As if owning a Motorola KRZR doesn't already make you a tool, why not outfit it with enough diamonds to make the regent of Siam jealous? That's exactly what Peter Aloisson did when he created the KRZR White, KRZR Leopard and KRZR Roma, the last one being a nod to his love for all things Francesco Totti-related. The price for these little wonders varies on the number and purity of diamonds used; Aloisson's other such luxury cellphones went for $1.3 million. Time to crack open the piggy bank or be content with your buy-one-get-one-free Verizon cellphone. Jump over the cliff for a few more pics.
Air guitarists of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your self-respect.
My name is Martin and I am an air guitarist. There, I admit it. I feel better. But I am not alone because inside every man – and woman, to a lesser extent – is a guitar axe monster trying to get out. All we need is to be alone. Or drunk.
Aussie scientist Dr Richard Helmer has taken things a step further with the Air guitar T-Shirt, which actually translates certain air-moves into real guitar.
Officially called the ‘wearable instrument shirt’ it’s been invented by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, as a way of getting non-traditional data into a computer. Air guitar certainly qualifies here then.
The t-shirt is made of special textiles and has sensors in different spots. Bending one arm decides the chord while the other does the strumming. Watch two cool short videos of it in action, here and here.
Apparently there’s a version for air tambourine but I can’t really see that taking off too fast, can you?-Martin Lynch
After two days of playing with the SIXAXIS, have we reversed our previous thoughts of how good it is? Yes, I think we have.
Previously, we thought the trigger buttons were too slippery and the controller too light. Now that we've gotten a lot more play-time with it, the SIXAXIS feels just like a DUALSHOCK. The R2 and L2 shoulder buttons are pretty squishy (that's good), and as long as you press it down in the middle of the pad, there's fairly little chance of slippage. The weight issue is negligible, and the lack of rumble was hardly missed. Since rumble was never a uniform thing throughout games, not having it doesn't really affect gameplay at all.
In the two games we tried, Genji and Resistance, the controls were tight and we didn't have any problems. – Jason Chen
Just like the Xbox 360 and PS3's wireless controllers, the Wiimote times out after a period of inactivity. We weren't really paying attention, but it's somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. After that you can just press the face button A to make the controller jump back to life and reconnect with the Wii. – Jason Chen
I'd forgotten to mention this interesting fact. Friday, when Jason and I took the retail PS3 out of its box and within a few seconds it was covered in dust.
I wiped some off with my hand, and lo and behold, it was scratched up to hell.
Eager to find out how the PS3 will play your old PS2 games? Here ya go. Here we take you on a tour of how the PS3 will make a new memory card, how the game loads up, and how you can reassign different SIXAXIS controllers to different "slots" on the virtual PS2.
Bonus: you'll even get a few seconds of the Final Fantasy XII title screen. – Jason Chen
We've had all weekend to look at the PS3, and we'll come away saying this: The extra time came in handy for figuring out the powerful machine's complicated menus. If you too want to start learning how to use the PS3 early, Sony's online manual is up. And they ingeniously built it in the exact format of the PS3's crossbar and it's completely hyperlinked.
So, if you click on over here, you can get some of the experience of owning a PS3, with £300 more in your pocket, without standing in line, and um, without the games. And for some actual video of the crossbar experience, we've got that too. –Brian Lam
from kotaku.com — The Wii is no multimedia device. That shouldn't come as a great surprise to anyone, but the lack of seemingly basic features is still a bit of a let down. Photo Channel: The heart of multimedia on the Wii is the Photo Channel. continue reading »
from kotaku.com — You will be happy to hear that both the Playstation 2 keyboard by Logitech and the PS2's EyeToy work on the Playstation 3. The keyboard, and I believe this is true of all USB keyboard, allows you to enter text in any text field and requires no set-up. continue reading »
Curious as to what the PS3's hard-to-read user interface looks like? You've come to the right place. Watch the video to see all the submenus (excluding media, that's coming later).
The new system update 1.10 lets us sign online to the PlayStation Network, but unfortunately the entirety of country selection consists of Japan. We'll try again in a few days. – Jason Chen
DoCoMo's i-mode phones are the only phones in the world that you can control T-Rex with.
This IR-enabled new toy, coming out in mid-November, includes a dinosaur-themed controller (that's the strap) with buttons shaped like fossilized tribolite and ammonite and a lifelike replica of T-rex. Almost lifelike. Except it's about 1/100 the size of the real thing. Or, if T-rex isn't your type, you can also get the Triceratops version. (My two cents? Get the T-rex over horn-head. He's sexier, taller, and he'd kick Tri-tip's ass any day.) –Lisa Katayama
How long is the PS3's charge cable compared to the Xbox 360's? Well, watch the video to find out. Ok, done?
As you can see, the PS3's cable is only five feet long, not nearly far enough for anyone to use while playing. It's only a "charge" cable—unless you want to sit up close and incur the wrath of mothers everywhere—as opposed to Xbox 360's "play and charge" cable. Just something to keep in mind.
Update: You could also theoretically plug the PS3 controller into a laptop, a powered USB hub or an Xbox 360 sitting next to you on the couch, but that's a kludge. – Jason Chen
The PS3's menu fonts are almost impossible to read from more than 6 feet away on a 37-inch LCD running at 1080p. Most 1080p displays are larger, and most people who can afford this console at £300 will have a large TV. But I think that most kids and lower end gamers who are traditional Playstation owners will have a hard time affording a bigger HDTV, yet will want to run in HD. Who wouldn't?
Either way, the fonts are too small.
