Hasta La Gadget!

The folks behind Star Wars want you to know that Wicked Lasers are not lightsabers, no matter what you might hear. Lucasfilms, which, let’s face it, has always been eager to pursue legal action when it comes to protecting its trademarks (particularly those of the “Star Wars” variety), has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wicked Lasers, asking the company to either change or halt production of its Spyder III Pro Arctic Series.

As any properly opportunistic business would, Wicked Lasers has taken the opportunity to use the potential suit to promote its product, sending out a press release titled “Lucasfilms Ltd. Sues Wicked Lasers Over Lightsaber Confusion.” According to Wicked Lasers, the company “has never compared this or any of his products to the Jedi weapon wielded by Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader–not to mention the other obvious differences between the two products.”

What “obvious differences,” you ask? Well, there’s the fact that the lightsaber is a terrific tool for beheading Sith and Jedi alike, whereas the Spyder III couldn’t scramble an egg. That said, I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of a lawsuit filed by the company that owns the trademark to Jedi Mind Tricks.

If there’s validity to a suit, it’s not in the use of names (which Wicked Lasers seems to largely avoid) so much as in the product design. As evidenced by the above picture, there is something pretty lightsabery in the design of the device’s handle.

Poor George Lucas just wants to let the world know that these are not the lasers they’re looking for.

At Disney Consumer Product’s TRON: Legacy preview yesterday, I was really captivated by these action figures. The company used “impulse projection technology” to project an illuminated, moving image of the actor’s face into the figure’s helmet as it speaks phrases from the movie. I’ve never seen anything quite like this in a toy!

Most of the figures are 7.5 inches; one special Ultimate Sam Flynn figure will be 12 inches. Prices range from $15 to $40 list. Look for the toys this holiday season.

If you have a Motorola Droid, a Motorola BackFlip, or an LG Ally, and you love to play video games on your phone, you’ll want to get your hands on the Game Gripper. It’s an attachment for the keyboard of your phone that turns it into a full gamepad, complete with directional pad and discrete buttons for different actions. The buttons on the Game Gripper match up with individual buttons on your phone’s keyboard, so you can map them to functions in your favorite game and then attach the game gripper to play.

Each button has a discrete switch under it so you’re not pressing two buttons on your keyboard with one press on the Game Gripper.  The Game Gripper fits snugly over your phone’s keyboard, and is designed for people who want to load up an emulator on their phone and play some old NES and SNES games.

Right now the Droid, BackFlip, and Ally are the only supported phones, but the creators are working on models for the Devour and N900, and welcome requests for additional phones. The Game Gripper comes in a number of colors and styles, and retails for $14.99. You can buy additional buttons for $3.99.  

Look out Roomba, MSI has some new robots that want to wipe the floor with you. Tucked into MSI’s Computex booth, alongside Windows 7 Tablets and overclocked Intel CPUs, MSI was demoing a robot floor cleaner that looks like it has an edge on iRobot‘s venerable Roomba. First of all, it will automatically go back to its docking station when it is done cleaning to recharge itself. Also, instead of blindly running into walls, the device uses ultrasound technology to avoid them. The M800 Smart Vacuum Robot is rated to last 110 minutes on a 4-hour charge.
 
The company is also releasing the R1300 Security Vacuum Robot, which comes motion detection and a wireless video camera that can stream video over the Internet.  (No word on whether this robot bad boy could be loaded with a Taser attachment.)

What’s more, MSI representatives to me that it has 8X the suction power as the Roomba, but of course we will need to get it into PC Labs for testing before we can know for sure just how much it sucks. 

MSI isn’t sure about pricing of either robot, or if they will definitely make it to U.S. floors, but it plans to ship the robots in Asia early next year. Until then, check out this video taken on the Computex Show floor.