Wearable computing to take off. Venture Development Corporation are predicting yearly sales of over a half billion dollars in 2006 of clothes and accessories with built-in MP3 players and PDAs. The only problem: does anyone really want to have to wear the same jacket every day just to be able to check your email? Read
Faced with a class action lawsuit, Palm has decided to offer full refunds to m130 owners who feel duped by the fact that the m130 can only display 58,621 “color combinations”, not the 65,000+ colors promised in advertisements. Definitely the right thing to do, even if it’ll cost them a lot of money. Read
For the travelling digital photographer – the eFilm PicturePad, a portable hard drive with a slot for CompactFlash cards. When you run out of space, just pop the card in and copy the images onto the drive. It even comes with a small LCD screen for viewing the pictures you’ve just taken. Comes in 20 … Continued
The HiFi-Link, from Xitel, which is basically a USB cable with a built-in 20 bit digital-to-audio converter that connects your PC directly to your home stereo system. There are a few other USB audio output devices like Roland’s UA-30 which do the same thing, but the HiFi-Link is probably the most affordable available. Read Buy
There’s a new Bluetooth-enabled digital camera from Sony, the four megapixel DSC-FX77. You can transfer files to your PC wirelessly now, rather than have to connect up a cable. Eventually these cameras should be able to bypass PCs entirely and transfer files directly to little Bluetooth-enabled storage drives. Read
New York Times article on the Sound Window, a new technique from Panasonic for making LCD screens double as speakers. Probably will first appear in PDAs and cellphones that usually lack an external speaker or have one that is so small as to be virtually useless. Don’t expect stellar sound though. Read
It looks like Ogg Vorbis, that open source audio codec developed as an alternative to MP3 and all the other proprietary (and this license fee demanding) formats out there, may finally be supported by portable digital audio players. Xiph.org, the group behind Ogg Vorbis, has released Tremor, an Ogg Vorbis player that doesn’t need a … Continued
November marks the tenth anniversary of the Sony Mini Disc, and to commemorate the event, Sony is releasing the world’s thinnest (1cm) and lightest (55g) mini disc player ever. It’s scarcely bigger than a mini disc itself. Read
New Scientist on an LCD monitor created by researchers at Japanese electronics company Iizuka Denki Kogyo which appears totally blank unless viewed with special polarized glasses. This would be great for laptops, especially if the screen could be switched back to normal when prying eyes are no longer around. Read
Sony’s new Linux-based digital video recorder comes with a 160GB hard drive, and a high-speed Internet connection, which I’m assuming is an Ethernet port. You can also use a cellphone to pick programs to record, which is perfect if you’re out and forgot to set it to record a particular show. The Cocoon, as it’s … Continued
Worried about someone free-riding on your wireless access point? Black Alchemy Weapons Lab has released Fake AP, which generates thousands of decoy 802.11b access points. Sure you’ll fake out the hackers, but the most immediate result might just be thousands of warchalking symbols turning up outside your window. Read