BTW, I am not an eye doctor, and the comparison to the Snellen eye chart aren't literal or scientific measurements. It's a joke.
from kotaku.com — When I got the Wii yesterday, the last thing I wanted to do was play Wii Sports. I wanted to dig into the interface, check out pictures, the online service, Excite Truck and of course, most importantly The Legend of Zelda. continue reading »
Looks like even though we can't connect to the PS3 network to grab the update (locked down until launch), we can grab it from online and update it via removable memory. Some updates from the 1.00 version (which couldn't access the PlayStation Network) are added screensaver options, PlayStation Store access, and online manuals.
We're going to try and update and see if that fixes some problems like letting us get online. – Jason Chen
Here's a tip to save all you new PS3 owners more than a few minutes of confusion. Even if you go out and buy the HDMI cable (not included) to use on your PS3, you'll still have to use the composite AV cable to set up your console first. Make sure to set your video inputs on your TV to display the video source that the composite cables are plugged into when it boots.
After you get into the menus, you can go into system display settings and change the display to HDMI, then switch over to Video 8 (or whatever your TV is) to display 1080p/1080i/720p.
Update: It may just be our TV. We'll look into it some more. – Jason Chen
The Zune, which comes out next week, isn't the only WiFi media player out there, remember.
The Archos 604 is here today, andI think the Archos might be better by some measures. Simply said, the 4.3-inch touchscreen is perfect, and extremely fingerprint resistant. Photo thumbnails were small enough to fit a ton of photos on the screen, with a little bit of zoom once you cursor over individual files. Video playback is blur free, and visible in indirect daylight. It'll even record TV/Video with the optional PVR kit (£50 for something that looks like it amounts to a dongle and dock). The hardware is beautiful. And the WiFi is somewhat useful, thanks to the Opera browser that allows for scaling of images and text so that it looks like a mini sized version of the browser on your PC. Unlike Zune, you cannot share with other users adhoc (player to player.) But there is a nifty file sharing mode that PCs on your home network should be able to hit.
But it ain't perfect because...well, click through the jump to find out why, or hit up our galleries for 70+ photos that show just about every beautiful angle and screenshot we could find.
Even though Sony's said that they will replace dead SIXAXIS controllers once the battery life is gone—there's actually a note that the battery has a limited life-span in the manual—they also give you a method for removing the battery. All you have to do is unscrew 5 screws on the back of the controller, pull the casing up, and disconnect the connector to the battery. In the above picture, you can see the connector and the battery (that may be exchangeable without getting an entirely new controller).
Our guess is that Sony, or perhaps third party companies, will sell these batteries and you will be able to replace them yourself with 15 minutes and some screwing. – Jason Chen
We talked about how the getting the PS3 to play back media was a bit complicated last night, but here's a video of the photo browsing and viewing area of the PS3 interface. This is in the traditional slideshow view, and not in the photo album view (we'll post that later), but it shows that you can flip through and rotate pictures, which are really gorgeous if you're viewing them on 1080p.
To view the high def video, you'll probably have to install the DivX web playback software. We'll be posting some more high quality videos, so you should can go and get it now and be set for later. – Jason Chen
from kotaku.com — I'm not a video snob. When I first got my big-ass high-def television I really wasn't that impressed. The non HD signal looked like crap and the HD stuff looked OK, but it didn't make my eyes bleed. I guess I heard one too many people tell me that an HD picture looks 3D. continue reading »
A little cellphone charm that has a boxing ring bell on it. One button starts the round with a DING! The other button yells FIGHT. If only they made one with Street Fighter Sound FX... –Brian Lam
I'd mentioned that the PS3's 3D slideshow was wonderful. Here's a video clip of it in action...as soon as youtube gets its ass in gear. Go Web 2.0 monkey! –Brian Lam
So the PS3 will playback JPG photos, Sony's own music format, ATRAC, MP3, AAC, and MPEG-4.
By far the coolest thing is the 3D slideshow view for photos. You can zoom in and out, and it even makes little negative strips from your images. Hot.
But at first, we couldn't get it to read any media from SD or CF cards (didn't try the supported Memory Stick.) It didn't even recognize our USB thumbdrive. Things worked better when we dropped photos inside of folders called "music", "picture" and "video". Weird shit. That's like the PSP's annoying file structure. Tell me Sony, would it have been so hard to scan the entire flash for file extensions?
This is for version 1.0 of the software, and v1.1 is out, but the PS3 didn't let us update. (Maybe the download isn't working yet because the console isn't officially shipping.) –Brian Lam
For me, the jury is still out on video glasses but ICUITI continues to forge ahead.
Meet the AV230 video glasses, the newest addition since the iWear for iPod glasses in September. The difference? These are designed to play video from any source. Boasting a 44in image seen from 9ft and weighing just 4ozs, they are certainly lighter than strapping a 42in LCD panel to your forehead. Here are some of the key specs:
• Integrated rechargeable battery allows approximately 5 hours of continuous operation
• 60 Hz update rates
The glasses support content from portable DVD players, media players, gaming systems, digital cameras and camcorders. Shipping from December 1st, they will cost around £145 from here.
As expected the console resale frenzy has begun with hot of the shelf PS3s suddenly reappearing back on store shelves with an extra zero on the price tag. The high-end version sold for an average of around £300 over there at the weekend - a lot cheaper than it will be over here – but images from this store below (via Kotaku) show that they are already being flogged for as much as £645.
I know of lot of people will be moaning about this and the whole scandalous nature of making a killing on a much-hyped and undersupplied console but look at this way. What we have is a few people who stood around for days getting frostbite to make a few hundred quid reselling a console to other people crazy enough to pay more than twice the price. That’s not unscrupulous, it’s capitalism. Hard-earned capitalism too.
Harsh on true gamers though that merely wanted to take it home for hugs, kisses and eternal love.
For me, the jury is still out on video glasses but ICUITI continues to forge ahead. 
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
