Gadgets Base

mobile phone manufacturers just love to pack their newest models of smartphones with all sorts of cool features. This concept Mooon (not a spelling error) smartphone has at least one unique feature that could easily become a new standard.

As you can see by the illustration to the left, the Mooon has a Bluetooth headset that can be detached from the phone’s body and then attached to your ear. This means the user can use a Bluetooth earpiece and not have to purchase one separately. I am assuming that the earpiece is calibrated to the Mooon phone straight from the box, so the user won’t have to go through the whole calibration rigmarole.

Oh, did I mention that the front of the phone is a touchscreen? Then again, it’s not like we haven’t seen that before, like on the iPhone and its many imitators.

Yeah, the detachable Bluetooth headset is the big selling point. Assuming this concept phone becomes reality, you can seriously brag that you have the first phone with “a detachable”. Hey, I’m already coming up with slang for it.

So if you’re one of the first with the Mooon, you can act prouder than those celebrities who first got the iphone. In fact, you can Mooon those guys. Oh man, what a terrible joke. I’d better go before it gets worse.

Source

Posted Mar 7th 2008 2:31PM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: cellphones
Knowing how rampant the Apple rumor community can get, we try not to stir the pot too feverishly, but iLounge has made a bizarre little discovery that we thought you might like to see. Apparently, it’s already possible for iPhone / ipod touch developers to create pages in iTunes offering content to limited groups of users. While perusing these pages, they apparently stumbled upon the Education First Educational Tours page, where international travel tour registrants can download TourCast audio and video content. Strangely, an odd, almost Zune-like device can be seen in the corner of the graphic for this page bearing the Apple logo. Could this be some wild slip? Is what we’re looking at a rendering of a new iphone or touch device, or is this some random mockup meant to suggest a “general” Apple product? We’re strongly, strongly leaning towards the latter, though maybe Jobs let one slide through the cracks this time. See the full view after the break.

[Thanks, Christian]

Posted Mar 7th 2008 1:31PM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: Robots We’ve already seen cities turn to technology to combat graffiti, but it looks like the tables could one day be turned, at least if designer Stefan Rechsteiner has his way. As you can see above, his so-called “Couleur sur l’Objet” robot concept would be able to climb walls (relying on suction, it seems), leaving a trail of graffiti behind it. That would apparently be entirely done using software to plot out its course ahead of time, although we’re sure it could also be rigged with a remote control to allow for a little freestyle spraying. Of course, the chances of anyone actually releasing such a bot are pretty slim (at least for graffiti-ing purposes), although there’s nothing stopping you from taking a certain DIY-friendly solution and trying to build your own.

Posted Mar 7th 2008 4:01PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Laptops
Well, would you look at that? Oh wait, you can’t — because Dell just removed a teaser tagline from its USA webstore that totally gave away the impending release of a Penryn-based M1530. Earlier today, the “Select My Processor” page seen while building an M1530 showcased the following message: “Intel Core 2 Duo T7250, T7700, and T7800 require a selection of 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS as your video card. Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, T9500, and T8300 require a selection of 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT as your video card.” Of course, said message has since vanished, but we’d wager that it’s only a matter of days (hours?) before Dell finally gets with the program and gives its 15-incher the same treatment the M1330 and M1730 already received (not to mention the M1530 in other corners of the globe).

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Mention rectal thermometer and you can see a lump forming in my throat. I just hate any sort of probes going up where the sun don’t shine, but if I were a kid and I see Spongebob Squarepants smiling widely like that, chances are the pain would automatically lessen (or even disappear) when he gets down to business. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be smiling like Spongebob if I knew just which orifice I was created to be stuck into. The Spongebob Squarepants rectal thermometer retails for $16.95 from Amazon.

Product Page via American Inventor Spot

With HD DVD officially having been declared a dead format, this news should not come as much of a surprise, but Samsung has officially killed off the BD-UP5500 combo player. The BD-UP5500 was originally introduced at CES this past January and seemed to be a dead product right from the beginning.

In a statement from Samsung they seem to feel that it still remains a good product, but not really a needed product. According to Samsung that while it “remains a practical solution…the window of opportunity is smaller than it was before. In light of recent announcements, Samsung will not introduce the BD-UP5500 Duo HD Player.”

