Fossil OLED Watches Tell Time, Impersonate Better Gadgets
18 Jul
Posted by admin as watch, Technology
OLEDs are finding their way onto all sorts of gadgets these days, from ridiculously overpriced keyboards to weird flexible screens that serve little purpose. It appears that watchmaker Fossil will soon be joining the ranks of the OLED purveyors with their officially unannounced men’s watches. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an OLED watch, but this one isn’t being billed as a miniature theater for your wrist. Hit the jump for a leaked action vid.
Instead of always having to remember to lock your desktop when you go for a whiz at work, this Security Ring by designer Yang Hai takes care of all of that for you. You put the ring on one of your fingers, and when it gets a certain distance away from the base station (which is connected to your computer), all your programs get locked. We’ve set up our machines to do the same thing with Bluetooth cellphones, but a ring is much easier to remember. Too bad it’s only a design, because we could see ourselves using this for other purposes as well.
Bedford Smart Recharge Station is Something Your Wife Would Like
18 Jul
Posted by admin as Mobile, Technology
Although the Gomadic charge station, the Chargepod, the Mahogany charge station, or even the DIY charge station are good enough for us males, our wives may have something entirely different in mind. For them, the Bedford Smart Recharge Station from Pottery Barn could be just the thing to charge your gadgets and keep your decorative style intact—just the way she wants. The bad news is that it costs $79 and doesn’t actually come with a power strip to plug your gadgets into. It actually reminds our resident teen expert Ben Longo of this $299 PB Teen Smart Bedside table, which is REALLY a ripoff.
The Palm Z Micro Plane is a lightweight flier controlled by infrared remote control. What’s really awesome is the plane’s bi-wing design and flaming paint job. Then there’s the remote’s tri-band functionality, allowing for three of the planes to fly in the same space, so you and your friends can trail one another under the dinner table and try to knock the planes out of the sky.
Sanyo, not the first name you think of when you dream of GPS navigators, just came out with the NVM-4070, equipped with a 4-inch, 16:9 touchscreen, a SiRF Star III receiver, traffic, text-to-speech for reading off street names, 1.8 million points of interest, Video/Photo/MP3/WMA playback and an FM transmitter to get the nav and music channeled through your car stereo.
Leave it to Brando to fill in the hole of USB warming by providing an actual stainless steel camping-like cup to the equation. So not only does this USB cup warmer warm cups, it provides its own cup to warm. Other than that, there’s a four-foot USB cable, a lid, and an LED indicator to tell whether it’s on or off. It’s pretty barebones, and the $16 reflects that.
I am a surprisingly hairy man. All that hair needs the right tools to tame, trim and shave. The three devices up to the task? The Mangroomer, the Philips Bodygroom, and the Flowbee have been around for a while and are great separately, but this is the first time that we’ve seen their full power unleashed together. Here’s how they stood up.
They may not be for everybody, but PC / TV combos seem to be proliferating at a steady pace, a trend to which Korea’s Compass is now further contributing. While specs on the PC end of the equation are a little light, the company’s new 47-inch PT-47FHD model certainly looks to deliver the goods as an HDTV, boasting the full 1080p resolution, along with an 8 ms response time, 1,600:1 contrast ratio, and a generous supply of inputs (including four HDMI ports). No word on what it’ll cost, but it should be available in Korea by the middle of next month.
Voodoo, a company hell-bent on out-spec’ing the competition, today announced that its ENVY H:171 has “set new standards for performance notebooks.” While we can’t completely trust everything some big PC manufacturer says, we can tell you that the 17-inch, widescreen laptop does flash some pretty robust specs. The maxed-out combo features a Core 2 Extreme CPU, a Dual NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 graphics chipset, 4GB of RAM, and a hard drive capacity of up to 600GB (using three drives). Additionally, you get your choice of paint jobs, and Voodoo will even slap a “tattoo” on the back, as long you pay for it. So what will it all cost? About $5,000 for the bare bones system, up to somewhere around $7,477 for the full monty — and those specs aren’t terribly dissimilar from something like the cheaper Dreambook — though they don’t offer a $380 “ink.”
While GPS units seem to be getting increasingly indistinguishable from one another these days, Korea manufacturer Mercury’s latest device looks like it won’t have much trouble standing out, with it boasting an integrated black box to record the final moments before an accident (GPS induced or otherwise). Apparently, the system uses a camera to track vehicles in front of you, with it able to detect when a car’s break lights go on. If there’s an accident, the system kicks in to store 12 seconds of video before from the accident and six seconds after — it’ll also try to warn you if it thinks you’re headed for an accident. Otherwise, you’ll get pretty much all the other features you’d expect, including the usual array of PMP functions and built-in DMB TV capabilities, which should make that black box all the more important.