z00pster’s gadget blog

Everything that’s currently known about the PS3 discussed in 1UP article. The good, the bad, and the ugly. You decide.

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Access, the Japanese company that now owns the Palm OS, has announced that Access Linux Platform, or ALP, will be the replacement for the Palm OS. It will still run legacy Palm software, in addition to many Linux-based apps. (via WIRED Gear Factor)

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Staples has the Maxtor SATA 200GB 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive with PCI Card Bundle for $69.99 shipped free. No rebates.

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Levi’s iPod-Ready Jeans

Now this is getting cooler. Pockets and snaps that are designed with listening to music in mind.

This week at Treehugger: A mechanical engineer creates a DIY solar-powered pontoon boat; The AladdinPower hand generator allows you to power gadgets even when miles away from electrical outlets; A rugged and fairly inexpensive solar-powered projector to help teachers in poor rural communities in Africa and Asia; Two brothers make a solar-powered coffee roaster that reaches 600°F; And finally, cool bamboo headphones from Japan. Read on for details…

Monte Gisborne is a mechanical engineer who built The Loon, a solar-powered pontoon boat. Six-day boating cruise along Ontario’s scenic Trent-Severn Waterway: “Cost of fuel for the 100-mile cruise? Zero. Amount of air and water pollution? Zero. Number of stares from other boaters? Countless.”

The AladdinPower hand generator promises to make dead cell phone batteries a thing of the past by putting the power of charging in your hands, literally. There isn’t a list of compliant manufacturers, though the website says it “universally connects to most cellphones regardless of brand, make, model, or manufacturer.”

The “kinkajou”, a solar-powered overhead projector will help teach reading to children and adults in poor, rural African and Asian communities that are without electricity. It has been tested successfully in 45 villages in Mali and organizers hope to introduce the projector in India and Bangladesh.

Two brothers — Mike and David Hartkop — have created a solar powered coffee roaster. The device is a parabolic mirror array that focuses on a roasting drum and heats it to 600° F. The drum’s motors are also solar powered. It can crank out 7 pounds of coffee per hour when the sun is shining.

Made with bamboo, each pair of headphones is unique, functional and unusually beautiful. They’re careful to note in a diagram picture that the earphones won’t climb walls, listen to the voice in your heart, or help you crack a safe. Okay…

Treehugger’s EcoModo column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo.

Haven’t had the time to read your scriptures lately? Now you can hang the King James Translation of The Holy Bible from your key chain and read it anywhere you please. The style is churchly—black with gold lettering and a nice little cross— and it would make a great stocking stuffer for the pious in your life. A switch on the back of the book slides out to reveal—miraculously(??)—the USB interface plug (which won’t work with Macs or Windows 98. Steve Jobs obviously didn’t tithe this year). Plug it into your PC and you can look at all 66 books of the Bible. And for $29.99, it’s certainly a steal—er, wait.

David Steele USB Digital Holy Bible [Bios Magazine]

IGN is reporting that the Nintendo Revolution will arrive just in time for another late November console camp-out party. The rumor comes from an anonymous game studio that was given the date from Nintendo itself. Might as well get in line now. What else could tide you over until Mario Kart: Nude Revolution comes out.

Revolution Arriving for Thanksgiving 06 [Kotaku]

Here’s the bottom line, folks: this is a run-of-the-mill PVR and probably the best thing about it is how pretty it looks. The PVR is based on an anodized aluminum shell that would match perfectly with a Mac tower or Powerbook of sorts. It features a 125-channel analog TV tuner and the ability to use digital cable from composite or s-video connections. The software has the ability to encode the video into various codecs including MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX. Unfortunately, the software has its fair share of bugs and errors to hinder a full PVR’ing experience, but it’s a start. It’ll have to do until FrontRow 2.0 hits the scene.

EvolutionTV [Macworld]

Just got the 770 here at the ranch and I’m tooling around a bit with it. At first glance, it’s a bit bigger than I expected, about 5 inches across. It’s very thin and light and very austere—not too many buttons, not too many ports. There’s a power port on the bottom, a mini-USB port, a headphone jack and a tiny reset button/hole thing. There are a few face and top buttons and a directional pad. The rest is done through the highly sensitive screen.

The screen on this thing is excellent. Quite bright and crisp. The UI is simple, if a little bleak. The icons and design is reminiscent of Nokia’s earlier super-smart phones. As this is apparently running Linux, I’d very much like to figure out if I can install a terminal client, but that’s for you h/\x0rs to discover.