Current owners of HD DVD media may need to start looking for a replacement to their current movies, possibly sell them off on eBay and move over to Blu-ray. hd dvd set top players that are new seem to becoming far and few, with most manufacturers having already discontinued producing any new models. There are still a few in the market, one other from Samsung, the BD-UP5000 (of course this is also expected to hit the dead pool shortly) and two models from LG, who have announced they plan to continue moving forward with dual-format players.

Samsung is also expected to release their dedicated Blu-ray player, the BD-P1500 sometime in the spring of 2008.

Via [Crave]

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Posted Mar 7th 2008 10:25AM by Darren Murph
Filed under: cellphones
It’s bad enough when exams have to cater to horrific spellers due to their SMS-based vocabulary, but we’re doing everything we can to make ourselves believe this latest report simply isn’t true. Reportedly, a social analyst in Australia somehow believes that the wide range in spellings in a few popular names is due in large part to the fact that we spend way too much time as a whole conjugating and hyphenating in order to get text-based messages across. Said analyst was even quoted as saying that “the use of a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i’ has hit epidemic proportions, as has the use of ‘k’ over ‘c’.” Realistically, we’re not about to believe the SMS craze is actually affecting children’s names en masse, but please, do your next born a favor and give him / her the vowels they deserve.

[Via textually]

In keeping with the actual name pattern, as opposed to those strange letter number combo’s, Verizon has taken the Samsung U740 and renamed it the Alias. The odd twist here is the U740 is not a new released and was originally added to their lineup back in February 2007, perhaps Verizon is hoping this new name will help with branding and attract more of a following.

If nothing else the name change from Verizon just makes it seem like it belongs in the current lineup a little more as it keeps the same pattern of other handsets such as the Venus and Voyager.

Via [Mobile Mag]

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Posted Mar 7th 2008 4:04AM by Thomas Ricker
If you’ve grown tired of the cold corporate design sensibilities of most NAS products (uh hem, Buffalo), then check the Wizplat NAS-20 from Sarotech. This 2-bay NAS box supports a pair of SATA disks for what should top-out at 2TB of roll-your-own storage on your gigabit Ethernet network. It features a pair of USB jacks, built-in iTunes and print servers, and even a BitTorrent server which should allow your home PC to take a rest from your 7 x 24 downloading scheme. Color us impressed while we wait for the price and ship date to be announced.

[Via Akihabara News]

There’s nothing new about electronics kits–I had one as a kid from Radio Shack, and I remember sitting over my desk, cutting and stripping wires and hooking up battery clips and the like. My problem was that the kit ended up as an unholy tangle of wires and loose clips and cardboard cutout diagrams after my first attempt to make a project, and the kit seldom survived the first attempt to wire up a telegraph key or flashing light. That’s why I was impressed with Snap Circuits electronics kits when I was looking for an electronics kit for my son.

All the Snap Circuits components–resistors, transistors, ICs, LEDs–are mounted on solid, durable, clearly labelled plastic modules with familiar metal button snaps that you use to connect them. Anyone with a passing familiarity with Legos understands instantly how to put the pieces together, which makes building the prediagrammed experiments in the books provided with the kits easy. Even better, once you’ve built some of the circuits in the book, experimenting and making changes to see what happens is just as easy.

Snap Circuits makes a pretty good spectrum of kits for different budgets, starting with single-project kits that include just a handful of pieces, to different levels of comprehensive kits, and the impressive Snap Circuits Rover, which allows you to put together your own radio-control car. All the kits have interchangeable parts, so you can combine the parts from two kits to make your own projects. Snap Circuits also sells “upgrade” kits that give the missing pieces to build the projects in their more expensive kits.

I’ve had experience with their customer service department as well. I had a malfunctioning rover base just a few days after the kit was opened on Christmas day. I corresponded with their email support team and promptly received a new piece in the mail.

Snap Circuits isn’t the cheapest electronics kit out there, but the pieces are durable enough to survive being handed down from an older brother to a younger brother. That alone makes the kit a solid investment… as well as a good stepping stone to future father/son projects with soldering irons and breadboards.