Cyberdine’s HAL Exoskeleton is more sophisticated than Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC), but HAL is only available to rent whereas HULC is available for buy. Unlike HAL, the HULC is focused entirely on helping the user carry heavy loads—up to 200 pounds without breaking a sweat. It also helps to reduce oxygen consumption by up to 5-10% when walking.
Obviously, a system like this could prove invaluable for military personnel, laborers, hikers and fat, lazy geeks that don’t want their heart to explode while they walk to the kitchen for a Snickers and a Red Bull. Unfortunately, no pricing information or availability dates have been announced, but you can pre-order one now from the Berkley Bionics website. [Berkley Bionics via New Scientist]
We get lots of pitches for products, but the guys at Disc Makers finally found one that pierces through the clutter and reaches into the heart of our everyday worries. Here’s what we got:
Hi Jason,
Are you looking for a safe place to store your adult DVD collection?
Dude, it’s like you’re staring right into my soul!
Disc Makers has you covered with the Disc Manager 100. The Disc Manager 100 allows users to store and password protect certain DVDs owners may like to keep private.
The Disc Manager 100 and its bundled software makes it simple to locate any file and eject the appropriate disc in seconds. It also protects your CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs from damage caused by improper handling, exposure to dust, and UV light.
No one wants dust on and/or improper handling of their adult DVDs.
Users can stack up to five Disc Managers 100s - allowing parents to manage a 500 disc library with just one USB connection.
Whoa, whoa. You didn’t say anything about letting my parents handle my adult DVD collection before.
Review: Cheap EVDO Modem Makes Not Having Wi-Fi Not a Problem Sierra Wireless Compass 597 Like dogs with shock collars, Wi-Fi users are constrained to a small coverage area. Stray too far and – zap – server not found. If you want unlimited browsing freedom, you could buy an pricey laptop…
Sierra Wireless Compass 597
Like dogs with shock collars, Wi-Fi users are constrained to a small coverage area. Stray too far and – zap
How To Stream Music To Your iPhone There’s one thing that would make the iPhone just a touch more awesome. Media streaming. The Holy Grail would be to directly send music from your iPhone or iPod Touch to Apple’s Airport Express, the little Wi-Fi brick which lets…
There’s one thing that would make the iPhone just a touch more awesome. Media streaming. The Holy Grail would be to directly send music from your iPhone or iPod Touch to Apple’s Airport Express, the little Wi-Fi brick which lets you stream music wirelessly to your stereo. Sadly, you can’t. But there are workarounds, ways to send music to and from your iPhone through the air, either from your computer or straight from the web.
Flytunes
Flytunes has nothing to do with your music library. Instead it is a way to stream audio and video directly to your iPhone, either over EDGE or Wi-Fi. Once you have registered (it’s free), you log in using Mobile Safari and the iPhone-friendly interface lets you choose high or low bandwidth radio streams, video or podcasts. There’s not exactly a feast of content (scandalously, the Gadget Lab Podcast isn’t in the directory) but if you’re out of content it’s worth a try.
Simplify Media works on the Mac and the Personal computer. You’ll need a Jailbroken iPhone, on which you install the Simplify application, and also a companion app for your personal. The next step is to sign up, with a name, email address and password, just like signing up for a Gmail account. Now, all your music on your home personal (in iTunes or Winamp) is available to you wherever you’re. As an added bonus, anyone else can share your music over the net (you need to invite them first). Your library shows up just like a regular shared library in iTunes.
Simplify takes a little time to get started, but once it’s up, it fast. And you even get an added artist’s biography and lyrics.
Mobile Scrobbler is native application which interacts with Last.FM, the internet radio service. It does two things: First, it “scrobbles” your music, sending the name of each tune you listen to up to Last.FM’s servers. This builds a profile of the music you like and grants recommendations, just like Amazon.
The second part actually streams music from the Last.FM servers direct to the phone. Using the profile it has built from your tastes, Last.FM can serve up a personal, streaming radio station or a stream based on artists similar to one you select. Mobile Scrobbler is the one I use. It’s free, and the interface is polished. The one thing wrong is that the Apple remote won’t skip tracks when the iPhone is in the dock. It will control the volume, though.
Lastly, you can use your iPhone as a dumb remote. There are a few options, but the simplest seems to be Signal, which runs on your Mac or PC. Using the iPhone’s browser, you can browse and choose songs from your iTunes library.
It’s well suited to parties: people can queue tracks from the iPhone. The problem? The free version won’t display album art and randomly overwrites the names of artists and albums with a message begging you to pay. And at $25, it’s a little high-priced for what it does.
