You are looking at China’s next iPhome. It was found lost in an electronics shop in Beijing, camouflaged to look like the real iPhone 4G. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s totally fake, and here are all the details.
About 30 years ago, Monster began to carve out a name for itself selling cables-on-steroids to musicians. Recently, they’ve decided to take on the likes of Bose and Audio-Technica with a line of hip-hop inspired headphones called Beats by Dr. Dre.
In between the series of massive, battery-operated over-ear models and in-ear buds sits the Solos, a folding, on-ear set that seems to hit all the key points for a stylish set of traveller’s headphones: Fly looks? Check. Portability? Yeah. Sublime, bass-infused sound? In spades. It even has a microphone. In fact, the only thing missing here — except for in one component — is Monster’s legendary build quality.
Most laptops and portable media players have pretty terrible bass, no matter how great their audio may otherwise be, but subwoofers aren’t exactly easily luggable devices. Digivoid’s latest device attempts to shore up your iPod and MacBook’s weak vibes.
The Zo Personal Subwoofer is a small gadget about the size of an iPod Nano. All you do is plug it into your device’s headphone jack through a supplied mini-stereo cable. You then plug your headphones into the Zo for improved sound, which is itself powered by an internal rechargeable battery.
According to DigiZoid, the Zo Persona Subwoofer offers bass that’s the equivalent of a 12-inch subwoofer. That seems like a little bit of a stretch to us, but if you’re interested, you can pick up a Zo to supplement your iPod’s bass for just $99.
The iPhone perhaps does not have the native tele-dildonic abilities of more prolifically vibrating devices like the Nintendo Wiimote, but if you’ve ever looked at your beloved handset and wished that love could be exhibited in a deep muscular rubdown, there’s an app for that… along with a $5,999 chair.
The Human Touch Connect is your typical Brookstone-esque massage chair, with the added ability to be controlled through the Internet, Bluetooth or any iPhone OS device. Use the app and you have access to a full library of massaging programs like the Coccyx Blaster or the O-Ring Loosener, although be wary of using the triggering the latter setting without a waterproof iPhone case.
Borrowing design motifs from Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation, this hideous, glowing pyramid is the kind of coffee table cum iPhone dock that only a degrading Replicant could love. It’s called the Horus, and if owning a glass topped coffee table is the sort of thing that made you paranoid before, we’re sure you’ll love the addition of a razor sharp, impaling spike on the surface top. You can contact the designer for pricing information, but furniture this garishly tacky doesn’t come cheap when you’re not buying it bulk in a storage auction.
[via Born Rich
Eye-Fi, pretty much the only company in town doing interesting things with SD cards, have just announced their newest card: the Apple-exclusive Eye-Fi GeoX2.
Like other Eye-Fi cards, the Geo X2 allows you to upload photos directly from your camera’s SD card to your computer over 802.11n WiFi. The Geo X2 will directly interface with iPhoto and MobileMe, as well as Picasa, Facebook and a slew of other online services.
The Geo X2 also boasts previous Eye-Fi cards’ cool Endless Mode, which allows the Eye-Fi to automatically clear space on the card after photos have been uploaded. It will also automatically geotag your photos to make it easier to use with iPhoto’s Places feature.
The Geo X2 will be exclusively available starting in May and cost $69.99 for a 4GB card.
The Horizontal 51 sound board from Finite Elemente isn’t just a shelf, it’s an iPod docking solution with integrated Surround Sound speakers with a 25WPC amplifier and a frequency range of 50 to 25,000Hz, as well as other available connections for TV, PCs and MP3 players. The shelf itself can support up to 25KG of weight, so if you don’t want to put plants or books on it, it can probably support the weight of a light HDTV. It’s an attractive solution, but $664 is a lot of money to spend on a shelf, no matter how many devices it can integrate with.
Unless you have a Mac Mini or Mac Pro, there’s not a lot of reason to buy a third-party webcam if you’re on a modern Apple machine, but Telcast’s latest webcam, the W900, does one thing your built-in iSight won’t: it’s a wireless web cam that can transmit 5 megapixel video and images at distances up to 200 meters.
A welcome advance in webcam technology that should prevent at least a few MacBooks from vibrating off the lubricated bedside table top on anniversary night. The Telcast W900 costs $117.
Nokia’s forthcoming N8 smartphone has been touted as the beleagured Finnish handset maker’s long-coming answer to the iPhone… but judging from Mobile Review’s preview of a leaked N8 handset, Nokia’s dropped the ball yet again.
The N8 looks great on paper — it has a 12-megapixel camera, HDMI output and a huyge touchscreen with multitouch support, as well as Nokia’s new Symbian3 operating system — but in practice it’s nothing special. The camera takes decent pictures, but the 720p HD video isn’t particularly special compared to other handsets, and the HDMI port uses a non-standard connector, making it unlikely to ever be used.
Worse, the much ballyhooed Symbian3 update is apparently just a cosmetic upgrade that isn’t even fit to lick the shoes of the features that both the iPhone OS and Android OS are boasting.
It’s strange to think that a mere three years ago, Nokia was pretty much the most popular handset maker in the world, but they have failed time and time again to be competitive with the likes of Apple and Google. With the N8’s failure, it may now be too late.
One of the secret new features of the new MacBook Pros is inertial scrolling, which causes the trackpad to function like the iPhone’s touchscreen when scrolling; in other words, your screen scrolls with momentum informed by how hard and fast you swipe your fingers down or up.
TUAW has a post up about the new feature, positing that it should be possible on “all multitouch Apple trackpads. They’re wrong: the feature should already be possible on every Apple touchpad out there, multitouch or not, as indicated by the SuperScroll software.
The big question is: if all Apple touchpads are capable of inertial scrolling, does the functionality in the new MacBook Pros indicate Apple will roll it out across all Snow Leopard machines in a forthcoming update?
How do you feel about inertial scrolling? Is it something you’d use if it was rolled out to existing Apple laptops? Let us know in the comments.
Apple has finally seen fit to update the design of its 85-watt MagSafe Power Adapters to use an all aluminum tip instead of a plastic one, mimicking the design of the 45-watt MacBook Air’s adapter.
Not only will this minimize the 85-Watt MagSafe’s physical footprint, but ditching the plastic should prevent the occasional melting problems we sometimes hear about. It also happens to look a hell of a lot better.
The 60-Watt MagSafe Power Adapter hasn’t been updated yet, but all things in good time. Hey, look at that! As Charli points out in the comments below, they just were.
[via TUAW]
This adorable little device looking something like the offspring of EVE and WALL-E is the Mint, a robot mop for your floors similar to the Roomba, but unlike the Roomba, the Mint complies with Jobs’ own requirements for absolute silence in his devices.
Since it lacks a vacuum or spinning brushes, the only noise you’ll hear as the Mint whisks across your floors is the a barely audible squeegeeing.
The tiny robot uses NorthStar Navigation to prevent it from mopping the same spot twice. It costs $250, which doesn’t necessarily beat the alternative — a Polish maid scrubbing your floors in a tank top — but is certainly cheaper in the grand scheme of things than the resulting temptation, and the lawsuits that might follow.
[via Gadget Lab]
It’s way buggy still, but hats off to jailbreak hacker David Wong who not only figured out how to get the iPhone to dual boot, but to actually run Google’s Android operating system.
Of course, the entire exercise is one of utter futility — why would you run Google’s inferior Android operating system when you can tool around in iPhone OS (my only tentative answer: maybe tethering?) — but even so: this takes some brain meats. Well done, sir.
Even HP’s aware that they’ve got a tough fight on their hands convincing consumers that they want to give them their $500 bucks for an HP Slate tablet as opposed to the iPad… but the PC manufacturer may still be be too optimistic.
If an early review of the device is anything to go by, it’s not going to be a fight… it’s going to be a slaughter.
With the fourth-generation iPhone making the display even bigger and more pixel dense, it looks increasingly unlikely that Apple has any plans for the much rumored iPhone Nano… but that’s not stopping just the scuttlebutt of a potential Apple product from inspiring competing phone manufacturers to release their own iPhone Nano clones.
The HTC HD Mini is just such a clone. It takes the 4.3 inch touchscreen on HTC’s HD 2 handset and squishes it down to a compact 3.2 inches, while also packing a 600MHz processor. It’s being touted as a budget version of the HD 2, and it could find its way to AT&T or even sold unlocked.
I definitely see the market for a tinier touchscreen phone, and the HD Mini is a cute little smartphone, but here’s where the bile rises: the Mini’s running the crapusculent Windows Mobile 6.5.1 operating system. Not even Android! I think I’d rather hold on to the fever dream of an iPhone Nano someday creeping out of Apple’s labs than ever sully my finger swiping it across a Windows Mobile homescreen again.
Assuming that the price of Tiffen’s soon-to-be-released Smoothee iPhone Steadicam would be beyond his budget, Babyology writer Ben Gurnsberg built this amazing iPhone steadicam robotic arm out of spare LEGO Technic pieces.
