combo

FaceFighter is a fairly simple, comically violent fighting game with a goofy twist: you create your own opponents, using pictures from your iPhone camera or photo albums--so that means you can bruise and brawl with just about anyone, whether your boss, your best friend, or a celebrity from a magazine. FaceFighter's foe-creation interface is intuitive and easy: you start with a pic, scale and rotate to line up the eyes and mouth, and then scale and rotate again to determine the face's borders. FaceFighter comes with two built-in enemies (Big Ben and Enemy Mime), but you'll quickly … Read more

There's nothing particularly eye-catching about this free system utility, but it successfully performed its single function--to immediately lock and password-protect your computer.

Lock System can be activated by clicking on the desktop icon. During setup, you have to enter and confirm a password that will be used to lock your computer. To access the program's menu options and to actually lock your computer, you have to right-click on its taskbar icon. A hot-key combination would have been more convenient. Settings options are few, and include changing your password and running the program when you start Windows. Still, we … Read more

iLuv is shipping its i1255 desktop media system, which Crave first saw at CES in January (video here). This home theater box combines a DVD player, iPod dock, and 5.1 surround sound in a compact unit that can be remote-controlled by a navigation system on the TV screen.

It's a few months behind its original March schedule, but that hardly qualifies as a disaster in the ever-tardy gadget universe. More noteworthy is its $150 price, which is $20 more than its first retail estimate.

We wish the U.K.'s John Lewis would expand to the States, just so we could keep up with the department store's latest kitchen creations. Last year we were smitten by its fridge-based wine cellar, and now they've done it again.

The "Ultimate Kitchen Combo" lives up to its name as a 4-in-1 system that includes an electric oven, a steam oven, a wall-mounted coffee machine, and a 19-inch LCD TV. Perhaps most impressive of all, this Rube Goldberg-sounding mashup of appliances looks surprisingly uncluttered, resembling some sort of high-tech art gallery.

When all this … Read more

We're not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but Canon seems to be getting some dubious product-design ideas from those mass-market gadget makers in Asia. Case in point: Its new 3-in-1 mouse that includes a calculator and numeric keypad.

The last time we saw one of these, it was from a Taiwanese company called Ezkey and bore a remarkable resemblance to a miniature George Foreman Grill. It's far from the weirdest mouse combinations we've seen, of course, which include everything from hand warmers and back massagers to gamepads and label makers.

Granted, it costs … Read more

It's often been unclear to us why anyone would want a standalone dictionary device, which seems like a lot of hardware to carry around just for text. Apparently Maxian agrees, because it recently released an upgraded version of its E900 media player with 60GB of storage to accommodate a built-in pocket dictionary.

The device also has a 4.3-inch display, USB ports, and Windows CE 5.0, according to MobileWhack, as well as support for audio and video. The dictionary combination makes particularly good sense for the Korean manufacturer, because it has already shown a penchant for cramming in … Read more

Combo TVs with built-in DVD or VCR players have always gotten little respect, found on the far reaches of shelf space at retail stores next to the HDMI cables or whatever else is in the next aisle. Given this lowly station, they've usually been allowed only the smaller screen sizes appropriate for such places as the kitchen or small family room--and rarely, if ever, bearing the latest technologies.

That's what makes Westinghouse's latest model interesting. The VK-40F580D integrates a DVD player with a 40-inch display, according to GizmoWatch, much larger than the 26-inch cap seen in practically … Read more