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- WX03A: World’s Smallest And Lightest PHS Cell Phone Unveiled In Japan
- Daily Crunch: Bird Bot
- Bell & Ross Releases WWI Edition
- Video: Padzilla Case Turns Your iPad Into An iCoffeeTable
- Is Printing A Gun The Same As Buying A Gun?
- Origo: A 3D Printer For Kids
- The HTC Rhyme: Apparently Girls Prefer Mid-Range Specs
- Angry Birds Costumes Arrive Just In Time For Halloween
- Netflix Stock Erases 12 Months Of Massive Growth, Crashes Through 52 Week Low
- The Logitech Harmony Link Turns Your iPad, iPhone Or Android Device Into An iRemote
| WX03A: World’s Smallest And Lightest PHS Cell Phone Unveiled In Japan Posted: 21 Sep 2011 04:54 AM PDT  Japanese mobile carrier Willcom has announced [JP] the WX03A today, the world’s smallest ten-key cell phone complying with the PHS standard (Willcom is Japan’s only telco left supporting that network system). The company markets the device as a “Frisk case”-sized handset, and in fact, it’s really tiny. Sized at W32×H70×D10.5mm, it’s smaller than the already tiny Palm Pixi (55x111x10.85mm), and at 40g, it’s substantially lighter, too (the Pixi weighs 100g). The WXo3A comes with a 1-inch OLED screen and a microUSB port and offers 300 hours of standby time (2 hours of talk time). Willcom plans to start distributing the phone in Japan in December. Via Keitai Watch [JP]
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| Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:00 AM PDT |
| Bell & Ross Releases WWI Edition Posted: 20 Sep 2011 01:49 PM PDT  Bell & Ross, not content to rest on their aviation laurels, has released the WWI-92 edition, a watch based on a World War I era pocket watch. The watch is strikingly simple – just a black face with silvered hands and case – and the 97 version has a reserve de marche and all models feature welded lugs, a wonderful detail that hearkens back to the days when wristwatches were actually pocket watches with bars soldered onto them so they could be worn on the wrist. If you want to go totally retro you can check out the PW1, a handsome B&R pocket watch that takes design cues from the WWI-92. Both watches are probably wildly expensive but man if I’m not hungry like a wolf for them. Product Page [Warning: Scratchy, tinny WWI-era radio noises]
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| Video: Padzilla Case Turns Your iPad Into An iCoffeeTable Posted: 20 Sep 2011 12:11 PM PDT  There were quite a few thoughts running through my head when I purchased an iPad, but I can honestly say that “I wish I had an iPad as big as a coffee table” wasn’t one of them. Now, after having seen Crunchy Logistics’s Padzilla case, I can safely say it’s all I’m thinking about right now. Crunchy Logistics seems to have a thing for creating absurdly big touchscreens, a great example of which is the conference table-sized display they showed off last month. The Padzilla is their newest product, and it allows users to interact with their iPhones and iPads on a completely ridiculous scale. To call it a case is a bit of a stretch: you’re not putting the Padzilla on your iOS device so much as you’re mounting your iOS device inside the Padzilla. The name is pretty apt, for sure: the Padzillas are custom made, and assuming you’ve got the green for it, they come in sizes as large as 150″ diagonal. To give you an idea of scale, the model demoed in the video below comes in at a slightly more reasonable 70″ diagonal. The Padzilla is a purely plug-and-play solution to boot; the iDevices don’t need to be jailbroken, but anything older than the iPhone 3GS isn’t supported. If playing Angry Birds and its ilk get old, feel free to connect your choice of game consoles or computers into the display too. While I’m sure the Padzilla has some practical uses (they’d give your local news station a bit of pizazz, for one), the wow factor alone is enough to make it tempting. Better start saving your pennies though, because CrunchyLogistics CEO Neil Dufva says that buying a 70″ rolling display like the one in the video would cost roughly between $30-40,000 (iPad included). If that seems a bit steep, don’t worry: Neil says CrunchyLogistics is open to renting these things out to interested parties.
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| Is Printing A Gun The Same As Buying A Gun? Posted: 20 Sep 2011 11:52 AM PDT  There’s an interesting back-and-forth going on at Thingiverse, a site founded by Makerbot to share 3D projects. Two designers have made two parts for the AR-15 rifle platform. The first part is a standard rifle magazine complete with spring but the second part is AR-15 lower receiver. Why are these parts important? Well, the magazine is just on the edge of Thinigverse’s implied (but not concrete) “no weapons” philosophy but the lower receiver is something else entirely. It is the only part of the AR-15 that you need a license to buy. Here’s what the creator, KingLudd, has to say about it:
Is it a weapon? Is it a part? Is it illegal or legal? The question, in short, is at what point is a “part” a weapon? If you buy all of the other pieces in metal – pieces that were made in much the same way this piece was made – are you breaking the law by building your own, final piece. Is this akin to building your own dum-dum bullets or is it more like “unlocking” a deadly weapon with a what amounts to a copied key? Bre Pettis, founder of Makerbot, said that he’s dealt with this before and that the answer is never clear-cut. “We’ve already been through a few flame wars around what a weapon is. Our take is that we’d rather you not upload weapons, but we’re not going to regulate it… unless it’s illegal. Which it isn’t.” I find it fascinating that we’re even asking these questions at this point. The fact that we are now able to manufacture usable weapon parts is an important step in the evolution of fabrication and manufacture and, if I were a weapons giant, I’d start rethinking my sales strategies. When a company of rebels can print their own AK-47s (a concept that is still a ways off), whose fault is it? The person who made the plans? The fabricator? The company whose rifles they copied? In the end, a thing is just a thing. After all, the same site that helps you build an AR-15 also lets you put a flower into the barrel of one. MakerBot Industries is a Brooklyn based company that creates affordable, open source 3D printers.
