As of today, I will never tweet again. Meanwhile, expect a hammer to be taken to every HTC/RIM handset within my reach. Jean-Luc Picard* has arrived from the future to capture a humpback whale and set technology straight.

* I know that Patrick Stewart is a real actor and that Jean-Luc Picard is a fictional character. Well, I should say, I know that’s the misconception guiding the world’s perspective regarding Star Trek TNG. But consider, if you will, the possibility that Picard is real, and he came back in time from the future to play an actor —oh yes—to give us a glimpse at a more peaceful future among the stars in which choice in one’s tea is every bit as important as choice in phaser array. [thenextweb]

Select Walmarts and Best Buys housed E-Play kiosks to accept used games. E-Play folded, and neither retailer found continuing the experiment worth the hassle. Just save your old media while it lasts, kids. Two words: collector’s items. [IndustryGamers via Kotaku]

You’d expect a watch called 01 “The One” to be a celebration of binary code, but while the 01 certainly has a dual-dialed binary design, it’s ironically analog.

A retro celebration of jump hour watches (that I’ve just learned were popularized in the 70s), one dial handles the hours, the other dial handles the minutes. It’s nothing complicated, which is completely the point.

01 is constructed of steel and leather, and it’s available in black, silver (pictured here) or what looks to be a bronze. It sells for $170—hey—just like an Xbox 360 hard drive! [Watchismo]

Handsets like the iPhone may be capable of transmitting stereo Bluetooth, but as we’ve seen, it’s tough to find a great stereo Bluetooth headset. So TDK just hands us a dongle instead.

Their new TH-WR700 utilizes any 3.5mm headphone port to transmit music for up to 10 meters, and thanks to Kleer wireless tech rather than Bluetooth, TDK claims a much higher fidelity—up to 40db less noise in the signal, which would be more than noticeable.

The TH-WR700 goes on sale in Japan starting this March for about $200, but there’s no word on a US release at this time. [TDK via CrunchGear]

Magnificent. Super. Amazing. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Exciting. Gorgeous. Nice. Great. Awesome. Remarkable. Phenomenal. Simple. Magical. [Neil Curtis]

It’s not in the US just yet, but Japan will receive the option to buy a standalone 250GB hard drive for the Xbox 360 starting March 11th. Sadly, it’ll run the equivalent of $170.

This news comes shortly after the 120GB hard drive has turned up out of stock at most retailers, meaning the 250GB version could (and probably will) end up replacing the 120GB version. That is, if you despise your checking account. [Impress via PCWorld via Engadget]

Wireless HD TVs and Blu-ray players are far from standard, but that may change as a plethora of super fast millimeter wave chips—based upon a standard by the IEEE802 (Wi-Fi) board—are released later this year.

We’re talking about a 1Gb/s transfer rates, which would allow you to transmit a CD in 5 seconds or an SD movie in 9 seconds, used in devices ranging from TVs to mobile phones. (We’ve seen millimeter wave in limited rollout already, licensed from a company named SiBEAM.)

But according to Tech-On, Hitachi, Panasonic and Toshiba are all working on 60GHz wireless millimeter wave chips (that transmit 7GHz of bandwidth) of their own, with complementary products arriving the second half of this year. Such news is certainly no guarantee that millimeter wave tech will be the future home entertainment standard, but I say we support it. Because, c’mon. If we’re still plugging in set top boxes 10 years from now, mankind has failed. We might as well just give up on world peace, walking on Mars and reaching a Gamerscore of 1,000,000.

More on the matter at: [Tech-On]

Note: these are Hershey’s-Kiss-inspired CD/DVD stands—not actual Hershey’s Kisses—that are being used to prop up optical media. The latter might work, but the former will crack that coworker’s tooth who keeps stealing your desk candy. [HiddenArtShop via NerdApproved]

What if your phone wasn’t a stagnant box with optional vibration, but a mechanism that responded to your touch like a living being? Well, designer Fabian Hemmert has created such a phone—albeit in early prototype form.

During his presentation from TEDxBerlin, Hemmert demonstrates how simple mechanical functions could add a level of tangibility that’s completely missing from the phones of today. Imagine a moving icon that has a shifting yet subconscious weight in your hand, or an eBook that shrinks thinner as you have less pages remaining.

Hemmert’s demos are unwieldy, for sure, and I’m not so sure these technologies could be readily miniaturized. But I’d certainly love to watch as someone tried. [information aesthetics via Engadget]

Your “friend” who brought you those “special” ramen packets straight from Japan? He’s not your friend. That’s Soap Ramen and Sponge Cup Noodles Ramen by Takara Tomy—out this month overseas for an unknown price. [TakaraTomy via AkihabaraNews]

While Apple released the iPad this week, we scored their internal work order admitting the iMac’s yellow screen problem, and one of our readers may have figured out how to fix it.

Can You Safely Buy a New iMac Yet?

Nope.

Why?

In the last week, ten readers have reported receiving yellow screened iMacs—the majority of whom are on their third system. Both the yellow/flickering screens have yet to be fixed.

What’s Being Done?

We’ve seen two very interesting developments since the last iMac update. First, Apple delayed shipments on new 27-inch iMacs (but not 21-inch models) for three weeks in what we can only assume is an attempt to fix any manufacturing/shipping issues. Meanwhile, they’re addressing the flickering problem, again, with a second patch that’s coincidentally arriving in “roughly three weeks” itself.

The Leak!

