Hi-tech Frontier

Chocolate Now Inhaleable, Literally Ready for a new addiction? How about ‘whiffing’ chocolate? Yes, that’s right, now you can satisfy all of your most serious chocolate cravings without even chewing… Just inhale a mouthful of aerosolized chocolate powder from a vaporizer: “it fills your mouth with almost pure chocolate - it tastes really good.” Oh, and incidentally, the powder has zero calories. The Le Whif inhalers are disposable, and cost about $2.50 each if you buy them in singles. Each one is good for a couple whiffs, and they come in mint chocolate, raspberry chocolate, mango chocolate, and of course plain, unadulterated, hardcore chocolate. Even though it’s April 10th, I’m still kinda wondering whether or not this is real, especially since the company has bigger plans on the horizon: “Chocolate is only the beginning - we’re going to be unveiling more different types of food in the future. Two Michelin-starred chef Thierry Marx is even working with us to develop meals, such as a m...

MSI Wind U123 netbook unboxed We already caught MSI's upgraded Wind U120 (which goes by U123, if you must know) sitting pretty at CeBIT last month, but the crazy cats over at PortableMonkey have gone and got a model fresh in the box. Needless to say, this retail edition (which is hitting Japanese shelves any moment now) didn't stay packaged up for long, but we are happy to say that we've been cordially invited to feast our eyes upon the unboxing process. Right out of the gate, we have to share the disappointment in the lack of a rear panel for easily accessing the internal RAM and HDD, but at least the Atom N280 is a (minor) step above what we've grown accustomed to.

ASUS P30 and P80 laptops Remember Intel's Anti-Theft Technology that debuted around this time last year? You know, that wicked cool invention that you've heard absolutely nothing about ever since? Evidently it's still alive and kickin', as ASUS has just announced that two of its lappies will come loaded with it. The P30 and P80 will both arrive with the so-called theft deterrent system, enabling owners to send a "poison pill" (it's words, not ours) remotely, rendering their computer inoperable by "comprehensively shutting it down." If you manage to reacquire it in one piece, a passphrase can be inputted in order to reactivate things. Still, we have to wonder how this will really detract thieves from snapping up unattended machines -- we mean, do they really stop to check out the anti-theft software before wheeling away with your rig? We're guessing not.

CUBE B52HD PMP It's not like we're ever going to bump into this in our local electronics store, but boy is this CUBE B52HD portable media player tempting. The thing has a 5-inch 480 x 272 LCD, all the codecs we could ask for (including fan faves like FLAC, OGG, along with plenty of video options), 1280 x 720 video out, 8GB of built-in storage and an expansion slot of some sort. We're not sure about input methods, but hopefully the interface involves Brendan Fraser to some extent. The best news? All this can be theoretically yours for a mere 499 yuan, about $73 US.