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| Posted: 20 Sep 2011 08:25 AM PDT  As predicted in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” toys will change the world. Our kids, growing up with computers, game consoles, and endless visual delights, will have different minds than previous generations and their children will be even more unique. After all, our kids are about get get toy 3D printers and there’s no telling what could come next. Origo is a concept product right now but it should be available soon. Clad in purple plastic, the system is a standard extruder-type 3D printer that can make various small objects out of a thin stream of plastic. The founders, Joris Peels and Artur Tchoukanov, are two experienced 3D printing experts. Peels was the community manager for i.materialise and Shapeways. They designed the Origo to have a minimum of moving parts and a simple UI using 3Dtin as a design platform. The Origo describes itself thusly:
No pricing or availability but Joris expects the device to cost about $800. Sadly, they’re not yet funded. “We’re currently speaking to VC’s and other investors but most run like little girls when they find out we actually want to make hardware,” said Peels. Considering Makerbot just grabbed a $10 million investment, these guys should be on the right track.
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| The HTC Rhyme: Apparently Girls Prefer Mid-Range Specs Posted: 20 Sep 2011 07:05 AM PDT  After wondering for a while what HTC’s mysterious media event would uncover, the woman-friendly (because women, like yours truly, apparently need gender-specific handsets) HTC Rhyme for Verizon has finally reared its pretty little head with several clever accouterments. As per the announcement (and earlier leaks), the Rhyme will run Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 1GHz single core processor, with HTC’s latest and greatest version of Sense slapped on top. That’s about the best part, so go ahead and let your excitement peak out. Past that you’ll see a 3.7-inch LCD WVGA touchscreen with a 5-megapixel rear shooter and a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera for video chat. As per usual, Bluetooth 3.0 and WiFi radios are in tow, along with 4GB of internal memory and 768 The HTC Rhyme also has charm factor. By that, I mean the phone literally has a little charm that is meant to hang out of a woman’s purse and lights up to tell if they’ve missed a call. While I see this as more of a Status-esque Facebook button gimmick, it will probably go over really well with 13-year-old girls. And that’s it. The Rhyme also launches with a surprisingly sweet charging station that also features speakers for improved sound quality, and what HTC is calling tangle-free headphones. Past those accessories, you’ll also get a Bluetooth headset (in matching magenta), a wireless visor speaker for the car, and an arm band for working out. As far as Sense 3.5 goes, HTC has thrown in 12 new stock wallpapers, updated the Flip clock, and added a preview tab that lets you peek into your recent emails, photos, music, texts and apps. These preview tabs remind me a lot of Windows Phone Mango’s live tiles, though on a much more subtle scale. Sense 3.5 also enhanced the camera app to add face recognition, the ability to take a quick-burst style series of shots, and a cool auto-upload feature. If you preset a certain Facebook album to upload pics from your phone, the Rhyme will automatically send any pictures taken on your phone straight to that specified album. This could make for a couple embarrassing moments, but it takes thinking out of the process of posting mobile pics to Facebook. According to Verizon, the phone will be available on September 29 at Verizon in-store and online, as well as at Target. Verizon says the Rhyme will cost $199 on-contract, with the docking station, the charm, and the headset all included.
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| Angry Birds Costumes Arrive Just In Time For Halloween Posted: 20 Sep 2011 06:53 AM PDT  The man glassed the road, watching the long procession slump south across the valley, armed and ragged like a band of crusaders for some dark creed. The rain caught them earlier, somewhere further north, and now they were wet to the bone, all of them, their eyes all downcast save a pair who looked like the guards, janissaries still young and with enough energy to lift their heads to watch the tree-line and all the darkness that lay beyond it. The years had brought many swart beliefs to the land and the man had seen blood cults and bridge trolls, men driven mad with hunger and terror and loss. But this group was different. Each wore something that was once brightly colored but now ratted to the color of the ground and the slate sky. One man wore a scarf, once red, another wore a shiny green hat gone the color of oil on pavement. This group had their own queens, two women, thin and frail as birds, slumped on car seats attached to a metal litter and carried by a team of slaves, four on each side. The women wore on their heads some sort of stuffed regalia – one woman, who looked asleep or dead, wore a red bird with wary eyes and the other wore something porcine in appearance, with a dull grin. The green pig covered the woman’s body as well and her arms stuck out like straws. Some of the stuffing had left it and it had been hastily taped shut but now the pig was deflated, like a Jack o’lantern left too long in the cool night. A yellow crown, carefully washed to the point of bleaching, lay perched on the pig’s lopsided head. What these headdresses meant the man did not know, and how these two women so bedecked assuaged this band’s fear was also a mystery. The land threw up strange prophets these days and one man’s sunken-eyed woman was another man’s celestial bride. The band clattered on, the litter groaning and their worn shoes flapping on the broken pavement like the slap of a branch on an abandoned barn. The man lay back, waiting for their passage, hoping none of them saw him high in the brush. They did not, and soon he was alone again, the sound of the rain gathering around him and an afterimage flare of the red bird (when was the last time he saw a live bird? Ten years? Twenty? Time was impossible here) still maddening him in the dead dark.
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| Netflix Stock Erases 12 Months Of Massive Growth, Crashes Through 52 Week Low Posted: 20 Sep 2011 06:32 AM PDT  And with the sound of Wall Street’s opening bell, Netflix quickly dipped below its 52 week low, opening at $141.40 but falling within a few seconds under $140. [NASDAQ:NFLX] Over the past two months the company watched subscribers leave along with 55% of its market cap from the same time period — which now places their valuation at its 52 week low of $7.46B. On July 12, 2011, just one day prior to Netflix’s all-time high price of 304.79, the company announced a radically different corporate structure and also raised the price of the most popular subscription plan by 60%. Sure, it’s still the top consumer of internet bandwidth and the de facto leader in video streaming services, but the company’s stock has lost a year of growth in a matter of two months, or rather, two decisions. Most should know the storyline by now: Netflix split the company into two separate divisions two months ago and raised the price of a popular subscription. A consumer backlash rightly ensued. Then late Sunday night Netflix took it even farther and announced that an entirely new company, Qwikster, would handle the DVD mailers while Netfix would do just streaming. A media snarkfest ensued while the stock price continued its nose dive. Both Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital recently lowered their price targets on shares of Netflix, with the former pricing the stock’s 6-month, DCF-derived target price at $270, down from $330. Barclays now labels the Netflix stock as overweight and repriced their target from $285 to $260. Last Friday, Caris & Company even downgraded shares of Netflix from above average to simply average. These shifts come as the company announced late last week that it lowered its Q3 subscriber projection by a million subs spanning both the streaming and DVD rental business. Reed Hastings Sunday night blog post stated in part that while the now two companies are done with price increases, the decision to completely separate DVD and streaming will help both businesses by letting “each grow and operate independently.” Qwikster was then announced, which will continue the task of servicing and mailing DVDs — and now games, too. Netflix’s slide from grace is exactly what Reed Hasting said he was trying to avoid. He stated that his recent moves were to prevent his company from moving before its too late. Aol and Borders are used as examples, which now seem rather appropriate as Netflix’s stock crashes through charts much as those two companies’ did. With more than 23.3 million members in the United States and Canada, Netflix, Inc. is the world's leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows. For $7.99 a month, Netflix members in the U.S. can instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes streaming right to their TVs and computers and can receive unlimited DVDs delivered quickly to their homes. In Canada, streaming unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix is available for $7.99 a month. There are...
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| The Logitech Harmony Link Turns Your iPad, iPhone Or Android Device Into An iRemote Posted: 20 Sep 2011 05:40 AM PDT  Logitech’s Harmony division has long made some of the very best universal remotes. But their latest product turns the very best smartphones and tablets into a great universal remote. Meet Harmony Link and the Harmony Link App. The Harmony Link hardware is a disc that’s placed near your entertainment system and provides the link between the new controller and the equipment using a local WiFi network. Tiny IR Blasters snake from the backside of the sleek disc to your cable box, TV and A/V hardware — just like every other Harmony remote. This not only facilitates communication but also allows owners to place all the unsightly hardware in a closet, enclosed cabinet, or like in my house, a basement room underneath the living room. Logitech says the Harmony Link can replace up to eight remotes. But this hardware isn’t the fun part. Nope, the real magic comes from the iPad app. The Harmony Link App turns the iPad into a universal remote, but one with a touch of flare. Instead of just being a touchscreen remote with the usual assortment of playback controls, the iPad app turns the chore of finding a TV program into a fun excursion. Slide through the interactive TV listings and just press Watch Now to engage the magic of Harmony Link, which will switch your TV to the appropriate station. Of course the app also features all the normal device controls and activity functions generally associated with Harmony remotes. At launch, only the iPad will feature this interactive programming guide. The iPhone and Android app will only display activity buttons and device controls. Expect the Harmony Link in stores next month with a $99 MSRP. Logitech designs and manufactures computer and electronics peripherals such as mice, keyboards, speakers, and remote controls.
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