CrunchGear

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• Japan’s $2 million rescue robot is a hummingbird
• iPhone rumors revisited
• Stolen XBox 360 reunited with its owner through the Internet
• Daily Crunch: Birdie Edition
• The color e-books are coming! The color e-books are coming!
• Patriot Box Office Media Player gets reviewed
• Rumor: Canon to put a “3D” model between 5D and 1D
• BMW Mini E sees huge mileage drop in cold weather
• Here’s how to pay too much for an SNES emulator
• “Rambler,” another dubious but perhaps useful socket modification
• Behold the Vespa stretch scooter
• PSA: Some OLED screens don’t suck under direct sunlight anymore
• Never buy an enclosure again: SATA to USB 3.0 adapter turns any HDD into an external
• TSA easing off new airline rules, JetBlue brings back live TV
• Quick Look: Sony VAIO X Series notebook
• LG to launch an Android handset on Sprint soon?
• Wi-Fi and OLED touchscreen-equipped Samsung CL80 P&S leaks out before CES
• Hollywood made $10 billion in 2009. In better news, only 5 billion years till the sun runs out of fuel!
• TenYears: Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade
• More video of the xpPhone released

Japan’s $2 million rescue robot is a hummingbird Posted: 29 Dec 2009 03:01 AM PST A Japanese researcher called Hiroshi Liu has developed a robotic hummingbird, which, just a real one, can flutter freely in mid-air by rapidly moving its wings (up to n impressive 30 times per second). Liu, who works for Chiba University just outside Tokyo, says his hummingbird is powered by a small motor and has four wings. It can be remote-controlled through infrared. The robo hummingbird can not only fly up and down but also in a figure of eight. Liu claims the little guy, who just weighs 2.6g, is more stable than a helicopter. It’s 10cm long, meaning it comes close to real hummingbirds in size and weight. According to his inventor, building micro robots is much harder than building large robots and requires specific knowledge not all robot makers have. R&D costs stand at about $2 million so far, but those costs are likely to rise. By 2011, Liu plans to equip the robot with a micro camera. The main purpose of the hummingbird is to one day use it to rescue people in emergency situations (when a building has collapsed, for example) or to hunt down criminals. Via Engadget and Der Spiegel [GER] http://www.chiba-u.ac.jp/e/

iPhone rumors revisited Posted: 29 Dec 2009 03:00 AM PST Good old Harry McCracken has build up another one of his exhaustive topical examinations, this time turning his bespectacled gaze towards the iPhone. Like the iSlate or the iTablet or the iNinjaStar, analysts, journos, and bloggers frothed at the mouth for years before the product was announced. Take Kevin Rose’s exciting prediction, straight from “sources:” * January launch on "all" providers, both CDMA and GSM * Extremely small form factor * Two battery design (with single charger) — one for playing music, the other for phone functions * Flash memory: 4GB for $249, 8GB for $449 * "Slide-out keyboard" * Possibly touchscreen Generally, what you’re seeing here are a million monkeys at a million typewriters. They eventually get some things right but they mostly get things wrong. Harry rolls into page three of his analysis with an with a few pertinent points to ponder when thinking about iPhone rumors. To wit: They rehashed a gumbo of "facts" from multiple sources. The stuff that might actually have been leaked by insiders in the know got indiscriminately blended with iffy guesswork and bizarre fantasy, until it was tough to tell the difference. For instance, several stories about the iPhone rightly talked about it having a touchscreen, but nobody figured out that this was (A) true, and (B) one of the phone's defining features. This rehashed gumbo of facts is what’s currently clouding our thinking on the iTablet and creating a mess of conjecture and prediction that, in the end, will be wrong. But darn it if we don’t keep right on fantasizing.

Stolen XBox 360 reunited with its owner through the Internet Posted: 29 Dec 2009 01:38 AM PST A young man named Jeremy Gillian stole another young man’s XBox 360 in a robbery and then turned it on… with the network and Gamertag intact. The results are as you’d expect: the victim was able to grab the IP, police tracked it to Gillian’s grandmother’s house, and the XBox and a trove of other stolen stuff were discovered. Now this story comes to us from the NY Post, not one of the most tech savvy newspapers in our fair city. Also the thought that NYC detectives would “work with Microsoft” to track a stolen XBox is a bit hard to accept at face value, but apparently the story happened so kudos to Pelham Detective John Hynes and Microsoft for working together on this. At least a detective had a bit of fun learning about IP scanning. We should also totes send the detective a new XBox. Anyone live in Pelham, Bronx?

