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.
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.
Look, we’re not going to mince words; it’s easy to make your gadgets look ugly. Tacky faceplates, hideous phone protecting cases, godawful engraving…bad things happen to good gear all the time. But, equally awful is when somebody spends an enormous amount of money to look classy on a case that either misses the point or announces to the world that you just have way too much money. In other words, just as one extreme is gauche, so is the other.
Meet the ne plus ultra of that concept, from De Bethune.
I’ve been using Apple products for two decades and buying them for myself for the last decade, and one thing I have learned, whether it’s the iMac dumping the floppy disk or Jobs deciding “No Flash for you!”, is that Apple just has to do something to make its products a pain in the butt to use in some respect. Any respect.
With the iPad, that apparently is USB connectors, because God forbid the $500 tablet computer has the same functionality as a netbook you can get from Best Buy. And HDMI can eat it too. Fortunately, the Japanese have our backs.
Say what you will about Android, the phone operating system, and the multiple issues it’s faced as it has entered the market and Google learned the hard way that “open source” to phone manufacturers means “Ooooh, we can break it in new and interesting ways like monkeys throwing stemware!”, but man, that is an incredibly cuddly mascot.
And, if the plushies, t-shirts, and other memorabilia aren’t enough for you, you can now get an Android headset jack. Well, sorta.
It’s an article of faith among travelers: you have to shut off your cell phone on the flight because it might disrupt the navigational equipment. And while you won’t be able to take it on a commercial flight yet, Aircell, leading providers in in-the-air telephony, are happy to sell you the first Android smartphone for in-flight use. Price is currently unavailable, but we’re going to guess “expensive”.
Or you could just use your actual cell phone, since the entire reason you can’t use your cell phone in-flight is due to bureaucratic problems, not science.
It may not to be a function that most Android users care about, but it’s something developers have been eagerly anticipating for months. No, not Google unlocking Honeycomb. No, not Google repairing Honeycomb from its painfully busted beta state. Nope, they’re finally ready to test…in-app billing.
OK, so it has nothing whatsoever to do with cars. But visual puns are just too powerful to resist sometimes.
Kind of like ST Ericsson neat new charger. One of the big problems with the newer generation of gadgets is that they’re huge power sucks. And while they have the high-capacity batteries necessary to last more than ten minutes, those batteries still have to be charged, and there’s no quick way of doing that. This is due simply to how much charge you can get into a battery through a charger.
The PowerHUB addresses this problem with a brisk boot to the rear.
The iPad exists for textbooks. Really, let’s not beat around the bush here; it’s practically designed for college students to just load up their texts and bring to class so they have everything at their fingertips. And yet, nobody was really pursuing that angle, despite all the chatter about “digital publishing” and how it was going to save the industry of applying carbon suspended in fluid to dead tree pulp.
That’s where Inkling comes in.
