Hi-tech Frontier

Smartfish PRO:Motion Auto-Adjusting Game Controller So not only are video games destroying our minds, our physiques and the fabric of moral society, but now it turns out they’re not so great for our wrists either. Well at least the standard game controllers aren’t. That’s why a company called Smartfish, known for their ergonomic peripherals, have developed the PRO:Motion Game Controller. Since everyone’s hands and wrists aren’t the same, the PRO:Motion gamepad can actually bend and rotate in the middle to create a more comfortable and ergonomically friendly controller for every user. But here’s the really cool part. Using the company’s DPC or ‘Dynamic Positioning Controller’ system, the PRO:Motion will actually study your “usage pattern” and make periodic but nearly imperceptible adjustments to the controller via a set of tiny onboard motors. So in other words, you don’t have to futz around with it to find the perfect angles, it will do it for you automatically. Unfortunately pricing i...

Wifi Detecting Baseball Cap You know what I like most about this wifi-detecting baseball cap that’s powered by a couple of CR2032 batteries and displays the strength of any 802.11b or g networks in your vicinity? The fact that it’s pretty much completely useless to the person actually wearing it! I mean the whole point of a wifi detector is so you can find an available hotspot and get yourself some free wireless internet, but unless you’re taking this thing off every 5 minutes to check the light-up panel on the front, you’ll be oblivious as to when you actually find a network. At least it’s just $21 from Thumbs Up.

GlobalSat GD-101 Is Another Glorified Compass At some point along the way the development of GPS devices split into two distinct paths. On one side you’ve got complicated touchscreen devices with maps of every road on the continent that can plan out the easiest route from point A to point B, and on the other side they’ve actually been simplified to what are essentially glorified compasses, like the GD-101 from GlobalSat. It forgoes the colorful touchscreen for a simple monochrome LCD display that features a digital arrow capable of pointing in one of 16 different directions. The idea is to set a destination you’d like to remember, like where you parked your car, and the GD-101 will easily guide you back, complete with detailed info on how far away you are. And it’s not that I think these types of devices are a bad idea or anything, I just think they could benefit from a price tag of around $30-40, instead of the roughly $80 they’re currently selling for online.

Trace Of Time Whiteboard-Esque Clock Erases Itself Over Time Designed by Il-Gu Cha, the ‘Trace of Time’ clock is made from stainless steel with a glass face that allows you to jot down meetings and other important events when they’re supposed to happen. But the single hour/minute hand actually features an integrated eraser which cleans the clock’s face as it sweeps around over a 24 hour period. So while the clock’s useful for planning out your day, you can forget about jotting down things you’ll need to remember later in the week, since they’ll be gone by tomorrow.

Didget Blood Glucose Meter Works With The Nintendo DS As the story goes, Paul Wessel noticed that his diabetic son Luke was always misplacing his blood glucose meter, though he never had any trouble finding his Game Boy. So Paul worked with pharmaceutical giant Bayer to develop the Didget which is a blood glucose meter that connects to the Nintendo DS and DS Lite systems. (It requires the slot 2 port so unfortunately it’s not DSi-friendly.) It works like a standard blood glucose meter, you prick your finger and then insert the blood-soaked paper strip into the reader, but the test results are converted into reward points that kids can use to unlock new levels and items inside the Didget NDS game. The basic idea is to reward kids who regularly check their blood sugar levels which hopefully helps them develop good testing habits in the future. According to the Didget website , the device will sell for about $50, though since it’s actually a UK-based site, there’s no word on if or when th...

Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds – dual screen laptop – $2,121.75 Where one screen is good – two is better, right? Aren’t most of us already using two screens on our desktop? Then why not two screens on your laptop as well. Lenovo’s done just that with their ThinkPad W700ds which GearSponsor Logibuy has spotted on promo for $704 off the normal list price. This unique laptop features two monitors – one is an 18″ WUXGA and the other a 10.6″ WXGA. There’s 2GB of DDR2 1067MHZ RAM, a 160GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive, 9-cell battery and a boatload of options can be added. Coupon expires 7/12/09.

Dyson Energy Concept Device Produces Energy to Charge Your Mobile Phone: Awesome Dyson Energy is a concept device with the shape of a bracelet, specially designed to resolve the everyday problem associated with charging your mobile phones on the go. This surface of this device produces electricity in the ambient air and stores in a Li-Po battery that can be used later to charge your mobile phone. The innovative Seebeck effect allows to keep the temperature difference between the outer surface and the other part that remains in touch with the skin. When its time to recharge a mobile device users just need to plug it into this device through a micro-USB port, and have some extra minutes in use.

Gluco(M) Wristband Monitors Your Blood Glucose Levels With the widespread of diabetics among almost all range of people around, medical equipment manufacturers are introducing various products everyday. The Gluco(M) Wristband is a concept medical device that offers three major functions to diabetics: non-invasive and instant glucose reading, storing previous readings history with averages, and an extremely useful insulin chamber with loaded syringe cartridge. This innovative product is featured with ‘Reverse Iontophoresis’ technology and collects glucose samples from body fluids by using an electric current flowing throughout the sensors. The readings are shown on the back-lit LED display and different required buttons for operating this device are placed at the edge of this device.

Pill Time : Pill Management System Provides Useful Assistance to Elder Patients Pill Time is a fashionable, user-friendly and simple pill management system aimed to provide useful assistance to Elder patients who usually forget to take their pills or take them less or more than the prescribed amount. This innovative system consists of three products, a nicely designed pill bottle, an automated personal medication assistant, and a loading station. The key advantage of this design is minimum features with cozy styling that will suit the needs of elder patients. The shaded body of this device does not get dirty or glare easily, yet providing adequate contrast to make it attractive. Pills are automatically loaded on this system and the safety lock prevents accidental overdose.