Daily Crunch: Birdie Edition Posted: 29 Dec 2009 12:00 AM PST Man-powered wooden digital clock (but is it art?) Japan gets another set of those "Crazy Earphones" Golf Ball Launcher replaces golf clubs, skill Thanko sells USB-powered "Hot Cat Gloves" "Rambler," another dubious but perhaps useful socket modification

The color e-books are coming! The color e-books are coming! Posted: 28 Dec 2009 11:00 PM PST More competition is the color E-book market can only be a good thing. The Nook is just sort of in color, the Kindle is the 800 pound gorilla, and no one knows what exactly Apple’s got planned. Now there’s this new guy Paradigm Shift, talking about launching a full-color e-book reader at CES. Bet they wish they’d come to market before the holidays. Only thing is, I’m not 100% sure this is an e-book reader. It looks more like a tablet to me – it runs Windows CE, it’s available in 5 and 7 inch screens, and has built in wifi. Windows CE has had ebook readers for years, I first got started using a HP Ipaq as an ebook reader many years ago. Now the $150 price sounds tasty, and the built in 2GB of ram will definitely do the job. I dunno. Windows CE is so quaint. I’d rather hear that they have a custom OS or are running some Linux thing then Windows CE. MSRP will start at $150 for the 5-inch model, and expect the price to be significantly higher for the 7-inch. Retailers that want it should have the device sometime in late February.

Patriot Box Office Media Player gets reviewed Posted: 28 Dec 2009 10:00 PM PST I’m afraid it’s time for me to upgrade my media center. My old Xbox just isn’t cutting it any more, between the composite input and the lack of processing power, it looks like it may be time to put the old reliable out to pasture and upgrade to something new. Is the Patriot Box Office Media Player the solution? Well HardOCP seems to think so, and I think it just might be. The Box Office supports pretty much everything, costs $99 after rebate and works at up to 1080p. The only thing that HardOCP didn’t like about it (and the thing that I don’t care for) is the interface. I’d love to see XBMC on this thing since the screenshots of the stock interface looks pretty bland.

Rumor: Canon to put a “3D” model between 5D and 1D Posted: 28 Dec 2009 06:30 PM PST Before we actually discuss the rumor, let me just say that having a product called 3D is misleading when it’s not actually 3D in any way but that it exists in a three-dimensional space. Really. People these days hear “3D” and they don’t think “Hmm, like the 5D?” — no, they think “OMG Avatar!” So keep that in mind, Canon. But as for the rumor itself, it’s actually kind of interesting. Apparently the 3D will be aimed at wedding photographers (!) and will incorporate new sensor technology to increase dynamic range and high-ISO clarity. The specs are listed over at Canon Rumors as: 16.7mp FF 7.2 µm pixel pitch DIGIC V Small magnesium alloy body similar to the 5D2 I’m not entirely convinced, but it might be cool. There’s probably room in Canon’s lineup, and a low-noise camera that isn’t full frame might be a big seller among the portrait/wedding crowd. Nikon has the high-ISO crowd wowed right now with the 3Ds, if I’m not mistaken. If it’s going to be announced, it’ll be at Photokina in September. That leaves plenty of time for further rumor-mongering.

BMW Mini E sees huge mileage drop in cold weather Posted: 28 Dec 2009 06:00 PM PST Remember that time you left your phone in the car on a cold night when you went to dinner, and when you got back to it, the battery was nearly dead because it had gotten so cold? Yeah, that would be happening a lot if you had an electric car that didn’t take temperature into account. And so the testers of BMW Mini Es are finding out in cold weather: range seems to be reduced by half in 23° temperatures. The Volt, as Matt discovered, has a battery heater to keep the electrical system at a decent temperature. Seems an elementary feature to include in an electric car, and maybe these tests will convince BMW that it’s necessary. On the other hand, we may be looking at a bit of a delay before all-electric cars are truly practical for the average family, seeing as if you can’t rely on it to get to work and back on some days of the year, there’s not much reason to buy one.

Here’s how to pay too much for an SNES emulator Posted: 28 Dec 2009 05:00 PM PST So, you want to play some Super Nintendo games. You’ve got some ROMs, but you don’t want to play it on one of the many devices already out there. No, you want to drop some serious cash on a homemade version of a portable player. Well, this guy has got your back. Or at least your wallet. To me, it is totally worth it to buy the emulator for your phone. But if you’d really rather have a custom-made portable SNES, then hit up this guy’s ebay auction. I think I’ll be passing though. I understand that the guy wants to paid for his work, but a starting bid of $550? The build quality just isn’t to command that type of price. I’ve seen some really elegant mods, and retrospectator9, you are no Ben Heck. [Via Technabob]

“Rambler,” another dubious but perhaps useful socket modification Posted: 28 Dec 2009 04:30 PM PST The common wall socket is, despite what you may think, a very well-engineered piece of work. There’s no way to put plugs in wrong, there are no moving parts, it’s difficult to electrocute yourself, and they put through plenty of juice as well as grounding your device. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, but people seem set on fixing it anyway. The pull-out looked good, but the Node was a disaster waiting to happen. This “Rambler” modification adds a length of extension cord to a removable wall outlet, but I’m skeptical of its compatibility with existing wiring spaces. That big spool of heavy gauge cord must take up about the space of a pop can. Also, those little clips that hold the plug in look breakable, and the spooling will probably end up uneven and weird after a few ins and outs. Still, perhaps an industrial application is more suitable. If one doesn’t have to take children, pet rabbits, and thin walls into account, it might be a really handy addition to a workshop. [via Dvice and Freshome]

Behold the Vespa stretch scooter Posted: 28 Dec 2009 04:00 PM PST File this one under “why?”. Vespa South Africa has launched a stretch scooter. Apparently, it’ll allow you to roll with three other people on a scooter. Or one prawn. No word on price, which is probably good considering it doesn’t look exactly safe. Not only that, but it’s a one-off build that’ll be used as a marketing tool for Vespa South Africa. [Via UberGizmo]

PSA: Some OLED screens don’t suck under direct sunlight anymore Posted: 28 Dec 2009 03:24 PM PST I loves me some AMOLED screens. They're easier on the battery, easier on the eyes, and the colors tend to be so damned strong that they just about jump off the screen and punch you in the face. I mean, what's not to love? Oh, that's right - they tend to fail miserably as soon as you step outside. Mix one part direct sunlight with one part AMOLED screen, and you'll find yourself with a completely illegible screen. At least, that used to be the case.. We're not quite sure why they didn't play this up with deafening fanfare, but it seems like Samsung has stealthily solved the direct sunlight dilemma.

Never buy an enclosure again: SATA to USB 3.0 adapter turns any HDD into an external Posted: 28 Dec 2009 03:00 PM PST Now here is something I may just order right now. This straightforward adapter from Unitek will turn any hard drive with standard SATA and power connections into an external drive with no frills and no gimmicks. Plug in the one side, plug in the other, and boom, it’s there on your desktop. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a few raw hard drives laying around and the idea of them constantly spinning and heating up in my case doesn’t excite me. I mean, of course it doesn’t excite me, but it… let’s move on. This is handy for people who need lots of storage but don’t need to move or access it much. Backup for HD video, for instance — my friend, who shoots on a RED, needs tons of space to archive raw files, but likely will only access them once or twice the next year. So you buy some bulk 1TB OEM drives, load ‘em up, label with a Sharpie, and you’re laughing. And the sweetest thing is that it supports USB 3.0. Not many of us are actually rocking that right now, but you better believe my next rig is going to. So this little doodad, which at $48 admittedly seems a bit expensive for a mere adapter, will last you for years. Don’t forget that SSDs use SATA as well. Pick yours up at Brando.

TSA easing off new airline rules, JetBlue brings back live TV Posted: 28 Dec 2009 02:30 PM PST It seems that the TSA is slowly backing down rules that were implemented after the foiled Christmas Day bombing. According to a Reuters report flight crews will now be a sort of Judge Dread enforcer. It will be up to the pilot and crew to determine if passengers need to stay seated or if they can have items in their lap. In-flight entertainment that shows the plane’s relative location will also be under their jurisdiction. With this much power in their hands, you better be good for the sake of everyone else on board. A simple request for a glass of OJ might result in everyone having to put their heads down for the rest of the flight. The TSA declined to comment on the Reuter’s story, but a JetBlue tweet seems to confirm it. [via Business Insider] But Joel Johnson might be on to something here. The real solution is probably just to fire the TSA.

Quick Look: Sony VAIO X Series notebook Posted: 28 Dec 2009 02:00 PM PST The 1.5-pound, half-inch thick Sony VAIO X Series notebook is easily one of the most impressive portable computers I've seen in quite some time. I can't convey how light it is. It seems to defy logic. My brain doesn't understand that it's seeing my hand hold up an 11.1-inch notebook that weighs less than half of what most other notebooks its size weigh. It's not a super powerful computer. No sir. But Sony's managed to stuff a nimble 2GHz Atom CPU (Z550) under the carbon fiber hood. It's not cheap either, starting at $1299. If you can mentally get past the whole $1300 netbook thing, you get a nice array of features – solid state drive, GPS, Bluetooth, Verizon 3G, Wi-Fi, 2GB of RAM, standard 3-hour battery and an unbelievably lengthy 12+ hour battery that doesn't seem to add much weight at all. Perhaps best of all is that unless you’re doing some relatively aggressive multitasking, using this computer doesn’t feel much like using a netbook at all. The screen is an 11.1-inch LED backlit affair at 1366×768, there's a tiny but relatively functional island keyboard, multitouch trackpad (it's too small to effectively use the multitouch features), webcam, Windows 7 Home Premium, Ethernet, memory card reader, VGA out, and two USB ports. And again, it's unbelievably light. I'll be putting the machine through its paces and will have a full review up shortly. X Series [SonyStyle.com]

LG to launch an Android handset on Sprint soon? Posted: 28 Dec 2009 01:27 PM PST Looks like one more Android-phone wanted to sneak onto the radar before 2009 was over, though we're probably not going to hear much more about it until CES next week.

Wi-Fi and OLED touchscreen-equipped Samsung CL80 P&S leaks out before CES Posted: 28 Dec 2009 01:00 PM PST It looks like Samsung has at least two CES-bound cameras. We already saw product shots of the NX-10 and now here’s pics of the pocketable CL80. Depending on its MSRP it might be a hot cam, too. It seems nearly everything has leaked out about the CL80. We know it comes packing Wi-Fi, which can be used to upload pics to Flickr, Facebook, Photobox and Picasa directly, and the entire backside is a 3.7-inch AMOLED touchscreen. A 14MP sensor is behind a 7x wide angle zoom lens and of course it can shoot 720p video. Now all we need is to see some sample pics and shots of the touchscreen interface to pass judgement. But so far, so good. Only one week and a couple of days until CES, anyway. [DPReview forums via electronista]

Hollywood made $10 billion in 2009. In better news, only 5 billion years till the sun runs out of fuel! Posted: 28 Dec 2009 12:30 PM PST On the face of it, today’s story that 2009 was Hollywood’s best ever (so thanks for rewarding creativity, America), raking in some $10 billion, should be good news for a few people. It should be good news for the movie studios, which will now invest that money in yachts, caviar, human growth hormone, and sequels to today’s sequels. It should be good news for theatre owners, who were concerned that people would stop going to the movies as a result of the recession. Not so! (As if they didn’t have a precedent to cite…) It should be good news, in a weird way, to people who pirate movies and bleat that their doing so isn’t harming the industry one bit. What I’m wondering is, do these figures take inflation into account? Should they? I remember when AC Milan transferred Kaka to Real Madrid last summer Sky Sports, which is UK-based, was all, “This is a world-record transfer fee!” (The fee agreed upon between AC Milan and Real Madrid was 67.2 million euros.) The thing is, Sky Sports converted that currency amount, 67.2 million euros, into pounds sterling, which worked out to 68.5 million pounds. A few years prior, in 2001, however, Zidane went from Juventus to Real Madrid for 78 million euros, which, went at the time was converted to pounds was less than 68.5 million pounds. Basically, between 2001 and 2009 the pound sterling had lost valued compared to the euro, so when you converted the 2009 transfer fee into pounds it looked bigger than it actually was. Then you have to take into account the relative inflation of both currencies between 2001 and 2009. Back to my point: is $10 billion in 2009 dollars really anything to get excited about? I mean it obviously is, here and now, but when we’re talking records these things really ought to be clarified. If something cost $10 in 1940, for example, it’d cost $15.07 in 2009. See what I mean? Oh, who cares. Hollywood made a bunch of money this year. Hooray and so forth. Let’s drink wine. Time to write my screenplay about a college chemistry professor who bilks the government out of tax revenue by claiming liquor store purchases as “chemicals” for his classroom, and thus a write-off.

TenYears: Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade Posted: 28 Dec 2009 12:05 PM PST It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present the first installment of our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: The Trek Thumbdrive In 2000, something strange happened. Overnight, we changed the way we carried data. Those of us coming up in the 1990s first used floppy disks then CDs and then Zip drives and generally the transfer of large amounts of data was a Sisyphean task. I personally still remember sending our entire university newspaper paper to the printers on a Zip disk. That year marked the launch of the Trek ThumbDrive, the world’s first usable USB storage device. You could slip it into a computer, drag over a few files, and pop it back out. You could drop it into a bag or pocket and it was cheap enough to lose – at least in theory. Thumbdrives would max out at about 256MB in 2000, but that soon changed. Now we can carry 32GB in our pockets – more than the entire computer system running that selfsame student newspaper back in 1997. If you’re asking why this made our gadget of the decade, think about it: the same flash technology in these drives is now ubiquitous. We have MicroSD cards the size of a fingernail. We have MP3 players as thin as a few business cards. Flash memory is so popular that’s it’s become scarce, with manufacturers buying up huge stocks prior to launching new product. It has removed delicate moving parts from the design of almost all electronics. Few devices in our purview have changed the way we work, play, and communicate in the way flash memory and thumbdrives have. They made massive amounts of storage available and disposable. They, in a real sense, changed the world. Runners Up The Danger Sidekick Before 2002 you either had a feature phone – essentially a phone that you could make calls and maybe play some Java games – or a smartphone – a phone that could run applications. Danger introduced the T-Mobile Sidekick on October 1, 2002 and changed all that. The phone let you send email and instant message, all in a package far more accessible – feature-wise and price-wise – than any smartphone. It was, in a sense, the first mainstream smartphone for the masses and it became a longtime fan favorite for years. Even after some high-profile problems the Sidekick is still going strong. Gmail Free email was nothing new. Odd ways of organizing your email was nothing new. What was new was all of the storage space Google offered to the average Joe, forcing others to follow suit. Gone were the days of “premium” webmail accounts – you got 1GB. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it: With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. 2MB? What did we do before Google? Sony Reader Before the Kindle, before the Nook, the Sony Reader was the only ereader in town. It didn’t do much of note nor was it particularly popular, but it paved the way for competitors and it showed Sony that they’d have to step up their game if they wanted to even be on the field. They were the first movers but they didn’t get the advantage, an parable for any and all manufacturers out there with something amazingly new. Our take Matt: Let’s not forget the Harmony Remote either. Before these Internet-connected remotes came along, you would have to spend hours programming a universal remote with codes printed in size 4 font. The innovative little company was eventually bought out by Logitech, but thankfully not much as changed. Doug: I have to agree with the T-Mobile Sidekick here. I can’t remember the last time I had a bigger tech boner about a particular product. The thing that made it so unbelievable was that it wasn’t priced outrageously at the time. If memory serves, the hardware was $250 and my monthly service was $30 for voice and $20 for unlimited data. I did a lot of web development back then and I still remember the first time I used my Sidekick to add a new user to one of my client’s e-mail systems while waiting for my luggage halfway across the country. Unreal. And never, ever, ever have regular people ogled a phone as much as they did the first Sidekick. There was nothing like it — that swiveling screen, especially. Devin: I just want to throw my weight behind Gmail and cloud apps here. I may not even use them, but I see them as being fuel for the next generation of computing. Flash memory has for sure enabled a huge amount of devices in the last decade, but cloud apps will power the next decade. Greg: As the resident mobile nut, it’s only appropriate for me to consider something from the mobile space to be the most innovative. I could cheat and default to the iPhone purely for the sake of stoking a flamewar in the comments below, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll go with SMS – otherwise known as text messaging; while technically a product of the 80s, SMS truly came to fruition in the naughts. In the past 9 years, we’ve gone from sending less than half a billion texts a year to over 80 billion – and that’s in the US alone. It paved the way for Facebook updates, tweets, and microblogs, killed the long form letter, and has completely overhauled how we, as a populace, communicate. Nicholas: I sincerely believe the word “innovative” has lost all meaning and should be eliminated from the English language. I have no time for it, and it seeing it instantly causes my renal glands to secrete exotic poisons. Call me when someone invents a simple water purifier that can treat water on the spot. That’d be helpful. Oh, and innovative.

More video of the xpPhone released Posted: 28 Dec 2009 11:48 AM PST After the xpPhone was announced back in May, word of its development went surprisingly quiet - enough so, in fact, that I'd been convinced the project had gone the way of Duke Nukem Forever. With this recent media dump, however, the xpPhone is looking more real than ever. ITG released a handful of prototype images just weeks ago, and followed it up shortly thereafter with a video of the Windows XP-powered handset booting up. This latest video goes on to show a bit of what the phone can actually do -- that is, make phone calls in Windows XP.

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