Crave

If you've visited Crave in the last couple of days, you may have noticed some changes. And no, you're not imagining things. Crave has gotten a little face-lift, and we hope you like the new look as much as we do.

Mostly, the site has taken on a sleeker aesthetic that we think better suits all the cool gadgets we cover. You'll see a new Crave logo, as well as a new What's Hot feature at the top of the main page so you can keep up with our most-followed subjects. Be sure to check out our ever-expanding roster of fun galleries on the right side.

Crave will continue to be your go-to source for gadget news, commentary, photos, and podcasts. It just has a different wrapping.

As always, we love to hear from readers with feedback and story ideas. Please continue to keep our TalkBack sections hopping, and write to us at crave dot cnet dot com. Now, back to our regularly scheduled gadget programming.

Justin Yu returns to the show from his sojourn to Boston, but he comes back with some monster grandma glasses from the '60s and a $40 check from Airborne. The 404 makes history by finally making it onto Urban Dictionary, with a word we still cannot write officially on CNET.

Really. Those glasses man?

(Credit: Wilson G. Tang/CNET)

While listening to NPR, Wilson rediscovered the good ole days of car stereos. Not the fancy built-in ones that come with your shiny new Toyota Camry, but the $400 dollar stereos that you put into your '88 Chevy Nova with the flip-down faceplate. Remember when you couldn't turn on your car with your stereo on at the same time without burning out your batteries? Well, apparently, the theft of car stereos has gone way down thanks to built-in iPod connectors and proprietary dashboards.

Also on today's show, we chime in on Facebook's new redesign of their redesign. It's not really that bad. One of the Jonas Brothers makes a racial slur that all of Hollywood seems to be embracing. It's not funny, y'all! We wonder how many trees had to die for you to get a phone book that you'll never use. It's called Google, people. Finally, leaving your computer on at work apparently costs companies $2.8 BILLION dollars a year, but damn, we hate waiting 10 minutes for our computers to restart. Not to mention the time it wastes to turn off the 20 spyware programs and relaunch your IM clients, browsers, iTunes, and Microsoft Office just to get started on the work day.

All that and more on today's show. Plus, an obligatory poop joke. We need callbacks! Leave a voice mail at 1-866-404-CNET (2638).

CNET Community,

For many long months, CNET's engineers, editors, and designers have been hard at work rebuilding CNET from the ground up. This week, those changes are being unveiled for all our users. Behind the scenes, our publishing infrastructure has been overhauled to provide many benefits, two of which will be most obvious: our page-load times are dramatically improved and our publishing tools have been streamlined to permit faster roll-out of content and new features (more on those below).

The most visible change is to our look and feel. Everything from our logo to our color scheme to site navigation was reviewed, tested, and reworked. The result is a site that many users who were able to view the pages in a beta stage described as "sleek" and "professional." There is one aspect to the changes, however, that has proved to be a bit more controversial: the shift to stars to represent editorial ratings.

Product ratings are the core of what CNET Reviews does, so any tinkering with a familiar and successful format is guaranteed to be viewed skeptically by some longtime users. To those users, rest assured that nothing has changed in terms of how we rate products, only in how we display the outcome.

Our knowledgeable and passionate editors are still performing the same rigorous tests that have helped millions of consumers since the mid-1990s. The subratings and the final score are calculated the same way, and even result in a decimal score (for example 6.2). What has changed is that those ratings are converted to a five-star rating (with halves). One reason for the new visual treatment is that five-star ratings match those at our sister site, CNET Downloads, and the ratings you supply in our user opinions. We anticipate the change to stars will encourage more users to rate products on CNET and will make it easier to compare user ratings to editor ratings.

The bottom line is that the only thing we've changed is the display of our editors' ratings. In fact, we've gone one step further to highlight the hard work that goes into a CNET review: we are now displaying on product pages the subratings and overall score in a mouseover that hovers over the star ratings. Previously, this information was almost impossible to locate because it resided on a page describing our rating process that only a handful of our users were able to find. (Eventually, we hope to allow users to sort for products based on these subratings. For example, adding a sort option that would display all cameras that received a subrating of 8 or above for image quality.)

As for the other improvements to the site, the infrastructure work will allow editors to update category home pages and various other pages much more rapidly, ensuring that users are always viewing up-to-date content. This back-end improvement also will allow us to rapidly build new features. Indeed, several are included with the "new" CNET:

•  Reviews from competing publications are now presented in the right-side column of our product pages. While we are confident that CNET provides expert reviews that can make or a break someone's decision to buy a product, we also know that some people want verification that there is agreement among reviews before pulling out their credit cards. No longer do those users have to scour the Web for these reviews, since we are now showing excerpts alongside our own reviews. See an example here (but note we are working on improvements to the presentation.)

•  We now provide in-line buying advice on our product filter lists (view an example). This information comes directly from our editors' buying guides, so you know you can trust it. This information is also being served on pages for products that we have not reviewed.

•  CNET is making its archive of reviews available to the public. Previously, we've hidden reviews after a product was discontinued to avoid any confusion with currently available items. But we recognize that these old reviews could be useful to users interested in buying or selling old devices, so they're back online and clearly identified as being discontinued. View an example.

There are numerous other improvements to the site (such as the treatment of photos on product review pages). Please spend some time clicking around and send me e-mail me your feedback. We are not finished improving the site and your opinions are an important part of the process. For example, maybe you'd like to choose between the old ratings and the stars, or see both, or ...

Scott Ard
Editor in Chief, CNET Reviews

Nintendo DS Lite

Yesterday, GameSpot reported that Pacific Crest Securities analyst Evan Wilson says Nintendo is gearing up to release a redesigned DS. Apparently, Wilson's "contacts" have told him that a new DS is complete. This redesigned DS, Wilson says, is slimmer than the current DS Lite, includes onboard memory, and features a larger screen. More interestingly, this new DS doesn't have a slot for Game Boy Advance games.

Call me a skeptic, because I'm pretty darn skeptical about this theory. Wilson seems to be straddling the line between "short-term prediction an industry analyst pulled out of thin air" and "long-term prediction that, two or three years from now, will obviously come true."

The Nintendo DS has already seen one hugely successful redesign in the DS Lite. It's thinner, lighter, and much brighter than the original DS and has been selling by the truckload. Last year, I saw times when the DS Lite was as scarce and sought-after as the Nintendo Wii. A generation before the DS, Nintendo redesigned the Game Boy Advance into the slimmer and lighter Game Boy Advance SP.

Unfortunately, Nintendo didn't stop there and instead went on to release the Game Boy Micro, a Game Boy Advance with a much smaller body and brighter screen. Gamers met this second redesign with a collective "Meh." The GBA SP already did what they wanted it to do; it was small, bright, and played all their GBA games. There wasn't a reason to get the Micro. Plenty of gamers are still quite pleased with their DS Lites, and I don't think they're going to find much of a reason to replace it, even if it has a larger screen and some onboard memory.

Wilson's claim that the redesigned DS won't support GBA games makes me even more skeptical; the GBA has a massive library of inexpensive, fun games that still see a lot of play. If Nintendo simply dropped that support, it would be as foolish as if Sony dropped support for games in its Playstation 3. Oh, wait.

In fairness, Nintendo dropped support for the original Game Boy games with the Nintendo DS, so there is at least some precedent for it. I just seriously doubt it would happen. The Game Boy library was huge, but seriously aging. The earliest Game Boy titles are 18 years old now. If you have the original Tetris, it can probably vote in the 2008 election. More importantly, unlike the Game Boy/GBA compatibility, the DS' backwards compatibility enhances game play for DS games. If you plug in certain GBA games while you play DS titles like Advance Wars Dual Strike or Mega Man Star Force, you can unlock bonus content in those games. Cutting out GBA compatibility removes that possibility and makes obsolete many gamers' sizable GBA libraries. The supposed redesign's onboard memory would open the possibility for downloadable Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games, but I don't see why Nintendo would waste such a massive new feature on a simple product redesign. That sort of upgrade would be more warranted in Nintendo's next handheld game player to justify outright replacing the DS with a new system. Onboard memory would either be wasted on the DS' current system design, or require a fairly substantial reworking of its interface.

Don't get me wrong, I definitely think that Nintendo is hard at work on a new handheld player. I just don't think that we're going to see a redesigned DS any time soon. In two years, maybe we'll see the Nintendo DS Advance or some other handheld with more power and features. And yes, it might drop Game Boy Advance support at that point but retain DS support. But it probably won't be a DS redesign any more than the DS is a Game Boy Advance redesign or the Game Boy Advance is a Game Boy redesign. It will probably be a new system.

Of course, I might be wrong and Nintendo might unveil the DS Micro for a summer release. But I seriously doubt it.

(Credit: e-Solex)

Alternative forms of eco-friendly personal transportation have been appearing on drawing boards and wacky-tech Web sites for quite some time now, and in most cases they don't actually gain much traction. And many are painfully awkward despite a seemingly 'streamlined,' 'futuristic' design (we're talking about you, Segway). So maybe it's time that personal-transportation visionaries actually looked to the past for inspiration.

Like this one, a new take on the classic VeloSolex motorized bicycle. The VeloSolex, according to oO's Very Eclectic, was originally introduced in 1946 as a low-cost transportation solution for post-war France. The funky little bikes, which could be given an extra speed boost by pedaling, were discontinued in 1988.

Leave it to Italian design house Pininfarina (best-known for many Ferrari-related endeavors) to revive it in a 21st-century incarnation that gives it a cool, old-school-visions-of-the-future look. Called the e-Solex, the new version of la bicyclette qui roule toute seule is now powered by an electric engine and a lithium-ion battery. It tops off at about 35 miles per hour, which you can juice up a bit with human power. It's currently available in France, and I'm guessing that prices vary depending on the dealer.

And since we all love pictures that move, here's a YouTube video of the e-Solex's test drive: