Gadget of the Week
While we featured the as-yet-unveiled BlackBerry 9000 as Gadget of the Week back in March, yesterday RIM officially unwrapped the BlackBerry Bold, as the handset will be known to marketing firms and eager buyers.
That 480x320 half-VGA screen with 65k colors sounds pretty bold indeed, and the word is it looks even better than it sounds - excellent video playback and an interface competitive with the iPhone. Also: leatherette texture on the back of the handset and superfast 3.5G tri-band HSDPA/UMTS support. Try finding an iPhone with download speeds as fast as 7.2 Mbps!
Wi-Fi a/b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and full A2DP support, and built-in GPS round out the feature set.
I'm just coming back from a wedding in Carmel where I picked the brains of what seemed like an endless stream of high-powered techies and business types who - without exception - bemoaned the iPhones they all owned. Former BlackBerry devotees, none of the moguls and madams I talked to could say a single good thing about the buttonless device that they all seemed to use a lot anyway: "It's impossible to send email," said one; "typing anything longer than an SMS is agonizing," said another.
It's important to remember that while the iPhone has all the hype and style going for it, there are armies of QWERTY keyboard-using BlackBerry addicts out there - and for them, Bold is not only beautiful, it's better.
The last few Gadgets of the Week have been pretty shallow - bedazzled cable plugs and bedazzled MacBook Airs - so I thought this week, as we properly introduce the merry spring month of May, the Homotron Laboratories, Dungeons & Mad-Scientist-Volcano-Lairs could try putting forth something green: namely, the Dell Eco Bamboo Computer that our resident tree-hugger Den Den Boy brought us last week.
By consuming 70% power and taking up 81% less space than traditional desktops, the Eco Bamboo manages to be friendly to both eye and planet - and the recycled innards, composed of "old bottles, milk jugs and detergent cases" give this $500-$700 bamboo-wrapped PC a pleasingly small eco footprint.
Sure, it's beyond ridiculous, but I feel I'd be betraying, as a gay man, along-seated love affair with all things bling if I didn't make sure that this gold-plated, sapphire-encrusted MacBook Air from Computer Choppers spent at least a week on the Homotron pedestal of pride.
It'll set you back $8k, or $5k if you opt out of the rainbow sapphire-set Apple logo. (Which would be stupid, if you're the kind of person who spends $5k on a gold-plated computer but thinks denying yourself a rainbow logo of precious stones somehow balances out the scales of karmic ridiculousness.)
Mostly, I just want to see a photograph of the Paris Hilton of notebooks out in the wild. Preferably not in a sex tape.
Bless Neutrik's absurd little corporate heart for making the CrystalCON, a 3-pole female XLR cable connector bedazzled with Swarovski crystals. One of its two features is "Fancy, noble, valuable, attractive package - an eye catcher." That's right, fancy and noble - just like you!
Considering that an XLR connector isn't going to crop up in your standard home AV-rig, this unpriced product has to be targeting... that girl from The Hills. Or maybe Prince? You'll see XLRs in industrial applications like sound mixers, studio equipment, loudspeakers and - what I'm guessing is the selling point here - microphones.
But how many of the people who'd be silly enough to spring for a jewel-encrusted mic plug will actually know about the existence of a jewel-encrusted mic plug? A product this absurdly, uselessly fabulous deserves nothing less than a single week of exposure on the gayest tech site on the webnet. What else could it possibly be good for?
The first conceited cable connector [Crave]
We here at Homotron usually adhere to the rules of good taste, which do not condone such things as calculator watches, wrist cameras, and touch screens attached to the body. However, the Van Der Led WM2, as Den Den Boy pointed out last week, combines all three - and then some:
- Quad band GSM phone
- Bluetooth with dual stereo support
- FM tuner
- 1GB storage
- 1.3MP camera
- 1.3" touch screen (there's a point when a touch screen can be too small here, Van Der Led.)
- 300 min call time, 240 hour stand-by
You may want it, you may need it, you may see it and vomit explosively - but this ticker's got more features than, well, the James Bond style gadgets that undoubtedly inspired it.
One of the hazards of building a tech site, I've noticed, is the tendency for your weekly editorial product highlights to reflect the neat products you may have seen the week before. Certainly, that's true this week - but the new LaCie Neil Poulton HDD is not only gorgeous, affordable, and just pretentious enough to be desirable without being snotty - it's also a stellar homage to Arthur C. Clarke, on account of looking like a giant black monolith from the "Space Odyssey" books and films.
Plus: It stores data!
