Category: Top stories
Diner Dirt Busters – retro-styled table top vacuums
It’s Friday, so let’s go for the novelty items – and they don’t get much more novelty than these Diner Dirt Busters.
Roberts to introduce digital radio add-on for the iPod
Roberts is temporarily ditching the retro boxes and chasing the iPod market instead, with the launch of a digital radio add-on.
Flexible, full-colour OLED from Sony
Yum yum, the time will come — the time when we can take our laptops into the bathtub. Sony has moved us one step closer to this with their new flexible, full-colour OLED. OLEDs are usually done on a glass substrate, but the new tech from Sony is done on plastic. The 2.5-inch prototype does up to 16.8 million colors, with a 120 x 169 resolution, is 0.3 mm thick and weighs 1.5 grams. Sony’s planning to spin out a bunch of new tiny televisions this year using the OLED tech, with the expectation of doing more thinner and lighter gadgets in the agreeably near future. I’ll take a waterproof word processor-cum-newspaper, please. Video after the jump. [GT]
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to conduct joint-interview next week
It’s ever so humid up here in Shiny Towers, and in between alternating between draping ourselves over the rotating fans and nipping down the road for iced teas, we’ve been reading about how Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft will be conducting a 75-minute joint interview next Wednesday the 30th with various ‘tech executives’ at the annual ‘D – All Things Digital’ conference in California. Yikes. It’s obvious…
Hitachi develops wearable brain scanner
Hitachi has unveiled a portable brain scanner, which measures your grey cells’ activity when worn over the course of a day. At least, I think they have: the photo sparks suspicions it may be a late April Fool illustrated with some archive Virtual Reality headset promo shots from the 1980s.
Why can't PSP just focus on being a great gaming device?
Stuart Dredge writes…
We live in a convergance era. My phone plays music, my iPod runs games, my set-top box has a whirring hard drive, and my fridge spends half the day pissing about on YouTube rather than keeping my carrots cool. That’s progress, I guess.
Ten sneaky ways the mobile operators will claw back their roaming revenues
Today sees the European Parliament voting on how much mobile roaming prices should be cut, following accusations that the mobile operators have been overcharging us for years – something that won’t be news to anyone who’s had to flog grandparents on eBay to pay a post-holiday phone bill.
Pouchlink: vending machine forms packages on demand
Instead of having to fill vending machines with pre-set volumes of particular drinks, Pouchlink would allow the contents of plastic envelopes to be mixed and dispensed on the spot. Since the machines would be hooked up to mains water supplies, water wouldn’t have to be trucked around, and the plastic pouches could be made of biodegradeable materials, allowing the entire process to become much more efficient as well as eco-sound. Further refinements could let you program what drink you like into your mobile so you could upload it to the machine on the spot. [GT]
Drinks vending machines can form pouches on demand [via Core77]
"Slidingly engaging fasteners" to replace zippers, velcro
Annoyed a decade ago when his zipper broke on the way to the airport, architect and inventor Leonard Duffy decided to design a replacement. The result: “slidingly engaging fasteners” which are quiet, carry a bigger load than velcro or zippers, don’t wear down with use, and can replace anything from butterfly clips which hold tensor bandages together, to shoelaces. Over 150 companies have contacted Duffy to investigate the product further, so it’s likely coming soon to a foot, chest, or bandage near you. [GT]
The New Velcro [via TechEBlog]
