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Domain: gizmodo.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to gizmodo.com.
Stories · 717
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What Will It Take For eBook Adoption?
zmcnulty writes "Gizmodo has a new weekly feature that appears to be off to a great start: their first 'Feature Creep' writeup (by Sanford May) is an excellent overview of some of the obstacles standing in the way of adoption of eBooks, and more importantly, a handheld device that supports them. We've probably all heard of the Sony Librie's lukewarm reception, but if you're not familiar with the somewhat stunted eBook market, this is an excellent essay to get you on your way." -
Korean Bipedal Robot Kit
The Black Dragon writes "This has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in a while. It's a bipedal (walks on two legs) robot that you can put together yourself and program with movements. The site is in Korean, but from what I've been able to get from translators and currency exchange, it'll cost about $1,400. (There's a movie embedded half way down.)" Gizmodo has a blurb. -
New Walkman-Branded Hard Disk Player
Darian writes "Following on the heels of Commodore's introduction of portable digital music players Sony has stepped up to the plate with their first Walkman branded product. Reuters has the story and The Register has a couple more photos. Gizmodo has an anonymous tip from a Sony insider. The NW-HD1 is a 'credit card-sized' 8.9m x 6.2 x 1.4cm unit fitted with a 20GB 1.8in hard drive. There's enough RAM on board to provide 25 minutes of skip-free playback. There's a seven-line LCD for track information and player status data. "We couldn't come up with something using the Walkman brand until it survived the 1 meter (3 ft 3.37 in) drop test," said Robert Ashcroft, senior vice president of Sony network services Europe. So digital music rights had nothing to do with it? Right. The unit is planned to undercut the iPod price point. Apple lawyers do have the upper hand with the scroll wheel." Update: 07/01 21:34 GMT by T : It's also the Walkman's 25th birthday; read on for more.Player Blog writes "The Sony Walkman, icon of the 80s and direct ancestor of the iPod and its ilk, first hit the streets 25 years ago. I don't know if July 1, 1979 was the actual first day for the Walkman, but Sony is celebrating it today. I had one, I loved it and I thought it was the greatest invention ever. Take a trip down memory lane with the history and photos at the Walkman Museum."
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Sony Projector Gets Bright Images From Black Screen
da_foz writes "Sony has developed a new projector that can give a bright, unfaded picture without the need to eliminate ambient light. The secret is that they project onto a black screen instead of a white one. Their screen uses species filters so that white ambient light is absorbed, but the red, green, and blue light from the projector is reflected. Sony sees a possible use in home entertainment systems because of the ability to have a much bigger picture than conventional TVs as well as businesses adopting the projectors for presentations." -
Hotmail Blocks Gmail Emails (and Invites)
bonhomme_de_neige writes "Emails and invitations sent to Hotmail from Gmail accounts do not bounce, but nor do they arrive in the recipient's Inbox - they vanish mysteriously into the aether. Joel Johnson writes in his Gizmodo weblog that invitations he sent to a Hotmail address bounced (this even received coverage from ZDNet). Search Engine Roundtable writes that several ISPs are blocking Gmail. It's already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I've personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking." Please note: I've not been able to verify this one way or another. -
Meet Joe Blog
theodp writes "According to the new issue of Time, we may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. Amateur scribblers posting on the Web are becoming the tails that wag the media, says Time, citing an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan as an example." Hey, if Circuits can discover USB, I don't see why Time can't discover weblogs. -
More 3D Displays to Come
Anonymous Writer writes "The first laptop using an autostereo display to show images in 3D without special glasses was the Sharp Mebius PC-RD3D in Japan, later released in the US as the Sharp Actius RD3D. NEC has a line of computers with autostereo displays as well. They are the NEC Valuestar T VT900/8D desktop, the LaVie S LS900/9E laptop, and LaVie RX LR700/8E laptop. The line uses NEC's SoundVu technology that uses the display as a speaker! Autostereo displays are becoming more popular according to Martyn Williams and Tom Krazit from the IDG News Service. In their article in PC World, they claim laptops are just the start of it. A new satellite service by Mobile Broadcasting will be broadcasting 3D content to handheld devices in Japan some time soon. Another player in this market is Dynamic Digital Depth (mentioned in a previous post of mine), whose content services convert 2D video to 3D for display in this medium. Sanyo may be releasing 50-inch Plasma Displays that can display 3D. MIT's Media Laboratory is developing a more advanced 3D display, calling it a full resolution autostereoscopic display, that would allow a viewer to walk around and not lose the 3D effect, which current autostereo displays can't do." -
iPod May Not Have The Horsepower For Ogg [updated]
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has an interview with a Rio engineer who speculates that current iPods may not have enough CPU power and/or memory to decode Ogg. He concludes that the Minis might be able to do it, and the next generation iPods will certainly be able to. Of course, just because Apple can doesn't mean it will." Update: 06/06 04:44 GMT by T : csm writes with this rebuttal: "According to Monty from Xiph.org (author of the Tremor codec and OGG itself), it should very well be possible to run Ogg on older generation iPods." -
iPod May Not Have The Horsepower For Ogg [updated]
An anonymous reader writes "Gizmodo has an interview with a Rio engineer who speculates that current iPods may not have enough CPU power and/or memory to decode Ogg. He concludes that the Minis might be able to do it, and the next generation iPods will certainly be able to. Of course, just because Apple can doesn't mean it will." Update: 06/06 04:44 GMT by T : csm writes with this rebuttal: "According to Monty from Xiph.org (author of the Tremor codec and OGG itself), it should very well be possible to run Ogg on older generation iPods." -
Via-based Handheld Game Console Runs PC Games
An anonymous reader writes "Via Technologies has teamed up with Ministry of Mobile Affairs (no, it's not a government agency) to build a handheld game console based on Windows XP Embedded that runs existing PC games. Described as the world's first handheld gaming device based on the x86 architecture, the Eve Mobile Gaming Console is said to be capable of instantly running thousands of existing PC games. Eve's embedded computer is built around a 533MHz Via Eden-N processor (which supports SSE and MMX) equipped with 128MB DDR266 SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive. A built-in 4-inch LCD screen supports resolutions up to 640 x 480 pixels." The initial impressions are pretty grim, and the form factor leaves something to be desired, at least for a product vying for a share of the GBA market. -
Xport 2 Turns Game Boy Advance Into Embedded Microcontroller
Thanks to Gizmodo for its article discussing the Xport 2.0 unofficial cartridge add-on for the Game Boy Advance, which allows users to turn their GBA "into a user-programmable embedded microcontroller for directing robots, capturing images or video, or operating anything else you can interface to its user-programmable I/O." There's more information on the official Charmed Labs site. -
PuTTY Beta For Symbian OS
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What's in Your Gadget Bag, Cory?
Cory Doctorow has taken a two-second break from his road warrior ways to pen this description of the crud he lugs around. Read it and weep, wanna-bes. -
Adding Background Noise To Your Phone Call
lww writes "By way of a Gizmodo article, you can now add your own background noise to a cell phone call. A company called Simeda is offering a product called SounderCover that allows you to play selected background noises such as traffic, construction, and even the dentist during your phone call. The possibilities are endless! 'Hi honey, I'm going to be late -- I'm stuck in the middle of a circus parade...Bye! Hey Joe, another round for me and the boys...what? Oh, whoops *click*'" -
Adding Background Noise To Your Phone Call
lww writes "By way of a Gizmodo article, you can now add your own background noise to a cell phone call. A company called Simeda is offering a product called SounderCover that allows you to play selected background noises such as traffic, construction, and even the dentist during your phone call. The possibilities are endless! 'Hi honey, I'm going to be late -- I'm stuck in the middle of a circus parade...Bye! Hey Joe, another round for me and the boys...what? Oh, whoops *click*'" -
Hektor: the Graffiti Robot
Lopex writes "Gizmodo has a story about Hektor, a graffiti robot. Apparently it is for the extremely geeky (or perhaps extremely lazy) tagger. Hektor.ch has photos, information (pdf), and a movie (15 Mb) of it in action." -
Review Of Yopy 3700 Linux PDA
SecondToughest writes "Gizmodo has a recent post referring to a review of the new Yopy 3700 Linux-based PDA. The reviewer seems to like it: 'Overall, this is beautiful hardware. The design is compact when not in use, but when opened the Yopy is quite user friendly. The really great thing about this PDA is the presence of both MC and CF card slots. To me, this is almost the perfect PDA design.'"