The on-screen keyboard was very responsive and easy to use. When I’ve used on-screen keyboards in the past, even on a full-fledged Tablet PC, it’s felt haphazard. Instead, what you type is what you get, even if the keys are relatively small. One issue is the handwriting recognition. As you can see from this image, I wrote “I hate monkeys.” It didn’t quite work.

I’m going to test the email client to see if I can stop opening the old Powerbook and treat this as my in-home email checkin’ device. We shall see.

UPDATE - Getting some pushback from 770 fans about availability and NokiaUSA failing to ship pre-orders. That kind of sucks.

Side view. It’s about half an inch thick.

UPDATE - Austere? WTF’s wrong with austere?

Can you gift me now?

It’s that time of year again when gadget lust can be easily justified simply as hankering to fill a holiday gift list. In case you’ve had any trouble coming up with any suitable suggestions from the mobile realm, or can’t think of anything for that cell-crazed person in your life, I’ve got several suggestions.

Let’s get the geek gift out of the way early: the Nokia 770 Internet tablet. It’s not a phone; it’s not a PDA; it’s an “Internet tablet”. You could call it a PDA if you wanted, just to annoy the Finns, but it’s essentially a big touchscreen made for Web browsing and e-mail either via Wi-Fi or a mobile phone using Bluetooth. The kicker for the 1334 h4×0rs in your life is that it runs Linux, so it should be fairly hackable, and plenty of applications are being ported to it. Nokia’s also said it will have an OS upgrade in the new year that will give the 770 VoIP and IM functionalities as well.

After the jump, one for the ladies, an EVDO pick, affordable mobile music and the ultimate accessory…

Next, for the ladies, or dudes that like pink, is the magenta Motorola RAZR, available from T-Mobile. It’s the same RAZR everybody knows and loves, but in tasty metallic magenta (or pink if you don’t have Crayola 64-color vision). These are supposedly in short supply, so if you can’t find one (or you’re cheap), go for a standard/passé silver version, then hop on over and pick up a Vaja leather case in pink for $55. Then, when pink isn’t cool anymore, you can replace it with one of their 35 other colors.

Battling pink for status as the new black is, um, black. Sprint’s got that one covered with the Samsung MM-A900 it’s selling, a half-inch think lump of blackaliciousness. It’s got a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, QVGA display, and it’s also one of Sprint’s “Power Vision” phones, meaning it uses their EV-DO network to access all kinds of content like streaming audio and video.

EV-DO on its own for a laptop is pretty cool: 400 to 700 kbps data speeds, and now wide coverage. Since it’s a cellular service, though, the carriers want to tie a single account to a single device, to a single user. But for those times when you feel like sharing, you can grab a router that takes an EV-DO card and shares its connection via Wi-Fi to multiple users. The Junxion Box — bane of Verizon Wireless — has been out for a while, but at $500 to $700, those better be some pretty good friends you let use it. Kyocera, though, has got its KR1 Mobile Router that performs essentially the same functions for about $200. That doesn’t include the EV-DO card to stick in or a handset to connect, though.

Mobile music is hot right now, or at least it’s supposed to be. But if you’re not into the $2.50 per song some phone companies wants to buy a track right from the phone, and just want to listen to your own damn music, Sony Ericsson’s got you covered with its Walkman phones. There’s the W600 that’s currently available from Cingular, a cool little swivel phone with a megapixel camera, FM radio, landscape-mode gaming, 256 megs of memory and EDGE for (relatively) high-speed data. Its older brother, the W800, is only available directly from Sony Ericsson or from third-party dealers, and while it’s got a more traditional candy bar design, it’s got quite a few more features. It loses the EDGE functionality, but replaces it with a 2-megapixel camera (that’s about the best currently available) and a Memory Stick Pro Duo slot that supports up to 1-gigabyte cards.

That leaves the ultimate gift. Well, the ultimate gift if you have a flip phone and are quite possibly the laziest person in the world: the cell phone opener. Because opening it yourself if so, you know, strenuous, and also because the Japanese have never found anything that couldn’t better be done by a machine. On tap for Christmas 2006: the cell phone closer.

Carlo Longino is a writer and analyst that follows the mobile industry. He’s co-editor of MobHappy, and also an analyst for Techdirt. He can be reached at carlo@mobhappy.com.

Read more Airtime. The column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo.