Author: Duncan Geere
LG watch-phone to cost £1,000!?
Gosh, that’s rather a lot. Mobile Today reckons that the LG watch phone that we covered here will be exclusive to Orange and cost a massive £1,000. Wow. The mere thought inspired Nate Lanxon from CNET to create the wonderous venn diagram over the the right there.
The G910 watch-phone was announced at MWC last week, and LG showed it off at CES too. Considering its appalling specs, requirement that you constantly wear a headset, and – now – massive price tag, it’s clear that Orange see this as a novelty for rich people, not a real device.
(via Mobile Today and CNET)
New Zealand's guilt-on-accusation copyright law postponed
New Zealand, as we’ve previously reported, wants to take a hard line against people accused of copyright infringement by cutting them off without any attempt to ascertain whether they’re actually guilty.
The copyright owners argue that this is necessary, because successfully prosecuting someone is a time-consuming and costly business. Of course, copyright owners have a history of falsely identifying acccused infringers.
As a result, there’s been uproar in the country, with many across the world “blacking out” their social network profile pictures to draw attention to the law, due to come into force this Saturday (28th Feb 09).
Thanks to their actions, and the media spotlight placed on the country from across the world, the law has now been postponed. Although it’s only postponed for a month, it’s still a major victory for consumers, who’ll now have a chance to input on a code of practice for the implementation of the law.
If no agreement is reached on the code of practice, then the law will be suspended further, and the government has also promised a review of the effectiveness of the law six months in, to see if it’s had any effect on volumes of filesharing. My guess? It won’t.
(via Stuff.co.nz)
Roll-up cooking mat design could prove useful in small flats
He’s a clever chap, Designer Maurizio Maiorana. He’s put together a concept design for a cooking mat that can be folded up and used on any surface without burning it. It’s all thanks to the remarkable thermal properties of silver.
There’s three hotplates on the device, and they’re surrounded by holes that blow out hot air, keeping the bottom cool while keeping a pan hot. As it connects with just a normal plug, this could also be useful for campers, or people in caravans.
It can handle temperatures of -60 to 280 degrees Celsius, and should be pretty easy to clean, too, thanks to the liquid silicone rubber that the whole thing’s made of. I want one.
BenQ announces the nStation i91 and i221
Display manufacturer BenQ looks like it’s branching out – it’s announced two all-in-one PCs. There’s an 18.5″ model, as well as a 21.5″ one. Let’s look at the former first.
The i91 (pictured above) has a 16:9 widescreen display, with an AMD Sempron 210U processor, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. That’s not too impressive, really. There’s a a webcam and a card reader, too.
Sat on the bottom-right of the display, though, is a whopping great big hi-fi-style knob for adjusting the volume, and shutting down the PC. Interesting move. It’s evident that this is being pitched for a multimedia market, then.
Then there’s a slightly larger model, the 21.5″ i221. No word on any detail on that yet though, and no word on release dates or price for either model. Oh well.
Stair lights – they're allegedly for safety purposes
Got dark stairs? No. Nor do I. Nor does ANYONE. So “safety” can’t be the real reason that these awesome stick-on lights were created. No, they were blatantly made because they’ll make your stairs look like the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
What would be even cooler is if you could rig these up with pressure pads so that they only turn on when you step on the relevant step, or perhaps turn off. You can bet your bottom dollar that someone’s making a music video of that RIGHT NOW.
(via The Design Blog)
VIDEO: Japanese exoskeleton suit called "HAL".
There’s a long comic book tradition of people going slightly doo-lally, building massive robot suits in their garage, and then stomping all over their enemies. Well, the Japanese just did it. They’ve built HAL, who looks like he’ll stomp all over you in an instant.
HAL is worn over your arms and legs, and uses eight motors to attached to your shoulders, elbows, knees and waist to control your movements. Let just hope that whoever’s controlling it has the same ideas about what you want to do as you do. Still, longer term, this could be an incredible help for the disabled.
(via WeirdAsiaNews)
Jessops announces two Olympus cameras
Olympus has just announced two digital cameras that’ll be exclusive to photo retailer Jessops. One’s pictured over there to the right – that’s the X915 – and then there’s the X890 too.
The X915 wears the trousers, so let’s examine him first. A 12-megapixel sensor, 2.7″ LCD screen and 5x optical zoom are packed into a 137g body. It’s XD and MicroSD compatible, and there’s a red eye editing feature, too.
It’s slightly younger brother is the X890, which has to make do with its older brothers cast-offs. A 10-megapixel sensor, 3x optical zoom and the same 2.7″ LCD are in the offing, as well as the aforementioned compatibility and editing settings.
The X915 costs £300 and the X890 costs £260. Both will be available on 21st February from your local Jessops.
Orange customer wins no phone signal lawsuit
An Orange customer named Tom Prescott is now £500 richer than a week ago, thanks to a court ruling in his favour.
He took out an 18-month contract with Orange, but found that he couldn’t get signal in either his home or his office. He then tried to cancel, but Orange told him it was his problem, not theirs. As you can imagine, he wasn’t too happy.
The court’s now ruled in his favour – saying that if you sell an 18-month contract to someone who doesn’t live or work in a place where you can provide coverage, then it damn well is your problem.
It could end up being a massive headache for the big phone networks as they suddenly become inundated with lawsuits. It also means that manufacturers of mini phone masts that exist in your home – called Femtocells – are suddenly rubbing their hands with glee.
(via News Wireless)
CO2 emissions data mapped on Google Earth
A team of scientists at Purdue University have mapped carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels across the USA. The mega-high-res map will show you CO2 emissions in metric tons per state, county or capita.
The project, which took three years to complete, also breaks down emissions by their source – offering the option of viewing only emissions from electricity production, travel, or residential homes, for example.
To check out the map you’ll need the Google Earth browser plugin, and a bit of patience because it takes a while to load.
Meanwhile, an erstwhile group of Google Earth explorers that thought that they’d found Atlantis have been disappointed. Metro is claiming that the vast city that observers had spotted on the floor of the Atlantic to the west of the Canary Islands is actually just an artifact of the sonar scanning process on the ocean floor. Pity.
(via AFP and Metro)
Thousands of MySpace sex offender "refugees" booted off Facebook
Since last May, Facebook has removed 5,500 registered sex offenders from its social network, many of whom are claimed to be ‘refugees’ from MySpace who themselves have booted 90,000 sex offenders in the last couple of years.
Last year, the Attorney General of the USA forced both sites to implement considerably more stringent safeguards – preventing older users searching profiles of sub-18-year-olds, and finding better ways of age verification.
Facebook relies on using people’s real names, and that helps, but the amount of people I know on Facebook who aren’t using their exact real names makes that reliance rather concerning. There’ll always be sex offenders on the sites, I suppose, and what’s most needed is a bit of common sense, and education, in kids of the dangers.
(via AP and TechCrunch)
