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Holux recently announced the availability of their new GPS, the GPSmile 61. The new addition was originally on display at CES 2008, but at that time it wasn’t known when it was going to be released. Holux recently confirmed that it’s going to be on sale soon.

The Holux GPSmile 61 sports a 4.3-inch TFT touchscreen, supports HDSD cards, comes with a removable battery and runs on Samsung’s S3C2443 processor. Additionally, it comes with a TMC traffic receiver, built-in speakers, Bluetooth connectivity for hands free calling and support for MP3, WMV, AVI and ASF files. Unfortunately, no word on exact shipping date at this time, but since it’s official, it should start shipping relatively soon. Also, no word on pricing at this time. All in all, it looks to be a nice, simple, and (hopefully) affordable GPS.

Via [NaviGadget]

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by Paul Miller, posted Jul 7th 2008 at 11:04AM
Look, this top ten celebrity child-rearing tips list of ours is gonna make it to the top, we just know it, and we’re tired of hitting up family members to get stories out of the single digits. Luckily there’s a better way. The robotic Digg arm — which appears to be slightly or entirely fake — refreshes a page, detects Digg badges on the screen, and then moves the cursor over them to “manually” Digg the stories. Apparently the bot can Digg 1500 stories a day, but we’re gonna need some more evidence than this joke vid (embedded after the break) to be convinced of this bot’s actual, welcomed existence.

[Via Make]

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Filed under: Robots

My, my, Google. It seems the words “Google” and “Privacy” can be found in quite a few articles across the internet as of late. Quite a few falling on the non-flattering side. Perhaps that’s why Google finally made a point of updating their main page to a never-before offered link to their privacy terms AND posting about the update on their corporate blog.

The issue was brought to the light in the first place by NY Times reporter Saul Hansell, when he asked if the company was violating California law by not posting a link to its privacy policy on its home page. The answer? Yes. That is when privacy advocates jumped in and became involved. Although in what is seeming to become an “oh so Google” move…it wasn’t done until Day 31 when the legal time frame following notice is 30 days.

For quite some time now, Google has been so very proud of their “nice and clean” 28 word home page. So, in order to not mar that image, when they added the new link (simply called “privacy”), they had to remove one of the words already on there. Off came “Google” at the bottom of the page. Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, says that she felt it was pretty obvious what page the user was on, so it was a safe word to remove. Somehow I think right now Google has bigger issues in front of them than how many words are on their home page.

However, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Marc Rotenberg, said Saturday that his group is “pleased” with the decision.

“This was not only required by California law (and Google is a California corporation) but is also the standard practice for commercial Web sites.”

Mr. Rotenberg’s company, along with the Privacy RIghts Clearinghouse and World Privacy Forum had all joined together to push for Google to make the change to clearly state their privacy policies. Although happy that Google is now showing this, Pam Dixon of World Privacy Forum still admits that “privacy policies are not a guarantee of perfect privacy practices.”

Somehow that line doesn’t really shock me.

Read [CNet]

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by Darren Murph, posted Jul 7th 2008 at 2:10PM
Troy Hurtubise has certainly auctioned off a few grizzly fighting suits before (not to mention the Halo-inspired Trojan), but this is likely your one and only shot at procuring the original Project Grizzly Mk VI suit worn by Troy himself in the generally unknown cult classic Project Grizzly. The suit is being offered to the highest bidder as the Grizzly Proof exhibit in Toronto shuts down, and while the starting bid sits at $500, it’ll take upwards of 40 grand before Mr. Hurtubise’s debts associated with the suit are cleared. C’mon, you know that’s all the reason you need to throw your hat into the ring.

[Thanks, Cantraider]

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Filed under: Robots

Now that the Hi-Def video format wars are over, the MAC obsessed can now turn to holy grail of digital backup, a Blu-Ray 6x Superdrive. And MCE Technologies is there to provide them.

Capable of burning both single and dual layer Blu-Ray DVDs, the MCE Superdrive can archive up to fifty gigabytes of information on a single disc. That translates to being able to backup an entire audio and home video collection on a single disc and probably have room to spare. Or, users can image drives to create handy system backups in the event of a calamity and still burn to a single disc. And with current technologies working on multilayer discs that can hold up to 200 GB and beyond, this Blu-Ray burner has only the sky as it’s limit. Firmware notwithstanding. It’s capable of burning at 6x for Blu-Ray, 16x for standard +R/RW DVDs, can burn CDs at a blazing 40x, as well as burning capabilities for DVD Ram at and HD- DVD-ROM at 5x. It even has Lightscribe.

MCE says that the MCE 6X Blu-ray Recordable Drive is compatible with any MacPro or PowerMac PC and is available immediately and will set you back about $500 US (with a single Blu-Ray blank disc included).

Hat Tip: gadgets Weblog

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by Darren Murph, posted Jul 7th 2008 at 2:41PM
Teclast’s M26 seemed vaguely more interesting than the dozens of other garbage, status-quo portable media devices that get pumped out of Chinese factories on a weekly basis — and now we need not spend any more time wondering just where they got their design, um, inspiration. At least Meizu’s M8 sexed it up a little — this take is just a bit depressing.

[Via thegadgetsite]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

A recently surfaced BlackBerry roadmap has just shown its face for Rogers. While this has not been officially confirmed yet, the projected dates are however believable and seem to fit in well with the prior rumors.

First up, it looks like Rogers is on track to offer their customers the blackberry Bold before AT&T here in the US. However it looks like the earlier projected date of July 25 is only partially true. It looks that the phone will be available to dealers on that date, with it hitting the regular retail market just a few days later on July 29.

The next two, both of which should be exciting is the newly announced flip-styled KickStart, which is expected to be available in September, however no specific date has been announced, or even rumored aside from mid-to-late September. And finally the Javelin is expected sometime during late November or early December, in other words it will be there in time for the holidays.

Via [CrackBerry]

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by Paul Miller, posted Jul 7th 2008 at 1:42PM
Well, we suppose the first two Orange Box mods we saw were Portal-related, but a love for Half-Life 2 is really implied in anything Valve-related, and this here Team Fortress 2 case mod feels like the end to a beautiful, Orange story — or perhaps the beginning of another. We’ll confess, we got our ass handed to us enough times in TF2 to make it a rare incident when we’d even make it to a Dispenser, but there’s love for this glorious blue box all the same, and TiTON has certainly done his homework in building the thing. Props all around. Now can someone swap to medic and give us a little backup over here?

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Filed under: Desktops

by Donald Melanson, posted Jul 7th 2008 at 12:09PM
Eee PC mods are already nearly as plentiful as actual Eee PC variations these days, and it looks like you can now add one more fairly ambitious one to the mix, with Australian modder Bismar aiming to turn the humble netbook into an e-book reader that he’s dubbed the Tabeee MK 1. While it’s still far from finished, as you can see from the pics available at the read link below, he is making some steady progress, and he’s even going so far as to incorporate a touchscreen mod. Of course, the screen itself still won’t exactly stand up to a dedicated e-book reader, but Bismar seems to think the cost savings will be worth the trade-off. Also, you can ignore the date stamp above — while Bismar seems to know his way around a heat gun, it seems he’s yet to master the ins and outs of digital camera settings.

[Via GottaBeMobile]

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Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops