Kitt Car for 30-Somethings…

Oh dear oh dear… Men, or should I say big kids of a certain age may remember the US TV series Knight Rider where David Hasselhoff drove around nabbing bad guys and generally saving the world in a computerised talking car called Kitt.

I bet you can see this one coming because GPS SatNav makers Mio have developed one that uses the voice the voice of a chap called William Daniels – the voice of the original Kitt  to tell you where you are, and where you are going. If you think that you can live with a GPS with swishy red lights and which says ‘ hello Michael, where do you want to go today?’ or you really are called Michael then your prayers have just been answered.

Sharper Fuel Cells

Sharp, in collaboration with MIT have announced an improved fuel cell technology that’s claimed to have the highest power density to date. Fuel cells have been around for yonks and basically convert chemical energy into electrical energy. It’s a sort of reverse electrolysis process (where water can be turned into hydrogen and oxygen by passing a current through it), using exotic materials that act as catalysts. In this case methanol is the fuel source. It’s a lot safer, cheaper and easier to transport than Hydrogen, which has been a popular choice with fuel cell developers in the past.

Sharp’s Direct to Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) prototypes are small enough to be used inside most gadgets, from mobile phones and GPS receivers to personal stereos and cameras and they say they’ll last around as long as lithium ion rechargeable batteries (3 – 5 years). Read More »

Watch Out Windows

Radio, phone, GPS, MP3 player, TV, camera… been there done that, but just when you thought there wasn’t anything else that could be shoehorned into a wristwatch, think again. A company called Epoq has managed to fit a copy of Windows Mobile onto one, which you drive using a 1.4-inch OLED touch screen, and just for good measure the EGP-98B has built in 1.3MP camera, wi-fi, Bluetooth and a 4-band GSM phone. Now, it might all be a wind-up (pun intended) because details and availability are all very sketchy, and good images are also hard to find. Read More »

Eye Lights

Here’s something to make your eyes twinkle, or water…. Researchers at the University of Washington developed contact lenses with embedded light emitting diodes LEDs and driver circuits just a few nanometers thick. The idea is eventually it could be formed into a ‘heads up’ display for a computer or GPS, night vision system or even an aid for the visually impaired. At the moment the prototypes can do nothing very useful, just a few blobs of light that flash on and off. A means of getting power to the chips in the lens also needs to be figured out, the idea of a couple of wires going onto your eyeball doesn’t bear thinking about, but it should be do-able, using electromagnetic induction or solar power; we’ll just have to wait and see where this one is headed…

Nokia X02NK To Hit Japan

Looks like Japan isn’t only the Land of the Rising Sun, but it ought to be dubbed the Land of the Many Cell Phones as well. Nokia is tipped to release its dual-slider handset known as X02NK soon. Read More »

iPhone Extreme?

While Apple doesn’t talk about upcoming products and services, they often have to start implementing support for them quite a while before the word gets out. As such, it is not surprising that the company’s support pages offer hidden tidbits.

MacPrime has stumbled upon hints of the next iPhone model, which is widely expected sometime next year. Hidden within the HTML code of Apple’s iPhone Feedback Page is a reference to a product called ‘iPhone Extreme.’ Much like in the way that the iTunes feedback mechanism had strings for rented movies, which are still currently unavailable and of which there has been no word, this little HTML string could end up being nothing. Apple has even been known to patent all kinds of things never to actually make use of them or turn them into an actual product. Read More »