Hot on the heels of last week's unveiling of the BlackBerry 9000, we've got some specifications to add to the story: the BlackBerry 9000 will feature, according to a source within RIM, a 480x320 screen, 624MHz processor, as well as the known quantities of Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G broadband. BlackBerry OS seems to have reached version 4.5, and sports a browser that loads pages in "as little as three to four seconds."
Internal memory remains an unknown quantity at either 128 or 256MB, and battery time clocks in at a bit of a disappointment: four hours of talk time and a wimpy two hours of Wi-Fi browsing. We've also got a soft release date of June 18, with rumors of a delay until July or August.
AND: Welcome to our newest writer, NeonMadman! Hazing starts at 7.
BlackBerry 9000 First Impressions [BoyGenius]
[via Electronista]
While I can't shake the feeling that he's really just the rear end of two separate dogs joined together with a lawnmower, BigDog the robotic dog holds the dubious indistinction of being the official Homotron House Pet as well as the only-slightly-less dubious actual distinction of being the most advanced quadruped robot on earth.
With legs articulated like a beast's, replete with shock absorbers that recycle energy, and an on-board computer that drives locomotion and integrates a dogload's worth of sensors, Boston Dynamics' BigDog can balance, steer, navigate and regulate its own energy output just like a lowercase big dog. He's also got a laser gyroscope and stereo vision and can carry up to 0.07 MegaTinys, or 340 lbs.
Only one question remains: how to simulate a big sloppy kiss?
"Don't tase me, girlfriend!" is the new "Don't tase me, bro!"
Why? Because at least half a dozen people have pointed this leopard-print bad boy toward my inbox, and I'm taking it as a sign from the Gay Gods (including a literal sign from Den Den, who may or may not have gay divine blood running through his nubile veins). While it's probably a good thing that I didn't have one of these in my pocket when my boyfriend and I got harassed in an alleyway on St. Thomas last week, the vengeful queen inside me wishes I had.
More to the point, the vengeful queen inside me really just wants a non-lethal dose of 50,000 laser-guided volts packed inside a delicate leopard print casing, so as to match my white-tiger print hand grenades and a stunning ivory-handled garrote wire I came across during my last jaunt to Angola.
Despite the tag line "Love her...protect her" we know these sparky sparklies were built for leather daddies and drag queens - not just hausfraus. I haven't wanted to slap down $380+ on a purchase this painful since..well, ever. Happy tasing, sugarbuns!
Product Page [Taser.com]
In honor of Jesse James and Den Den Boy, who've been holding down the Homotron Laboratories (situated atop a volcano just a short monorail ride away from the GayGamer Castle) while I took off for parts unknown, I'm slapping up a late Gadget of the Week that we'll ride through next week: the MiniStation Turbo HD, for which Den Den expressed his lust earlier in the week:
Not only is the MiniStation TurboUSB a small 2.5 inch drive, but the magic is in the disk controller, which through some Buffalo secret sauce technology boasts data transfer rates of up to 35MBs/sec - 30% faster than other 5,400RPM drives on the market.
Lust-worthy indeed, DDB! Kisses.
It's not exactly as revolutionary as the Chumby, nor as space opera as the MacBook Air. But the new line of MacBook Pros sport an iPhone-like multi-touch trackpad, which is more than enough to make anyone with an older MacBook Pro turn acid green with envy.
That's no doubt by design, since the sci-fi feature isn't available on the new standard MacBooks. As always with the cult that Jobs built (ok, not always. I'm looking at you, Newton), I didn't even know I wanted this, and now life looks bleak without it.
Le sigh. Le multi-touch sigh.
Ok, this one wins GotWeekage on weird factor alone. The Chumby answers this age-old question: "What do you get when you cross a softball with a Linux computer with a 3.5" touch screen with speakers and Wi-Fi?" Well, Grandpappy Tiny, here's your answer: Chumby, which probably ends up pulling quadruple duty as a digital photo frame, internet radio, alarm clock and/or some user-specific, ingenious use like, say, checking to see if your gay-themed tech blog is still alive without getting out of bed.
I'm just guessing here.
At $179 the Chumby is most likely a luxury buy, and I'm sensing that it's most often a gift rather than a direct purchase. Because I look at it and say, "Hey, if my boyfriend bought me that I'd be happy, but I wouldn't snap it up on purpose." But with two USB ports, a headphone jack, and alarm-clock caliber speakers (not to mention creamy upholstery), Chumby ain't half bad. Whimsical and impractical, but cute.
I've been called worse.
And girls who like girls who like fembots!
Gadget of the Week
Show-stopping "half-VGA" screen and HSDPA/UMTS support, gorgeous video playback: Bold, Bold, Bold!
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