(Credit:
Acousticom)
Acousticom manufactures audio communication equipment utilized by the Department of Defense and leading aerospace companies. The company is well-known for its flight helmets, but it is coming to CES 2010 with something almost everyone can enjoy--the Sound Egg.
The egg chair is back, but with a 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound system and an intimate media experience not intended for sharing. The chair can be connected to a television or computer and its unique foam insulation means no more complaining from your significant other. Go ahead, play Call of Duty all you want--he or she won't hear a thing.
The Sound Egg was initially manufactured as a demonstration tool for trade shows. Although this is still a marketed use, Acousticom is making it available as a consumer electronics item. The $1,450 seat is not for everyone, but audiophiles might call it an "investment."
Humans have a nasty habit of producing and accumulating garbage, but Gabriel Dishaw, a junk-metal genius from Carmel, Ind., turns trash into artwork. His most recent pieces were inspired by his love of Nike shoes, as he fashioned five different kicks, including dunks and high tops.
Dishaw's shoes are collages of otherwise potentially useless hardware salvaged from computers, typewriters, and metal scraps. His work is meticulous, as it takes him up to several weeks to complete one pair of shoes and an accompanying carrying case for storage.
Though the sculptures are aesthetic replicas of real Nike shoes, they are far from wearable. His latest pair, Blazer Pentium 1.0 (named for Intel chips), weighs 15 pounds--and we're guessing the shoes don't have arch support.
See our photo gallery of Gabriel Dishaw's Nike-inspired junk art.
This "Eleven Commandments" bible mod came as something of a surprise--we always assumed God was an iMac user, given that he's such a creative chap. Click on the photo for more extreme case mods.
(Credit: Freezefreeks.de)Before laptops, World War II, and dinosaurs, desktop PCs ruled the Earth. And they were dull. And they were beige. And nobody liked them.
Unsurprisingly, many users attempted to modify their desktop PCs in increasingly extreme ways. Some added stickers, others added flashing lights, while some--jobless students, mostly--pimped their rigs until they were utterly unrecognizable as PCs.
Today, we pay homage to those men and women of the modding scene by presenting to you the 20 most pimped-out case transmogrifications ever conceived. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will wonder why some of these people even bothered.
Above all, however, you will be thankful you bought a laptop.
Read more of "The 20 most extreme case mods of all time" at Crave UK.
Tom and Rafe discuss the apps they put on first thing when they get a new computer.
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The Audioengine P4 is a cheap speaker.
Correction, it's an audiophile speaker that sells for $249 a pair. But that hasn't stopped it from getting raves from audiophiles who live with speakers that sell for a whole lot more.
I use Audioengine A2 self-powered speakers ($199 a pair) with my computer, so I thought I had a handle on what to expect from the P4.
The review P4 speaker sported a real, solid bamboo cabinet, wow!
(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)I did not; it's a whole new ball game. First, the P4 is a "passive" speaker, so you need to hook it up to an amplifier or receiver. The A2 is an "active" self-powered design that can be connected to a computer or MP3 player via a headphone jack.
I started listening to the P4 with my computer, with the speakers hooked up to an old Jolida hybrid tube/solid-state amplifier. The A2 is a sweet sounding little speaker, but the P4 was dramatically clearer, cleaner, and more vibrant. The P4 blows the A2 away--it's not even close.
At 9 inches tall by 5.5 inches wide by 6.5 inches deep, the P4 looks like a larger A2 (the A2 is 6 inches high by 4 inches wide by 5.25 inches deep). The P4 comes in satin-finished black or gloss white paint for $249 a pair, or in bamboo for $325 a pair. The wood isn't merely a veneer over medium-density fiberboard; no, the P4's cabinet is made out of solid bamboo, it's gorgeous!
Audioengine offers a nifty tabletop stand, the DS1 ($29 a pair), that cants the speaker back at an angle to project sounds up. The rubbery stands also isolate the speaker and prevent it from transmitting bass into your desk. Want to wall mount it? No problem, use the threaded inserts on the speaker's rear-end.
The P4's three-quarter inch silk dome tweeter and 4-inch Kevlar woofer appear to be of very high quality. Both drivers are made by Audioengine.
... Read more
HP Touchsmart 600
(Credit: HP.com)HP just announced the third upgrade to of its line of TouchSmart PCs, and the first model we've laid hands on, the TouchSmart 600 (full review here), was good enough to earn an Editor's Choice award. The new TouchSmart 300 and TouchSmart 600 feature 20-inch and 23-inch screens, respectively, and both offer the same multitouch screen with either a 16:9 1080P HD or HD-ready display.
To coincide with this announcement, HP is also rolling out exclusive applications for the TouchSmart PCs that take advantage of its multitouch enabled screen and Windows 7, including, but not limited to:
- Hulu Desktop: browse and watch your favorite TV shows
- Netflix: Instantly watch movies or browse and add films to your online queue
- Pandora Internet Radio: Discover new music based on your personalized taste
- TouchSmart Live TV: Watch and record your favorite television shows
- TouchSmart Canvas: organize your photos on a virtual canvas and use your fingers to make edits
- TouchSmart RecipeBox: Enjoy a hands-free cooking experience with recipes that respond to voice commands
Of those apps, the Recipe Box is the most impressive. Smart software lets you scrap and catalog recipes from a variety of popular recipe Web sites (Epicurious, Food Network, and Martha Stewart among them), and via voice recognition and text-to-speech you can navigate the recipes hands-free. It's the best kitchen-oriented PC solution we've seen.
The new 300 and 600 models also include a new swivel stand, a built-in wall mount support, in addition to a new tiltable web cam for group conferences and video chats. Both models are available in a variety of retail configurations with customizable configurations available at HP.com.
More photos after the jump.
... Read moreThe massive data failure at Microsoft's Danger subsidiary threatens to put a dark cloud over the company's broader "software plus services" strategy.
A key tenet of that approach is that businesses and consumers can trust Microsoft to reliably store valuable data on their servers.
T-Mobile Sidekick Slide
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)A week ago, though, Microsoft's Danger unit experienced a huge outage that left many T-Mobile Sidekick users without access to their calendar, address book, and other key data. That's because the Sidekick keeps nearly all its data in the cloud as opposed to keeping the primary copy on the devices themselves.
Things got even worse on Saturday, as Microsoft said in a statement that data not recovered thus far may be permanently lost. It's not immediately clear how many people lost their data. The outage earlier in the week affected a broad swath of Sidekick users, though many had data return during the week.
While outages in the cloud computing world are common (one need only look at recent issues with Twitter or Gmail), data losses are another story. And this one stands as one of the more stunning ones in recent memory.
The Danger outage comes just a month before Microsoft is expected to launch its operating system in the cloud--Windows Azure. That announcement is expected at November's Professional Developer Conference. One of the characteristics of Azure is that programs written for it can be run only via Microsoft's data centers and not on a company's own servers.
It should be pointed out that the Azure setup is entirely different from what Danger uses: the Sidekick uses an architecture Microsoft inherited rather than built (Microsoft bought Danger last year). Still, the failure would seem to be enough to give any CIO pause.
Update, 2 p.m. PT, 10/11/2009: I asked Microsoft for comment Saturday when I was writing this, in particular as to how the rest of its cloud might differ from the Danger set up.
Microsoft said Sunday that its the fabric controller that manages the Azure service is built with redundancy in mind.
"We write multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices so that the data is available in a situation where a single or multiple physical nodes may fail," Windows Azure general manager Doug Hauger said in a statement to CNET News.
That doesn't mean Azure is immune from data loss, though I'm told an entire data center would have to be wiped out, as opposed to just a server or collection of servers. I'd be interested to know whether Microsoft will also offer multiple location options so that users that want to can have their data in more than one physical spot as well.
But that's just one of many questions raised by this spectacular failure. Among the other questions still looming large in my head are:
1. What backup procedures did Danger have?
2. Just how many of T-mobile's Sidekick customers lost their data? (Feel free to let me know, Sidekick users.)
3. What impact will this have on the Pink project, which was largely seen as the evolution of the Sidekick, and some say was already in trouble?
4. Will this hurt Microsoft's efforts to build a brand around the notion of Windows Phone even though that uses a different architecture (with its own challenges, to be sure)?
The Latitude Z on wireless charging station, and wireless dock adapter on the right.
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET)That Dell is releasing a new laptop for business customers is the opposite of surprising. But the fact that it contains notable features not seen in any other laptops certainly is.
Most everything about the new Latitude Z is expected: It's yet another very thin notebook (a metric which PC manufacturers keep using to try to one-up each other), with a different kind of exterior finish (soft-touch, in this case), and comes in a black cherry. It measures 16 inches across, and is 14 millimeters thin at its most narrow point.
But you probably wouldn't guess that the Latitude Z charges wirelessly. And as far as we can tell, it's the first laptop to do so. Surprised that this is coming from Dell? You're not alone.
The wireless charging is handled elegantly enough. An inductive pad that's built into a laptop stand can accomplish a full recharge in "about the same amount of time" as a standard-issue cabled charger, according to Dell. While smartphone maker Palm has a similar (albeit smaller) wireless charging system for the Pre, and companies like Visteon and Wild Charge have debuted wireless charging accessories for phones, no PC maker has incorporated the idea until now.
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(Credit:
Timbuk2/CNET)
Netbooks are generally small enough to fit in most any bag you've got, but if you want something small to carry around your Netbook (and your Netbook only), Timbuk2's new T-Pack does the trick. This bag can be used in one of three ways: as a standalone, padded case to be thrown in another bag, as a shoulder bag, or as a backpack-style bag, which in the above photo looks kind of ridiculous.
Along with holding your computer, the bag also has a zip pocket on the bottom that can be used to stash your power adapter, along with a few odds and ends like a wireless card, mouse, or USB sticks. The bag costs $30 and can hold Netbooks up to 10 inches in size, although buyers on Timbuk2's site report that some machines with extended life battery packs don't fit.
(Credit:
Gizmodo)
It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we've all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft's astonishing take on the tablet.
Courier is a real device, and we've heard that it's in the "late prototype" stage of development. It's not a tablet, it's a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking, and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They're connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.
Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it--Microsoft's brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who's spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.
Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that's a longtime Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.
The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple's tiger style. It's complex: two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a "pocket" to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft's tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we've seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.
Over the next couple days Gizmodo will be diving much, much deeper into Courier, so stay tuned.
This story originally appeared on Gizmodo.
