Crave

Talk about diminishing returns. The "Xun Chi 138" claims to be the world's smallest phone at 2.64 inches long and weighing less than 2 ounces. And if OhGizmo's list of its features is anywhere near true, it's a marvel of modern engineering: "It features a VGA camera with video recording & Webcam, a video player, photo editor, MP3 player w/EQ settings, voice recorder, 121 MB of memory, a 260,000-color touch screen, multimedia messaging, WAP browser, GPRS, calendar with multiple alarms, handwriting recognition, vibrating alert, games, calculator and unit converter!"

But … Read more

Many of us at Crave aren't animal people, yet we try to keep open minds. But while we tolerate penguins, pigs and even the occasional duck, we draw the line at cats. Yes, cats.

Other Cravers might ascribe our emotional response to sanriophobia, but our feline fixation goes well beyond the evil and mouthless Kitty. So we recoiled at the sight of Willcom's "Nico" phone. (As Akihabara News points out, it probably should have been named "Neko," the Japanese word fo cat.) No matter what it's called, this handset gives us the creeps.… Read more

As some of you phone fanatics may know, the 3GSM World Congress is coming up soon in Barcelona, Spain (unfortunately, Crave won't be there in person sipping on Spanish wine along Las Ramblas, err, I mean, to cover the event). The annual conference brings together the cell phone industry to discuss and showcase the latest 3G technologies and developments, and in recent years, it has also served as backdrop to some pretty cool product announcements. Now, based on some blogosphere rumblings, it looks like this year won't be any different. According to Engadget Mobile, Motorola is prepping to … Read more

Once again, technology finds inspiration in nature. This Orca-like craft is actually a catamaran.

Paritet Boat, the Moscow-based boat manufacturer, has released a successor to the glass-bottom Looker. The Looker is a hydrofoil boat--a boat with two wing-like struts mounted to the bottom of the hull. When you pick up enough speed, the hydrofoils raise the entire hull out of the water and you're essentially riding on the hydrofoils. This provides less drag and, therefore, less fuel needed for going fast.

Paritet's newest boat, the Ellips, has the same whale-shaped design, but is actually a catamaran. This means … Read more

As though Ford wanted its experimental Edge to rank high on Google's results for any alternative fuel car search, it unveiled a research version of its Edge that combines every hot new propulsion technology. First, this Edge is a hybrid because it uses electricity and hydrogen, which should please the mainstream clean-car crowd. Ford puts 'plug-in' into the car's power train tech, which should please the fanatical plug-in crowd that thinks current hybrids just aren't efficient enough. For the really forward-looking people who don't really need a production car on which to base their arguments, Ford … Read more

We've often thought that real-time traffic reports was an obvious use of interactive technologies, but for some reason they're still not universal. (These thoughts typically come to us while stuck on a freeway, which is often.) But a German GPS software company called Navigon says it will "radically change" this sluggish pace of development with a free service that will be offered with GPS services right out of the box, according to Twice.

The company, which is working with ClearChannel's Real Time Traffic, has made a deal with the Porsche Design Group as the first … Read more

Toshiba was one of the first PC vendors out of the gate with a working Windows Vista system--the attractive but expensive Portege R400. Now the company is rolling out Microsoft's new operating system to its most popular laptops, the 17-inch Satellite P105 and the 12.1-inch Satellite U205.

More interesting than that is a newly announced model, the Satellite A135. It's a 15.4-inch multimedia laptop with a feature rarely found on even the biggest desktop replacements--dual hard drives. Why would you want two hard drives? A RAID setup for duplicating and protecting your data is always a … Read more

No offense to the waterfowl lovers among us, but we feel the same way about ducks as we do penguins. (Sorry, Caroline.) So it is with some irritation that we pass along news of SolidAlliance's four-port USB hub for ducks. Well, duck-shaped USB keys, anyway. We don't really know what to think of SolidAlliance. What would possess a company to go from making "gold" USB keys to duck docks? We wouldn't be surprised if 'gwins were next.

It may be sold at a site called "Fun Shop," but we think this mouse is worth taking seriously, at least in concept. Rather than just flattening out its profile or some other flawed attempt at design, Evoluent made the "Vertical Mouse" with a far more practical ergonomic approach, as Coolest-Gadgets notes. Like the "Wow-Pen," this mouse is constructed to work with the natural movement of our hands. wrists and forearms. What a concept.