Apparently Steve Jobs was holding back at last week’s Macworld Expo. Apple’s new iPhone can do a lot more than just play music, movie and make phone calls.

As you can see from this video, the research staff at Late Night with Conan O’Brien were able to uncover all of the iPhone’s features including camera, movie player, remote control, electric razor…

If you want to copy this video off of YouTube and save it on your hard drive, then check out this tutorial: Copy Videos Off YouTube.

social: youtube | digg story | methodshop

2 Comments »

It looks like SandDisk is not messing around to get its Sansa players out on the market. The flash memory manufacturer presented in fact the Sansa Connect MP3 player over this year’s CES, and it received a lot of positive feedback.

The new player comes with a 2,2 inch TFT color screen, an internal speaker and flash memory instead of hard disks. The really innovative feature, however, is the Wi-Fi connectivity. The Sansa will be able to connect to the Internet from any open wireless hotspot, creating a myriad of new opportunities. Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment »

WowWee’s new robot, which appeared at this year’s CES, is called Roboquad and amused people crawling around on its four legs. The robot comes with infra-red sensors and apparently it can be used as guard since it is able to scan for sounds and movements, up to 10 feet away. The manufacturer is claiming that the robot should also be able to identify objects of different sizes, move around furniture and detect the edge of doorways. Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments »

If you were paying attention to all the hype building up to the Apple iPhone announcement on Tuesday, then you might recall the little snag concerning who actually owns the “iPhone” name.

Even though Apple unveiled the iPhone in San Francisco this week, Linksys, a division of Cisco Systems Inc., announced a product called the iPhone on December 18th, 2006. The Linksys iPhone is a Web-enabled telephone handset capable of making calls over the Internet using voice over Internet protocol (VOIP).

So how can two different companies lay claim to the “iPhone” name? That’s the problem… they can’t.

Linksys, actually owns the “iPhone” trademark because of a Cisco acquisition. A company called Infogear registered the “iPhone” name in 1996. Then Cisco then absorbed the “iPhone” trademark when it acquired Infogear in the year 2000.

So what happens now? It’s all up to the lawyers. Cisco filed a lawsuit against Apple yesterday in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Basically Cisco and Apple need to reach a settlement or Apple will have to call their iPhone something different like iChat Mobile.

According to the NY Post, Cisco thought it had reached a deal with Apple. The two companies were reportedly engaged in heated talks over the “iPhone” name the past few weeks leading up to the Apple iPhone announcement.

“We sent them final terms on Monday, but we never got approval back,” Cisco spokesman John Noh told The Post. “We’re very open to sharing the trademark. We made that clear. But then they went ahead and used the name without our permission.”

Apple has been trying to get the iPhone name away from Cisco since 2001 when they first released the iPod. Will Apple finally be successful? They obviously have something up their sleeve or they wouldn’t have halted talks with Cisco and just announced the iPhone this week. It will be interesting to see what happens these next few months.

Apple plans on releasing the iPhone in June 2007.

digg story | methodshop

4 Comments »

“Photo wallets” are nothing new - devices to back up your memory card to a hard drive have become common in the past few years. The Sanho Hyperdrive is one such device and while it may not be the newest product concept there’s still room for a well implemented one.

The Hyperdrive has a rechargable Li-Ion battery, takes a whole list of card formats that I’m not going to bother retyping (most of them), shows up as a PC hard drive via USB and has the usual “press one button to dump the card” function.

Things I like:

• It doesn’t try to be a photo viewer, video player or TV adapter
• It is available as an empty chassis for you to put your own hard drive
• It verifies the data has copied correctly before wiping your card
• it’s fast

The bare chassis is $149, the 160gb version is $399 and you can get them from www.hypershop.com

No Comments »

I’ve seen some awesome sights at CES (especially since the Adult Entertainment Expo is next door :)) but the booth with Nancy in the hot tub became a regular meeting point and navigation spot. Nancy demonstrated the skins-mobile a pretty interesting way to keep wet stuff and grime off your device. A big thanks to Charlie of Gizmodo for the video, enjoy!

2 Comments »

The title is deliberately vague, because it’s so different to anything out there that I can’t draw a comparison with anything else. I think we’ll stick with “controller” as that’s nice and generic.

The basic idea is that you manipulate the ball in X and Y axis, just like a mouse, but the controller can push back on any one of it’s three connecting arms. The end result is motion feedback unlike anything else I’ve experienced. It’s much more sophisticated than a standard “rumble pack” - with this thing you can feel whether you’re pushing through treacle or sliding along ice.
Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment »

I’ve seen some pretty cool mice in my time (Slim Mouse, SD Card Reader Mouse, hand warming mouse, etc.), I can now add to that list the slipper mouse, a mouse you control with your feet.

At first it looked a bit odd to use, you wear a slipper on one foot which you drag around to move the pointer whilst with the other foot you can hit pedals in place of mouse buttons. It’s never going to replace the standard mouse but for people with severe disabilities this could make using a computer a whole load easier.

Further info available at www.billinc.com and I’d like to thank Tianou “Phil” Li for taking the time to demo this to me.

5 Comments »