Tech Gadgets Reviews

Posted Mar 7th 2008 8:19AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Robots

Move over Rolly, there’s a cheaper, craplasticer bot ready to stomp out your game. Sega Toys just announced their ¥5,250 ($51) I-Spin dancing robot. Apparently it responds to ambient sounds by rolling around and flipping its ears in time with the beat. After that novelty wears thin, you can directly attach the creature to any audio source where it will live out its remaining years as an external speaker.

Posted Mar 7th 2008 9:57AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: cellphones, Gaming

It’s nice to know that Sony Ericsson is plugging away on making our crazy, dare-to-dream fantasies a reality. The latest proof that someone up there (and by up there, we mean Japan) likes us comes in the form of a new patent for a touchscreen handheld that forgoes physical buttons for a haptic-feedback scheme. The design mandates that the phone / game device would be free of the pesky clutter of regular buttons, and would instead by configurable to any number of forms (PSP, phone, mp3 player, digital camera) by arrangement of on-screen controls. The device would vibrate in accordance with button-presses, though it’s unclear whether this will just be a standard vibration, or a more advanced, location-specific feedback system. Even with a little buzz, we’re not quite sure you can replicate the feeling real gaming controls provide — and that could seriously interfere with our typical success in games.

[Via Unwired View]

Details are still sketchy concerning this agreement concerning projector maker InFocus’ interest in using USB display technology from DisplayLink to work on a whole new line of projectors from the second half of 2008 onwards. While the DisplayLink technology has worked well thus far, chances are it will be inadequate to cater for high-end games, no thanks to the USB cable’s relatively limited bandwith. Then again, if you’re a hardcore gamer who wants to see your games on a display much larger than what the monitor can offer, you will probably settle for a totally different, high-end projector instead. Other than that, standard PowerPoint presentations ought to fare just fine over USB display technology in the upcoming InFocus projectors.

Source: Gearlog

Disney announced plans to work with Japanese animation studios in order to make its products more appealing to a Japanese audience.

The collaborations will be with Toei Animation Co., Madhouse Co., and Jinni’s Animation Studios. Each animation studio has been assigned a project, with an emphasis on taking existing Disney IP and making it appeal to the Japanese.

Toei is to create a short animation for release in June entitled, “Robodz.” MadHouse, meanwhile, will be creating a 30-minute show called “Stitch” based on the “Lilo and Stitch” series shown in the West. Finally, Jinni will be creating a short animation for release in April entitled, “Fireball.”

By using local companies, Disney hopes to take advantage of the existing animation talent that already exists in the home of manga and anime. The company also suggested that if successful the collaborations could be expanded upon to include more animation studios.

Read more at the Associated Press article.

Matthew’s Opinion

I think this is an intelligent move by Disney. There is certainly a wealth of drawing and animation talent in Japan, as the amount of anime they produce every year can attest. In a country that watches so much animation, the population is more acutely aware of what they like, and the only way Disney could ever get the “feel” right for the territory is to use locally produced animation.

Anime in the West is growing in popularity, and one positive aspect to Disney’s new collaborations is the fact the re-imagined shows may also become popular outside of Japan. A different art style, setting, and tweaked storyline certainly won’t make it unsuitable for the West, because we are starting to watch so much Japanese animation anyway.

Hopefully, these collaborations will be a success, and Disney will continue to work with talent in Japan and expand to other parts of the world as well.

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]

Posted Mar 7th 2008 3:33PM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: Robots

It may be not be the only bot on the block for long but, for now at least, the Canadian-built Dextre robot has the spotlight to itself, with it set to blast off Tuesday on board the shuttle Endeavor for delivery to its new home on the International Space Station. As USA Today reports, the robot has been some ten years in the making (at a cost of $210 million), and is designed to handle many of the tasks that would otherwise be done by astronauts on spacewalks. Those astronauts will still have a job for a while yet, with one of the main tasks during Endeavor’s mission obviously being the assembly of Dextre, which is currently broken down into nine parts. Even after that’s done, however, Dextre apparently won’t start work until sometime in 2009, at which point it’ll be able to replace nearly 140 parts on the ISS, and be controlled either by mission control or the crew on the space station.

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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Getting hit by a paintball is a painful affair, but at least you can try to exact revenge on your human counterpart. What happens if you are up against a robotic opponent? Builder Che Edoga (aka “darkback2?) has come up with Gepetto, a remote-controlled robot who fires paintballs without flinching when fired at. Originally designed to be an artificially-intelligent mobile robotic platform, throwing in a paintball modification is nothing but a stroke of genius. Gepetto has the strength to carry a laptop on its back and is able to navigate challenging surfaces courtesy of independent wheel mechanisms that can travel as much as 3″ in height. It won’t be able to traverse hills though, but a carpet and uneven surfaces should be not a problem.

The G-Fi is a standalone GPS add-on which will work with any WiFi device that has a web browser. When it ships, the G-Fi folks say that there will be a “complete software navigation suite” available for the iphone. Given the apparent size of the box, we have to ask “why?”. Both the iPhone and the ipod Touch already have workable faux-GPS in the form of triangulation, and both already sport one of the best implemented versions of Google Maps.

G-Fi should think about teaming up with the Eye-Fi folks. Apart from the naming possibilities, having a GPS in your backpack which could talk to your camera would solve both the battery and bulk concerns which currently keep GPS out of cameras.

Product page [Posimotion]

Here comes the Technaxx touch screen portable media player that seem to ride on the iphone craze. What are some of the features you can expect from the TouchMe player? Well, check it out below :-

• 2.8″ (320 x 240 resolution) QVGA touch screen display
• Supports MPEG-4 (AVI), MP3, WMA, WAV, MP1 & MP2, JPG & BMP file formats
• e-Book compatibility
• Pre-loaded games

While this isn’t the thinnest kid on the block, with a weight of 37 grams, you probably won’t be able to feel it weigh down your pocket. There is no word on pricing as at press time.