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Celeb Bloggers - Ashton Kutcher Launches Blah Girls (VIDEO)(TrendHunter.com) Ashton Kutcher is the man behind Katalyst Media, and Blah Girls is the first of their many web projects. Blah Girls runs on a common blog platform, WordPress, and is an animated character...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 1:00 pm TV-Watching Health Risks - Crime Shows Cause Weight Gain (VIDEO)(TrendHunter.com) The U.S. is getting fatter and now a study indicates crime television may be a big, fat, contribution to overeating. Law and Order, all the CSIs, Cold Case, The Closer, and all of...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 12:20 pm Telanetix Appoints CEO Douglas N. Johnson to Chairman- Board Thanks Thomas A. Szabo for Service - BELLEVUE, Wash., Sept. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Telanetix, Inc. (OTC BB: TNXI), a leading IP solutions provider...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:05 am GuestLogix handheld devices and software services to be deployed by US Airways to support and grow a la carte salesTORONTO, Sept. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - GuestLogix Inc. (TSX-V:GXI), the leading provider of on-board retail technology and solutions to the airline industry, today announced...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:03 am Zune exec on phone future, new iPods - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:00 am Bling Software Announces Active Phone-Top: The Industry's First Mobile Widget Platform Based Fully on Web StandardsEnd-to-End Solution delivers the most function-rich consumer web experience possible without the complexity of a proprietary scripting language for web authors SAN...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:00 am UCN Appoints Steven ZoBell as Chief Technology Officer and EVPFormer Microsoft Product Unit Manager Joins UCN Executive Team SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- UCN Inc. (Nasdaq: UCNN), leading provider of...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:00 am Mitek Systems Joins the BlackBerry ISV Alliance Program to Develop ImageNet Mobile Deposit for BlackBerry Bold SmartphoneProgram Will Help Deliver Mobile Merchant Check Deposits to Millions of Mobile Professionals Who Use BlackBerry Platform SAN DIEGO, Sept. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:00 am Aehr Test Systems Announces Follow-On WaferPak(TM) Contactor and Fox(TM)-1 System Upgrade OrdersFREMONT, Calif., Sept. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Aehr Test Systems (Nasdaq: AEHR), a worldwide supplier of semiconductor test and burn-in equipment, announced today...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:00 am New wide dynamic range CMOS image sensor from Texas Instruments offers high image quality, exceeding conventional CCD sensors, for advanced video surveillance camerasSensor from Texas Instruments Japan Ltd. was co-developed with Tohoku University TOKYO, Sept. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN) todaySource: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:00 am Tyco Electronics Australia and New Zealand Selects System Management Tools From Halcyon SoftwareLONDON, September 11 /PRNewswire/ -- - Global Electronics Giant Announces Selection of Message Manager and Message Communicator From UK Based Provider,...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:00 am Verizon Wireless Seeks to Expand Local Workforce at Job Fair in ManhattanGrowth in Hispanic Population and Customer Base Fuels Search for Bilingual Employees ORANGEBURG, N.Y., Sept. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon Wireless, the leading...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 11:00 am Viral Top 50 - Elisabeth Hasselbeck Kicking Ass and Sarah Palin Action Figure (CLUSTER)(TrendHunter.com) Today's viral Top 50 cluster is led by Elisabeth Hasselbeck kicking ass and the Sarah Palin Action Figure. The first story is about Elisabeth Hasselbeck publicly burning Michelle...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:50 am DIY Music Remixes - Musinaut Customizable MXP4s (VIDEO)(TrendHunter.com) Imagine being able to create your own music remix of songs you have in your playlist--adding harmony, supplementing the existing beat, adjusting the bass--and you have the primary...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:40 am Switching on the large hadron colliderIan Sample watches the Large Hadron Collider being switched on in Geneva. With comment from Professor Peter Higgs, inventor of the Higgs boson particle theorySource: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:36 am New World Tableau: Cala Rossini Does Neat Tricks"Neat Tricks" is the name of a strange and marvelous area created by Kali Meads (direct SLURL teleport link here), and from certain angles, as Cala depicts above, Tricks seems like a moody Americana landscape...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:34 am Sonic EDGe Debuts Key BD Revisioning Solution With BD ReauthorDVDLogic Joins Sonic Extended Developer Group NOVATO, Calif., Sept. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sonic Solutions(R) (Nasdaq: SNIC), the leader in digital media...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:30 am 77 Pro-Geek Innovations (CLUSTER)(TrendHunter.com) Not so long ago, being dubbed a geek or nerd was one of the most socially painful nicknames one could get. No so anymore. As this wide range of pro-geek designs shows, people...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:20 am LHC Works Without Earth Being Sucked UpWe are still here! In case you hadn’t heard, the LHC initialization is a success. After all the colliding beams are established, the researchers will be measuring and calibrating before performing...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:17 am Star Wars lives on through games (Reuters)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:07 am RIM's BlackBerry 'Flips' Out to Woo Consumers - InternetNews.com
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:06 am Building Google Chrome: A first look - InfoWorld
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:04 am Will the carriers kill the iPhone? - InfoWorld
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:04 am Ericsson reveals contract to set up international network for C&W (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:02 am Virtualization showdown: VMware Workstation vs. Sun xVM VirtualBox (InfoWorld)InfoWorld - A two-horse race. That's how the market for general purpose desktop virtualization packages is shaping up, at least for the foreseeable future.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Sep 2008 | 10:00 am Hey, Dad, did you hear the world was going to end this week? - ZDNet
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:41 am Hands-Free Driving - Self-Steering Bus at UC Berkeley (VIDEO)(TrendHunter.com) Life as a University of California at Berkeley bus driver just got much easier--researchers have tested a self-steering bus that actually works. Developed by California Partners...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:40 am Digital Photo Viewer Makes This The Wallet Of The FutureBy Luke Anderson Guys, how many pictures do you keep in your wallet? I have seven (not including the one on my license), which seems like a small amount in comparison to some people. All of those pictures...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:39 am EU welcomes Google move to cut data retention time - Reuters
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:38 am Helio by Virgin Mobile arrives - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:36 am US text usage hits record despite price increases - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:36 am Cliff Harris: How I learned to love the game piratesFor the past three years I've been running a one-man games company from home, programming games and selling them direct to gamers all over the world. Over that three years I discovered that all of my games...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:21 am Yahoo Boosts Mobile App Development Platform - InformationWeek
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:00 am Creepy Recycled Sculptures - Nemo Gould Robots (VIDEO)(TrendHunter.com) Nemo Goulds recycled robot sculptures are made almost entirely with found objects, but Gould would rather you focus on these objects current iteration--as some seriously creepy robots...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 9:00 am Task2Gather task manager released for iPhone (Macworld.com)Macworld.com - Vito Technology released a new application for the iPhone called Task2Gather.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:30 am Particle Release From Woven Cellulosic SubstratesBy Manian, Avinash P Lenninger, Margit; Bechtold, Thomas; Steinlechner, Erik Abstract The liming propensity of a woven cellulosic substrate is investigated as a function of substrate characteristics and of different parameters in the test environment.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am Residents Plan Prayer Vigil in North L.B.By Tracy Manzer Residents fed up with the violence that has plagued their North Long Beach neighborhood plan to hold a prayer vigil this Saturday. The public is encouraged to join in the vigil, which is scheduled for 10 a.m. at the corner of 60th Street and Myrtle Avenue.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am Free Workshop in Downey Covers Organic GardeningThe city on Saturday will host an organic gardening and integrated pest management workshop at the Barbara J. Riley Community and Senior Center. The event is from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. at 7810 Quill Drive.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am Apex Oil to Pay for Illinois Pollution CleanupBy Snow, Nick Apex Oil Co. Inc. has been ordered to clean up contamination from its former refining operations in Hartford, Ill., the US Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency joindy announced July 29. Chief Judge David R.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am Down the DrainBy Tonia Moxley tonia.moxley@roanoke.com 381-1676 Across what once was a 50-acre marine playground now stretches a startling vista more reminiscent of Arizona's Painted Desert than of the Blue Ridge Mountains.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am Democrats to Rally in Long BeachBy John Canalis LONG BEACH - Some of Long Beach's most powerful Democrats hope to do a little damage to John McCain's post-convention bounce - and help some of their own win Nov. 4 - by gathering for a rally at noon Saturday at Recreation Park, 4900 E. Seventh St.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am Rocky Mount Drains Tank Amid Water ConservationBy Janelle Rucker janelle.rucker@roanoke.com 981-3159 Rocky Mount officials made the call last week to do away with about 350,000 gallons of treated water while the town was still under a mandatory conservation order.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am Verimatrix Extends Advantages of Software-Based Content Security to One-Way Pay-TV NetworksIBC2008, Stand 4.B45 -- Verimatrix, the company setting the standard in content security technologies that enhance the value of pay-TV networks, today announced its VCAS(TM) for DVB 2.0 solution, which extends the reach of its multiple layered security architecture to digital broadcast content in satellite, cable and terrestrial broadcast networks where no direct return path is available.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am IBM and NEC Electronics Sign Agreement for Joint Development of Next-Generation Semiconductor Process TechnologyIBM Corporation (NYSE: IBM) and NEC Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723) today announced they have entered into a multi-year joint development agreement under which they will develop next-generation semiconductor process technology.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am ViXS XCode(TM) 3290 Video Processor Works With Bluestreak's MachBlue Flash(R) PlayerViXS Systems, the leading developer of video processing solutions, announced today that the XCode(TM) 3290, the world's most advanced MPEG4 AVC (MPEG4 Part 10/H.264) Transcoder/Encoder/Decoder System-on-a-Chip (SoC) has been enabled with Bluestreak's MachBlue TV product.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am NTT DOCOMO Invests in Irish Maritime Wireless Systems ProviderTokyo, Sept 11, 2008 - (JCN Newswire) - NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced today that it has invested 10 million U.S. dollars to acquire an 11.5 percent stake in Blue Ocean Wireless (BOW), an Irish company providing GSM communication systems to the merchant maritime sector.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 8:00 am CTIA convention a stage for wireless innovatorsIf it's a new or better use for a cellphone, it's here. But even if you have the next can't-miss breakthrough, getting noticed isn't easy. ...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 7:00 am Young Bell's palsy patient is smiling on the insideCulver City fifth-grader Kiana Deane tries to help her classmates understand the science behind her limited self-expression -- and struggles to come to terms with her own brand of beauty. ...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 7:00 am Vishay raises bid for International RectifierChip maker adds about $100 million to its previous offer of $1.6 billion and plans to take it directly to shareholders. International Rectifier had rejected the earlier figure as too low. ...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 7:00 am Coffee, tea or pornography?American Airlines flight attendants are worried about something special in the air: passengers surfing porn websites.Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 7:00 am Arthroscopic knee surgery for arthritis not effective, study findsAfter two years, there was no difference between participants who had undergone the procedure and those who had not. The research confirms the results of a 2002 study. ...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 7:00 am Particle smasher begins Big Bang experimentScientists around the world celebrate the tests at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. 'We will be unlocking the secrets of the universe,' one physicist says. ...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 11 Sep 2008 | 7:00 am Verizon Tech Accused Of Making $220K In Sex Calls On User LinesJoseph Vaccarelli, a former Verizon Technician, has been charged with racking up $220,000 in phone-sex calls by tapping into the land lines of nearly 950 customer. Authorities say that he made approximately 5,000 calls, resulting in 45,000 minutes of call time. Verizon estimated that out of a 40-week period, Vaccarelli spent 15 weeks talking on sex lines. How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 11 Sep 2008 | 6:31 am iTunes 'Genius' is half-savant, but here's what we really need... - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:46 am Potassium Nitrate in the MixPotassium nitrate is an ingredient of fertiliser and widely available from garden centres. It is a stable substance until mixed with certain other materials. Once this happens, a chemical reaction takes place as it releases carbon dioxide. It was favoured by IRA bomb-makers.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am Farm Home Plea Refused Yet AgainBy LAURA DALE Dartmoor farmers have been refused planning permission to build an agricultural worker's home for their son for the second time.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am Milk Link Sets Up Sale of CreameryBy Emma Corlett Business Editor Milk Link is selling its Somerset creamery in a deal that promises fresh investment in the site.Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am IBM Delivers Industry-First Tool to Help Small and Medium Businesses "Deadbolt" DataIBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today the industry's first hardware-based encryption tool to secure data on a server's hard drive. Once encrypted, data is well protected -- even if the hard drive is improperly disposed of or stolen.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) Processors Prove to Be Optimal Choice for VirtualizationAMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors now power 37 platforms from global OEMs, nine of which are designed with virtualization in mind.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am Preservation Program to Take Place MondayThe Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation will hold a workshop Monday for congregational leaders on maintaining architecturally significant, historic religious structures.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am Hitachi Launches a Trial of GazoPa, a Similar Image Search ServiceHitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT)(TOKYO:6501)(hereafter "Hitachi"), announced today that it has launched a trial of a similar image search service called GazoPa as an invitation-only beta at TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. GazoPa was selected as a finalist at the conference.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am The Sale of the CenturyBy Rob Cowen The internet presents challenges and opportunities for both traditional and online retailers, writes Rob Cowen Whether it's a case of browsing for books or searching for sportswear, recent research shows that more and more of us are spending our hard-earned cash via the internet.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am Computer Shop Rises From the Old Post OfficeBy Ben Falconer A Small computer shop, offering the whole range of IT services and more, has been officially opened by Stroud MP David Drew.Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 11 Sep 2008 | 5:00 am New Brad Sucks CD: "Out of It"
Creative Commons folk hero musician Brad Sucks has a new album out: Out of It! Brad sez, "It’s got ten songs, you can pay what you want, it’s available in CD, MP3 & FLAC. There’s no stupid DRM and it’s Creative Commons licensed. CD purchases get instant downloads and the full audio multi-track source will be available."
Brad Sucks: Out of It
(Thanks, Brad!)
Source: Boing Boing | 11 Sep 2008 | 4:58 am Home Movie Day PSAHome-movie-making super-star Robins Barstow produced this fantastic PSA for the upcoming Home Movie Day. Home Movie Day
See also: Home Movie Day, Oct 18: show your home movies to your neighbors and vice-versa
Source: Boing Boing | 11 Sep 2008 | 4:57 am iPod briefing: a few quick snaps, a few new apps. I met with some folks from Apple today to fondle the new nano-goods announced at the big event this week, and to touch the new Touch. The candy-colored nanos fit well in my hand -- heh, okay, too well (sorry security guy!). I couldn't stop moving them vertical/horizontal/vertical to play with the accelerometer functions, and was impressed by how well something so small displays video (I'm curious to check out how Boing Boing tv episodes look on 'em... one in particular). The new Touch is a nice upgrade, too; the fellow who demoed it for me showed me some of the new apps coming out later on this year. Most impressive of these was Need for Speed: Undercover from EA, shown publicly during the launch event yesterday. Crisp, aggressive, felt a lot like a console in the important ways. Pretty phenomenal, the growing app-o-verse, considering it only hatched what, 60 days ago? Bottom line on this week's news: steady, incremental improvements on already-loved products. Here are some snaps i took, (Flickr). The BB Gadgets dudes have been covering this week's Apple announcements in more depth: * New iPod Touches feature built-in speaker, volume control, Nike Plus Source: Boing Boing | 11 Sep 2008 | 4:44 am Gear Gallery: Sexy and Tough Mobile, Green Dell PC and More : First, a word to the RAZR fans. (There are some still left.) Though the V750 has similar looks and ergonomics, this isn't the second coming of the world's favorite fashion phone. With military-grade protection from dust, shock and high and low temperatures, it's a different creature entirely. Even though it casts the same fragile silhouette as the RAZR, my review unit took repeated 4-foot drops and dirt naps with ease (and just a few cracks). After brushing the phone off, I was still able to make and receive calls with reasonably clear audio. If you're concerned with the average accidental drops and collisions a cellphone endures on a day-to-day basis, the V750 has you covered, hands down. Ohhh, but that doesn't mean all is well in Rugged Town. The phone's hard plastic chassis and keypad did fine in my splash tests, but without the official certification in place, it's unlikely that the V750 could take a full dunk. Luckily, Motorola defied rugged convention by outfitting the V750 with an impressive array of multimedia features. Be it pictures, video, music or (gasp!) mobile web, the V750's brisk interface and capabilities match pace with most midlevel multimedia phones. Its 67 MB of memory and crippled Bluetooth keep it from groundbreaking status, but paired with its price, these features make the V750 a solid investment for the weekend adventure-seeker. WIRED: Sensible balance of utility and entertainment. Fantastic data speeds via EV-DO Rev A. 1,000-entry phone book stores multiple numbers per entry and postal addresses. 1.6-inch external LCD makes on-the-go media playback a breeze. Looks and handles like a sleek, non-rugged phone. TIRED: Modestly rugged at best. Push-To-Talk setup is convoluted and clunky. Muddy speakerphone audio at high volumes. Flimsy battery door flies off during impacts. Verizon OS cripples Bluetooth, video message length and file sharing. Flashless cameras are the stuff of the Dark Ages. $260, Motorola
Read our full Motorola V750 Adventure review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : The Dell Studio Hybrid doesn’t run on ethanol and D-cells, but it does consume about 70 percent less electricity than those hulking desktop towers. This über-cute little media-cruncher comes in your choice of rich automotive colors (or bamboo, for Pier 1-themed abodes), and you can swap colors on demand with interchangeable sleeves. The Hybrid starts at $500, but by the time you trick it out with goodies like a slot-loading Blu-ray drive, Wireless-N adapter, Logitech’s diNovo Mini Keyboard (a must if you’re planning couch time), a digital TV tuner, and the bamboo sleeve (a $130 upgrade -- WTF?), the price rockets north of $1,300. Hybrids can serve desk duty or accent your living room: Even the base model comes stocked with HDMI port (DVI, too), so it’s a cinch to pair with HDTV. Blu-ray movies at 1920 x 1080 did just fine aside from a video stutter every time we adjusted the volume. Dell scores big points for style, power conservation and customization. WIRED: Sips power, unlike those heinous watt-guzzling towers. Swappable color sleeves let you change the paint job to match your mood -- or paint job. Reports for media-center duty with HDMI port and slot-loading Blu-ray drive. Metal stand cleverly morphs between vertical and horizontal positions. TIRED: Wussy integrated graphics choke on 3-D games. Looks rigged for silent running, but actually runs a little noisy. $130 bamboo sleeve will only appeal to aristocratic pandas. $1,365 (as tested), Dell
Read our full Dell Studio Hybrid review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : To instantly win the mine's-better-than-yours camera contest, show friends the Z150's gorgeous 3-inch LCD. It's mammoth for a camera with a sub-$200 price tag, and bright enough to see in direct sunlight. You can also fire off a group shot without having to take the customary 20 steps back to fit everybody in: The Z150's wide-angle lens (28mm) offers a dramatically broader field of view than most pocket cams. Meanwhile, the lens zooms to 4x before the digital faux-zoom kicks in -- that’s a whole "x" better than other models in this price range. Idjit-proof controls and logical onscreen menus make the Z150 a camera anyone can pick up and use sans manual. A dedicated video-record button captures YouTube-friendly movies at 30 fps. The Z150 tops out at 8.1 megapixels -- more than adequate for the party scene. But as you might expect, the camera produces considerable image noise when the lights are low and the ISO high. Only the color reproduction disappoints: It's good, but lacking that zing we see in competing models from, say, Canon. Of course, some of Canon's pocket shooters tend toward the bulky as well, so we can forgive the EX-Z150 its slightly excessive carriage. And we're mad for its big-screen, sweet wide-angle lens, and affordable price. WIRED: Wide-angle lens just plain kicks ass, and 4x optical zoom gets you close. One-touch video recording and YouTube-upload software make this the perfect camera for Paris-Lindsay-Bigfoot sightings. TIRED: Too thick and heavy to leave in your pocket all day. Small, stiff control pad. Snapshot colors lack pop. Battery must be removed for charging. $200, Casio
Read our full Casio EX Z150 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Everything’s getting tiny. The once-sexy V-8 engine is now an automotive pariah while the Smart Car gets all the chicks; HD video cameras are now damn near Twinkie-size, and we’ll probably be implanting the next-generation iPod in our molars. But at least one company isn’t succumbing to all this smaller-is-better madness: TiVo just announced the TiVo HD XL. Stuffed like a Cornish hen with a terabyte hard drive, it’s the highest-capacity DVR available, with room for 150 hours of HD content. That’s, like, every Olympic event you actually care about plus all 60 episodes of The Wire. It’s an entire season of Sunday Night Football with more than enough space for your Food Network-obsessed roommate to go balls-out on Batali. -- Joe Brown WIRED: Western Digital hard drive is nearly silent. THX-certified audio and video (finally). Say goodbye to the ugly stick -- the XL gets the same slick programmable remote as the Series 3. TiVo-easy, as expected, with the company’s ever-expanding catalog of downloadable videos (YouTube!). TIRED: Remote collects more greasy fingerprints than a secondhand sexbot. Annoying info screen hovers over the picture a few seconds too long with each channel change. Cutesy TiVo noises are a little grating, and your only other option is to turn all the sound effects off. We noticed an increase in video artifacts when recording off both tuners simultaneously. In San Francisco, at least, you have to deal with $600, TiVo
Read our full TiVo HD XL review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Need to juice up your desktop music scene? Nuforce has just the thing. Its new Icon is a miniature, multithreat amplifier that can be used to pump music from a computer or audio player to your speakers and headphones. Although it's only 12 watts per channel, the Icon is powerful enough to act as a pre-amp to full-fledged stereos and on its own can drive most bookshelf speakers, producing a wide, spacious sound stage. The sound quality from the headphone jack on my laptop is thin and distorted, but when I hooked up the Icon via the USB port and patched in my Grado SR80 cans, it was a revelation. The Icon uses a high-quality digital-to-analog converter to convert the computer's digital signal to sweet-sounding analog, and all of a sudden the music was crystal clear, the bass cleaner and deeper, and the overall sound infinitely better. The only downside here may be that you'll realize how crummy some of those downloaded MP3s actually sound. In the end, the beauty of the Icon is that it can be used in so many different ways. I've got it powering some outdoor speakers on my patio -- and it excels wherever you rig it. WIRED: Sturdy silicon-like stand holds it vertically. Rad design and color choices: red, black, blue, silver. Small enough to take on vacation. TIRED: Ethernet speaker cables are cutting-edge, but standard banana plugs would be better. Bass can be a touch thin in heavier (rock, hip-hop) music. Price/maker: $250, Nuforce
Photo: Christopher Jones/Wired.com Read our full Nuforce Icon Desktop Amplifier review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : The Treo Pro sports a shiny, rounded, tuxedo-black exterior and a handful of practical OS "shortcuts." Aside from the industrial iPhone-like design lines, those shortcuts are enough to make even the most die-hard Machead grin and bear Windows Mobile (almost). At the top of our shortcut list are the dedicated WiFi button on the right side and customizable button on the left (ours was set for camera). Circumventing the main menu and tiresome nav made the phone a joy to use. The touchscreen, on the other hand, was far from blissful. Laggy and unresponsive, we found ourselves double- and sometimes triple-tapping -– even with the stylus. Palm is definitely flexing its once-mighty muscle and trying to say it can build a stylish multimedia device with a touchscreen. But for $550, a touch interface should have more precision than this. We can only hope Palm continues to fine-tune the screen and ditch that archaic stylus permanently. WIRED: Trim, light and pocketable. Shortcuts prove beyond useful. Decent 2-megapixel pics. MicroUSB Battery lasts almost two full days. 3.5mm headphone jack. PPT/Excel/Word and PDF-reading, of course. Google Maps and TeleNav GPS, which offers turn-by-turn directions plus target searches; e.g., gas stations by price. Ships unlocked. TIRED: Menu scrolling is about as fluid as a piece of dolomite. Slippery "obsidian" plastic casing retains more fingerprints than the NSA. Noticeable screen glare. Curved design comprised by bottom-side USB/headphone jack that should be recessed more. Bluetooth not included in image send options. Only way to access microSD? Remove battery cover. Price/maker: $550, Palm
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Palm Treo Pro review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Look! Hardware that breaks –- on purpose! The Z10's apparent bendy kick-slide design may be flashy, but turning out an innovative design is about the only thing this phone has going for it. Though it's billed as a "pocket-sized mobile studio," this 4-ounce, platinum-trimmed phone is certainly no substitute for even a mediocre minicamcorder (Exhibit A: the Flip Mino). So why drop $500 on the Z10 when you can get a 5-megapixel camphone (Exhibit B: the Nokia N82) that shoots crisper stills and comparable vids? Beats us. Maybe it's the intuitive editing suite: The Z10's storyboard feature let us cut together a montage of clips and pics with cinematic fades, circle dissolves, music and title cards in less than 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the OS wasn't nearly as user-friendly. We literally had to break out the instruction manual just to send a Bluetooth pic (no joke). Had Motorola spent even half as much time making the software as innovative as its breakaway hardware, the Z10 would have wowed us. But with its lacking OS and underwhelming camera, the phone didn't feel ready for prime time. WIRED: 30-fps vid clips don’t look too shabby. Quick, easy uploading to YouTube and Shozu. Storyboarding was a cinch. Camera shortcut button, plus autofocus, great for snapping pics on the fly. Easy-to-access external microSD card slot is ready for 32 GB.
Price/maker: $500 (unlocked), Motorola
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Motorola Z10 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : The Sylvania G Netbook is a fairly direct response to the Asus Eee PC 900 series, with an 8.9-inch screen, Linux OS and chicklet keys that make touch typing a fever dream fantasy. And while some of Sylvania's choices here are merely dreadful (the arrow keys are a mere 12mm wide — thinner than my pinky), it's actually the OS that royally blows it for the Netbook. Ubuntu is known for being one of the most stable and simple versions of Linux on the market, but Sylvania somehow turns it into a nightmare on this system. For a computer ostensibly designed for inexperienced users, it's a disaster. I had trouble with the Ubuntu installation on the Netbook from the start: Blank screens on bootup. MPEGs wouldn't play and codec installations repeatedly failed (or even crashed the machine). Help files weren't installed. And most annoying of all, the battery meter couldn't decide whether the computer was plugged in, and pegged battery life remaining at 0 or 2 percent no matter how long we charged it. The Netbook abruptly shut itself off on at least one occasion, possibly convinced that it was out of juice. With stability this dismal, the specs are largely irrelevant. But if you're willing to invest the time to work through the Netbook's quirks and faults, it could make a great replacement for your desk calculator. —Christopher Null WIRED: Has a real hard drive (80 GB) instead of flash storage. Includes three USB ports and an SD card reader. Comes in colors. Bright screen for this category. TIRED: Slower than a sedated slug at just about every app despite 1.6-GHz Atom chip and 1-GB RAM (standard $399 model includes just 512-MB RAM). Cartoonish styling. Considerably heavier than advertised (and the Eee PC 900) at 2.6 pounds. Far too buggy to be taken seriously. Price/maker: $450 (as tested), Sylvania
Photo courtesy Sylvania Read our full Sylvania G Netbook review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Think of this 26-inch TV from Samsung as any one of last year's larger models, shrunk down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's only 720p, but its bright, detailed picture is impressive and its vivid color is surprisingly accurate for a set this small. It scores surprisingly well in our video-processing tests, even besting many of this year's small models. Sure, this model is a bit challenged in the areas of de-interlacing 24-fps film-based HD sources and removing jaggies from diagonal lines, but then so are many of the 32-inch and smaller TVs we've tested this year. And who really worries about 24 FPS film sources on a 26-incher besides geeks like us? Unlike many small sets, though, the Samsung's noise reduction performs beautifully. We saw good results leaving it in "auto" for all but the crappiest video, and only had to really adjust for our truly hideous NR test clip. Hardcore testing aside, the Samsung's good NR combined with its great picture and color delivered where it matters the most: Our HD and SD test movies looked awesome, as did satellite HDTV and output from our 360. —Chuck Cage WIRED: Attractive, simple remote-control. Side ports (HDMI, S-Video and composite) make hooking up a 360 or camcorder a breeze. Optical digital audio out -- perfect for tying into that massive dorm-theater sound system. TIRED: Some video-processing issues. 1366 x 728 native resolution makes it a not-so-great computer monitor unless you're over 40 and want to read without your glasses. Price/maker: $550, Samsung
