Author: Kat Hannaford

Apple tablet, schablet. Who needs a stand-alone tablet when you can turn your existing MacBook into one? Inklet is a cool program which lets you draw on your trackpad, turning your scribbles into Photoshop masterpieces.

To download, you’ll need to give up $24.95 (though there’s also a free demo that’s worth checking out), and will obviously need a MacBook with multitouch, along with Snow Leopard. Inklet works best with a stylus, so better scratch around for your old DS one if you can. The familiar multitouch gestures work well with Inklet, so if you’re at all art-inclined, the video below is worth checking out for a demo. [Inklet]

Thought the Pirate Bay saga was done and dusted? I’m sure you can spare a few more tears for Universal Music, EMI Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music, who are still chasing their money from the two Swedish escapees.

Both Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij moved outside of Sweden after the trial, and while The Pirate Bay site is still up and running, the law can’t exactly prove the duo are still behind it. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped the aforementioned labels trying their hardest to recoup 1m Kronor (USD$142,770).

Neij is still adamant they’re no longer behind The Pirate Bay, and as he already owes 50m Kronor (which is around USD$7m), “a few million more or less doesn’t really affect me.”

One day, they’re going to make a movie about all of this. Hopefully starring Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley. [TorrentFreak]

Good news, N900 owners—all three of you—as Nokia’s Ovi Store is now available for download thanks to a firmware update. Don’t get too drunk on your apps downloading frenzy, now. [Nokia Conversations]

Google’s pushing the Nexus One hard, but could people be holding out for Apple to show its hand in June? 20,000 sales is 230,000 less than the Droid, and 1.580m less than the iPhone 3GS. [Mobile-Ent]

Last week you were crying out for more ideas from Haier’s wall o’ ideas, so I swung by there on the last day of the show to see if there were any more hare-brained suggestions. I was in luck!

Of course, I’m willing to bet some of these ideas are taking the piss, but if at least one of them is actually serious, humanity is even more doomed than I once thought. Check out the first batch of ideas over here, if you missed them.

Is this guy for realzies?

Until Star Wars comes out on Blu-ray, I really don’t see the point.

The answer is: don’t buy a 3DTV.

Designers can have senses of humor, too.

I’d say judging by the smell of some CES-goers, they didn’t even bother with a catheter.

Spamming goes back to the pen and paper days.

Did anyone see a Dolby marketing guy lurking around Haier’s stand last week?

While phones don’t often fold, I’m pretty sure you can watch TV on them and they fit in pockets.

Dear god, please—no more!

It’s such a simple idea, why didn’t Apple think of it before?

Australians say the darndest things.

Has this guy never seen an iPod Touch, Zune or Creative Zen in his life?

I’ll leave you with the CES equivalent of your mother’s calendar. Enjoy.

You want to be green, but you also want to take your MacBook to Starbucks without bothering with a backpack. It totes ruins your look. Designer Yuji Fujimura has conjured up a laptop-docking bike concept, just for these moments.

The laptop storage space actually docks your laptop, charging as you cycle. The inbuilt screen on the handlebars not only gives you internet access via your laptop (presumably you have to stick a 3G dongle in somewhere), but also ensures you wind up in the A&E ward several times a month. I’m sure the nurses will all like your tales of masochistic hipsterdom. [Coroflot]

Using a mouse is old-hat, if the recent wave of ball-shaped motion-sensing PC remotes is anything to go by. Straight out of Japan, the Puyocon can be squeezed, thrown around or rolled, controlling actions on the computer.

The Entertainment Computing Laboratory, at Tsukuba University in Japan, should hook up with Cambridge Consultants, whose Suma controller has been designed especially for PC gaming. Both ideas are very interesting, taking the Wiimote as influence, with 14 pressure sensors, a three-way acceleration sensor and Bluetooth taking up the core parts of the Puyocon. Could these balls wipe out traditional computer mice in the future?

Check out the video below for a demo of how the Puyocon is used. [Puyocon via Crunchgear]

Are black, silver, pink and blue the most popular iPod Nano colors? According to JVC, yes, yes they are. The SP-A130 speaker not only matches those Nanos in size, but also shade.

Whilst I have a blue Nano knocking around somewhere, I do wish they’d used the same metallic paint that Apple uses. To blast music out you just slide the cover out to reveal the dual 30mm drivers on the portable speaker, with the back containing a 3.5mm input and area for inserting two AAA batteries.

The speakers also have an active/passive mode, giving you the choice of using the device’s amplifier or the iPod Nano to power it. Out in March, it’ll be $29.95—a pretty fair price if you ask me, unless you own a red, purple, green, yellow or orange Nano. [Far East Gizmos]

Taking design cues from the Oakley Thump MP3 player sunglasses is never a good idea. But that’s not the only fault these Vuzix Wrap 920AR glasses have. The resolution sucks.

