Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Xerox‘s Geoffrey Woolfe seems to think he’s found a way to make picking just the right color a bit easier, laying out his plans for so-called “natural language color editing” at the annual meeting of the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC). While it’s apparently still in the early stages, the system will supposedly let you adjust colors simply by describing them in natural langauge, using voice or typed commands like “make the sky a deeper blue” or “make the background carnation pink” — the software then does all the rest of the work. Of course, Xerox isn’t exactly giving any indication when that may happen, so you’ll have to make do with the cumbersome point-and-click method of color-choosing we’ve somehow managed to get along with all these years for a little while longer.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Culture, Handsets, Sony Ericsson, GSM, GPRS, UMTS

If you find the thickness of a Vertu positively offensive — but the Sony Ericsson W880i isn’t quite exclusive enough for you — might we recommend a golden rendition of the same? A phone customization outfit, Amosu, is offering said golden W880i for a mere £569 (about $1135). The catch? Turns out the handset is merely plated in the precious stuff, which means you’re really not getting a heck of a lot of gold for the surcharge. Finding a yellow Ai any other way is gonna be a challenge, though, so spend the dinero if you must.

[Via Just Another Mobile Phone Blog and E24.se]

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Original post by Chris Ziegler

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

The U.S. Navy certainly doesn’t seem to have any shortage of unconventional weapons in development, but it looks like it still has plenty more ideas on its plate, with a recent patent revealing yet another new weapon that takes a slightly different path towards its target. While this one is unconventional, it certainly doesn’t appear to be non-lethal, employing sonar to generate what the Navy describes as “acoustic remote cavitation,” which can supposedly destroy torpedoes, mines, and any other “undesirable objects” in its path. What’s more, the Navy says that can be done from a distance of up to one kilometer away, which is apparently far greater than other similar examples of the technology. Less clear, however, is how the Navy plans to deal with the seemingly inevitable swarms of irate dolphins set on enacting some revenge.

[Via Danger Room]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Looking for an exciting new way to earn money flexing that 20th century brain of yours? Try inventing gadgets! Americans spend more the $100 million a year on these useless, dangerous or just plain idiotic devices, which can often be found in 5 and 10 cent stores. Or something like that. The folks at Modern Mechanix unearthed this interesting advertorial from 1935, which hopes to inspire folks to design and patent their own “gadgets,” little widgets that the magazine defines as “something that we would like to own, if it doesn’t cost too much, yet something that we can do without if we absolutely must.” We’ve been trying to look around the Engadget HQ and decide what we could live without, but decided that was just silly — next thing you know it, stupid magazines from the past will be trying to tell us we don’t need our Nabaztag reading us news in the morning, or LED umbrellas to know what the weather’s like outside. Clearly preposterous.

[Thanks, Charles S]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Paul Miller

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Laptops, Peripherals, Tablet PCs

As if the influx of products like the Wiimote, SIXAXIS controller, and DoCoMo D904i series of handsets hadn’t yet convinced you that motion control is the future of PC input (well, either that or knuckle rapping), BT is currently field testing a USB dongle that promises to bring the excitement of gaming to boring computing tasks. Like other implementations before it, the so-called Balance technology uses a small accelerometer to translate various tilts and movements of a connected laptop or UMPC into certain commands, letting you violently shake your expensive gear to do something as simple as empty the trash. Actually, the current trials aren’t meant to enable an even lazier lifestyle for your average geek — at least in the short term — but rather to give disabled individuals a way to hop on the mobile computing bandwagon without having to deal with finicky trackpads, control nubbins, or onscreen thumbboards. While no specific plans for a commercial launch have been made, BT anticipates that a product stemming from this research will hit the market in two to three years, just in time to be replaced by the thought-controlled input devices that are once again being trailblazed by the cutting-edge gaming community.

[Via Reg Hardware]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Evan Blass

Filed under: Handsets, Motorola, Windows Mobile, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, UMTS

Hutchison 3′s flagship “X-Series” platform of data-enabled goodies is missing a pretty critical piece of the puzzle — Windows Mobile support — but it now looks like the carrier plans to add it with a bang. Despite seeing a Vodafone-branded unit some time ago, MoDaCo reports that 3 is positioning itself to pick up a period of exclusivity on the upcoming Motorola Q9h (exclusivity which we assume will be limited to the UK, or perhaps Europe) to launch Windows Mobile support for X-Series. Of course, once 3 has bothered to gather all the apps necessary to take X-Series to the Microsoft camp, it only stands to reason that the Q9h will become just the first in a line of Windows Mobile phones to rock it, so if you’re on 3 and the Q9h isn’t quite your cup of tea (we can’t blame you), sit tight.

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Original post by Chris Ziegler

Filed under: Gaming

While it’s hardly a secret that the Xbox 360 will be getting a 65nm CPU upgrade sooner or later, China’s Commercial Times (not always the most reliable source) is now reporting that the console’s Xenos GPU will also be switching over to the cooler, lower-power chips, supposedly sometime this fall. According to the paper, an “engineering version” of the new and improved 65nm Xenos GPU has already been sent out, with production set to get underway in May, which would certainly seem to make a fall launch a possibility. Unfortunately, there’s still no word on a possible disc drive upgrade to go along with these other revisions, which we all know is the real culprit for most of the console’s noise problems.

[Via Joystiq]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Games, Studies

Middle aged gamers for teh win (or something)! The NPD Group is reporting that in an average month, 29 million cell owners play games on their mobile devices and more than 7 million download games — though there isn’t any mention of where they are downloading from. NPD further break this down with 29 percent downloaded by people aged 24 – 34, 27 by the 18 – 24 set, and 15 percent by the youngest group aged 13 – 17. No shocker here — the oldest group typically has the means, a credit card to shop with, and depending on the career choice, time.

[Via mocoNews]

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Original post by Sean Cooper