Read our full Samsung LN26A450C1 LCD TV review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : The HP TouchSmart IQ506 is an update to last year's all-in-one touchscreen, the TouchSmart IQ770. This year, HP went for a countertop-friendly design by packing all the components into the IQ506's brilliant 22-inch, touch-sensitive display. As a whole, this makes for a much more streamlined and clutter-free presentation compared to its predecessor. In terms of general ease and responsiveness, the IQ506's touchscreen does a marginally good job. Common maneuvers like double taps and click-and-drag highlighting can be pulled off with minimal hassle. Even problem areas like corners were accessible with relatively effortless finger pokes. Save for a pinch/zoom gesture, however, all the image-rotating fun we were expecting was largely nonexistent. In its defense, leaving notes, creating calendar reminders and a host of other "bulletin board" tasks were a cinch using the TouchSmart dashboard. But even though you can incorporate non-dashboard programs like Firefox into the interface, opening these applications kicks you back out to the Vista desktop. On one hand, the system is a great value when one compares the sticker price to the components, but it's disconcerting that a $1,500 computer lacks the flair and usability of a relatively inexpensive device like the iPhone. We've got our fingers crossed for next year's model. WIRED: Elegant space-saving design. Speaker bar produces booming lows and clear highs. Bright 22-inch screen hides smudges and fingerprints. Integrated TV tuner adds living room chops. Blazing connectivity via gigabit Ethernet and integrated 802.11b/g/n. 500-GB hard drive offers plenty of room for media storage. Whisper-quiet operation. TIRED: Not the smoothest touch-based interface. Handoffs between TouchSmart/Vista programs are slow and awkward. Very limited upgrade options. Midrange GPU puts a damper on hardcore gaming. Retractable bezel feels cheap and rickety. Sluggish processor given its all-in-one class. What? No Blu-ray? Price/maker: $1,500 (as tested), hp.com
Read our full HP TouchSmart IQ506 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Dubbed the "Boulder," this angular, candy-colored handset is the offspring of the Gadget Lab's crumpled Type-V, Type-S and Type-SL review units. The Boulder isn't another rugged rehash, though. In fact, Casio finally threw a curve by including some fairly useful multimedia features. Welcome additions like music playback, a more powerful (but still lacking) camera, and zippy EV-DO connectivity fatten up this phone's already rock-solid resume. But let's face it -- Casio is extremely late to the party with these commonplace features. Previous pratfalls like the laughably low-res external LCD, and an annoying light show for incoming calls have returned too. Foibles aside, a lot of the "new" features were actually well integrated into this otherwise hard-knock handset. Tasks like downloading and playing music, mobile messaging and accessing webmail were brisk and painless due to a sensible layout and speedy EV-DO network. Little usability improvements (and smart additions like a waterproof cover for the microSD port) reinforced Casio's obvious commitment to achieving a rugged/user-friendly balance. Casio definitely gets kudos for bringing a tank like the G'zOne into the multimedia era. However, the Boulder is more a patchwork of desirable features, rather than a cohesive marriage of entertainment and durability. WIRED: Armored cross section where mud meets multimedia. External LCD doubles as wanderlust-friendly e-compass. Awesome camera flash/flashlight combo. Expanded memory via microSD card slot. Solid call quality -- even after 12 rounds of tough love. Included cradle doubles as a travel charger. Also comes in "less-flamboyant" black. TIRED: Terrible speakerphone quality for both voice and music. Far too expensive. Annoying multicolored lights show signals incoming calls. No file sharing via Bluetooth. Lackluster 1.3-MP camera sucks for both stills and video. Sweet angles still can't hide a brick-ish profile. Price/maker: $130 (after $50 rebate), Verizon
Read our full Casio G'zOne Boulder review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Out of the box and straight up to the eye you'll immediately enjoy the D3's spacious and bright viewfinder. The noticeably improved 51-point auto focus system is whip-fast and works in concert with an outstanding 1005-pixel metering sensor that gets it right in the most challenging lighting. Images are beautifully consistent with a wide dynamic range and improved noise-reduction settings that give the pictures a more natural look. To achieve that end, Nikon pulled back on the sharpening levels, leaving the choice of added "crunchiness" to a photographer's post-production predilections. Nikon's new three-inch high-res LCD is a revelation. If you do take the plunge, be ready to spend a good chunk of time learning the feature set to exploit the D3's capabilities. From resolution to speed, color control, bit-depth and so much more, the D3 is incredibly customizable. Dial it in for lightning-quick 11-fps sports action, superlow-light shooting (ISO up to 25600), handheld or tripod-mounted live view -- you name it, whatever and however you want to shoot, the D3 does it exceptionally well. WIRED: High ISO shooting is fantastic with relatively low noise at settings up to ISO 3200 and beyond. Live view function the best of the top-end DSLRs. Dual CF card capability. TIRED: So many functions it could take a lifetime to learn them all. No in-camera dust-reduction system. Price/maker: $5,000 (body only), Nikon
Read our full Nikon D3 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : The U110 ultralight we received looks striking, with a scarlet paisley-etched aluminum lid paired with a shiny jet-black keyboard area. As soon as you open it up and power it on, you come face to face with one of the U110's most interesting yet unsettling features: VeriFace recognition. After booting up, the webcam embedded in the bezel starts scanning the room. When it finds you, it superimposes disturbing cross hairs on your eyes in an attempt to recognize you and unlock the PC. If you haven't registered your peepers, the system will hang, so you have to shut it down, turn the notebook away and open it up again to get it to boot. The 11.1-inch display is bright and sharp, though it can look a bit iridescent at close range. The glossy black keys are big and square but the thin membrane beneath the keys is flimsy and deforms as you type. There is a decent set of ports, but the designers couldn't find room for an optical drive. Seriously, we're pretty disappointed. The included external DVD drive looks cool, but you know what would be even cooler? Not needing an external drive at all. For work purposes, the Lenovo is a capable little machine. The U110 excelled in our PCMark tests, far outdistancing most other ultralights. Overall this is a good PC; it just has a few annoyances. WIRED: Charming good looks will attract the Lenovo faithful who are sick of looking funerary. Excellent business performance will silence office critics of your "red PC (Harumph!)." Delightfully light and slim. TIRED: The keyboard, though pretty, is pretty flimsy. Terminator-style face recognition will give you the heebie-jeebies and make you torch all your Schwarzenegger flicks (Especially Batman and Robin). External DVD means one more gadget to tote. Price/maker: $1,800 (as tested), Lenovo
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad U110 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Dishing out a hefty helping of HD, the SR12 is a lot of camera, both in your hand and under the hood with its 120-GB hard drive. The upgraded CMOS sensor and Bionz image processor have significantly improved image quality and stomped out even more noise. Sony’s face-detection system, which works snappily for video and the 10.2-megapixel stills, is very effective both up close and at long range. OK, so it makes great video, but what about the controls? For those who fly on manual, the Cam Control Dial is like piloting an F22. Neatly nestled next to the lens, the silver nubbin is a twisty-twirly festival of videographic functionality, providing quick access to manual adjustments of exposure, focus, white balance and aperture. There’s also an “easy” button on board. A quick tap on the little blue button and all you’ve got to do is point the camera in the right direction to get the good stuff. In spite of all this Sony video goodness, the SR12 has one glaring flaw — terribly difficult Mac integration. To get it working you’ve got to have iMovie '08. Previous versions of iMovie don’t have the capability to natively read the AVCHD codec meaning that you had to convert the video to other formats in order to do any post-production. WIRED: Excellent AVCHD video quality got better this time around. Extra-wide 3.2-inch touchscreen LCD is a big bonus. Outstanding sound quality. TIRED: Massive internal hard drive makes it somewhat chunky and a bit of a load to carry. The “easy” button should be bigger and easier to find. And it should be red. Yeah red and all glowy. $1,400, Sony
(Photo by Jackson Lynch for Wired.com) Read our full Sony HDR-SR12 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : With Kensington's Wireless USB Docking Station, the moment you open your Wireless USB (WUSB)-enabled notebook, all your desktop devices are ready to go. We were amazed at how seamless the process is: The station recognized our 20-inch monitor, wireless USB mouse, keyboard and printer. It was as if they were always connected to the notebook. Of course, there are a few gotchas. WUSB is a new standard and some notebooks can't hook up with this docking station. Dell and Lenovo offer a few models, and other companies should be out the gate by this fall. With its plain, geeky looks, the 11.4-ounce antenna-topped station could get lost in a field of wireless routers. But that's not quite enough to put our Battlestar boxers in a knot: The Kensington Wireless Docking Station is a snap to set up and makes mobile computing, well, mobile and hassle-free. You know, the way it's supposed to be. —Michael S. Lasky WIRED: Drop-dead, simple setup and instant wireless connection of all desktop peripherals makes moving a notebook to and from the desk a hassle-free, nothing-to-plug-in experience. Small footprint means no great loss of desktop real estate. TIRED: Still few WUSB-enabled notebooks on the market. Audio handling could be smoother; default requires USB-powered speakers. First generation device is still pricey. $230, Kensington
Read our full Kensington Wireless USB Docking Station review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : This standard-definition lightweight shoots better video and has a much smarter feature set than most of its competitors. In fact, JVC knows that YouTubers can't bear missing the latest police beating or Matthew McConaughey shirtless in the grocery store, so the MS100 is lightning-quick on start up. The 35x optical zoom allows you to capture the crushing blows and bothersome blemishes while keeping a safe distance. Plus, the nifty laser-touch LCD makes you feel like a real cinematographer with speedy access to manual features. While it's nicely appointed, you've got to bridle at a couple things. First, there's no optical image stabilization. But shaky image stabilization aside, the very nature of this camcorder calls into question its usefulness. While neither big nor expensive, there are other, better, ultrasimple run-and-gun camcorders out there. Most are smaller and cheaper, too. With this form factor at this price, the MS100 is kind of stuck in the middle between the svelte flash-based AVCHD camcorders and the shirt-pocket shooters from Flip, Kodak and Creative. WIRED: 35x optical zoom brings the action right to your doorstep. Superb video quality. Formula 1 start-up speed. Easy to use laser-touch LCD. TIRED: No optical image stabilization. Lack of Mac compatibility is inexcusable and utterly perplexing. Three hundred and fifty bones for a camera that's made to record for YouTube? The Flip Mino does the same thing for about half the cost. $350, JVC
(Photo: Jackson Lynch/Wired.com) Read our full JVC Everio GZ-MS100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Through some loophole, wormhole or deal with the devil, Gateway has produced a massive desktop replacement that's fast, good and cheap. How fast, you ask? Fast enough to go toe-to-toe with -- and school -- a $4,800 Alienware Area 51 m15x: In our Quake 4 test, the Gateway posted a score of 167.8 fps to the m15x's 167.2. This is partially because the Gateway's 512-MB Nvidia Geforce 9800M is running the show. The FX also has Olympic endurance for larger-class notebooks, going 2 hours, 23 minutes to play a DVD. And that brings us to the cheap part. The Gateway is just $1,400 -- more than three times less than the Alienware and hundreds (and more hundreds) less than most other desktop replacement machines. Sure, it lacks the latest processor (it's got a 2.27-GHz Core Duo), but it has a whopping 4 GB of RAM to help it attack processing tasks and a spacious 200 GB of drive space for your stuff. The big bummer here is the missing Blu-ray drive, which is what is likely keeping this thing so affordable. WIRED: Some of the best gaming performance ever recorded on a PC. Long battery life for a desktop replacement. Comfy and solid keyboard withstands heavy hands. Multimedia controls and slide volume look cool without glowing too brightly. TIRED: No Blu-ray is a letdown for HD-heads, and you can't configure your PC to include the drive. The battery sticks out a bit in the back, and the power brick is monstrous. Power lights on the front, unlike the multimedia controls, are too bright. Price/maker: $1,400 (as tested), Gateway
Read our full Gateway P-7811FX Notebook review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Alienware prides itself on its tower rigs and desktop replacements, but several of its earlier forays in to the mid-size laptops were disastrous; the branding was intact but the performance wasn't. Not so with the m15x. This 15.4-incher is plenty portable, yet it has all the gaming trappings and the performance to back it up. From the unboxing onward, you can tell that you are paying for the experience as well as the hardware. A baseball cap with an alien head on it, an extra battery, VGA-to-DVI adapter, FireWire adapter and entertainment remote show that Alienware will risk no dissatisfied customers due to lackluster goodies. With specs that include a 2.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, 3 GB of RAM, and a 512-MB nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX, the m15x performs impressively, but not out of this world. It all comes down to the loot; this is a luxury item and there are far more affordable PCs with comparable performance. WIRED: Tip-top business and gaming performance. Lots of included extras for gaming elitists. The solid and handsome design will please gamers, and cool lighting effects will titillate geeks. TIRED: Exorbitant price that only a space tourist could pay without wincing. For all the expense, it's not the very best gaming PC. Dual batteries take a long time to charge up. The Blu-ray drive must be removed to accommodate the secondary battery. Price/maker: $4,880 (as tested), Alienware
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Alienware Area-51 m15x review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : The Archos 605 WiFi is a damn fine portable media player. Now it’s slightly mo' better due to this new GPS accessory, which for $130 adds full-bore street navigation that's on par with a Garmin or TomTom system. Well, a low-end Garmin or TomTom from a few years ago, anyway: This lackluster accessory does not have many of the bells and whistles of modern nav systems, and the one it does have -- real-time traffic updates -- works only in Europe. On the plus side, the software locks in satellite signals faster than NORAD. However, it navigates like a base commander heading home from the officer's club. On several occasions the GPS tried to route us totally out of the way instead of continuing on the road right in front of us. To make matters worse, the software doesn't announce street names, only directions. The GPS Car Holder would look pretty good if this were, say, 2003. And it does get you where you're going, if not always by the fastest or most logical route. At $130, it's a decent deal for current owners, but definitely behind the GPS times. WIRED: Cheaper than a standalone GPS, at least if you already own an Archos 605. High-resolution screen makes maps look mighty purty. Lightning-fast satellite lock. TIRED: The 605 can’t navigate without the car holder, so you can’t go on walkabout. Doesn’t say street names. Requires you to move to Europe if you want traffic features. You have to manually restart the GPS app every time you power on the 605. Price/maker: $130, Archos
