Best New Technology

Big boys’ toys are oftentimes uber-expensive, as with the case of this Blazing Angels simulator that resembles a cockpit from the World War II era. It adds a dash of realism with fake bullet holes in the fuselage, and comes with a 42″ high definition LCD TV, rumble seating, 5.1 Digital Dolby Surround Sound audio for a greater level of immersion, and a price tag that goes up as high as the plane’s altitude - $9,475 to be exact. Now that’s not exactly chump change for most of us.

AT&T’s BlackBerry Pearl 8120 spends its 20 upgrade points on WiFi, an accessible MicroSD card slot and a 2 megapixel camera. The 8100 will henceforth be considered obsolete and undesirable. Available through your IT department for $200, the refresher also has an improved web browser, a new UI theme, and new fonts and colors and everything.

It totally isn’t the archetype of an incremental upgrade of something which already exists and from which it is physically indistinguishable. It is new and you should go and buy it at once.

Given the otherwise unremarkable nature of the spec hike, the fact that it brought the release date forward does show the importance of getting WiFi out to its market as quickly as possible. Connectivity, not functionality, is this year’s watchword for smartphones. Because the iphone, if you ever doubted it, is definitely now a smartphone.

RIM blackberry Pearl 8120 lands at AT&T [CNET Crave]

Posted Mar 14th 2008 7:04AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Robots

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute believe they’ve built an AI smart enough to pass an avatar version of the Turing test — convince a human that it is human while conversing in a virtual environment like Second Life. The bot is named “Rascals,” which stands for Rensselaer Advanced Synthetic Architecture for Living Systems. Naturally, this first-ever achievement requires some world-class juice, and the team will using IBM’s Blue Gene, the world’s fastest supercomputer, to run the AI in real time. The AI’s thoughts about itself and others is based on a grad student guinea pig, and it can even formulate thoughts about the beliefs of others and their beliefs about the beliefs of others. Trippy, no? Rascals will be put to the test in October 2008.

[Via Slashdot]

Kanguru today released a new secure usb flash drive, the KanguruDefender Pro. According to the company, the KanguruDefender Pro enhances both security and performanceaddressing the needs of the most secure applications and users from government, healthcare and financial sectors. Its tamper-proof design makes it impossible to remove the KanguruDefender Pro’s chip without it breaking and becoming unreadable.
[ Source ]

YouTube can be fun, and very occasionally brilliant, but a lot of its content is, let’s face it, Amateur Hour. Not so Hulu.com, which just opened to the public. It features real TV shows and even movies. For free - so long as you’re willing to watch ads too, of course. (Hulu estimates its ads at about 2 minutes per half-hour’s entertainment, less than commercial television.)

I was one of Hulu’s beta testers, but I didn’t get the big head because there were 5 million of us. I only checked in a couple of times, partly because the selection was limited and partly because I’m spoiled by my fairly big TV screen - not to mention haunted by many hours of programming languishing unwatched on my DVR.

Some of Hulu’s offerings are top-drawer. TV shows include “The Simpsons,” “30 Rock,” and “The Office” (US version). Among the movies are “Sideways,” “Ice Age,” and “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” - plus several golden oldies. There is, of course, also dreck. Exhibit A: “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.” I can tell it’s dreck without having watched a minute of it. Don’t argue.

A USB hub is a USB hub, right? Wrong! Evergreen has decided to take the humble USB hub another step further by including photo frame capability inside. So what you perceive to be a digital photo frame here is also a 4-port USB 2.0 hub in reality. Just make sure you do not have pictures of your secretary there instead when the wife barges through to the office.

Sometimes, I feel like introducing order to my dirty desktop. Unfortunately, I’ve never found the right way to do so. But the gods are good, and I have newfound hope with the Ultra Space Station 6 USB flash drive. Now I can’t wait to think of all the six endless possibilities! Using alien technology from a planet in a parallel universe, Ultra has managed to pack six (count ‘em, six) USB ports on a 0.03-pound sliver of plastic that seems as small as your average credit card. Each USB port supports flash memory storage devices up to 2GB in size, so after doing the math you’ll find that you can have a total of 12GB flash storage in the palm of your hand (or inside your wallet, if that’s your thing).

What’s really cool about this new USB flash drive is that you can add labels to each individual USB port to denote what kind of data goes there. Perhaps the only letdown is that it can only support up to 2GB per port, which would limit, for example, the amount of music that you can squeeze in it. Still, this will be a very helpful product for wannabe neat freaks like me who can’t seem to find the time to organize their stuff.

Aside from the 12GB model, a 6GB variant of the Ultra Space Station 6 USB Flash Drive is also available via Ultra’s web site. Pricing starts at $59.99.

Product [Ultra Space Station 6] Via [OhGizmo!]

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The world’s leading graphics company has released a new platform for mobile devices that promises to change the meaning of smartphones. The APX 2500 is a applications processor that enables intuitive 3D user interfaces and engaging high-definition video on connected Windows Mobile phonesThe APX 2500 applications processor delivers an unprecedented 10 hours of 720p HD playback—an industry first for video quality and power consumption on a mobile device, as well as stunning HD camcorder and ultra-high-resolution photo imaging capabilities.
[ Source ]

AUDEO has been dubbed to be the first voiceless phone in the world, converting nerve impulses into speech courtesy of Ambient and Texas Instruments. The main idea of the AUDEO is to create a human-computer interface for communication without the need of physical motor control or speech production. Signal processing is used to interpret unpronounced speech by picking up nerve signals. Unfortunately, AUDEO’s vocabulary is extremely limited at this point in time, recognizing only around 150 words and phrases. I wonder whether the programmers have included an Easter egg within that recognizes expletives. After all, wrong words are always the easiest to pick up, right?

Posted Mar 13th 2008 4:14PM by Ryan Block
Filed under: Misc. gadgets

Mark your calendars, Apple fans — WWDC officially kicks off June 9th this year (running until the 13th). Expect Mac, iphone, and IT tracks for your varied Apple platform development needs. No official word yet as to whether El Jobso will be taking the stage at this WWDC, but it certainly wouldn’t be an Apple event without him.