It looks cool, but how’d it work? Not well, says Gurnsberg.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOKu9uwdwZI
I use my MacBook Pro as my main work computer thanks to a Logitech notebook keyboard stand and an external monitor, but I’ve often wanted something cleaner: a simple and elegant docking solution without any need to manually connect DVI cables and USB umbilicals.
Henge Docks’ line of MacBook docking stations seems to be just solution. All you do is slap your MacBook into the docking station and it’ll drive an eternal keyboard, mouse, printer, hard drive, stereo and any FireWire or USB hard drives you care to connect to it… all in a clean, compact and efficient design. It even uses your existing MagSafe charger.
Very nice indeed, and with prices starting at $59.95, this looks like an easy product to recommend to any Apple fan who uses their MacBook as their main work machine.
My esteemed colleague John Brownlee wrote earlier today about the excellent article at Ars Technica which explains in detail why the new 13″ MacBook Pro doesn’t have a speedy i5 or i7 chip, while its bigger brothers and sisters do.
What interests me more, though, is the discussion that follows the Ars article.
The latest MacBook Pro refresh finally brought Intel Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs to Apple’s line-up of laptops… but only the 15 and 17 inch models. If you want a 13-inch MacBook, you need to satisfy yourself with the Intel Core 2 Duo chipset.
Steve Jobs claims that the reason Apple went with the Intel Core 2 Duo chips for the 13-inch MacBook Pros because a 20% CPU increase was outweighed by giving the 13-inchers a much better CPU and 10 hour battery life.
But Ars Technica has a more in-depth explanation: price, graphics performance, battery life and the laws of physics.
It’s been a content rich morning from the Chinese gadget sweatshops, but this latest handset will undoubtedly give the true Mac faithful the vapors: the TEG W3000 is the spitting image of the unholy, cross-species union of an iPhone and a Nexus One.
The latest in a long and veritable line of Chinese iPhone knock-offs is this button cute Leady Apple… although we think they probably meant “Lady Apple.”
As the name implies, it’s like the iPhone 4G redesigned by the Powerpuff Girls.
After one of the longest waits in the Intel era, the MacBook Pros were updated Tuesday complete with a migration to the new Intel i5 and i7 architecture. In addition to the CPU update these new top-end notebooks feature better battery life, and the ability to switch from integrated to high performance graphics on the fly. We here at the Cult managed to get our hands on one of the top-dog 17 inch i7 models on Wednesday have have been putting it though it’s paces.
Follow us after the jump for out first impressions and a detailed rundown of the King of the Hill’s real world performance.
If you want to watch movies on your iPhone outside, you’ve got a couple of options. You can hold it in your hand like a sucker, or you can lay out $30 for this TV Hat, an absurdly long billed baseball cap with a built-in hood like an even bigger sucker. Just harness your iPhone at the end of the darkened viewing chamber and you’re good for hands and glare free viewing. Alternatively, duct tape your iPhone to your face. Whatever!
Poor Verizon. They’ve got the nation’s best 3G coverage, but there’s no concrete plans for them to get an iPhone in sight. They don’t even have the so-called Googlephone, the HTC Nexus One, probably the second best smartphone on the market after the iPhone.
Looks like Verizon just caught a break, though. They’ve just announced that they’ll be getting HTC’s latest, the Droid Incredible on April 29th, which is equal to the Nexus One in almost every way, including a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 3.7-inch 800 x 480 AMOLED touchscreen display, an 8MP camera with dual LED flash, integrated 3G, GPS and wireless. It’ll be available for $200 with a two-year contract.
Not a bad little coup for Verizon, but with the next generation iPhone just around the bend and likely boasting a 1GHz A4 CPU, a 960×640 display and dual-cameras, the Incredible’s not going to look so very much so for long.
This week’s MacBook Pros were pretty much cutting-edge all over, but they were missing one major upgrade: USB 3.0 ports. After all, the transition is already under way, and the newest version of USB can move over 5GBps, over ten times faster than USB 2.0 and about six and a half times faster than Firewire 800.
Still, maybe Cupertino’s waiting to see how USB 3.0 now that Intel’s Light Peak standard (which is rumored to be Apple-inspired) is making its way to market. Intel Light Peak pundit Kevin Kahn has gone on record saying that he believes that the standard will be available in computers and laptops by 2011, and totally replace USB 3.0 over the course of the next few years.
“We view this as a logical future successor to USB 3.0,” Kahn said. “In some sense[s] we’d… like to build the last cable you’ll ever need.”
A noble goal. Considering USB 3.0 has barely been adopted yet, and given that Light Peak is twice as fast, it may very well behoove Apple to wait until 2011… then start shipping Light Peak capable machines that sync even the largest iTunes libraries in mere seconds.
