Here’s you chance to try out the most over-hyped, most expensive and most delayed games console in the history of the universe.
UK gamers might have to wait to longer than the rest of the world to be given a chance to spend over £400 on the PS3 but, if you want to try one out first, get yourself over to the Best of Stuff and What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision Show November 3-5. According to the organisers, you’ll have a chance to:
“Try the new Sony PS3 at the show, before anyone else!”
Hmm? True, but only if you discount the hundreds of other rabid gamers that will be climbing over the backs of fallen children and old age pensioners to get to it. You have less than three weeks to prepare soldier so, now is the time to sort out your armour, your sleeping bag and your strategy for success. Details here.-Martin Lynch
I love old phones. They were reassuringly big and solid and had that wonderful ‘BRNNG-BRNNG’ ring.
They were also solid enough to withstand hitting your annoying younger brother with whenever he tried to interrupt vital six-hours calls to your class sweetheart, who lived just four doors away. I’d say these are well overdue a comeback and for £60, you get a communications classic back in your life.
Made from the original case mouldings of the phones BT built in the 1970s, the Retro Telephones are reborn. Of course, they sport modern socketry but also come with the fantastic ‘click and whirr’ dialing action and the ring tone is the hollow bell one – not digital either.
Available to pre-order now, they'll be shipping in two weeks in Pillar Box Red, Ivory and Black. – Martin Lynch
Online game Second Life is fast becoming THE place to promote your goods and services.
In a bizarre twist, real companies are entering virtual worlds to launch real-world products. Yes, it is that weird but that doesn’t make it totally stupid either. Sun launched its Sun Pavilion within the Second Life world and managed to attract 50 hacks to the event where it discussed future plans and virtual environments, in general.
Attendees can walk around the pavilion, which has an outdoor theater, meeting spaces and kiosks that show videos about recent Sun technologies and projects underway. Sun is not the first though, with the BBC buying a virtual island within the world last year.-Martin Lynch
The two giant stars plan to unveil a 4GB red iPod Nano in order to benefit the Product RED charity. From each sale of the £100 iPod, £5 will be donated towards The Global Fund to help out HIV/AIDS sufferers in Africa. Rumors of a red iPod have been around since January of this year, but we're certain that Oprah used her cosmic powers to get this deal done.
We also heard the red iPod nano is making an appearance at the 5th Ave. Apple Store. If any readers wander down there, email us some photos of the iPod and we'll hit you up with a personalized email with your name in it and a "thank you". If we're feeling generous, we'll even attach our signature.
Oh and by the way, the reason Gizmodo was red yesterday wasn't because we were helping The Global Fund. We just sold out to Radio Shack for a day. Go us! – Jason Chen
Made for cramped spaces like cars and NY apartments, the Dyson Root 6 takes Dyson's special sucking power and transfers it to a handheld. Despite looking like something out of Ghostbusters, the Root 6 maintains suction like all other Dysons, and has a "one-touch emptying" system so you don't have to get your hands (very) dirty.
It's relatively cheap for a Dyson at £75.00, meaning we're definitely picking one to clean up the mess our kids make in our precious car when the Root 6 is available October 23. – Jason Chen
Contrary to our update that said the Wii does not have a sunlight problem, a company rep just said that the sensor bar in fact does have interference issues.
Nintendo told Kikizo today that this is a known issue with the Wii. A company representative explained that the Wii sensor bar is affected by head-on exposure to sunlight, which could cause "some interference". But he likened it to not being able to see a TV with the sun shining straight on it.
So yes, you're going to have problems in direct head-on (apply directly to your Wii) exposure to sunlight, but that will probably be rare unless you can't find a way to close your blinds at certain times of day. – Jason Chen
If you enjoyed Dr. Ashen's review of a piece of shite MP4 player, you'll definitely love what he's done with a green laser pointer. Oh yes, we're proud to announce that Dr. Ashen and Gizmodo have joined forces to provide you, dear reader, with an intercontinental review of humorous objects Ashen has lying around his house.