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Archos 605 WiFi GPS Car Holder review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : As one of six new Fujitsu offerings equipped with Intel's Centrino 2, the Lifebook A6120 more than makes up for its dull exterior with features that will have prettier laptops quaking in their neoprene sleeves. Opposite its no frills glossy shell resides a gorgeous 15.4-inch LCD capable of brightening even the darkest depths of Mordor. Battery life and performance are equally impressive. The new 2.26-GHz CPU more than did the job when it came to photo editing, gaming and pretty much every other benchmark we threw at it. What's more, we squeezed a respectable four and a half hours of battery life under normal usage out of A6120. In fact, after playing with the Lifebook for a week, we were hard pressed to find anything significant to complain about. Would Fujitsu be well served by spending a little more time and effort on design and shrinking down that plump chassis? Sure. But this reviewer is more than happy to overlook a 1.7-inch waistline as long as it hides enough goodies. WIRED: Great bang/buck ratio. The A6120 starts at only $1,150 and jumps but $200 for a Radeon HD 3470 card and Blu-ray drive. Sharp, beautiful screen is one of the brightest we've seen on a laptop. Screw the chicklet-style keys found on other notebooks: Fujitsu's old school keyboard provides near perfect "clickiness" (to borrow a term from designer Amar Sagoo). TIRED: Small trackpad makes for a less than thrilling multitouch experience. Runs consistently hot -- don't rest it on your lap for long or risk a scorched crotch. While certainly not ugly, design is blander than a plate of lima beans. Price/maker: $1,350 (as tested), Fujitsu
Read our full Fujitsu Lifebook A6120 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : GeTac clearly had utilitarian users in mind with the E-100, which makes for a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to function. On the bright side, this surprisingly light ultramobile PC is military certified to withstand splashes of water, dust, humidity, shock and even freezing temperatures. Even common vulnerabilities like exposed ethernet and USB ports have been sidestepped with a bevy of watertight rubber stoppers. In fact, my review unit was able to smoothly stream South Park episodes while taking repeated tumbles down a flight of stairs. But it was when I looked under the hood that I found kinks in the armor. Mission-critical applications like Office ran at a reasonable clip in a number of bumpy environments, but for the E-100's price I was expecting a little more "oomph." The 100-GB shock-resistant ATA hard drive and 1 GB of RAM tilt the balance a little bit, but honestly, even the unassuming Eee PC comes stock with Intel's newer Atom chips. Mediocre specs aside, this rough and tumble UMPC performs solidly in a number of harsh environments and boasts a host of connectivity options. WIRED: Rock-solid construction, ergonomics and field performance. Responsive 8.4-inch touchscreen looks phenomenal in direct sunlight. Web ready with 802.11b/g, gigabit ethernet and SIM card slot. Waterproof combination SmartCard/PCMCIA slot. Decent battery life at 3.5 hours (WiFi on). 100-GB hard drive has its own heater for cycling up in freezing conditions. TIRED: Too little processing given the amount of buck. Near three grand price tag? Seriously? No option for a solid state drive?! Recessed USB and headphone jacks are a hassle to plug into. Tinny speaker is more of an afterthought. Lose the stylus and you're S.O.L. Looks that only a FedEx driver could love. Price/maker: $2,880 as tested, GeTac
Read our full GeTac E-100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Most of the new mini-laptops look like toys, educational tools or lab experiments in miniaturization, but the MSI Wind is an actual PC. Packing the latest 1.6-GHz Atom processor and a roomy 80-GB drive, the Wind boasts some legit PC cred. Yes, your iPod probably has more drive space, but 80 gigs was plenty not so long ago, and it's not like you're going to be producing HD video on this thing; it's more of an internet lapdog than a laptop. The 10-inch widescreen can display most fixed-width webpages comfortably, and its keyboard is large enough to house decent-size keys so you can type easily without resorting to Homer's dialing wand. While even some larger laptops are short on ports, the Wind finds room for three USBs, an SD slot and a display connector (take note, MacBook Air!). Of course, it's not perfect. We would have loved to see a DVD burner included, and with all its ports, a mini FireWire would be welcome. Also, don't expect high-end performance from the unit or hearty battery life from its slim, three-cell battery. But if you want a cheap and tiny companion for uploading pictures during a Malaysian jungle trek, or just a little buddy to hang out with you on the couch for IMDB searches, it's pretty hard to be against the Wind. WIRED: Grown-up looks (as opposed to "I want to sit at the big kids' table" found in other netbooks). Full keyboard and the largest screen among mini-notes. Plenty of ports to plug away at. 2.3-pound weight and rounded edges make it simple to pack and lug. TIRED: Lack of a DVD is understandable, but it still makes us cry a little. Hard drive sometimes makes mysterious swallowing sounds. Two-hour battery life is OK, but three would be better. $500, MSI Mobile
Photo: Jon Snyder/ Wired.com Read our full MSI Wind U100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Behold, the new Eee Box! Like the rest of the Eee bloodline, these varicolored desktop boxes are small, cheap and adorable (think AppleTV or Mac Mini). Intel's 1.6-GHz Atom processor, up to 2 GBs of memory, four USB ports, an SD card slot, 802.11n and Bluetooth are plenty for the Eee Box to hit that elusive "good enough" mark with aplomb. Once again, you'll get your choice of running either Linux or Windows XP. Then there's the size. While it does have a slightly larger overall footprint, it's much trimmer than the Mac Mini. Not only will this elegant 8.5 x 7 x 1-inch box fit anywhere, but you also have the choice of mounting it directly to the back of any extra monitor you happen to have lying around. To be clear, the Eee Box is not for sweaty frag fests or heavy-duty HD video decoding. But if you have a hankering for a killer kitchen PC or just an über-cheap second or third home PC that runs Linux or XP, it simply can't be beat. WIRED: Small, lightweight and cuter than a bowlful of kittens. More than enough processing power for everyday computing. Cheaper than an ounce of Da Kine bud. The option of running Splashtop for preboot access to Skype, web browsing and IM clients. TIRED: Where's the optical drive? No HDMI output, which actually doesn't matter much because there's also no hardware to decode acceleration. By itself, the Atom processor can barely handle 720p H.264 streams, dashing our hopes of this being the ultimate home-streaming box. $300 as tested, Asus
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Asus Eee Box review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Iomega's own $190 solution for a filled DVR is a 500-GB drive that plays nice with two DVRs in particular: Scientific Atlanta's 80-GB standard definition 8300 and the more recent 160-GB 8300-HD model. We tested the drive out on the latter model and found it more or less did what it promised. It even worked with a neighbor's Series 3 TiVo, which (to its credit) is known for being something of an eSATA slut. Setup in both instances was quick and painless, and involved simply turning off the DVR, plugging in the Iomega drive, and then turning everything back on again. Voila, no more having to choose between Emmanuelle: The Art of Love and the latest episode of Mad Men. WIRED: Reasonably priced. Your grandmother could probably set it up. Instantly adds an additional 300 hours of SD TV, or 60 hours of HD content. TIRED: Only one way to connect the drive to a DVR (that would be eSATA). Limited compatibility, although Iomega claims the drive will work with future SA eSATA-enabled DVRs. No way of controlling what gets stored on the expander drive and what gets stored on the DVR. Transporting DVR'd content to your computer is verboten, and plugging the drive into a computer will automatically reformat it. $190, Iomega
Read our full Iomega DVR Expander Drive review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  :
The Samsung U900, aka Soul, aka Magical Touch, doesn't really have any supernatural abilities. What it does have is a tiny, touch-sensitive OLED nav-pad that is one of the coolest, most efficient touch interfaces we've seen on a handset. The small display (situated below the main 2.2-inch QVGA screen) features icons that morph based on whatever application is currently on the screen. Switch to camera mode and controls for snapping pictures. Toggle to the music player and buttons for fast-forward, rewind, pause and play pop up. The big selling point is the phone's pocketability. The picture quality and dynamic range could be better (LED flash, we're talking about you), but at 0.5-inches thick and 7 ounces, this slider is more svelte than just about every 5-MP cam we've tested. Ultimately, our biggest complaint is that you cannot use the camera without sliding open the phone first. This design protects the lens from dust bunnies and pocket grime, yes, but shooting with a fully open device was a tad awkward at times. WIRED: External microSD slot makes it a cinch to swap cards on the fly. Bluetooth (+A2DP). Competent image-editing suite. Video editor allows you to layer additional audio tracks. Decent facial detection. Haptic feedback can be tweaked to three different levels of intensity or switched-off entirely. TIRED: Bundled proprietary ear buds sound duller than Ben Stein. No Xenon flash. No GPS. No WiFi. Lower-res video clips. Proprietary headphone jack positioned on the side = hard to pocket when phones are plugged in. Noticeable screen glare when outdoors. $400, Samsung
Photo: Issac Brekken/Wired.com Read our full Samsung SGH-U900 Soul "Magical Touch" review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : The biggest selling point of the new Sidekick is supposed to be the customizable "skins" you can order to replace the solid-color ones (we opted for jet black). But apart from flashy aesthetics, the pocket-friendly 2008 is 0.4-inches shorter and 0.9-ounces lighter than the pricier LX. It also packs features that were sorely missed with the tragically minimalist iD. Most notably, a 2.0-megapixel camera that can also capture video clips (albeit crappy ones). Though the 2.6-inch WQVGA swivel screen’s received a slight -- and necessary -- boost in pixels (400 x 240), the resolution’s still not fantastic. And neither is Bluetooth. We found data transfers not only paused the media player (annoying), but afterward, we had to go back and manually un-pause whatever track was playing (doubly annoying). For the price, though the 2008 is a solid option compared to the LX -- but only if you live and die by instant messaging and you don't mind being seen with Paris Hilton's device of choice in public. WIRED: Spacious, comfy QWERTY. 3.5-mm headphone jack. Surprisingly loud, radically clear music player. Wide screen excellent for web browsing. Solid battery life. Quick video recording/sharing. Comes with two skins (we got black and iridescent lime). Bluetooth with A2DP (great to have, even if it does disrupt tunes). TIRED: Screen retains more fingerprints than the Feds. No flash. No WiFi. Mike captures poor sound when recording video. Only 20-second video clips. Only 512-MB microSD card included. Apps are mostly in the $2.99+ range (except for the janky free Calculator). No 3-G. Price/maker: $150 (with 2-year contract), T-Mobile
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Sidekick review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : Cyclists know it's plum foolish to roll around on two wheels sans helmet, but it can be just as dangerous to bike about at night without a light. A good headlight affixed to your handlebars is just the thing to help cut through the murk and get you to your destination safely. Here we pit two of the top dogs on the market against each other and see which comes out on top. —Eric Smillie This one-watt LED cannon goes the extra mile, and we don't just mean it shoots light a ridiculous distance. Due in no small part to its particularly aggressive blinking mode, accurately called superflash, it didn’t just help us catch drivers' attentions; it had them anxiously craning their necks to check whether we were trying to pull them over. Drawing on only two AA batteries, this baby cuts down on weight but its CREE XR-E diode, coupled with a specially engineered Fraen lens, still pumps out the brightest light of all the lamps we tested -- enough to bounce off signs, license plates, and other reflective materials up to four blocks away, giving us plenty of time to make an impression. All we have to worry about now is whether some cop-hating, GTA IV-overdosing motorist trying to run us down. WIRED: Recessed switch only works if pressed firmly, which means it won’t turn on in your bag while you jostle your way to the bar, leaving you in the dark at closing time. Planet Bike spends 25 percent of its profits on bike advocacy. TIRED: The brightness and reduced weight come at a price: 20 hours of battery life in blinking mode, and only seven on high. Though it installs without the use of a tool, the handlebar bracket is tricky to tighten and slips easily. $50, Planet Bike
Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : While not the sharpest bulb on our handlebars, the WhiteLite HP AA is in it for the long haul. Don’t get us wrong -- just like other 1-watt LED headlamps, this portable, all-in one lamp is more than a glorified blinky. When engineering this light, Topeak got all snippy, cutting the cords to one of its external power-pack lights and reengineered it to accept three AA batteries. Its widely diffused beam covers plenty of surface area and earned our trust by helping us dodge nasty potholes and tree roots on unlit paths. But where this guy really shines is in perseverance, by lasting 30 hours on high and a whopping 120 on flash. WIRED: The mounting bracket screws tight with a finger knob and adjusts five degrees left and right to get a straight aim even on angled handlebars, although it does require an Allen key to tighten. Little red LED signals when batteries are low. TIRED: Blinks come slowly and lack urgency in flashing mode. Pushing the rear on/off push button can rotate the mount and mess up the light angle. Sound like a small problem? It won't be when you look up just in time to face plant into the bumper of a lifted pickup. $60, Topeak
Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily.  : The E71 looks more like a Blackberry Killer, but don’t be fooled: This great white hope gives the iPhone a run for its money in a lot of different areas (yes, really). Despite its obvious lack of an oversize touchscreen interface, Nokia wins points for a remarkably trim profile (10mm vs. 12.3mm), decent 3.2-megapixel camera (instead of 2.0), and the fact it's not tied to any carrier (yet). Setting up Nokia's Mail for Exchange program required no IT help or time. QuickOffice let us create, edit and send Word/Excel/PowerPoint files on the fly while we browsed PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Reader. The E71 is stocked with enough apps and goodies to keep even the most overworked road warrior on the ball, but it didn't feel too "business" due to two separate customizable home screens. One is designed to house all of your work apps while the other is geared more toward entertainment with programs for audio, video and gaming. The phone's 2.36-inch, 320 x 240 QVGA display is only slightly smaller than the iPod classic's, and though the resolution can't top the iPhone's, with 15 fps, the E71 is still solid for YouTube clips. Oh, and did we mention the E71's got battery life for days? Yes, literally, three of them. WIRED: Up to 8 GB in an easy-to-access, external microSD slot. Quick and seamless OS. GPS, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth (you name it, it's basically got it). Vivid screen (even in direct sunlight). Textured stainless steel backing prevents slippage. Relatively lightweight (127 grams = six grams lighter than iPhone). Hit any letter on the QWERTY pad and predictive text calls up that section of your address book. TIRED: No standard 3.5-mm headphone jack. 3.2-megapixel camera's optics could be better. LED flash could be way better. N-Gage gaming platform not available. Screen's wide, but not wide enough to do a feature-length film justice. For $500, you could get two 8-GB, 3-G JesusPhones (with $100 left over to put toward AT&T's data plan). $500 (unlocked), Nokia
Photo: Max Buck/Wired.com Read our full Nokia E71 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. 
