Hasta La Gadget!

The first Philips Bodygroom was a revolution in below-the-neck (read: genital) shaving. How did Philips manage to improve on that design? Simple: by introducing a better trimmer.

The original concept was already solid. The main body consists of a small trimmer and a shaver, which you can then add one of three plastic guards onto to vary the length of your human forest. The new design keeps the side trimmer and the shaver face intact, but adds a new dedicated trimmer head, plus two attachments with five lengths each.

Shaving with the main head is essentially unchanged. You can maneuver and ‘Tokyo’ drift around corners to get in close without doing damage to sensitive areas. If you like looking like a gigantic, ugly baby then that’s the tool to use.

If you don’t want your logging to go all the way to the stump, there’s the new trimmer head. This, my generously follicled friends, is where the action is.

Cutting through swaths of hair like small arms fire through decayed zombie flesh, the trimmer takes at most two passes to undo what 11 years of nature prepared your body for. It’s painless, not too noisy and much more sanitary than using the same trimmer you use on your beard.

So the only question you need to ask yourself is whether you want the original, which retails for $30, or the updated version, which hits you for $50. People that are “sometimes” shavers, those that are closer to space aliens than apes on the evolutionary scale, can make do with the $30 BG2020. But those “people” that would cause Alec Baldwin to exclaim, “that’s one hairy dude,” need to splurge on the upgraded Bodygroom BG2030. Anyone who has to look at you naked will thank you. [Philips BG2030 and Philips BG2020]

Philips has been hitting us with some out-there lighting concepts lately, but the company’s Master LED light bulb is actually already on sale in Europe and is set to brighten up Stateside lives around July. The 40W-equivalent bulbs should run between $50 and $70, and expected lifetime is set at 45,000 hours — just slightly more than a CFL’s 10,000 or a standard bulb’s 750 hours. The Master is certainly a damn sight nicer looking than the other mutant LED bulbs we’ve seen, but we’ll see if consumers are ready to jump on another more-expensive-upfront lighting tech so soon after CFLs have hit the mainstream.

[Via Core77]

Filed under: Household

Philips Master LED light bulb set for US release in July originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Compact discs weren’t always impromptu drink coasters. Once, in the not-so-distant past, they played music, contained pictures, and let people play video games with tacked-on FMV sequences. And today, the venerable CD turned 30.

Happy birthday! 1979-2009.Thirty years. Pretty amazing that it’s been that long since those crazy Dutchmen at Philips spun the technology off of laser discs as part of an optical digital audio disc demo in Eindhoven.

Of course, the CD didn’t immediately take off right then and there. It needed a little help from Sony, which worked with Philips to get the format standardized. The standard they named Red Book, which included everything from playing time (initially 60 minutes), to the disc diameter to sampling frequency. Put simply, the collaboration worked out, and Red Book was a success. In the book The Compact Disc Story, Philips reps lauded the task force they established with Sony. The CD that team created was “invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team,” Philips said. If only Apple and Microsoft could say the same, no? Oh, the things they could build.

Gushing and my bloviating aside, it wouldn’t be until October 1, 1982 that Billy Joel’s 52nd Street became the first CD album released. It was conveniently released in Japan alongside Sony’s brand new CDP-101 Compact Disc player. The album (and more importantly the medium it was pressed upon) changed history, as more compact disc players were introduced into the market beginning in 1983. The music CD would reach its zenith with The Beatles “1” (30 million in sales), before beginning its eventual and inevitable fall to the Mp3 in the mid-2000’s (in 2008, for example, CD sales dropped 20%).

Related to that point on Mp3s is copy protection. Or, to be more accurate, the CD’s complete and utter lack of copy protection of any kind.

When the Red Book was finalized, the standard made nary a mention of copy protection. Other than an anti-copy clause in the subcode, there was nothing. In fact, if a company tried to market a copy-protected CD (no ripping, copying, etc), as many did in 2002, Philips said the discs would not bear the official Compact Disc Digital Audio logo. It’s great that Philips did this, because as is the case with many “protected” forms of media today, these non-standardized CDs were anti-consumer; they often did not work in a variety of CD-ROM drives or standalone players. And yet Lars Ulrich was silent. Baffling, but true, and definitely an interesting parallel to today’s debate about digital rights management and piracy.

As was noted by Blam today in an email to me about this anniversary, Red Book’s active attempts to keep copy protection from the spec was incredibly forward thinking at the time. You definitely didn’t see it in the infamous anti-consumer Extended Copy Protection (XCP) debacle at Sony Music BMG. Remember that ol’ chestnut? Ironic that the creator of the original standard would be somehow involved in one of the most egregious CD-related abuses of consumer trust, no?

But back on point. The CD is 30. It changed tech and gadgetry pretty substantially. Even as it enters the twilight of its existence, we geeks have a lot to be thankful for, and there’s still plenty to learn from that copy of What’s the Story Morning Glory you have under your coffee mug right now. [Wikipedia]

Congratulations. You made it through yet another week. The economic crisis can be hard, but these bargains may just help you ease the pain. Check out Gearlog’s deals for Friday, February 27:

1. The best part about Fridays is Amazon’s Friday sale. This week brings us a variety of camcorders. Save 53 percent off of the Flip Video Ultra Series Camcorder. Now just $69.99, the Flip Ultra comes in white and has 30-minutes of video space. The Sanyo Xacti VPC-E2 Digital Camcorder and 8 MP Digital Camera, in blue, is 55 percent off of the original price of $399.99. Get it today for just $179.99. Check out the other deals at the Amazon Friday Sale.

2. Today, save $50 off of a Dell Inspiron Mini 9. The Inspiron Mini 9 has an Intel Atom processor, and a 8.9-inch LED display. Get it today only for $199. [Via Bargainist.com]

3. Need a cheap music player? The Philips GoGear 4GB Media Player is 60 percent off at Buy.com. The refurbished MP3 player is now $39.99, down from $69.99.

Look, we don’t really “get” people who aren’t willing to buy the latest and greatest thing regardless of the price and / or current economic state, but evidently there’s a rather large sector still clinging to their antiquated DVD format. Blu-ray proponents Panasonic, Philips, and Sony are looking to change all that by knocking down the tab a few notches. The trio has revealed plans to form a single licensing firm for Blu-ray, which they anticipate will lower the cost of the license — and therefore the retail price — by “at least” 40 percent. They expect it’ll amount to $9.50 for read-only BD player, $14 for a burner, 11 cents for read-only discs, 12 cents for BD-Rs, and 15 cents for BD-RE rewritable discs. In its current form, hopeful BD makers have to seek out each company individually. The group also hopes a single licensing entity will help them spot unauthorized BD devices, so watch out, suspicious mom and pop Blu-ray stores.

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Cheaper Blu-ray? Sony, Panasonic, and Philips say it’s coming, honestly originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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