In case you haven’t heard, we’re going to the Cyclones game on Coney Island tomorrow then going out for drinks. Come hang out! Come meet us at 5:30pm at the Statue on the west side of Keyspan Park. If you’ve GA tickets, everyone can go in together. If you don’t, we’ll figure out a place to meet afterwards. If you get there late, just meet everyone at the same place after the game and we can head to the bar together. Huzzah!
Check our Twitter during the day for updates as to whereabouts. Benny will be hitting the rides at Astroland around 3pm or so.
Photo [redjar/Flickr] The latest version of iTunes (7.7), which was yesterday sent early to developers, contains this nugget: Use iTunes 7.7 to sync music, video, and more with iPhone 3G, and download applications from the iTunes Store exclusively designed for…
The latest version of iTunes (7.7), which was yesterday sent early to developers, contains this nugget:
Use iTunes 7.7 to sync music, video, and more with iPhone 3G, and download applications from the iTunes Store exclusively designed for iPhone and iPod touch with software version 2.0 or later.
Also use the new Remote application for iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your home — a free download from the App Store.
That wording looks a tiny janky, with the ‘Touch’ in iPod Touch spelled with a small ‘t’, and some run on sentences, but maybe that’s just the transcription-monkeys over at Mac Rumors.
We’re guessing that this will work over your home Wi-Fi network in a similar way to the web-apps that already do this. Of course, being a native application, and being Apple designed, it should be a lot faster and slicker. We still can’t help wondering, though, when Apple will let us stream music direct from our iPhones to the Airport Express, cutting out the middle Mac entirely. C’mon guys. What’s stopping you?
Consumerist’s taken all the early termination fee news we’ve reported on lately and shoved them into an easy-to-read graph to show you what’s up. If you’re talking two-year contracts Verizon and AT&T are tied for the ideal at the begin, but T-Mobile beats them somewhere around the 22nd month. For one year contracts, T-Mobile wins at about 7 months. Head over to the Cons to see the details. [Consumerist]
Bill Gates puts up with us, having granted us three interviews in the past three and a half years. It’s an intense experience: Bill isn’t always fond of making eye contact, and is known to snap at reporters who ask dumb questions. After all, he’s not just the Andrew Carnegie—or Emperor Palpatine—of his time. He’s also a guy who gets interviewed a hell of a lot, and doesn’t stand for bush-league Q&A. But we have always enjoyed the guys company and even have had the chance to make him laugh a few times. Here’s a swift look back at our three Bill interviews, in a Retromodo re-run fashion:
Joel Johnson at CES 2005:
I didn’t quite know what to think of it, but I wasn’t going to turn it down. I would ask the hard questions: Does Ballmer really eat children? Can I swim in your Money Bin? I didn’t quite muster the balls to ask those, though, and instead acted like I had real questions or something.
I’d asked him about the mug shot [from his Albuquerque arrest] and at first he looked a bit apprehensive, but answered. Apparently, Bill cares about fast cars. In 1978, he told us, he’d gotten 3 speeding tickets on his drive to move up to Seattle. Two from the same cop. It was a Porsche 911 from that era.
When it came to be my turn, I had the warnings and admonitions of Blam to guide me. And sure enough, he didn’t look me in the eye at first, and though he was accommodating with my nervous stuttering, I could tell he was judging the substance of my questions. Mercifully, he little by little began looking more directly at me, and he lit up with answers, even letting his guard down enough to comment frankly about Windows, and the difference between Apple and Microsoft.
Here’s the vid itself, plus various excerpts, shot and digitally mastered by our own Chris Mascari:
A few days ago we discovered that Sharper Image had “something big coming,” but as of today, there has been no official word from the company about their future plans. However, the WSJ is reporting that the company will resurrect itself as a virtual brand. No stores, just a name that retailers can rent to drive up the sales of any number of useless, overpriced gadgets.
There’s even speak of major retailers like Target and Best Purchase getting involved—but you have to wonder whether or not the moniker of a semi-defunct gadget company is enough to drive sales of vacuums and massage chairs in other stores. Either way, if this is Sharper Image’s “big announcement,” that’s pretty lame. [WSJ]
Kodak, Motorola Team Up for 5-Megapixel ZN5 Cell Phone Five-megapixel image sensors have been slowly trickling into cellphones, blurring the boundaries between cameras and phones. Now Motorola can join makers like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung with its own handset sporting a 5-megapixel image sensor. We couldn’t be happier…
Five-megapixel image sensors have been slowly trickling into cellphones, blurring the boundaries between cameras and phones. Now Motorola can join makers like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung with its own handset sporting a 5-megapixel image sensor.
We couldn’t be happier with the new trend. After all, the ideal cell phone is the one you’ve with you, right?
The mega-cameraphone trend is also a boon for venerable camera company Kodak, which has been busy reinventing itself as an intellectual-property and digital-imaging company (while shedding more than 80 percent of its workforce over the past 20 years). Kodak provides the optics inside Moto’s new handset.