Source: Wired Top Stories | 11 Sep 2008 | 4:00 am Sept. 11, 1822: Church Admits It's Not All About Us1822: The College of Cardinals finally caves in to the hard facts of science, saying that the "publication of works treating of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted." It represented a major shift in dogma for the Catholic Church, a concession that the Earth, in fact, might revolve around the sun. Unfortunately, it came 189 years too late to do Galileo Galilei any good. Still, it would take another 13 years, until 1835, before Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems -- the work in which he defends the heliocentric theory -- would be removed from the Vatican's list of banned books. As a theory, heliocentrism had existed since the ancient Greeks, who were the first to determine that the Earth is a sphere in a sky full of spheres. It remained an unproven theory directly opposed to the geocentric view held by Ptolemy and Aristotle, and embraced by Rome, that the Earth is the center of the universe. Galileo was greatly influenced by the Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, who not only posited that the Earth revolves around the sun but that it makes a complete turn on its axis every 24 hours. The Catholic Church, however, considered the theory heresy, and Galileo was convicted by the Inquisition in 1633 and remained under house arrest for the rest of his life. Nearly two centuries later, however, the weight of scientific evidence was so overwhelming that the College of Cardinals finally reversed itself and allowed the teaching of heliocentrism. Still, it would take another 170 years, until 1992, for a pope -- in this case, John Paul II -- to officially concede that, yes, the Earth isn't stationary in the heavens. Eight years after that, in 2000, John Paul apologized for the way the Catholic Church treated Galileo. Source: Various
Source: Wired Top Stories | 11 Sep 2008 | 4:00 am Gear Gallery: Sexy and Tough Mobile, Green Dell PC and More: First, a word to the RAZR fans. (There are some still left.) Though the V750 has similar looks and ergonomics, this isn't the second coming of the world's favorite fashion phone. With military-grade protection from dust, shock and high and low temperatures, it's a different creature entirely. Even though it casts the same fragile silhouette as the RAZR, my review unit took repeated 4-foot drops and dirt naps with ease (and just a few cracks). After brushing the phone off, I was still able to make and receive calls with reasonably clear audio. If you're concerned with the average accidental drops and collisions a cellphone endures on a day-to-day basis, the V750 has you covered, hands down. Ohhh, but that doesn't mean all is well in Rugged Town. The phone's hard plastic chassis and keypad did fine in my splash tests, but without the official certification in place, it's unlikely that the V750 could take a full dunk. Luckily, Motorola defied rugged convention by outfitting the V750 with an impressive array of multimedia features. Be it pictures, video, music or (gasp!) mobile web, the V750's brisk interface and capabilities match pace with most midlevel multimedia phones. Its 67 MB of memory and crippled Bluetooth keep it from groundbreaking status, but paired with its price, these features make the V750 a solid investment for the weekend adventure-seeker. WIRED: Sensible balance of utility and entertainment. Fantastic data speeds via EV-DO Rev A. 1,000-entry phone book stores multiple numbers per entry and postal addresses. 1.6-inch external LCD makes on-the-go media playback a breeze. Looks and handles like a sleek, non-rugged phone. TIRED: Modestly rugged at best. Push-To-Talk setup is convoluted and clunky. Muddy speakerphone audio at high volumes. Flimsy battery door flies off during impacts. Verizon OS cripples Bluetooth, video message length and file sharing. Flashless cameras are the stuff of the Dark Ages. $260, Motorola
Read our full Motorola V750 Adventure review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Dell Studio Hybrid doesn’t run on ethanol and D-cells, but it does consume about 70 percent less electricity than those hulking desktop towers. This über-cute little media-cruncher comes in your choice of rich automotive colors (or bamboo, for Pier 1-themed abodes), and you can swap colors on demand with interchangeable sleeves. The Hybrid starts at $500, but by the time you trick it out with goodies like a slot-loading Blu-ray drive, Wireless-N adapter, Logitech’s diNovo Mini Keyboard (a must if you’re planning couch time), a digital TV tuner, and the bamboo sleeve (a $130 upgrade -- WTF?), the price rockets north of $1,300. Hybrids can serve desk duty or accent your living room: Even the base model comes stocked with HDMI port (DVI, too), so it’s a cinch to pair with HDTV. Blu-ray movies at 1920 x 1080 did just fine aside from a video stutter every time we adjusted the volume. Dell scores big points for style, power conservation and customization. WIRED: Sips power, unlike those heinous watt-guzzling towers. Swappable color sleeves let you change the paint job to match your mood -- or paint job. Reports for media-center duty with HDMI port and slot-loading Blu-ray drive. Metal stand cleverly morphs between vertical and horizontal positions. TIRED: Wussy integrated graphics choke on 3-D games. Looks rigged for silent running, but actually runs a little noisy. $130 bamboo sleeve will only appeal to aristocratic pandas. $1,365 (as tested), Dell
Read our full Dell Studio Hybrid review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : To instantly win the mine's-better-than-yours camera contest, show friends the Z150's gorgeous 3-inch LCD. It's mammoth for a camera with a sub-$200 price tag, and bright enough to see in direct sunlight. You can also fire off a group shot without having to take the customary 20 steps back to fit everybody in: The Z150's wide-angle lens (28mm) offers a dramatically broader field of view than most pocket cams. Meanwhile, the lens zooms to 4x before the digital faux-zoom kicks in -- that’s a whole "x" better than other models in this price range. Idjit-proof controls and logical onscreen menus make the Z150 a camera anyone can pick up and use sans manual. A dedicated video-record button captures YouTube-friendly movies at 30 fps. The Z150 tops out at 8.1 megapixels -- more than adequate for the party scene. But as you might expect, the camera produces considerable image noise when the lights are low and the ISO high. Only the color reproduction disappoints: It's good, but lacking that zing we see in competing models from, say, Canon. Of course, some of Canon's pocket shooters tend toward the bulky as well, so we can forgive the EX-Z150 its slightly excessive carriage. And we're mad for its big-screen, sweet wide-angle lens, and affordable price. WIRED: Wide-angle lens just plain kicks ass, and 4x optical zoom gets you close. One-touch video recording and YouTube-upload software make this the perfect camera for Paris-Lindsay-Bigfoot sightings. TIRED: Too thick and heavy to leave in your pocket all day. Small, stiff control pad. Snapshot colors lack pop. Battery must be removed for charging. $200, Casio
Read our full Casio EX Z150 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Everything’s getting tiny. The once-sexy V-8 engine is now an automotive pariah while the Smart Car gets all the chicks; HD video cameras are now damn near Twinkie-size, and we’ll probably be implanting the next-generation iPod in our molars. But at least one company isn’t succumbing to all this smaller-is-better madness: TiVo just announced the TiVo HD XL. Stuffed like a Cornish hen with a terabyte hard drive, it’s the highest-capacity DVR available, with room for 150 hours of HD content. That’s, like, every Olympic event you actually care about plus all 60 episodes of The Wire. It’s an entire season of Sunday Night Football with more than enough space for your Food Network-obsessed roommate to go balls-out on Batali. -- Joe Brown WIRED: Western Digital hard drive is nearly silent. THX-certified audio and video (finally). Say goodbye to the ugly stick -- the XL gets the same slick programmable remote as the Series 3. TiVo-easy, as expected, with the company’s ever-expanding catalog of downloadable videos (YouTube!). TIRED: Remote collects more greasy fingerprints than a secondhand sexbot. Annoying info screen hovers over the picture a few seconds too long with each channel change. Cutesy TiVo noises are a little grating, and your only other option is to turn all the sound effects off. We noticed an increase in video artifacts when recording off both tuners simultaneously. In San Francisco, at least, you have to deal with $600, TiVo
Read our full TiVo HD XL review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Need to juice up your desktop music scene? Nuforce has just the thing. Its new Icon is a miniature, multithreat amplifier that can be used to pump music from a computer or audio player to your speakers and headphones. Although it's only 12 watts per channel, the Icon is powerful enough to act as a pre-amp to full-fledged stereos and on its own can drive most bookshelf speakers, producing a wide, spacious sound stage. The sound quality from the headphone jack on my laptop is thin and distorted, but when I hooked up the Icon via the USB port and patched in my Grado SR80 cans, it was a revelation. The Icon uses a high-quality digital-to-analog converter to convert the computer's digital signal to sweet-sounding analog, and all of a sudden the music was crystal clear, the bass cleaner and deeper, and the overall sound infinitely better. The only downside here may be that you'll realize how crummy some of those downloaded MP3s actually sound. In the end, the beauty of the Icon is that it can be used in so many different ways. I've got it powering some outdoor speakers on my patio -- and it excels wherever you rig it. WIRED: Sturdy silicon-like stand holds it vertically. Rad design and color choices: red, black, blue, silver. Small enough to take on vacation. TIRED: Ethernet speaker cables are cutting-edge, but standard banana plugs would be better. Bass can be a touch thin in heavier (rock, hip-hop) music. Price/maker: $250, Nuforce
Photo: Christopher Jones/Wired.com Read our full Nuforce Icon Desktop Amplifier review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Treo Pro sports a shiny, rounded, tuxedo-black exterior and a handful of practical OS "shortcuts." Aside from the industrial iPhone-like design lines, those shortcuts are enough to make even the most die-hard Machead grin and bear Windows Mobile (almost). At the top of our shortcut list are the dedicated WiFi button on the right side and customizable button on the left (ours was set for camera). Circumventing the main menu and tiresome nav made the phone a joy to use. The touchscreen, on the other hand, was far from blissful. Laggy and unresponsive, we found ourselves double- and sometimes triple-tapping -– even with the stylus. Palm is definitely flexing its once-mighty muscle and trying to say it can build a stylish multimedia device with a touchscreen. But for $550, a touch interface should have more precision than this. We can only hope Palm continues to fine-tune the screen and ditch that archaic stylus permanently. WIRED: Trim, light and pocketable. Shortcuts prove beyond useful. Decent 2-megapixel pics. MicroUSB Battery lasts almost two full days. 3.5mm headphone jack. PPT/Excel/Word and PDF-reading, of course. Google Maps and TeleNav GPS, which offers turn-by-turn directions plus target searches; e.g., gas stations by price. Ships unlocked. TIRED: Menu scrolling is about as fluid as a piece of dolomite. Slippery "obsidian" plastic casing retains more fingerprints than the NSA. Noticeable screen glare. Curved design comprised by bottom-side USB/headphone jack that should be recessed more. Bluetooth not included in image send options. Only way to access microSD? Remove battery cover. Price/maker: $550, Palm
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Palm Treo Pro review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Look! Hardware that breaks –- on purpose! The Z10's apparent bendy kick-slide design may be flashy, but turning out an innovative design is about the only thing this phone has going for it. Though it's billed as a "pocket-sized mobile studio," this 4-ounce, platinum-trimmed phone is certainly no substitute for even a mediocre minicamcorder (Exhibit A: the Flip Mino). So why drop $500 on the Z10 when you can get a 5-megapixel camphone (Exhibit B: the Nokia N82) that shoots crisper stills and comparable vids? Beats us. Maybe it's the intuitive editing suite: The Z10's storyboard feature let us cut together a montage of clips and pics with cinematic fades, circle dissolves, music and title cards in less than 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the OS wasn't nearly as user-friendly. We literally had to break out the instruction manual just to send a Bluetooth pic (no joke). Had Motorola spent even half as much time making the software as innovative as its breakaway hardware, the Z10 would have wowed us. But with its lacking OS and underwhelming camera, the phone didn't feel ready for prime time. WIRED: 30-fps vid clips don’t look too shabby. Quick, easy uploading to YouTube and Shozu. Storyboarding was a cinch. Camera shortcut button, plus autofocus, great for snapping pics on the fly. Easy-to-access external microSD card slot is ready for 32 GB.
Price/maker: $500 (unlocked), Motorola
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Motorola Z10 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Sylvania G Netbook is a fairly direct response to the Asus Eee PC 900 series, with an 8.9-inch screen, Linux OS and chicklet keys that make touch typing a fever dream fantasy. And while some of Sylvania's choices here are merely dreadful (the arrow keys are a mere 12mm wide — thinner than my pinky), it's actually the OS that royally blows it for the Netbook. Ubuntu is known for being one of the most stable and simple versions of Linux on the market, but Sylvania somehow turns it into a nightmare on this system. For a computer ostensibly designed for inexperienced users, it's a disaster. I had trouble with the Ubuntu installation on the Netbook from the start: Blank screens on bootup. MPEGs wouldn't play and codec installations repeatedly failed (or even crashed the machine). Help files weren't installed. And most annoying of all, the battery meter couldn't decide whether the computer was plugged in, and pegged battery life remaining at 0 or 2 percent no matter how long we charged it. The Netbook abruptly shut itself off on at least one occasion, possibly convinced that it was out of juice. With stability this dismal, the specs are largely irrelevant. But if you're willing to invest the time to work through the Netbook's quirks and faults, it could make a great replacement for your desk calculator. —Christopher Null WIRED: Has a real hard drive (80 GB) instead of flash storage. Includes three USB ports and an SD card reader. Comes in colors. Bright screen for this category. TIRED: Slower than a sedated slug at just about every app despite 1.6-GHz Atom chip and 1-GB RAM (standard $399 model includes just 512-MB RAM). Cartoonish styling. Considerably heavier than advertised (and the Eee PC 900) at 2.6 pounds. Far too buggy to be taken seriously. Price/maker: $450 (as tested), Sylvania
Photo courtesy Sylvania Read our full Sylvania G Netbook review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Think of this 26-inch TV from Samsung as any one of last year's larger models, shrunk down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's only 720p, but its bright, detailed picture is impressive and its vivid color is surprisingly accurate for a set this small. It scores surprisingly well in our video-processing tests, even besting many of this year's small models. Sure, this model is a bit challenged in the areas of de-interlacing 24-fps film-based HD sources and removing jaggies from diagonal lines, but then so are many of the 32-inch and smaller TVs we've tested this year. And who really worries about 24 FPS film sources on a 26-incher besides geeks like us? Unlike many small sets, though, the Samsung's noise reduction performs beautifully. We saw good results leaving it in "auto" for all but the crappiest video, and only had to really adjust for our truly hideous NR test clip. Hardcore testing aside, the Samsung's good NR combined with its great picture and color delivered where it matters the most: Our HD and SD test movies looked awesome, as did satellite HDTV and output from our 360. —Chuck Cage WIRED: Attractive, simple remote-control. Side ports (HDMI, S-Video and composite) make hooking up a 360 or camcorder a breeze. Optical digital audio out -- perfect for tying into that massive dorm-theater sound system. TIRED: Some video-processing issues. 1366 x 728 native resolution makes it a not-so-great computer monitor unless you're over 40 and want to read without your glasses. Price/maker: $550, Samsung
Read our full Samsung LN26A450C1 LCD TV review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The HP TouchSmart IQ506 is an update to last year's all-in-one touchscreen, the TouchSmart IQ770. This year, HP went for a countertop-friendly design by packing all the components into the IQ506's brilliant 22-inch, touch-sensitive display. As a whole, this makes for a much more streamlined and clutter-free presentation compared to its predecessor. In terms of general ease and responsiveness, the IQ506's touchscreen does a marginally good job. Common maneuvers like double taps and click-and-drag highlighting can be pulled off with minimal hassle. Even problem areas like corners were accessible with relatively effortless finger pokes. Save for a pinch/zoom gesture, however, all the image-rotating fun we were expecting was largely nonexistent. In its defense, leaving notes, creating calendar reminders and a host of other "bulletin board" tasks were a cinch using the TouchSmart dashboard. But even though you can incorporate non-dashboard programs like Firefox into the interface, opening these applications kicks you back out to the Vista desktop. On one hand, the system is a great value when one compares the sticker price to the components, but it's disconcerting that a $1,500 computer lacks the flair and usability of a relatively inexpensive device like the iPhone. We've got our fingers crossed for next year's model. WIRED: Elegant space-saving design. Speaker bar produces booming lows and clear highs. Bright 22-inch screen hides smudges and fingerprints. Integrated TV tuner adds living room chops. Blazing connectivity via gigabit Ethernet and integrated 802.11b/g/n. 500-GB hard drive offers plenty of room for media storage. Whisper-quiet operation. TIRED: Not the smoothest touch-based interface. Handoffs between TouchSmart/Vista programs are slow and awkward. Very limited upgrade options. Midrange GPU puts a damper on hardcore gaming. Retractable bezel feels cheap and rickety. Sluggish processor given its all-in-one class. What? No Blu-ray? Price/maker: $1,500 (as tested), hp.com