Ben Heck's latest portable Xbox 360 adds sleek white finish, Jasper motherboard Even after five iterations, Ben Heck's portable Xbox 360 models are still a spectacle to behold -- he seems to keep outdoing himself every time, both in functionality and style. This latest model has the appearance of an oversized plastic polycarbonate Macbook when closed, and packs a 17-inch Gateway LCD panel. The big improvements here include the Jasper motherboard, a flush-mount DVD door and side panels, digital potentiometer / button volume controls, and an ethernet port in addition to WiFi. Not everything's been kept, as Heck says he ditched the camera, not seeing a point for it -- but hey, there's still two USB ports if any of his (already spoken for) customers want to add it. Impressive work, indeed.

Samsung Omnia II and the case of the musical guided tour Samsung's Omnia II and its gorgeous 3.7-inch AMOLED screen is still without a Verizon release date, but don't let that stop you from enjoying Italian site HDBlog's ten-minute guided tour of the device. Hard to tell exactly how crisp is from the footage, and we also couldn't help but note a good bit of interface lag, especially when using the new cube menu. We're hopeful that'll get remedied before launch, and all in all, it's looking good, and the hardware definitely has some style.

Samsung's XL2370 'highest performance' 1080p monitor goes global in August We're not at all clear what, if any difference, exists between Samsung's new XL2370 monitor and the $399 P2370L announced back in January. Both are 23-inch LED backlit members from Samsung's "Touch of Color" lineup sporting a 2ms response and 1080p resolution. The XL2370 claims an ambiguous "finger-slim" design sounding very much like the 0.65-inch depth of the P2370L. The only hard difference is the stated increase in dynamic contrast ratio from 2M:1 (P2370L) to 5M:1 -- a pointless distinction most likely rooted in competitive hyperbole rather than any visible distinction you'd see in your home office. Regardless, the XL2370 will carry the title of Samsung's "highest performance monitor" (which is saying something) when it ships to Korea in mid-July on the way to its European and "other parts of the world" debut in August.

BMW kicking Garmin's zumo 660 up a notch with the Motorrad Navigator IV Sure, Garmin's zumo 660 was designed with the biker in mind, but BMW's taking it one step further with the latest in its branded Motorrad series, the Navigator IV. Based on Garmin's GPS ditty, it's got the same 4.3-inch "glove friendly" touchscreen, voice control, and A2DP support. It can withstand heavy vibration, fuel sprays, UV rays, is waterproof and most importantly, can play your favorite adrenaline-pumping tunes for when those other precautions are being handily tested. Additionally, we've got a four-button motorcycle mount and it comes pre-loaded with a database of BMW dealers, just in case you ever need one in a jiff. Coming third quarter to US and Europe, there's no word on price yet, but as a basis for comparison, the cost of the zumo 660 is about $700.

Ned Kelly thumb drive for the bushranger in your life Bushrangers were Australia's answer to English highwaymen and Ned Kelly was perhaps the most celebrated of them all. Known for his homemade armor and helmet -- here represented by the USB plug -- Kelly has now been truly immortalised by the art of memory stick modding. Fair enough, woodworking isn't a terribly precise art and we could just as easily claim this to be a Hristo Botev (who?) USB drive, but we have to commend the considerable effort required to put this baby together. On the other hand, there are snazzier alternatives out there, which look great even without you explaining the mythology behind their design.

Eurotech introduces Atom-powered in-wall Panel Computers Why leave all the new computer fun to your desk or lap, right? In an effort to give that barren wall of yours something to cheer about, Eurotech has recently introduced a new trio of Panel Computers, all of which are powered by Intel's less-than-amazing Atom CPU. The Vx-120F-N270 and Vx-150F-N270 are practically identical save for the 12.1- and 15-inch touchscreens (respectively), with each possessing an Atom N270 processor, a fanless design, high-brightness LCD, twin gigabit Ethernet jacks, a front-mounted USB port and an expansion slot for add-on boards. The outfit also debuted the rugged Bx-400F-N270, which should withstand abuse not seen on typical in-wall PCs. Prices have yet to be made public, but you can pretty much bank on your local home automation dealer charging a boatload come mid-September.

Sony Ericsson "Twiggy" seems to leak into the wild Sony Ericsson has a world-renowned reputation for being unable to keep a lid on its stuff, and the trend appears to be continuing with the "Twiggy" -- a phone that seems destined to replace the aging W350. This bad boy was actually first spotted way back in March -- curiously leaked in Sony Ericsson's own marketing materials, no less -- but this time around it looks like we have a unit somewhere out there in the real wild ("IRL" as those particularly internet-savvy folks out there might say). No word on specs just yet; regardless, though, we're just pleased to see that the company appears to still be committed to this niche form factor most manufacturers won't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Bristol's ViewSurfer PC/TVs let you use XP from 10 feet away Face it, we're not normal. Most consumers don't want to convert their home PCs into media centers. That doesn't stop them from wanting a single device serving as both their TV and PC, however. That's where the 22- and 32-inch Bristol ViewSurfer PC/TVs carve out their niche. Each set features a FreeView tuner and an integrated, netbook-like, Atom-based Windows XP computer with 160GB of storage, 1GB of memory, 4x USB, and Ethernet. The PC lacks integrated WiFi, oddly enough, and the TV seems to function in complete isolation from the computer processing -- so no integrated DVR, for example. The £500 (about $814) 22-inch model does feature a 1680 x 1050 pixel resolution, well above the 1024 x 600 display found in most netbooks. Not that you'll be pushing Flash-based video from YouTube or BBC's iPlayer full-screen as these ViewSurfers are undoubtedly saddled with Intel's integrated 945GSE netbook g...