As expected, Palm has just announced the low-end Treo 680 for GSM markets sold unlocked in four colors: crimson, copper, arctic and graphite. In non-marketing speak, that's red, orange, white and silver. Each of these phones come with a 320x320 color screen, 64MB of internal storage, 312MHz Intel PXA270 processor, quad-band GSM, EDGE class 10, speakerphone, VGA camera, 352x288 video recording, and a full QWERTY keypad. Software includes an MP3 player, threaded IM software, and various other PalmOS compatible apps.
No pricing or availability yet, but since it's GSM, that rules out Verizon and Sprint. As always, we'll update as we know more. Here's all our Treo coverage to get familiar with the platform.
If you've seen that classic movie A Christmas Story, this 4-inch nightlight will mean one thing, but if you haven't, it will probably mean something entirely different. Either way, it's good for a laugh or two, or maybe even a boner if you're easily impressed. Remember, those (dreaded/cherished, insert one or both here) holidays are just around the corner. – Charlie White
Addonics aims to make swapping hard drives as easy as changing floppy disks with its Snap-in SATA Mobile Rack. Mounted in a 5.25" drive bay, it lets you hot-swap any 3.5-inch SATA hard drive. The rack itself is £15.00, buy a bunch of drives and you'll be on your way to having unlimited storage.
Sure, we've seen hot-swappable devices before, but this is a good way to get the speed of SATA in a hot-swappable form factor for a low price. It's as easy as USB with no pesky rebooting required. – Charlie White
If you're looking for the fanciest range hood of all time, the Zephyr Elica OM Glass Hood might fit the bill. The 31.5-inch vent hood is available in black, red or white and has electronic touchscreen controls right on the glass. Its remote control sits on any flat surface, and rotating it controls the fan speed. Tap down on its top and you can control the lighting in the vent hood.
We're liking the colorful and space-saving near-vertical on-the-wall style of these range hoods. Our favorite feature is the innovative RF remote with its gestural controls. That's an idea that might be used elsewhere. But if you want this range hood, it's not going to be cheap. Brace yourself, it's £2000. – Charlie White
Robots are gonna rule the world one day. If they're not cooking for us, then they're out chopping weeds in a field somewhere. A group of engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently developed a solar-powered, weed-chopping robot. The high-tech killer, which uses GPS for navigation, stands a little over 2-feet tall and 5-feet wide. Once it spots a weed, it'll chop it off, spritz the remainders with some weed-killing juice, and move on to the next target. The robot's got two small cameras and uses an onboard Windows computer complete with an 80GB drive and a wireless Internet connection. Sadly, it sounds more powerful than our current laptop. –Louis Ramirez
Sony's SRS-BTM30 Bluetooth Speakers look like a pair of binoculars with the caps on, but don't tell our beloved Commander-In-Chief. The two 48mm speakers inside are amplified with 3 watts of power for each one, and can play back 30-foot-distant sounds from any device supporting the Bluetooth A2DP profile. It'll also connect with players using a mini stereo plug.
They're a bit bigger than binoculars at 11 inches wide, but tell the prez they're secret terrorist-spotting field glasses and he'll probably want to take a peek. Available later this month in Japan, they'll be £60. – Charlie White
This is Microsoft's first commercial for the HD DVD player that is slated for a release later this year for £100. Kind of cool, kind of cheesy—you be the judge. – Travis Hudson
Dell has announced this lower-end 20-inch widescreen LCD display, the e207wfp. It has a 1680 x 1050 resolution with a DVI input. It also has a 5ms response time and a price tag of £150. Three hundos for a 20-inch wide monitor, hot diggity damn! It should be available immediately—it's not on the Dell site currently, but keep your eyes out, it will be there soon. – Travis Hudson
Sharp is improving its in-vehicle LCDs, now touting what it calls an industry-high 1500:1 contrast ratio in its latest screen destined for dashboards. The 8-inch widescreen 800x480 panel has triple the contrast of in-vehicle LCDs previously released by Sharp.
This is the next step toward the era where instrument displays in cars will resemble those of aircraft. It's high time, too. Imagine having a backup camera/rear-view monitor, GPS navigation, speedometer and other gauges, all displayed on configurable high-contrast video panels across the dashboard. Then spread a few across the seatbacks so those back seat drivers will stfu and enjoy total multimedia and carputing.