Announced today, the ZN5 is a candybar-shaped cellphone that’s the very first in Motorola’s MOTOZINE device series. (Amazing fact: Motorola is using vowels for a change!) The goods on image capturing: a 5-megapixel shooter coupled with Kodak engineered optics. The cam will also have autofocus, a Xenon flash, as well as panoramic image stitching — much like the Sony Ericsson K850i we tested earlier this year.
The quadband GSM phone will also serve up hot heaping Wi-Fi, allowing the handset to interface with the online Kodak Gallery. There’s also GSM radio, EDGE, and a feature called “ModeShift” which re-aligns buttons based on the application you’re in.
Jonesing for a ZN5 next month? You’ll have to make friends with someone who lives in China; the phone goes on sale there in July. It won’t be available in the rest of the world until later this year.
Don’t worry though, the G-lab has friends throughout the world — we’ll have the lowdown on the device just as soon as one of our international pals in the People’s Republic sends one our way.
Yesterday, I showed you the first photos of the new NYC waterfalls in action, taken during a test run. This morning, a grey and muggy NYC morning, they were turned on officially. Here’s a close-up video taken of the waterfall under the Brooklyn Bridge from Fulton Landing in Brooklyn. I can’t wait to see it at night all lit up from the Manhattan Bridge. [Gothamist]
AA Smackdown: Pop Photo’s Exhaustive Battery Test Photo [anaulin/Flickr] Over at Popular Photography, Zach Honig has taken $200 of company cash and blown it all on AA batteries, splitting the money evenly between single use and rechargeable cells. He then tested the bejeesus out of them to…
Over at Popular Photography, Zach Honig has taken $200 of company cash and blown it all on AA batteries, splitting the money evenly between single use and rechargeable cells. He then tested the bejeesus out of them to determine the lowest cost per shot in a digital camera, and came up with some surprising results.
With rechargeables, it’s hard to know the real cost per shot until the end of their life, but the standout product is the Energizer 15 Minute Charger, which actually does charge fully in just a quarter of an hour. It’s also the most high-priced, at $30 for four cells. Kodak’s value charger offers the lowest cost-per-shot ($0.0022), and the same company’s 1-Hour Charger actually takers three hours to top off the juice.
The biggest surprise comes with the throwaways. Would you drop nearly $20 on a set of disposable AAs? Counter intuitive though it may be, Energizer’s e2 Lithium set, at $17 for 4, gives the ideal bang for your buck, at just $0.0016 per shot (flash off). The cheapest set in the lineup, Rayovac’s set of eight alkaline cells, will last just 1/7th of the time, and cost $0.0028 per shot.
Zach’s exhaustive review is skewed towards a green point-of-view. And that’s great. Greener often means cheaper. The longer your batteries last, the less you throw away. Head over to Pop Photo to see the full, painstaking test results.
Fashion Personal Just as Air-Headed as Their Catwalk Contemporaries Personal in fashionable boxes. A sure subject for Gadget Lab ridicule, you’d think. And you’d be right. From Asus’ leather clad U2E to the preposterous Ego Signature (a notebook inside a bit of a cow), these “Fashionable PCs” are nothing…
Personal in fashionable boxes. A sure subject for Gadget Lab ridicule, you’d think. And you’d be right. From Asus’ leather clad U2E to the preposterous Ego Signature (a notebook inside a bit of a cow), these “Fashionable PCs” are nothing more than run-of-the-mill hardware inside fancy cases. And we’re sure that they’ll sell just fine.
The trouble is that the word design is often confused with the word decoration. Hollowing out a farmyard animal and stuffing an AMD processor inside isn’t design. Neither is painting something yellow and slapping on a Lamborghini badge. Design is something that happens when the outside appearance is a servant of the internal requirements. Beauty can often result.
Take the sleep light on a Mac: Jonathan Ive (Apple’s head designer) was once challenged that this was trivial eye candy. His answer? That a soft, pulsing light perfectly represents the sleep say of the personal. That it also looks good is an intentional bonus. Lately, this design has been refined — the light glows steadily when the display sleeps, indicating that the machine is still on. It also glows steadily while the contents of RAM are written to disk on entering hibernation.
That is design: Details sweated over so thoroughly that they look nearly childishly easy. Which is why it rankles so much when some airheaded moron sprays a tiny glue onto a gadget, rolls it in a bag of crushed glass and calls it a “Designer Phone”. It’s utterly demeaning to any real designer. My designer stubble is, of course, another matter entirely.
In case you haven’t heard, we’re going to the Cyclones game on Coney Island tomorrow then going out for drinks. Come hang out! Come meet us at 5:30pm at the Statue on the west side of Keyspan Park. If you’ve GA tickets, everyone can go in together. If you don’t, we’ll figure out a place to meet afterwards. If you get there late, just meet everyone at the same place after the game and we can head to the bar together. Huzzah!
Consumerist’s taken all the 
A few days ago we discovered that Sharper Image had “
Personal in fashionable boxes. A sure subject for Gadget Lab ridicule, you’d think. And you’d be right. From Asus’ leather clad U2E to the preposterous 
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