Read our full HP TouchSmart IQ506 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Dubbed the "Boulder," this angular, candy-colored handset is the offspring of the Gadget Lab's crumpled Type-V, Type-S and Type-SL review units. The Boulder isn't another rugged rehash, though. In fact, Casio finally threw a curve by including some fairly useful multimedia features. Welcome additions like music playback, a more powerful (but still lacking) camera, and zippy EV-DO connectivity fatten up this phone's already rock-solid resume. But let's face it -- Casio is extremely late to the party with these commonplace features. Previous pratfalls like the laughably low-res external LCD, and an annoying light show for incoming calls have returned too. Foibles aside, a lot of the "new" features were actually well integrated into this otherwise hard-knock handset. Tasks like downloading and playing music, mobile messaging and accessing webmail were brisk and painless due to a sensible layout and speedy EV-DO network. Little usability improvements (and smart additions like a waterproof cover for the microSD port) reinforced Casio's obvious commitment to achieving a rugged/user-friendly balance. Casio definitely gets kudos for bringing a tank like the G'zOne into the multimedia era. However, the Boulder is more a patchwork of desirable features, rather than a cohesive marriage of entertainment and durability. WIRED: Armored cross section where mud meets multimedia. External LCD doubles as wanderlust-friendly e-compass. Awesome camera flash/flashlight combo. Expanded memory via microSD card slot. Solid call quality -- even after 12 rounds of tough love. Included cradle doubles as a travel charger. Also comes in "less-flamboyant" black. TIRED: Terrible speakerphone quality for both voice and music. Far too expensive. Annoying multicolored lights show signals incoming calls. No file sharing via Bluetooth. Lackluster 1.3-MP camera sucks for both stills and video. Sweet angles still can't hide a brick-ish profile. Price/maker: $130 (after $50 rebate), Verizon
Read our full Casio G'zOne Boulder review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Out of the box and straight up to the eye you'll immediately enjoy the D3's spacious and bright viewfinder. The noticeably improved 51-point auto focus system is whip-fast and works in concert with an outstanding 1005-pixel metering sensor that gets it right in the most challenging lighting. Images are beautifully consistent with a wide dynamic range and improved noise-reduction settings that give the pictures a more natural look. To achieve that end, Nikon pulled back on the sharpening levels, leaving the choice of added "crunchiness" to a photographer's post-production predilections. Nikon's new three-inch high-res LCD is a revelation. If you do take the plunge, be ready to spend a good chunk of time learning the feature set to exploit the D3's capabilities. From resolution to speed, color control, bit-depth and so much more, the D3 is incredibly customizable. Dial it in for lightning-quick 11-fps sports action, superlow-light shooting (ISO up to 25600), handheld or tripod-mounted live view -- you name it, whatever and however you want to shoot, the D3 does it exceptionally well. WIRED: High ISO shooting is fantastic with relatively low noise at settings up to ISO 3200 and beyond. Live view function the best of the top-end DSLRs. Dual CF card capability. TIRED: So many functions it could take a lifetime to learn them all. No in-camera dust-reduction system. Price/maker: $5,000 (body only), Nikon
Read our full Nikon D3 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The U110 ultralight we received looks striking, with a scarlet paisley-etched aluminum lid paired with a shiny jet-black keyboard area. As soon as you open it up and power it on, you come face to face with one of the U110's most interesting yet unsettling features: VeriFace recognition. After booting up, the webcam embedded in the bezel starts scanning the room. When it finds you, it superimposes disturbing cross hairs on your eyes in an attempt to recognize you and unlock the PC. If you haven't registered your peepers, the system will hang, so you have to shut it down, turn the notebook away and open it up again to get it to boot. The 11.1-inch display is bright and sharp, though it can look a bit iridescent at close range. The glossy black keys are big and square but the thin membrane beneath the keys is flimsy and deforms as you type. There is a decent set of ports, but the designers couldn't find room for an optical drive. Seriously, we're pretty disappointed. The included external DVD drive looks cool, but you know what would be even cooler? Not needing an external drive at all. For work purposes, the Lenovo is a capable little machine. The U110 excelled in our PCMark tests, far outdistancing most other ultralights. Overall this is a good PC; it just has a few annoyances. WIRED: Charming good looks will attract the Lenovo faithful who are sick of looking funerary. Excellent business performance will silence office critics of your "red PC (Harumph!)." Delightfully light and slim. TIRED: The keyboard, though pretty, is pretty flimsy. Terminator-style face recognition will give you the heebie-jeebies and make you torch all your Schwarzenegger flicks (Especially Batman and Robin). External DVD means one more gadget to tote. Price/maker: $1,800 (as tested), Lenovo
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad U110 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Dishing out a hefty helping of HD, the SR12 is a lot of camera, both in your hand and under the hood with its 120-GB hard drive. The upgraded CMOS sensor and Bionz image processor have significantly improved image quality and stomped out even more noise. Sony’s face-detection system, which works snappily for video and the 10.2-megapixel stills, is very effective both up close and at long range. OK, so it makes great video, but what about the controls? For those who fly on manual, the Cam Control Dial is like piloting an F22. Neatly nestled next to the lens, the silver nubbin is a twisty-twirly festival of videographic functionality, providing quick access to manual adjustments of exposure, focus, white balance and aperture. There’s also an “easy” button on board. A quick tap on the little blue button and all you’ve got to do is point the camera in the right direction to get the good stuff. In spite of all this Sony video goodness, the SR12 has one glaring flaw — terribly difficult Mac integration. To get it working you’ve got to have iMovie '08. Previous versions of iMovie don’t have the capability to natively read the AVCHD codec meaning that you had to convert the video to other formats in order to do any post-production. WIRED: Excellent AVCHD video quality got better this time around. Extra-wide 3.2-inch touchscreen LCD is a big bonus. Outstanding sound quality. TIRED: Massive internal hard drive makes it somewhat chunky and a bit of a load to carry. The “easy” button should be bigger and easier to find. And it should be red. Yeah red and all glowy. $1,400, Sony
(Photo by Jackson Lynch for Wired.com) Read our full Sony HDR-SR12 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : With Kensington's Wireless USB Docking Station, the moment you open your Wireless USB (WUSB)-enabled notebook, all your desktop devices are ready to go. We were amazed at how seamless the process is: The station recognized our 20-inch monitor, wireless USB mouse, keyboard and printer. It was as if they were always connected to the notebook. Of course, there are a few gotchas. WUSB is a new standard and some notebooks can't hook up with this docking station. Dell and Lenovo offer a few models, and other companies should be out the gate by this fall. With its plain, geeky looks, the 11.4-ounce antenna-topped station could get lost in a field of wireless routers. But that's not quite enough to put our Battlestar boxers in a knot: The Kensington Wireless Docking Station is a snap to set up and makes mobile computing, well, mobile and hassle-free. You know, the way it's supposed to be. —Michael S. Lasky WIRED: Drop-dead, simple setup and instant wireless connection of all desktop peripherals makes moving a notebook to and from the desk a hassle-free, nothing-to-plug-in experience. Small footprint means no great loss of desktop real estate. TIRED: Still few WUSB-enabled notebooks on the market. Audio handling could be smoother; default requires USB-powered speakers. First generation device is still pricey. $230, Kensington
Read our full Kensington Wireless USB Docking Station review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : This standard-definition lightweight shoots better video and has a much smarter feature set than most of its competitors. In fact, JVC knows that YouTubers can't bear missing the latest police beating or Matthew McConaughey shirtless in the grocery store, so the MS100 is lightning-quick on start up. The 35x optical zoom allows you to capture the crushing blows and bothersome blemishes while keeping a safe distance. Plus, the nifty laser-touch LCD makes you feel like a real cinematographer with speedy access to manual features. While it's nicely appointed, you've got to bridle at a couple things. First, there's no optical image stabilization. But shaky image stabilization aside, the very nature of this camcorder calls into question its usefulness. While neither big nor expensive, there are other, better, ultrasimple run-and-gun camcorders out there. Most are smaller and cheaper, too. With this form factor at this price, the MS100 is kind of stuck in the middle between the svelte flash-based AVCHD camcorders and the shirt-pocket shooters from Flip, Kodak and Creative. WIRED: 35x optical zoom brings the action right to your doorstep. Superb video quality. Formula 1 start-up speed. Easy to use laser-touch LCD. TIRED: No optical image stabilization. Lack of Mac compatibility is inexcusable and utterly perplexing. Three hundred and fifty bones for a camera that's made to record for YouTube? The Flip Mino does the same thing for about half the cost. $350, JVC
(Photo: Jackson Lynch/Wired.com) Read our full JVC Everio GZ-MS100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Through some loophole, wormhole or deal with the devil, Gateway has produced a massive desktop replacement that's fast, good and cheap. How fast, you ask? Fast enough to go toe-to-toe with -- and school -- a $4,800 Alienware Area 51 m15x: In our Quake 4 test, the Gateway posted a score of 167.8 fps to the m15x's 167.2. This is partially because the Gateway's 512-MB Nvidia Geforce 9800M is running the show. The FX also has Olympic endurance for larger-class notebooks, going 2 hours, 23 minutes to play a DVD. And that brings us to the cheap part. The Gateway is just $1,400 -- more than three times less than the Alienware and hundreds (and more hundreds) less than most other desktop replacement machines. Sure, it lacks the latest processor (it's got a 2.27-GHz Core Duo), but it has a whopping 4 GB of RAM to help it attack processing tasks and a spacious 200 GB of drive space for your stuff. The big bummer here is the missing Blu-ray drive, which is what is likely keeping this thing so affordable. WIRED: Some of the best gaming performance ever recorded on a PC. Long battery life for a desktop replacement. Comfy and solid keyboard withstands heavy hands. Multimedia controls and slide volume look cool without glowing too brightly. TIRED: No Blu-ray is a letdown for HD-heads, and you can't configure your PC to include the drive. The battery sticks out a bit in the back, and the power brick is monstrous. Power lights on the front, unlike the multimedia controls, are too bright. Price/maker: $1,400 (as tested), Gateway
Read our full Gateway P-7811FX Notebook review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Alienware prides itself on its tower rigs and desktop replacements, but several of its earlier forays in to the mid-size laptops were disastrous; the branding was intact but the performance wasn't. Not so with the m15x. This 15.4-incher is plenty portable, yet it has all the gaming trappings and the performance to back it up. From the unboxing onward, you can tell that you are paying for the experience as well as the hardware. A baseball cap with an alien head on it, an extra battery, VGA-to-DVI adapter, FireWire adapter and entertainment remote show that Alienware will risk no dissatisfied customers due to lackluster goodies. With specs that include a 2.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, 3 GB of RAM, and a 512-MB nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX, the m15x performs impressively, but not out of this world. It all comes down to the loot; this is a luxury item and there are far more affordable PCs with comparable performance. WIRED: Tip-top business and gaming performance. Lots of included extras for gaming elitists. The solid and handsome design will please gamers, and cool lighting effects will titillate geeks. TIRED: Exorbitant price that only a space tourist could pay without wincing. For all the expense, it's not the very best gaming PC. Dual batteries take a long time to charge up. The Blu-ray drive must be removed to accommodate the secondary battery. Price/maker: $4,880 (as tested), Alienware
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Alienware Area-51 m15x review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Archos 605 WiFi is a damn fine portable media player. Now it’s slightly mo' better due to this new GPS accessory, which for $130 adds full-bore street navigation that's on par with a Garmin or TomTom system. Well, a low-end Garmin or TomTom from a few years ago, anyway: This lackluster accessory does not have many of the bells and whistles of modern nav systems, and the one it does have -- real-time traffic updates -- works only in Europe. On the plus side, the software locks in satellite signals faster than NORAD. However, it navigates like a base commander heading home from the officer's club. On several occasions the GPS tried to route us totally out of the way instead of continuing on the road right in front of us. To make matters worse, the software doesn't announce street names, only directions. The GPS Car Holder would look pretty good if this were, say, 2003. And it does get you where you're going, if not always by the fastest or most logical route. At $130, it's a decent deal for current owners, but definitely behind the GPS times. WIRED: Cheaper than a standalone GPS, at least if you already own an Archos 605. High-resolution screen makes maps look mighty purty. Lightning-fast satellite lock. TIRED: The 605 can’t navigate without the car holder, so you can’t go on walkabout. Doesn’t say street names. Requires you to move to Europe if you want traffic features. You have to manually restart the GPS app every time you power on the 605. Price/maker: $130, Archos
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Archos 605 WiFi GPS Car Holder review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : As one of six new Fujitsu offerings equipped with Intel's Centrino 2, the Lifebook A6120 more than makes up for its dull exterior with features that will have prettier laptops quaking in their neoprene sleeves. Opposite its no frills glossy shell resides a gorgeous 15.4-inch LCD capable of brightening even the darkest depths of Mordor. Battery life and performance are equally impressive. The new 2.26-GHz CPU more than did the job when it came to photo editing, gaming and pretty much every other benchmark we threw at it. What's more, we squeezed a respectable four and a half hours of battery life under normal usage out of A6120. In fact, after playing with the Lifebook for a week, we were hard pressed to find anything significant to complain about. Would Fujitsu be well served by spending a little more time and effort on design and shrinking down that plump chassis? Sure. But this reviewer is more than happy to overlook a 1.7-inch waistline as long as it hides enough goodies. WIRED: Great bang/buck ratio. The A6120 starts at only $1,150 and jumps but $200 for a Radeon HD 3470 card and Blu-ray drive. Sharp, beautiful screen is one of the brightest we've seen on a laptop. Screw the chicklet-style keys found on other notebooks: Fujitsu's old school keyboard provides near perfect "clickiness" (to borrow a term from designer Amar Sagoo). TIRED: Small trackpad makes for a less than thrilling multitouch experience. Runs consistently hot -- don't rest it on your lap for long or risk a scorched crotch. While certainly not ugly, design is blander than a plate of lima beans. Price/maker: $1,350 (as tested), Fujitsu
Read our full Fujitsu Lifebook A6120 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : GeTac clearly had utilitarian users in mind with the E-100, which makes for a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to function. On the bright side, this surprisingly light ultramobile PC is military certified to withstand splashes of water, dust, humidity, shock and even freezing temperatures. Even common vulnerabilities like exposed ethernet and USB ports have been sidestepped with a bevy of watertight rubber stoppers. In fact, my review unit was able to smoothly stream South Park episodes while taking repeated tumbles down a flight of stairs. But it was when I looked under the hood that I found kinks in the armor. Mission-critical applications like Office ran at a reasonable clip in a number of bumpy environments, but for the E-100's price I was expecting a little more "oomph." The 100-GB shock-resistant ATA hard drive and 1 GB of RAM tilt the balance a little bit, but honestly, even the unassuming Eee PC comes stock with Intel's newer Atom chips. Mediocre specs aside, this rough and tumble UMPC performs solidly in a number of harsh environments and boasts a host of connectivity options. WIRED: Rock-solid construction, ergonomics and field performance. Responsive 8.4-inch touchscreen looks phenomenal in direct sunlight. Web ready with 802.11b/g, gigabit ethernet and SIM card slot. Waterproof combination SmartCard/PCMCIA slot. Decent battery life at 3.5 hours (WiFi on). 100-GB hard drive has its own heater for cycling up in freezing conditions. TIRED: Too little processing given the amount of buck. Near three grand price tag? Seriously? No option for a solid state drive?! Recessed USB and headphone jacks are a hassle to plug into. Tinny speaker is more of an afterthought. Lose the stylus and you're S.O.L. Looks that only a FedEx driver could love. Price/maker: $2,880 as tested, GeTac