Last January we saw tech conglomerate VIA announce its line of Isaiah processors. These clever chips were designed to revolutionize mobile computing through a mix of lightning fast computing speeds and low power consumption. This day it has announced a new…
Last January we saw tech conglomerate VIA announce its line of Isaiah processors. These clever chips were designed to revolutionize mobile computing through a mix of lightning fast computing speeds and low power consumption.
This day it has announced a new processor family and dubbed it Nano. Guess what kind of computers the processors are designed for? The very first 64-bit superscalars and speculative out-of-order processors ever made by the Bejing Taipei based company should provide owners of ultraportables some insane boosts in performance and function.
Now you’re probably wondering why you should care.
Imagine now if you would, an utraportable computer like say, the Asus Eee PC. Small personal, great cost, performs reasonably well … for something of that size. Now imagine the same personal with VIA’s Nano processor. Now the computer is running Photoshop without a hiccup. Now the computer is playing Blu-ray movies without a snag. Now the personal is running Crysis at a frame rate that’s actually playable.
The new Nano processors will run up to four times faster yet consume the same amount of power as the Isaiah chipsets VIA currently offers. The Lab can’t wait to get ahold of a super small lappy running one of these processors inside. Envision, fragging fools in Crysis on a new OLPC. Ah, the dreams of geeks.
More details coming, but it will be separate from the Unbox download system, and will launch in a few weeks. No more details right now, but I’ll let you know when we hear em. Read what else Bezos had to say at All Things D in the liveblog.
This may not be a typical gadget post, but here’s an idea that fascinates me. Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, left to found a company called Intellectual Ventures. They invest in invention, not companies. He’s been the subject of a New Yorker article on the abundance of massive ideas by Malcolm Gladwell, which covers the basics of what they do at IV. I believe that Nathan also worked on a post-doc in Cosmology alongside Stephen Hawking. Mossberg is interviewing him at D, right now.
Nathan is talking about some of his patents, like a mini nuclear reactor. It’s safe because most accidents in power plants are caused by human error, so automating this and using different fuels (like spent uranium and depleted rods from huge plants) to make things less dangerous. I wish he’d talk more about their inventions but Walt and Nathan don’t think it’s appropriate to speak physics on stage.
Nathan and co. brainstorm ideas and license patents. Do they troll patent? They haven’t.
They took the entire company to Iron Man to hear the line from the bad guy: “Just because you had an idea doesn’t mean you own it.” He hates that guy!
Walt is asking him about patent problems in tech, where terrible patents are being approved. Nathan states that originally, the patent office wouldn’t approve software. Patents were ignored at first by software people, because speed was more important than “owning”.
Nathan: “It was a good decision; many companies went massive and fair or foul said, hey, we’re going to grow fast and copy everything we can whether it’s patented or not. Massive boys play rough.” (Interesting perspective from an Ex Msft guy-B.L.)
By the way, Nathan has very entertaining voices, low and high. He’d be a great audiobook voice actor.
“You have to think that there’s some technology that will take us from this day to tomorrow, but there haven’t been. We thought it was 3D, but it wasn’t. No one has done that graphical treatment for office or research. Maybe that’s a failure of imagination but no one has figured that out and I wish we would.”
Mossberg asks about Apple’s Multitouch on the iPhone, where Jobs claimed 200 patents in the device. Nathan suspects that the multitouch in the iPhone was done before, outside of both Apple and Microsoft, by someone who couldn’t pull it off.
Calacanis had an interesting question: Is IV making an unethical land grab for patents? His answer was that he didn’t know how to answer that question, except that people might complain if he has a lot of success, but no one was going to give him back his money. (Fair enough-B.L.)
Guy from Intel asks if an unintended consequence of IV’s patent action and speculation is that large companies would keep extending patents to protect them. Nathan says its BS. Most companies are doing R&D with a tiny R and a BIG D. They need to put more into the research. If people know they have the ability to spin out inventions, like they do divisions, they’ll be more apt to do more research.
“If you’re not doing something that’s somewhat threatening to the apple cart, you’re not doing something interesting.”
Engadget got their hands on a Helio Ocean 2 shot, and it looks quite similar to the sketch we saw on the FCC site a while back. If this is it, it’s still rounded and dual-sliding like the first, but supposedly has various upgrades like a 3-megapixel camera, 1GB internal storage, 30FPS video recording and a touch-sensitive D-Pad. We’re not sure how we feel about that touch sensitive part—most TS D-Pads we’ve used have been kinda awful—but we can’t wait for the final version. [Engadget Mobile]
Kuchofuku, the same company that brought us air conditioned shirts, has re-applied their groundbreaking technology in an effort to deliver us from one of the biggest problems facing mankind this day. Of course, I’m speaking about ass sweat. In fact, their air conditioned seat cushion line can pump up to 170 liters of air per minute through the seat using an extraordinarily low amount of electricity in the process.
Apparently, the energy consumption of the device is so low that you could run it every day for eight hours and only pay the equivalent of around five cents extra on your electricity bill for the month. However, this isn’t the first time we have encounter an air conditioner of this type—Thanko came out with a version last year that’s powered via USB. It also appears to be a little cheaper than the Kuchofuku model, but we are not sure how well it stacks up in terms of butt cooling performance and power consumption. [Product Page via Fareastgizmos]
9:45 Stringer is on stage. Mossberg: Last time you were up here, things were tough. Stringer: We’ve turned things around but before Profit was not bit priority in Japan. Reminds me too much of Benny Hill.
9:47 Mossberg: You didn’t build your own facilities for LCD production and had to purchase them from a competitor, Samsung.
Stringer: That was done to leap frog the tech, but that didn’t work. The brand covered us and we were still number one in the US one year. LCDs have a lot of life in them, but we started doing OLEDs a few years ago and we can’t mass produce it, but we’ve got a $250 model. Mossberg corrects him, the XEL-1. Stringer jokes that it’s $250 for people in this room (a special deal.) And mossberg leads him: How huge is it? Stringer: 11-inches, but the dreamwork execs love it.
He’s showing a 0.3mm OLED that’s thin as a playing card and can be used in a 27 inch Television that will ship soon. But not at reasonable prices.
Mossberg: Is the video game business profitable? Stringer: The PS3 is building excitement. The model is to lose money on the hardware for a long time and then make money on the software and later the hardware. The PS3 is costly. We’ll see games in June, not GTA4, that take advantage of the network, too. (Metal Gear)
Mossberg: But don’t gamers want to just play games on these? Stringer: People are starting to download content, though. The first million customers of the PS3 were gamers, but more people ended up after that being Blu-ray customers and that’s why we won the format war. So we’re on the edge of the
Mossberg: I thought you won the war with bags of cash? Stringer: I thought that’s what they did. You read it in the paper. We’re not in the check writing competition. Mossberg: Then I believe it!
Mossberg: Does physical media have a future? Stringer: You can finally see, using blu ray the number of arabs in Lawrence of Arabia. Digital downloads aren’t matching the detail now. (I don’t know if I concur that its not somewhat close, though-B.L.) Mossberg: You’re in the Computer business. Sales have dropped a bit… Stringer: Actually we’ve done well, ideal year ever. Mossberg: But I’m talking about marketshare. Why are you not the number one in the market? Stringer: Because we’re high end and high-priced. Mossberg: Is this your strategy? Stringer: Yes, the less profit the better. (Laughs from the crowd.) The fact that we’ve a low marketshare, like Apple, doesn’t mean we’re inferior. Our engineers like to try new things, too. Mossberg: What about craplets on your pc? It loaded all this stuff on my machine I had to uninstall. (He owns a vaio.) Stringer: I’ve to evaluate these craplets, and I promise you a craplet review. (Vaio’s have the most craplets of anyone-B.L.)
Mossberg: What about the Walkman phones? Stringer: We started the trend and have more phones sold than the iPhone. All of this is on the back of music downloads. Nokia’s got that all you can eat system.
Stringer speaks about being down on the iPod battle, too, but they’re coming back by his estimation, quoting that a London paper stated the audio quality was superior.
We’re a giant department store competing with lots of botiques like Apple (although not little anymore) and ebook readers from Amazon. But do we want to invest that much money to compete with the Kindle’s wireless? And we’ve to deal in millions in millions and prioritize.
Q from Crowd: What about advancing audio? Stringer jokes, we’ve two new speakers that are so high-priced, it’s mind boggling, and the three people who can afford them love it. He then states its not different from before.
Q Can Sony do software as good as their hardware? Stringer: The test will be the PS3 network, and we’ve a lot of software engineers, contrary to popular opinion. They’re well versed at doing firmware, but our software engineers are in vertical silos separate from each other. We’ve knocked down those walls. Firmware is late, but app ware comes early. And you’ll see how we’ve done. (We’ve also taken a lot of American software engineers into the company because they are more flexible, typically.) [All Things D]
We get lots of pitches for products, but the guys at Disc Makers finally found one that pierces through the clutter and reaches into the heart of our everyday worries. Here’s what we got:
Engadget got their hands on a 
Kuchofuku, the same company that brought us 
9:45 Stringer is on stage. Mossberg: Last time you were up here, things were tough. Stringer: We’ve turned things around but before Profit was not bit priority in Japan. Reminds me too much of Benny Hill.
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