows heat current to travel in one direction but not in the other. The breakthrough essentially paves the way for thermal computing to actually take off, with obvious applications including heat sinks for microprocessors. Kobayashi, who may or may not be able to eat a dozen hot dogs per minute in his spare time, also hopes that his discovery will lead to a thermal transistor, thermal logic gates and a thermal memory. The future’s yours, friend.

Filed under: Science

Heat diodes give thermal computing a fighting chance originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hey, remember that OpenFrame touchscreen home telephone that we first peeked way back in August of 2008? Seems like O2 and Verizon weren’t the only ones looking to jump on that bandwagon, as Sharp has now issued a phone / frame tandem that looks eerily similar. The JD-7C1CL/CW is available in black and white to match the motifs present in 99 percent of pristine suburban domiciles, with the frame packing a 7-inch touch panel (800 x 480) that acts as a status indicator, calendar, clock, address book and (gasp!) photo frame. The phone itself doesn’t look to be anything special, though the frame does include a whopping 128MB of internal memory. No word on a price or release date, but really, you shouldn’t be considering a “home phone” in 2009 under any circumstances.

[Via Akihabara News]

Filed under: Displays, Misc. Gadgets, Home Entertainment

Sharp’s JD-7C1CL/CW pairs a home phone and digiframe in fine fashion originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toy Story can suck it. The Japanese didn’t need computer animation to bring this toy to life. Pictured above, a lifesize Gundam robot in Tokyo stands at a gawk-worthy 59-feet tall. The robot looks even more impressive when it lights up at night (pic and video below the jump). Now all they have to do is charge for rides on it — after hiring some top-notch lawyers, of course. More pics and video at Zack Sheppard’s Flickr blog.

We won’t front — our heart goes into overdrive each time Japan’s own Digital Cowboy births a new product, and we’re especially jazzed about its latest Movie Cowboy. Known for introducing markedly outré home entertainment gear, the company’s freshest piece is an iPod-friendly HDD-based media streamer that inexplicably boasts branding from DC Comics. So far as we know, the DC-MC35ULI doesn’t come loaded with a director’s cut of Watchmen, but it does provide room for a single 3.5-inch hard drive along with an Ethernet jack, USB 2.0 sockets, coaxial / optical digital audio outputs, HDMI, a few composite hookups, iPod streaming and charging capabilities and support for an array of file formats. Still, for ¥24,800 ($255), we’d definitely expect some built-in storage… or the promise of eternal invisibility, one.

[Via Impress]

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Movie Cowboy iPod media streamer goes heroic with DC branding originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not that Fujitsu’s totally new to the netbook arena or anything, but we’ve got to hand it to the outfit’s design team on this one. The newfangled LOOX M netbook is definitely handsome, even though the innards contain a list of hardware components that we could rattle off in our sleep. Ready? Here goes. A 1.6GHz Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160GB hard drive (yawning yet?), WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, three USB 2.0 sockets and a multicard reader. If you’re suddenly overcome with déjà vu, you’re definitely not alone — ’tis a shame Fujitsu has the nerve to charge ¥59,800 ($611) for something that’s no more advanced than the original line of Eee PCs.

[Via Engadget Japanese]

Filed under: Laptops

Fujitsu’s 10.1-inch LOOX M netbook looks good, positively average originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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