What took so long? These objects may be closer than they appear. – Charlie White
According to our ever so sexy counterparts, Kotaku, both versions of the Japanese PS3 will not be bundled with HDMI cables. Rather they will have the bare essential cables bundled. Those cables being a power cable, USB cable, Ethernet cable and composite cables. No, not component, just a single, little yellow composite cable for the revolutionary PS3 out-of-the-box graphics. – Travis Hudson
There are people out there still using pencils, and this is the perfect pencil sharpener for them. Stab the robot in it's big, oily, mechanical heart, twist and not only will you get your pencil sharpened, it will also wind up the robot and he will walk a few steps. It's pretty cheap, too—own your very own pencil eating robot for £5. – Travis Hudson
Our old pals at CrunchGear got their hands on a trio of Zune players yesterday, coming back with some cool close-ups and a Ken Burns-style video, too. No user interface shots yet, though—we're told that's still under wraps 'cause it's a work in progress. For that, we'll have to wait until November 14 when we plunk down our £125 clams.
If reader interest is any indication, the buzz level of the Zune is up into the stratosphere, that heady place where only the iPod has gone before. On a scale of one to 10, it registers an 11 on our HypeModo Meter. – Charlie White
More photos and the ultra-revealing video, after the jump.
At the same time it launched its latest Walkman S Series, Sony also rolled out three Sony NetJuke systems, giving you a place to plug in/charge your Sony digital audio player, store tons of audio files, play CDs and MDs (MiniDisc), and also transfer their content to the Walkman players. The M90HD has a 250GB hard disc, CD and MD, while the NAS-D50HD has an 80-gig hard disk, CD and MD.
Notice Sony is still pushing its hoary old MiniDisc format (did you realize it was first introduced in 1992?), apparently for those who have already been suckered into buying content on that proprietary format. Anyway, these are some attractive designs; might be popular in Japan. – Charlie White
Close-up pictures of the two other models, after the jump.
This can't be good news for those of us who fantasize about driving the Skycar, flying over traffic and thumbing our noses at the rest of the world as we jet along at 500 mph. Alas, the Moller M400X Skycar Prototype is for sale on eBay, its owners saying they're trying to raise capital for the company. Although the reserve has not yet been met, the current bid is $1.7764 million.
Sure, this Skycar hovered a couple of times in tests, but it looks pretty shaky. You know something's fishy when the sellers are touting it as a "fantastic piece of aviation history." We're about as skeptical as Mike Elegan at Personal Tech Pipeline, worried that today's shitty drivers might be tomorrow's flying car pilots. Flying cars? When pigs fly. – Charlie White
Jump for the video of the flying car tentatively hovering, and look carefully for a little secret.
Japan's Scitec takes you back to the good ol' days when radio was the dominant mass communication medium with its TCU-311D retro-styled radio. Beyond simply letting you tune into the your favorite radio programs on the AM or FM dial, you can load up all those boy band CDs and LPs you've collected over the years. Better still, you can record any of the content onto memory cards of up to 1GB in size. So it's an old-looking radio that also doubles as an MP3 recording device. You'll be able to get your old timey hands on it (in Nippon) this November for around £90.
The radio certainly looks nice and if you're a big fan days-of-yore styling, strap on your hula hoop and get to it. – Nicholas Deleon
Sony unveiled its Walkman S Series flash memory-based digital audio players, with the headliner being the NW-S700 series available in 1GB, 2GB and 4GB trim. The line of DAPs play back pretty much any kind of digital audio including MP3, Sony's ATRAC formats, Linear PCM and AAC/WMA, and can also record PCM and ATRAC audio. Trying to do what Apple hasn't, the company also crammed an FM tuner in there. The 4GB NW-S706F will be available in a couple of weeks for around £120, pick up the cheapest 1GB NW-S603 without the FM tuner and noise cancellation for around £70 on November 18.
Sony's pushing hard on the S Series noise-canceling earphones with a built-in microphone, claiming a 25% reduction in ambient noise, but you can reduce noise by that amount just by sticking your fingers in your ears—same thing as putting on a pair of earphones. Anyway, these are nice-looking players, but the proof of the player is in the listening thereof; we'll see if they really are, as Sony claims, the company's best-sounding music players yet. – Charlie White
I love old phones. They were reassuringly big and solid and had that wonderful ‘BRNNG-BRNNG’ ring. 
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Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