Here’s Apple’s internal guide on the jaundiced screen problem. Obviously, they’ve noticed customer complaints, no matter what customer service might tell you.
(click to enlarge)

The main points you should take away from this memo are that Apple knows about the problem but wants you to ignore it, they’re choosing to replace screen components rather than complete iMacs (bad news for those of you who rightly desire a purely new product off the line), and again, Apple seems to be arranging a fix in 3 weeks time that I’m guessing correlates with the main 27-inch iMac delay. Oddly enough, Apple makes no mention of 21-inch systems having yellow screens, even though problems have been reported (albeit not as often).

What Could Be Wrong?

The same reader who tested the color temperatures of his yellow iMac display last week—and coincidentally fixed his jaundiced iMac without knowing how he did it—thinks he may have figured out the issue:

I now am fairly certain that the yellowing of the display is a manufacturing defect involving the distance between a layer of material used to diffuse the LED backlight and the LCD panel. To show a perfectly even color, this light scattering panel has to be absolutely flat and free of any warping, kinking, or thickness defects. It is this layer that I believe is at fault, and causes the color to drift and give the perception of yellow stripes, fields, and corners.

This would be absolutely consistent with the reports of horizontal and vertical stripes (a vertical or horizontal kink) or corners (a bad tuck). I believe these defects may not appear in the factory. Rather, with the rough handling the monitors receive when shipped this layer gets knocked out of alignment.

I don’t know what Apple could do to solve this problem, other than a wholesale change of manufacturer for the panels, or a complete redesign of the panels themselves to better pin the diffusion layer.

It also explains why my careful assembly and dis-assembly resulted in the yellowing disappearing. By being cautious, I basically returned the monitors to the original factory state of perfect alignment.

If anyone wants to test this theory on their own machine, let us know how it went at [email protected]. Just use caution, as I’ve heard cracking your case this deep may void your warranty.

Quote of the Week, Apple Apologist Edition

“Running a business is difficult.”

How Can you Test Your Machine?

A flickering screen will be immediately obvious. As for issues where the bottom half of the screen looks a bit yellow, you can confirm those suspicions here.

Keep those updates coming to [email protected]. I urge you all to tweet this story to get the word out. The louder everyone complains, the less iMacs Apple will sell and the more likely this saga will have a happy reasonable ending.

And maybe, just maybe, Apple will choose to test their new products on someone other than their customers next time.

Just a quick note if you missed our live updates—our iPad hands on now has video. Check it out here.

It’s substantial but surprisingly light. Easy to grip. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it’s fasssstttt.

Apple didn’t really sell this point, but it’s the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you’d hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.

Build
Imagine, if you will, a super light unibody MacBook Pro that’s smaller, thinner and way, way, way lighter. Or, from a slightly different perspective, think about a bigger iPhone that’s been built with unibody construction. The iPad really does feel like some amalgamation of these two product lines from Apple. And, in the hands, it feels great—not too heavy at all.

The screen looked nice, and it’s able to display even small text crisply. Touch responds like a dream.

But one point of the build seems odd. It’s the Home button. In portrait mode, hitting the Home button is far less natural than on an iPhone because your thumbs naturally rest in the middle of each side of the case (not the bottom). A Kindle-like side Home button may not have been a horrible idea, even if it broke up the stoic minimalism of the case a bit.

iBooks
It’s an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn’t seem to strains the eyes—but time will tell on that.

Keyboard
Typing in portrait is better than anticipated but still quite a stretch for our average-sized hands, which means that letters like F G and H will take a moderate conditioning for some. What about in landscape mode, sitting flat on the table? Well this is problematic too, as the iPad sort of wobbles. The back is not perfectly flat, meaning your typing surface is never perfectly flat, so the virtual keyboard becomes that much more difficult to use.

Pictures
Pinch, zoom, whatever—like we said, it’s fast—the photo app is faster than iPhoto performs on an aging Core2Duo laptop.

Apps
Apps can play in their native resolution, or be 2x uprezzed for the screen. How does it look? An ATV game we tried actually looked pretty good—limited more by its base polygon count than the scaling process itself. Bottom line: it’s about as elegant solution as Apple could have offered, even if that graphics won’t be razor sharp.

Browsing
Over Wi-Fi, Gizmodo loaded quickly. The 9.7-inch screen is an excellent size for reading the site. You can pinch zoom, but you won’t need to. Of course, on such a pretty web browsing experience, not having Flash makes the big, empty video boxes in the middle of a page is pretty disappointing. Put differently, the fatal flaw of Apple’s mobile browser has never been more apparent.

Google Maps on the iPad isn’t significantly different from Google Maps on the iPhone. But Street View? It’s huge. As is the Eiffel Tower.

So is reading a book on Apple’s iPad any better than a Kindle? Well, you have complete page flipping control. And that’s something.

Live at the keynote in San Francisco, Steve Jobs reveals the iPad.

For today’s tablet launch, I just wanted to remind you how Apple launches new products. The gadgets themselves are, eh, they’re OK, but the showmanship—that’s the magic.

Japan’s latest Xbox 360 ads follow the trials of 3-6-0, a salaryman for the Xbox Mission Department with the duty of scoring big name games. Watch the rest of the saga unfold at: [Kotaku]

This candy apple Sophie Madeleine limited edition LP is just oozing with style that no one can digitize. [Sophie Madeleine via boingboing]

Check your watch. Fist pump. Clap. Raise the roof. Release mosquitoes. Fist bop. Wave your lighter. Repeat as necessary. That’s the Bill Gates Boogie. [Guest of a Guest and CrunchGear]