Apr 04, 2011 - By danseitz
The boom box was an ’80s cultural icon. Either you shut out the world with a Walkman, or blasted your music everywhere with a boom box. OK, so a lot of guys with boom boxes were basically being jerks, but it helped to spread hip-hop and propagate mixtape culture in the ’70s and ’80s, so they were a good thing in that respect. And, now, after years of iPods and dweebs playing their music over tinny cell phone speakers, TDK is bringing them back.
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Apr 04, 2011 - By danseitz
The Kinect has already done a lot for a $150 webcam designed to imitate a Wiimote. It’s been hooked up to a PS3, used to control medical robots, created “Minority Report”-style displays, and even create stereoscopic 3D. Now there’s an application that means your dad will be trying to steal your Kinect for the office: videoconferencing with all the bells and whistles.
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Apr 01, 2011 - By danseitz
Adobe and Apple haven’t been buddies ever since Apple decided it was going to hire all of the Premiere team and make a video editing program that wasn’t outrageously broken. It’s a fight that only got worse when Apple banned Flash from iPhone and iPad in favor of HTML 5. Adobe has recently made a peace gesture by creating Wallaby, which can transcode Flash to HTML 5, and now is showing another allegedly experimental technology: Photoshop.
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Apr 01, 2011 - By danseitz
As we all know, often from painful experience, AT&T has a terrible network. So terrible, it had to buy an entire other carrier just to get up to speed on 4G. Unfortunately, until that happens, there needs to be other solutions, especially since iPhone customers are jumping ship to Verizon left and right. So AT&T has to get proactive to keep those profitable customers and boost its network.
So, free femtocells for everyone!
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Mar 31, 2011 - By danseitz
One of the key selling points of Google’s Android platform was its open source mentality; anybody could have the code! Anybody could do anything with Android! It’s your mobile phone OS! It’s free! Free!
Many analysts predicted that this would do two things: make Android the number one smartphone OS and backfire horribly and cause dozens of broken versions of Android. Guess what? They were right. Now Google is yanking some control back, and its partners are less than happy about it, as in “talking to the Justice Department” unhappy.
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Mar 31, 2011 - By danseitz
Netflix is a great service, and an extremely profitable one, raking in billions and building a stock price higher than the companies making the movies they sell. But it’s also been a limited service: it was only available in the US and Canada. Netflix always planned to expand someday…and someday could be coming a lot sooner than everybody thought.
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Mar 30, 2011 - By danseitz
I drive my girlfriend crazy in the kitchen, because I’m a perfectionist. She tolerates it to a point, because I have good knife skills, but she hates it when I try and cut things to precisely the measurements required by the recipe. I can’t help it: I’m very picky and I take instructions literally.
It’s like Fred, the greatest products store ever, knows me or something.
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Mar 30, 2011 - By danseitz
It’s a common problem: you’re trying to listen to music on a busy street, and somebody keeps honking his honk at you, probably because you’re scrolling through your iTunes in the middle of a crosswalk. Hey, it happens to the best of us. Fortunately, you can tune that guy out completely with Sony’s luxurious new earbuds.
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Mar 29, 2011 - By danseitz
It’s a problem with even the greenest products: packaging. How do you package the product so that it’s protected, but without destroying the environment or creating unnecessary waste? Paloma Agliati, a designer in Chile, is tackling the problem with the revolutionary Plamp! lamp design: the lamp isn’t encased in the packaging. The lamp IS the packaging.
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