We all love gadgets and most of the time the flashier and more space age the design the bigger the wow factor.
There’s a fine line between stylish innovation and ‘just a bit silly’ though, and Chinese manufacturer Shanling seems to have no qualms about crossing it.
The CD-T3000PRO looks very much like a cross between a second generation flux capacitor and something you’d dig up around Area-51. Nothing wrong with this per se, particularly if time-travel is on the agenda, but sadly it’s just a rather elaborate CD player with a few unnecessary flashy lights.
It would seem rather belated to start complaining about cleverly worded adverts that appear to offer things like mobile ringtones and games for ‘free’, only to sting you with some indecipherable small print after you’ve signed up.
This sort of thing has been going on since fonts were made small enough to be barely legible, yet industry regulator PhonepayPlus has only recently announced that it’ll be keeping a sharper eye on services.
If you’re a fan of all things Wii but are loathe to pick up the new Wii Fit package because it sounds too much like healthy exercise, there’s a game on the horizon that might just convince you otherwise.
Family Ski (why didn’t they call it Wii Ski?) adds that much needed element of competition as well as appealing to winter sport types with a range of races and tricks to master and a full ski resort to explore if you fancy a bit more of a leisurely cruise around the slopes.
What’s better – or worse – than two mobile phones? Why two mobile phones in one device, of course. Meet the WND Wind DUO 2200, the Siamese Twins of mobile phones.
Flip it over and there’s a phone face on each side – twin displays, twin SIMs, twin keypads and even twin 2MP digital cameras. It’s a tri-band phone boasting 180 hours of standby time ‘under optimum conditions’, which probably means Bluetooth disabled, one phone off and no one calling the other one.
It seems like the death of HD DVD and the end of the high-def movie format war hasn’t helped Blu-ray take off like a rocket after all.
Data from NPD Data in the US – a Blu-ray stronghold during the war – shows that even though the war ended, consumers haven’t raced out to buy standalone Blu-ray players. In fact, sales of players dropped off by an alarming 40% between January and February this year and only saw a 2% rise in March. The irony is that HD DVD player sales only dropped 13% between January and February – although they’ve dropped off a cliff since. The survey excluded PS3s.
Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis, NPD, commented:
Radiohead might have shaken up the traditional method of selling records when it allowed fans to pay what they liked to download the In Rainbows album but, the freebies stop here.
Lead singer, Thom Yorke, has called the move a ‘one-off’ that will not be repeated. Chatting to The Hollywood Reporter, he said:
We all know the boffins at MIT have brains the size of planets but when it comes to reinventing one of the most useful office inventions of all time, they ended up just tweaking the original.
Meet the new, overhauled Post-It notes, or should I say ‘Quickies’, which take the incredibly useful originals and give them an electronic twist. Quickies are classed as intelligent Post-It notes, combining AI, RFID and ink-recognition technologies, but which still use the same format as the originals.
Here, you can write your ‘Gone To Lunch’ message to someone on a Post-It note but, instead off slapping it on their PC screen, your handwriting is interpreted by some special PC software and the message is forwarded to the person’s phone as an SMS, or to their PC screen.
Those wacky ad people. The last 6 months has seen the media world bombarded with TV ads, posters, celeb interviews and promos for a mysterious action TV series called ‘Scarlet’. Just this week though, the joke was revealed and it all turned out to be just a front for LG’s latest range of TVs, called Scarlet. Exciting, eh?
Anyway, now that the ad-folk have earned millions for this nonsense, we can tell you what all the fuss is about.
What’s better – or worse – than two mobile phones? Why two mobile phones in one device, of course. Meet the WND Wind DUO 2200, the Siamese Twins of mobile phones. 
Radiohead might have shaken up the traditional method of selling records when it allowed fans to pay what they liked to download the In Rainbows album but, the freebies stop here. 
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