Unless you’ve never picked up an iPhone or Android handset—or don’t have boasting friends with them—you would’ve heard of augmented reality, right? These glasses use stereoscopic cameras to create a “virtual world” where something you’re fixing your begoggled vision on suddenly turns animated, with different 3D layers. You can connect the glasses to a screen so your pals can watch whatever you’re viewing—and they’re the lucky ones, because what you’re watching, the wearer, sucks. The video you can see in the glasses is really low-res, and I actually had trouble with seeing the bottom of the picture. The lower the video gets, it seems to just fizzle and fade out.

The demo Vuzix was giving at CES was pretty fun. I was given a chart with rows of QR-type barcodes on, and when I looked through the glasses at it, it looked like one of those games where you tilt the board to roll a marble through a series of challenges. Just like “Maze” on the iPod Nano, actually. It was a really hurried demo, and actually I was thoroughly confused—the quality of what you’re seeing through the glasses is so poor, I could barely see what I was doing. Everyone watching me had a hoot though, watching my gameplay on the TV screen above.

The glasses themselves look really shitty, and unlike the Oakley Thumps, you can’t wear them like sunglasses. At $800, and with only one purpose, I’d say avoid.

So many gadgets around, so little cash with which to buy them. That’s where convergence comes into play—and the enTourage eDGe dualbook is a great example. I’d get one myself, if only they weren’t so damn big.

It looks like a laptop, with the left side devoted to a 9.7-inch e-paper screen, and the right side a 10.1-inch color LCD. Obviously, the left side is for reading ebooks on, and the right side has all the functions of a laptop—but running on Android. You’re able to download apps to it, and with any luck the eDGe will attract some custom apps which will suit the integrated nature of this dualbook.

It’s not just half an ereader, half a tablet. The two sides actually talk to each other very effectively, with one example being when you highlight a word or sentence on the ereader side. On the right side, a box pops up asking if you’d like to google the word, search for it on the dictionary, look it up on Wikipedia, and so on. Any notations you make on the ereader columns will be transferred to the tablet side for storage, and if the book contains pictures, you can choose to view them on the color tablet half.

You can either hold the eDGe like a book, with both screens in front of you, or fold it back on itself, so you see just one side. The outside has a glossy sheen, choose from red, blue, black or white, and the inside is silver. It looks nice, if a little cheap. I’d like to see them work on the design some more, if they bring out a second model.

The ereader works just as well as the Kindle, in my opinion. Flipping pages was easy—and fast—with the page buttons located to the left of the screen. The screen is very large, so you actually get quite a bit of white space located around the text, for writing in. You can flip to other chapters by pressing the stylus (which slots neatly into the back) on a bar at the bottom of the screen. Or, load the library function on the right side of the screen, and choose chapters there.

Using the tablet side is as easy as you expect it to be. It runs Android, so everything’s really user-friendly. The touchscreen was really responsive for a resistive panel, in the 20 or so minutes I played with one I didn’t have any problem opening icons. The actual machine runs pretty fast, I didn’t notice any notable lag or programs freezing. To input text, there’s a virtual keyboard (which fills half the LCD screen), or you can use the stylus, and write on the ereader side—it converts it into text. Or, plug in a keyboard via USB or Bluetooth.

Right, so here’s the thing—I was bowled over by how many features the eDGe had. For $499, it’s incredible. But I’d wait until they make a smaller version, the thing is just too big to read books on, you can’t really hold it up in one hand (it’s quite heavy), and as the page buttons are located to the left, you have to use your left hand. It’s just a bit awkward to use, unless it’s laid flat on a table in front of you. But hey, if you’ve got mutant hands and are able to handle it with ease, go for it—it’ll make you as happy as larry. Whoever he is.

Kuo Design has rounded up an impressive collection of magazine covers bearing Jobs’s face. Watch him as he loses hair; puts on weight, loses weight; has a brief flirtation with a bow tie, moustache, Sheryl Crow. Poor guy.

Is that…is that a bow tie Jobs is wearing there?

The Full House parody.

Jobs went through a heavy Kraftwerk era.

Promo from Jobs’s Japanese gangsta movie.

Jobs was a secret New Wave fan, Gates, well…he was going through a rough time.

Geppetto’s creation.

I like this, his long hair looks silky-smooth.

Buy this iPod…or I will shoot lasers from my eyes.

Did they photoshop Jobs’s head on Ive’s body?

Jobs is given the Warhol treatment.

After a hard day at work, Jobs likes nothing better than to have Gates give him a rub-down.

“How he plans to save the music biz”…with Sheryl Crow?

Steve throws a curveball.

That mustache is definitely a risk.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could charge your phone by pouring Coca-Cola into it? Like the Delorean in Back To The Future? You’d never have a flat battery again! Of course, it’d be even better if it was water-compatible.

This concept phone was created by designer Daizi Zheng, who said of the design:

“The concept is using bio battery to replace the traditional battery to create a pollution free environment. Bio battery is an ecologically friendly energy generates electricity from carbohydrates (currently sugar) and utilizes enzymes as the catalyst. By using bio battery as the power source of the phone, it only needs a pack of sugary drink and it generates water and oxygen while the battery dies out.”

It’s a great idea, but I very much doubt we’ll see Nokia adopting it anyday soon. [Daizi Zheng via LikeCool]

We traveled to the desert wilds of Vegas, to watch ioSafe literally GO CRAZY in their thirst to prove that their Solo SSDs are tougher than Rambo. It survived being set fire to, drowned and crushed under 25t of weight.

Not sure our lungs will survive though, after breathing in all those toxic fumes from the fire. Check out the MASS display of DESTRUCTION, above. [ioSafe]

Falling somewhere from a division of ASUS, PEGA has created this inflatable lamp concept which uses a pump to increase the size of the light.

It’s called ‘Pumplight,’ aptly nough, and the more you pump it, the larger the balloon, and the brighter the light. Opening the air valve lets the air out, and turns the light off. Simple, effective and fun. [PEGA Design via DesignBoom]

The Pixi got even fewer upgrades than the Pre, if that’s possible. The Pixi Plus now has Wi-Fi—which worked well when I tried it out—but the main draw to the Plus is the super-colorful cases.

They’re TouchStone charging-compatible cases, which is a nice addition, but like I said with the Pre Plus it just means you’ll have to spend extra on buying a TouchStone. The cases feel good, rubbery with perforations (on the solid color versions, the printed ones are smooth), and have holes for the camera lens, headphone jack, speakers, right-side buttons and on/off button. They’re swappable, so expect Palm to team up with more designers in future.

Otherwise, like with the Pre Plus, the upgrades are minor. It’s running on Verizon (which showed full bars for reception), and I managed to switch Wi-Fi connections easily—and quickly. The screen could be a little more responsive, but it’s the same fault we found in the original Pixi. It’s very much aimed at the youngsters now, with these cases—but actually, I really like them. Especially the Artists’ Series editions, which will cost $49 and charge wirelessly.

Jon Rubinstein dropped the news only minutes ago that the new Palm devices—the slightly-upgraded Pre Plus and Pixi Plus—would be arriving on Verizon later this month.

I got some hands-on time with them, and while the Pre Plus has had the navigational button removed, little else has been touched aesthetically. The inductive TouchStone back comes as standard now—but looks just like it always did. Still feels rubbery, which I like. Makes you feel like you’re holding a proper gadget. The removal of the button isn’t big news, I don’t think it’ll hamper use of the Pre, with the touch input being reliable most of the time anyway.

Otherwise, everything else is exactly the same. The keys are still gummy pegs that are too small for your fingers The keyboard is actually improve and a lot less mushy—instead it feels solid when you press down and comes back up quickly. The bottom edge of the slide-out QWERTY can still cut cheese, it’s still that sharp. Shame they didn’t improve upon that aspect. Or make it even SHARPER to do the “Plus” name justice. I want to cut a steak.

It’s speedier, thanks to the double RAM that’s been added, and noticeably easier flipping between apps and programs. The screen is responsive, but no more responsive than it was before. All in all, it’s the same Pre experience you’ve had before, just faster. Oh, and guess you’ll have to fork out for a TouchStone now.

HTC’s laying its cards down with a phone called “Smart” for Europe and Asia, which runs on Qualcomm’s BREW platform. As BREW is cheap for the manufacturer, I’m willing to bet the Smart will be cheap for the consumer too.

Running on BREW, it’s actually been painted with HTC’s Sense interface which as you know, was last seen on the HD2. Processor speed is just 300MHz—pretty slow—and RAM is a fairly average 256MB. Internal memory is 256MB, but that’s expandable by microSD. The touchscreen QVGA is 2.8-inches, and connectivity is HSDPA internet, and Bluetooth, with no GPS or Wi-Fi mentioned. The camera is 3.0-megapixel with flash. So yes, it’s a budgetphone, but at least it’ll be cheap, right? [HTC]

The enTourage eDGe dualbook has been officially ushered in at CES, along with the news it’ll be on sale in February for $490. It’s the world’s first dualbook, which translates as an ereader, tablet, notepad and PMP.

The dual-screen enTourage eDGe sounds more than decent, for anyone considering either an ereader, tablet PC or PMP. I like convergence when it actually works, and this Android job sounds like it works. The device has a 9.7-inch e-paper screen on the left, and a 10.1-inch LCD screen on the right. Wi-Fi is included for web browsing, or downloading ebooks, and a noise-cancelling microphone and 1.3-megapixel camera allows for video and audio recording, with audio files saved as MP3s.

Ebooks are downloaded in PDF and EPUB format, with enTourage creating its own ebook store, with everything coming from Google. It may not be up and running by the time it goes on sale in February, but obviously you can download ebooks through other means.

With all those functions, battery life is six hours when using the LCD screen, or seven days when using just the ereader. It’s possible to use both screens at once, either held flat like a book, or with one screen folded back to show just one side.

Available for pre-order now, it’s on sale in February for $490. If only they’d sort out the annoying capitalization of their name. [enTourage eDGe]