Mobitrends

Benjamin just spotted another fun mod of or beloved Spykee, the “compact” mod by Zuneo. Pretty easy, they took the head apart and fed it into the body of Spykee. Can’t do any smaller than that !

Back in 1995 - those units called “Virtual Boy” still retail on Ebay at 139€. Those were using Monochrome display made of blue and green LEDs. More on its wikipedia page. Trying to be strong and not to buy one!

More videos on spykee’s website

God I love playing PGR4 on the XBOX 360 with the helmet on! If you come around our offices rue Daunou, stop by for a game!

Yesterday while doing some research, I stumbled upon the “TIMEX” brand name which brought back lots of memories from the early 90’s… This watch, the Timex DataLink, was the result of a JV between Timex and Microsoft and had a sensor on the top casing and could talk with your PC through a software having your CRT monitor blink. That was probably the nerdyiest watch ever ! Check out wikipedia for more infos.

What’s smaller then a netbook ? A mini-netbook ! Check this device produced by Pandora the size of a Nintendo DS and based on w00t hardware base including an ARM core, a DSP, 3D accelerato, a nice 800×480 4.3″ screen and a full qwerty keyboard. OS is ubuntu and it’s aimed as well as mobile productivity and gaming. Unit is running Linux Ubuntu.
Would love to get my hands on one unit ! Pre-order open at 330USD…

like a Tiki’pad but retailing today, pretty funky! Aimed at left-hand casual typing, pretty easy and funky !

Two announces around the same technology/use case in a few days,
Violet, on one hand, announces its “mirror”, a USB RFID reader along with bunny-shaped tags
Alcatel-Lucent’s startup (!?) tikitag announced today its tikitag rfid reader + 10 tags will be available soon on Amazon at 50 USD
This is nice - as a geek I love connected devices, yet I still wonder what the real mass-market use-cases for this technology really are. It’s “nice to have” to bind a digital action with a swipe of a RFID tag but having a USB connected reader really makes me wonder what’s so much easier when anything can be done from the computer itself… at least the tiny nabaztag are super-cute - I would buy them without the reader !

Wireless USB has been along since CES 2007, but it took a while to see the first products. Belkin announced last year a wireless USB hub that eventually got shipped this summer and now it’s IOGEAR’s turn to announce their VGA extenders priced at a hefty 229.95USD which is really an awful lot.
I guess all this CE industry is being so pressured at showing innovative products that they tend to forget that making industrial wireless devices is not always so easy and that emerging new chipsets need time to mature and enter industrialization phase.
The IOGEAR’s looks nice although I can only regret that it’s not a VGA dongle on the PC side - using the USB port to connects to the PC limits its used to supported Windows machines. My guess is they had to do this to enable pc-based pre-treatment of the images to lower the required bandwidth needs…

Source Engadget

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