Read our full GeTac E-100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Most of the new mini-laptops look like toys, educational tools or lab experiments in miniaturization, but the MSI Wind is an actual PC. Packing the latest 1.6-GHz Atom processor and a roomy 80-GB drive, the Wind boasts some legit PC cred. Yes, your iPod probably has more drive space, but 80 gigs was plenty not so long ago, and it's not like you're going to be producing HD video on this thing; it's more of an internet lapdog than a laptop. The 10-inch widescreen can display most fixed-width webpages comfortably, and its keyboard is large enough to house decent-size keys so you can type easily without resorting to Homer's dialing wand. While even some larger laptops are short on ports, the Wind finds room for three USBs, an SD slot and a display connector (take note, MacBook Air!). Of course, it's not perfect. We would have loved to see a DVD burner included, and with all its ports, a mini FireWire would be welcome. Also, don't expect high-end performance from the unit or hearty battery life from its slim, three-cell battery. But if you want a cheap and tiny companion for uploading pictures during a Malaysian jungle trek, or just a little buddy to hang out with you on the couch for IMDB searches, it's pretty hard to be against the Wind. WIRED: Grown-up looks (as opposed to "I want to sit at the big kids' table" found in other netbooks). Full keyboard and the largest screen among mini-notes. Plenty of ports to plug away at. 2.3-pound weight and rounded edges make it simple to pack and lug. TIRED: Lack of a DVD is understandable, but it still makes us cry a little. Hard drive sometimes makes mysterious swallowing sounds. Two-hour battery life is OK, but three would be better. $500, MSI Mobile
Photo: Jon Snyder/ Wired.com Read our full MSI Wind U100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Behold, the new Eee Box! Like the rest of the Eee bloodline, these varicolored desktop boxes are small, cheap and adorable (think AppleTV or Mac Mini). Intel's 1.6-GHz Atom processor, up to 2 GBs of memory, four USB ports, an SD card slot, 802.11n and Bluetooth are plenty for the Eee Box to hit that elusive "good enough" mark with aplomb. Once again, you'll get your choice of running either Linux or Windows XP. Then there's the size. While it does have a slightly larger overall footprint, it's much trimmer than the Mac Mini. Not only will this elegant 8.5 x 7 x 1-inch box fit anywhere, but you also have the choice of mounting it directly to the back of any extra monitor you happen to have lying around. To be clear, the Eee Box is not for sweaty frag fests or heavy-duty HD video decoding. But if you have a hankering for a killer kitchen PC or just an über-cheap second or third home PC that runs Linux or XP, it simply can't be beat. WIRED: Small, lightweight and cuter than a bowlful of kittens. More than enough processing power for everyday computing. Cheaper than an ounce of Da Kine bud. The option of running Splashtop for preboot access to Skype, web browsing and IM clients. TIRED: Where's the optical drive? No HDMI output, which actually doesn't matter much because there's also no hardware to decode acceleration. By itself, the Atom processor can barely handle 720p H.264 streams, dashing our hopes of this being the ultimate home-streaming box. $300 as tested, Asus
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Asus Eee Box review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Iomega's own $190 solution for a filled DVR is a 500-GB drive that plays nice with two DVRs in particular: Scientific Atlanta's 80-GB standard definition 8300 and the more recent 160-GB 8300-HD model. We tested the drive out on the latter model and found it more or less did what it promised. It even worked with a neighbor's Series 3 TiVo, which (to its credit) is known for being something of an eSATA slut. Setup in both instances was quick and painless, and involved simply turning off the DVR, plugging in the Iomega drive, and then turning everything back on again. Voila, no more having to choose between Emmanuelle: The Art of Love and the latest episode of Mad Men. WIRED: Reasonably priced. Your grandmother could probably set it up. Instantly adds an additional 300 hours of SD TV, or 60 hours of HD content. TIRED: Only one way to connect the drive to a DVR (that would be eSATA). Limited compatibility, although Iomega claims the drive will work with future SA eSATA-enabled DVRs. No way of controlling what gets stored on the expander drive and what gets stored on the DVR. Transporting DVR'd content to your computer is verboten, and plugging the drive into a computer will automatically reformat it. $190, Iomega
Read our full Iomega DVR Expander Drive review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. :
The Samsung U900, aka Soul, aka Magical Touch, doesn't really have any supernatural abilities. What it does have is a tiny, touch-sensitive OLED nav-pad that is one of the coolest, most efficient touch interfaces we've seen on a handset. The small display (situated below the main 2.2-inch QVGA screen) features icons that morph based on whatever application is currently on the screen. Switch to camera mode and controls for snapping pictures. Toggle to the music player and buttons for fast-forward, rewind, pause and play pop up. The big selling point is the phone's pocketability. The picture quality and dynamic range could be better (LED flash, we're talking about you), but at 0.5-inches thick and 7 ounces, this slider is more svelte than just about every 5-MP cam we've tested. Ultimately, our biggest complaint is that you cannot use the camera without sliding open the phone first. This design protects the lens from dust bunnies and pocket grime, yes, but shooting with a fully open device was a tad awkward at times. WIRED: External microSD slot makes it a cinch to swap cards on the fly. Bluetooth (+A2DP). Competent image-editing suite. Video editor allows you to layer additional audio tracks. Decent facial detection. Haptic feedback can be tweaked to three different levels of intensity or switched-off entirely. TIRED: Bundled proprietary ear buds sound duller than Ben Stein. No Xenon flash. No GPS. No WiFi. Lower-res video clips. Proprietary headphone jack positioned on the side = hard to pocket when phones are plugged in. Noticeable screen glare when outdoors. $400, Samsung
Photo: Issac Brekken/Wired.com Read our full Samsung SGH-U900 Soul "Magical Touch" review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The biggest selling point of the new Sidekick is supposed to be the customizable "skins" you can order to replace the solid-color ones (we opted for jet black). But apart from flashy aesthetics, the pocket-friendly 2008 is 0.4-inches shorter and 0.9-ounces lighter than the pricier LX. It also packs features that were sorely missed with the tragically minimalist iD. Most notably, a 2.0-megapixel camera that can also capture video clips (albeit crappy ones). Though the 2.6-inch WQVGA swivel screen’s received a slight -- and necessary -- boost in pixels (400 x 240), the resolution’s still not fantastic. And neither is Bluetooth. We found data transfers not only paused the media player (annoying), but afterward, we had to go back and manually un-pause whatever track was playing (doubly annoying). For the price, though the 2008 is a solid option compared to the LX -- but only if you live and die by instant messaging and you don't mind being seen with Paris Hilton's device of choice in public. WIRED: Spacious, comfy QWERTY. 3.5-mm headphone jack. Surprisingly loud, radically clear music player. Wide screen excellent for web browsing. Solid battery life. Quick video recording/sharing. Comes with two skins (we got black and iridescent lime). Bluetooth with A2DP (great to have, even if it does disrupt tunes). TIRED: Screen retains more fingerprints than the Feds. No flash. No WiFi. Mike captures poor sound when recording video. Only 20-second video clips. Only 512-MB microSD card included. Apps are mostly in the $2.99+ range (except for the janky free Calculator). No 3-G. Price/maker: $150 (with 2-year contract), T-Mobile
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Sidekick review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Cyclists know it's plum foolish to roll around on two wheels sans helmet, but it can be just as dangerous to bike about at night without a light. A good headlight affixed to your handlebars is just the thing to help cut through the murk and get you to your destination safely. Here we pit two of the top dogs on the market against each other and see which comes out on top. —Eric Smillie This one-watt LED cannon goes the extra mile, and we don't just mean it shoots light a ridiculous distance. Due in no small part to its particularly aggressive blinking mode, accurately called superflash, it didn’t just help us catch drivers' attentions; it had them anxiously craning their necks to check whether we were trying to pull them over. Drawing on only two AA batteries, this baby cuts down on weight but its CREE XR-E diode, coupled with a specially engineered Fraen lens, still pumps out the brightest light of all the lamps we tested -- enough to bounce off signs, license plates, and other reflective materials up to four blocks away, giving us plenty of time to make an impression. All we have to worry about now is whether some cop-hating, GTA IV-overdosing motorist trying to run us down. WIRED: Recessed switch only works if pressed firmly, which means it won’t turn on in your bag while you jostle your way to the bar, leaving you in the dark at closing time. Planet Bike spends 25 percent of its profits on bike advocacy. TIRED: The brightness and reduced weight come at a price: 20 hours of battery life in blinking mode, and only seven on high. Though it installs without the use of a tool, the handlebar bracket is tricky to tighten and slips easily. $50, Planet Bike
Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : While not the sharpest bulb on our handlebars, the WhiteLite HP AA is in it for the long haul. Don’t get us wrong -- just like other 1-watt LED headlamps, this portable, all-in one lamp is more than a glorified blinky. When engineering this light, Topeak got all snippy, cutting the cords to one of its external power-pack lights and reengineered it to accept three AA batteries. Its widely diffused beam covers plenty of surface area and earned our trust by helping us dodge nasty potholes and tree roots on unlit paths. But where this guy really shines is in perseverance, by lasting 30 hours on high and a whopping 120 on flash. WIRED: The mounting bracket screws tight with a finger knob and adjusts five degrees left and right to get a straight aim even on angled handlebars, although it does require an Allen key to tighten. Little red LED signals when batteries are low. TIRED: Blinks come slowly and lack urgency in flashing mode. Pushing the rear on/off push button can rotate the mount and mess up the light angle. Sound like a small problem? It won't be when you look up just in time to face plant into the bumper of a lifted pickup. $60, Topeak
Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The E71 looks more like a Blackberry Killer, but don’t be fooled: This great white hope gives the iPhone a run for its money in a lot of different areas (yes, really). Despite its obvious lack of an oversize touchscreen interface, Nokia wins points for a remarkably trim profile (10mm vs. 12.3mm), decent 3.2-megapixel camera (instead of 2.0), and the fact it's not tied to any carrier (yet). Setting up Nokia's Mail for Exchange program required no IT help or time. QuickOffice let us create, edit and send Word/Excel/PowerPoint files on the fly while we browsed PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Reader. The E71 is stocked with enough apps and goodies to keep even the most overworked road warrior on the ball, but it didn't feel too "business" due to two separate customizable home screens. One is designed to house all of your work apps while the other is geared more toward entertainment with programs for audio, video and gaming. The phone's 2.36-inch, 320 x 240 QVGA display is only slightly smaller than the iPod classic's, and though the resolution can't top the iPhone's, with 15 fps, the E71 is still solid for YouTube clips. Oh, and did we mention the E71's got battery life for days? Yes, literally, three of them. WIRED: Up to 8 GB in an easy-to-access, external microSD slot. Quick and seamless OS. GPS, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth (you name it, it's basically got it). Vivid screen (even in direct sunlight). Textured stainless steel backing prevents slippage. Relatively lightweight (127 grams = six grams lighter than iPhone). Hit any letter on the QWERTY pad and predictive text calls up that section of your address book. TIRED: No standard 3.5-mm headphone jack. 3.2-megapixel camera's optics could be better. LED flash could be way better. N-Gage gaming platform not available. Screen's wide, but not wide enough to do a feature-length film justice. For $500, you could get two 8-GB, 3-G JesusPhones (with $100 left over to put toward AT&T's data plan). $500 (unlocked), Nokia
Photo: Max Buck/Wired.com Read our full Nokia E71 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. Source: Wired: Gadgets | 11 Sep 2008 | 4:00 am Has Superstition Evolved To Help Mankind Survive?Pickens writes "The tendency to falsely link cause to effect — a superstition — is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. For example, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but "if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around." Foster worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off and found as long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favored. In modern times, superstitions turn up as a belief in alternative and homeopathic remedies. "The chances are that most of them don't do anything, but some of them do," Foster says. Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect — often falsely — science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition. "You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant," Forstmeier says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, "quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often.""Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 11 Sep 2008 | 3:57 am Today at Boing Boing Gadgets Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we went gaga for the Peek, a minimalist email-only cellular device: read why they made it and what we thought of it.
Did you know that there were vending machines that dispense hot pizza? Now you do! Once you've had a few of those, the healing begins with FitBit, an exercise-tracking gizmo. Wear it with some new wireless headphones from Sony.
John schools us all when it comes to fashionable pipes. He also spotted a tiny hard drive; a cool finger-tracing predictive text system; and slim chips to help fight "the creeping gelatinaion of my late twenties."
Joel collided hisself some Hadrons; was shocked, just shocked at what the BlackBerry Pearl Flip turned out to be; and raided the crapvendors, as is his wont.
But he also found items of beauty, today: a new watch from Crispin Jones, amazing custom pedal cars, and the Autovolantor flying car.
Behold! Flesh of pig!Source: Boing Boing | 11 Sep 2008 | 2:54 am Research Finds Carbon Dating Flawedeldavojohn writes "New research funded by the National Science Foundation at the University of Miami is showing that carbon dating (the 13C/12C ratio used to infer age) in the ocean can only be trusted up to 150 million years ago. From the primary researcher, "This study is a major step in terms of rethinking how geologists interpret variations in the 13C/12C ratio throughout Earth's history. If the approach does not work over the past 10 million years, then why would it work during older time periods? As a consequence of our findings, changes in 13C/12C records need to be reevaluated, conclusions regarding changes in the reservoirs of carbon will have to be reassessed, and some of the widely-held ideas regarding the elevation of CO2 during specific periods of the Earth's geological history will have to be adjusted." While this research doesn't necessarily throw carbon dating out the window, it should cause people to rethink so many theories about early life that revolved around ages of sediment in the oceans."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 11 Sep 2008 | 2:42 am Microsoft Concedes Vista Launch Problemsnotdagreatbrain writes "Maximum PC just posted a lengthy feature looking back at the myriad problems that went into Microsoft's 6 billion dollar failure of the Vista launch. Aside from running benchmarks comparing Vista at launch how its performing now, they also found a Microsoft exec who was willing to speak frankly about Vista. The Microsoft source blamed bad drivers from GPU companies and printer companies for the majority of Vista's early stability problems and described User Account Control as poorly implemented but defended it as necessary for the continued health of the Windows platform. He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end. Finally he conceded that Apple appeals to more and more consumers because the hardware is slick, the price is OK, and Apple doesn't annoy its customers (or allow third parties to)."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 11 Sep 2008 | 1:48 am Russell Porter with Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip: interview + music videoBBtv presents a performance and interview with Dan le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip, purveyors of cut-up street talk and fine electro-glitch-funk. Their new album, Angles, was just released in the United States, and our UK music correspondent Russell Porter digs in. The duo consists of Dan Stephens and David Meads, both of whom are natives of Stanford-le-Hope in Essex, England. Their band's name -- "Scroobius Pip" -- is an intentional botch of the Edward Lear poem, The Scroobious Pip. The second half of today's episode (at about 7:00 in, after the midroll ad, and the stuff about Pip's lip tat) is the music video for Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip's "A Letter from God to Man," directed by Steve Glashier of NTSH. The song is constructed around a short, sweet Radiohead sample (Planet Telex) from the 1995 album, The Bends. The still you see in the flash embed above is from this music video.
Link to Boing Boing tv blog post, with discussion and video podcast subscribe instructions. Here are previous editions of Russell's interviews with up-and-coming indie artists for Boing Boing tv. Their 2007 song "Thou Shalt Always Kill" was featured in this previous Boing Boing tv episode, embedded below. Source: Boing Boing | 11 Sep 2008 | 1:33 am Add Compression to Your Web ServerMost web servers know how to decompress gzip and it can save transfer speeds up by almost a third, in some cases. It doesn't take much time to tweak your web server and save bandwidth. Learn how with our tutorial.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 11 Sep 2008 | 1:00 am Obama sex video? Hardly. It's spyware spreading via e-mail (CNET)CNET - Don't believe everything you read on the Internet: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama isn't a terrorist...or a porn star.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 11 Sep 2008 | 12:57 am Nagi Noda, Japanese artist and director, has passed away. The beautiful, eccentric, and talented multimedia artist Nagi Noda has died. Back in 2004 I blogged about video Noda did in which she dressed up like a poodle-person and did aerobics with a chorus line of bipedal poodle people. Her work was weird and wonderful and graceful like that. Lisa Katayama says: Nagi Noda, talented, internationally famous artist and director who put her own unique artsy-girly high fashion sense on the international art scene map, died on Sunday.Nagi Noda, super-talented Japanese pop artist, is dead (Tokyomango; thank you Susannah Breslin). Update: there are some truly amazing comments over at antville, the one about the napkin drawing is really beautiful. Previously on Boing Boing: * Mutant panda hybrid toys: Hanpanda Source: Boing Boing | 11 Sep 2008 | 12:02 am Amazon.com to sell wine online in U.S.: vintners (Reuters)Reuters - Amazon.com, the largest global online retailer, plans to start selling U.S.-produced wine on its website within the United States by early October, wine industry insiders said on Wednesday.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Sep 2008 | 11:48 pm Researcher Publishes Industrial Complex Hacksnydeq writes "Security researcher Kevin Finisterre has published code that could be used to take control of computers used to manage industrial machinery, potentially giving hackers a back door into utility companies, water plants, and even oil and gas refineries. The code exploits a flaw in supervisory control and data acquisition software from Citect. The vendor has released a patch and risk arises only for systems connected directly to the Internet without firewall protection. Finisterre, however, sees the issue as indicative of a 'culture clash' between IT and process control engineers, who are reluctant to bring computers off-line for patching due to the potential havoc wreaked by downtime. 'A lot of the people who run these systems feel that they're not bound by the same rules as traditional IT,' Finisterre said. 'Their industry is not very familiar with hacking and hackers in general.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 10 Sep 2008 | 11:41 pm ElectroVee's "Popstars" videoThe song on this video by ElectroVee is catchy. I hope he makes more videos. Source: Boing Boing | 10 Sep 2008 | 11:40 pm Mattson Technology to cut 80 positionsMattson Technology Inc. said Wednesday that it will cut about 14 percent of its work force, or 80 jobs, as part of a plan to lower its cash losses from operations while continuing to invest in growth areas...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 10 Sep 2008 | 11:35 pm DC-area mayor whose dogs were shot dead in botched drug raid to speak out Tom Angell says Berwyn Heights, MD Mayor Cheye Calvo, who was handcuffed by police after they shot and killed his two dogs in a baseless marijuana raid on his home, will criticize the overuse of SWAT-style drug raids this Thursday (9/11) at the Cato Institute in Wash, DC.DC-area mayor whose dogs were shot dead in botched drug raid to speak out Source: Boing Boing | 10 Sep 2008 | 11:31 pm Happy 63rd birthday to Mike the Headless ChickenHappy birthday to Mike the Headless Chicken!This following is from my book THE WORLD'S WORST: A Guide to the Most Disgusting, Hideous, Inept and Dangerous, People, Places and Things on Earth.
Source: Boing Boing | 10 Sep 2008 | 11:21 pm Ask Jack blogs.guardian.co.uk/askjackGoing on 64-bitI recently bought a new quad-core desktop machine, but I am considering increasing the amount of Ram from the 3GB now installed. Would I have to upgrade to the 64-bit version to increase...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNPaperTech | 10 Sep 2008 | 11:20 pm Startup Fights Greenwashing With Data Sent to Your PhoneA new website puts tons of data on how green and healthy products really are right at your fingertips. You can even text a UPC code to the company and get the relevant stats back while you're in the store.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Sep 2008 | 10:42 pm Spectacular Fossil Forests Found In US CoalmineSmivs passes along a report up on the BBC about the fossil forests found in coal mines in Illinois. "The [US-UK] group reported one discovery last year, but has since identified a further five examples. The ancient vegetation — now turned to rock — is visible in the ceilings of mines covering thousands of hectares. These were among the first forests to evolve on the planet, [according to] Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang... 'These are the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time. It is quite extraordinary to find a fossil landscape preserved over such a vast area; and we are talking about an area the size of [the British city of] Bristol.' The forests grew just a few million years apart some 300 million years ago; and are now stacked one on top of another."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 10 Sep 2008 | 10:32 pm Apple Closer to Cleaning Up Options MessApple is close to putting the backdated stock options scandal behind it. Steve Jobs and several board members reportedly reached a preliminary settlement with shareholders for damages related to improperly booked stock options. If everything goes according to plan, Jobs and friends could finally be in the clear by the end of October.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Sep 2008 | 9:57 pm Senator Questions Rise In US Texting Pricesvimm writes "Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) has started an inquiry on the rising prices of text messaging (up 100% since 2005) that has occurred almost in sync with the consolidation of 6 major carriers down to 4. In a letter sent to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile, Kohl said the increase 'does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 10 Sep 2008 | 9:45 pm The Web's Photographic Memory: A History of IMG and EMBEDBack in the old days, the nascent web didn't have any support for images. But the key supporters of the new standards stuck to their guns, and the IMG and EMBED tags came to be. Webmonkey takes a look back into the dark ages and considers the birth of multimedia on the internet.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Sep 2008 | 9:30 pm Review: 'Zoids Assault' Is a Disappointing MessAtlus' new anime-inspired game outfits animal robots with heavy weaponry, but fails to deliver killer fun.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Sep 2008 | 9:15 pm VideoSurf hopes to ride Internet video wave (AP)AP - There are plenty of places to watch online video, but still no easy way to find a particular clip without suffering through a lot of trial and error.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Sep 2008 | 9:10 pm Proposed Copyright Law a 'Gift' to Hollywood, Info Groups SaySpecial interest groups urge members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to squelch proposed legislation that would give the U.S. Justice Department the power to prosecute civil copyright-infringement cases. The department has the power to prosecute criminal charges of infringement. The groups said rights holders should police their own marks and file their own lawsuits -- absent Justice Department intervention.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Sep 2008 | 9:06 pm In IE8 and Chrome, Processes Are the New ThreadsSenFo writes "To many of the people who downloaded Google Chrome last week, it was a surprise to observe that each opened tab runs in a separate process rather than a separate thread. Scott Hanselman, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft, discusses some of the benefits of running in separate processes as opposed to separate threads. A quote: 'Ah! But they're slow! They're slow to start up, and they are slow to communicate between, right? Well, kind of, not really anymore.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 10 Sep 2008 | 8:55 pm Mobile Industry Discovers It's the Software, StupidHardware schmardware. Real wireless geeks know that pretty industrial design is only skin deep. The software on the inside is what makes the difference between a barely usable piece of eye candy (Motorola Z10, we're looking at you) and a revolutionary, industry-changing device like the iPhone. That's why your next cellphone will have a slicker user interface, a cleaner menu and plenty of mobile applications to help you manage your photos, videos, evening plans and friendships. You may not even care who made your hardware -- especially if you're running the Google-backed operating system called Android. This week the world will a get preview of the software, apps and operating systems changing mobile tech at a San Francisco trade show with the awkward name of CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment. The focus will not be on new handsets, but on what's happening behind the screens. "There's not much to expect on the hardware front," says Avi Greengart, a research director at Current Analysis. "This year the big story is the fragmentation of the OS market and how it will affect media, VoIP, and other applications." Third-party apps, OS updates, slightly suspect accessories, and nary a new handset in sight. These are the things that CTIA Part II is comprised of. Over the next three days, here's a rundown of what we should see. Applications Expect to see a lot of apps dedicated to controlling different household appliances. Downloads already exist for controlling your TiVo and Slingbox from a mobile device, but there should be more apps emerging designed for you to exert totalitarian control over everything from your toaster to garage door opener. (Yes, there will be an app for opening your garage door with your cellphone.) Operating Systems Google: Android is the OS everyone is waiting for. And it doesn't even exist yet. "Right now it's vaporware," says Greengart, "but it's still going to make a big splash. Google has enormous resources and they're dedicated to breaking open mobile advertising." Microsoft: Expect a major overhaul of Windows Mobile to happen in the next year. But despite selling over 20 million units, WinMo will still be, "put on the back burner" according to Greengart -- especially when compared to the Android juggernaut. Palm: Two million Centro owners can't be wrong, right? Palm will be rewriting its also-ran OS once again this year to stay competitive with Android and to woo more users with Palm's vaunted usability and simplicity. Symbian: Largely overlooked and dismissed in the wireless industry, the plucky smartphone OS favored by Nokia will undergo some major reconstructive surgery to make its menu structure easier to navigate and to render its most-useful applications a lot more accessible. Hardware Although there won't be many new handsets unveiled at CTIA IT & Entertainment (if any), there will be a ton of accessories. Expect to see a deluge of hands-free solutions -- especially gray-market Bluetooth sets -- pouring in from overseas manufacturers. Source: Wired: Gadgets | 10 Sep 2008 | 8:30 pm Mobile Industry Discovers It's the Software, StupidHardware schmardware. Real wireless geeks know that pretty industrial design is only skin deep. The software on the inside is what makes the difference between a barely usable piece of eye candy (Motorola Z10, we're looking at you) and a revolutionary, industry-changing device like the iPhone. That's why your next cellphone will have a slicker user interface, a cleaner menu and plenty of mobile applications to help you manage your photos, videos, evening plans and friendships. You may not even care who made your hardware -- especially if you're running the Google-backed operating system called Android. This week the world will a get preview of the software, apps and operating systems changing mobile tech at a San Francisco trade show with the awkward name of CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment. The focus will not be on new handsets, but on what's happening behind the screens. "There's not much to expect on the hardware front," says Avi Greengart, a research director at Current Analysis. "This year the big story is the fragmentation of the OS market and how it will affect media, VoIP, and other applications." Third-party apps, OS updates, slightly suspect accessories, and nary a new handset in sight. These are the things that CTIA Part II is comprised of. Over the next three days, here's a rundown of what we should see. Applications Expect to see a lot of apps dedicated to controlling different household appliances. Downloads already exist for controlling your TiVo and Slingbox from a mobile device, but there should be more apps emerging designed for you to exert totalitarian control over everything from your toaster to garage door opener. (Yes, there will be an app for opening your garage door with your cellphone.) Operating Systems Google: Android is the OS everyone is waiting for. And it doesn't even exist yet. "Right now it's vaporware," says Greengart, "but it's still going to make a big splash. Google has enormous resources and they're dedicated to breaking open mobile advertising." Microsoft: Expect a major overhaul of Windows Mobile to happen in the next year. But despite selling over 20 million units, WinMo will still be, "put on the back burner" according to Greengart -- especially when compared to the Android juggernaut. Palm: Two million Centro owners can't be wrong, right? Palm will be rewriting its also-ran OS once again this year to stay competitive with Android and to woo more users with Palm's vaunted usability and simplicity. Symbian: Largely overlooked and dismissed in the wireless industry, the plucky smartphone OS favored by Nokia will undergo some major reconstructive surgery to make its menu structure easier to navigate and to render its most-useful applications a lot more accessible. Hardware Although there won't be many new handsets unveiled at CTIA IT & Entertainment (if any), there will be a ton of accessories. Expect to see a deluge of hands-free solutions -- especially gray-market Bluetooth sets -- pouring in from overseas manufacturers.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Sep 2008 | 8:30 pm How to Cheat at Wii FitWhy jog in place with the Wiimote when you can just bounce it on your knee? The console will never know the difference -- it'll just be a secret between you and your waistband. Meanwhile, you'll free up some time to chow down. Learn how to score high points without breaking a sweat on Wired's How-To Wiki.
Source: Wired Top Stories | 10 Sep 2008 | 8:30 pm Apple senior execs settle options case for $14M (AP)AP - Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs and several other senior executives and board members have agreed to settle a lawsuit that claimed the company was damaged by their role in Apple's mishandling of stock option awards.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Sep 2008 | 8:26 pm Review: Peek is e-mail on the go, and that's it (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Sep 2008 | 8:16 pm Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14Bcmd writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story." The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 10 Sep 2008 | 8:10 pm DVS wins TransWorld SKATEboaring's Skate & Create video contest
From DVS:
Back in April, TransWorld SKATEboarding held its first annual Skate & Create contest. In a nutshell, the contest consists of four teams of four pros, one am, a photographer, a videographer, and an art director. Each team is locked in a warehouse for nine days with a smorgasbord of ramps, rails, banks, and boxes. The team that can come up with the most creative set concept, skate obstacles, photography, skateboarding, and video wins. All teams involved produced amazing videos and brilliant photos, but after the judging was said and done it was DVS that emerged as the winner. Even your granny is going to want to start building a half-pipe in the living room after she sees this. As kids, we were constantly building crude skateboard ramps and BMX tracks that were even worse. The winning DVS video captures not just the kinetic freak out fun of skateboarding, but also the joy of building. DVS mini-site for their Skate & Create winning entry (via Design is Kinky) Other entries at TransWorld SKATEboarding (Mister Jalopy is a guest blogger!) Source: Boing Boing | 10 Sep 2008 | 7:48 pm A WoW Player's Guide To WarhammerWith Warhammer Online just around the corner, Zonk wrote up a guide which compares it to the current top dog of the MMO market, World of Warcraft. He highlights the fact that despite the appearance of "War" in both names, Warhammer is much more focused on the struggle between factions, in gameplay and artistic style. Warhammer's open beta started on Sunday, doing well in the US but stumbling in Europe. The full version launches on Sept. 18th, but people who pre-order the game will be able to access live servers up to four days before, thanks to Mythic's head-start program. Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs recently launched a blog to answer questions about the game.Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 10 Sep 2008 | 7:18 pm Vesuvius Could Blow Again, Pompeii-StyleAnother cataclysmic explosion by Vesuvius can't be ruled out, say scientists.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 10 Sep 2008 | 7:00 pm Ants Slack Off for Colony's Greater GoodLeaf cutter ants carry much less than they're capable of, but it's for the greater good.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 10 Sep 2008 | 6:14 pm Showdown: New Zune Vs. iPodThe new Zune and new iPod refreshes have just been announced. But which one to get? We make it easy for you with a side-by-side comparison of the two devices.Source: Wired: Gadgets | 10 Sep 2008 | 6:02 pm Microsoft joins OMG (InfoWorld)InfoWorld - As part of its strategy for model-driven software development, Microsoft on Wednesday announced it has joined the Object Management Group (OMG).Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Sep 2008 | 5:26 pm Astronomers Spy Brightest Galactic BlastAstronomers look down the barrel at the most powerful explosion ever seen.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 10 Sep 2008 | 5:00 pm Particle Smasher's Black Holes Would Be TinyA particle smasher is unlikely to produce a black hole, and if it did, it would be harmless.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 10 Sep 2008 | 3:24 pm Largest Atom-Smasher Runs Successful TestThe Large Hadron Collider successfully fires a beam of protons around its 17-mile ring.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 10 Sep 2008 | 1:24 pm Mega-Quakes Hit Where Ocean Mud Piles HighEarth's strongest quakes often strike where sediments fill ocean trenches.Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 10 Sep 2008 | 1:19 pm Pearl Flip Folds, a Blackberry FirstResearch in Motion unveils a Blackberry that folds in half, a departure from the slab-like design that has defined its products. The long-rumored BlackBerry Pearl Flip will be available from T-Mobile USA and with overseas carriers later this year, at an undisclosed price.Source: Wired: Gadgets | 10 Sep 2008 | 11:33 am
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Exotic pets are often quite ugly—that’s part of the fun in having one. Their owners think it’s neat to keep repulsive animals such as tarantulas, snakes, and hissing cockroaches. But such unadorable creatures are like cuddly teddy bears compared to Miracle Mike, the celebrated headless chicken of Fruita, Colorado.
