Samsung has teamed up with Absolut Vodka to show off the screen on a commercial cooler for its liquor. The screen is the front of the glass cabinet door. The buyers can see advertisements on the door of the cooler and still look inside to see if the cooler is stocked.

The 46-inch LCD screen has a contrast ratio of 4500:1 and a resolution of 1366 x 768 allowing it to show (720p) HD content. The downside is that the see-through design makes the display have worse than normal color reproduction with a 70% color gamut. Still, it’s pretty cool.

Samsung showed off a similar transparent display demo at last week’s CES, which was used to create what they called a “Smart Window.” What other cool uses do you see for a clear display like this?

The display will ship out this month starting at $8,400 (USD). That price is for the screen only, if you need a table stand as well it will set you back $9,049 for both the stand and display. For that much money, you get a 40-inch screen with 1920 x 1080 resolution. That screen is sealed against water and external shock. It also uses one of the biggest pieces of Gorilla Glass in the industry to protect it from scratches.

The display supports 50 points of touch at one time. It can be hooked to all sorts of accessories via USB ports and Wi-Fi connectivity. The processor inside is an Athlon X2 245e running at 2.9GHz. Other hardware includes 320GB of storage and a Radeon HD 6750 video card.

I think it would be awesome to have one of these in my game room.

As you’ll see in the parts list below, the Kinect isn’t the only tech behind the BoA. Since fitting an Xbox 360 or a laptop on the board isn’t exactly a smart move, Chaotic Moon Labs used a tablet as the system’s brains. But they didn’t just use any tablet, they got their hands on a yet-to-be-released Samsung tablet running the yet-to-be-released Windows 8 operating system. The tablet handles the voice control, toggling the motor on and off as well as managing the speed settings.

Thanks to Kinect, the Board of Awesomeness has the Controls of Simplicity: put your arms forward and push down to make it accelerate – the board’s max speed is 32mph – and pull your arms back up to make it slow down.

A few years ago it would be unthinkable for prototype products to make their way to pet projects like this. Now the next Windows is chillin’ on a longboard, the next iPhone’s getting wasted on a bar… Things have really loosened up.

[via Chaotic Moon Labs via Slash Gear]

The Samsung Audio Dock’s hybrid amp system combines digital amplification with vacuum tubes. The 2.1-channel speaker comes with a built-in subwoofer and produces 100 watts of sound. It has USB and analog audio inputs, support for AllShare, AirPlay and Bluetooth wireless audio streaming, and the dock is capable of accepting either iOS or Samsung Galaxy devices.

The DA-E750 is the flagship model, but there’s a 40-Watt DA-E670 model as well, which skips the fancy vacuum tube setup, and looks nearly as good. Pricing and a release date has yet to be announced.

Other than the fact that the displays will support 802.11 b/g/n, dual-band Wi-Fi, and WMM multimedia standards, there really isn’t any additional info available yet. Both series were certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance on December 30, 2011, so I can only imagine that these are some of the displays we’ll see at next week’s CES show.

While the “X Series” moniker doesn’t sound like anything too mysterious, my curiosity is definitely piqued by the “Echo-P” name. Any guesses as to what might be special about those displays?

The Korean electronics giant recently released a video showing off the future potential for bendable OLED screens, and it sure looks cool. In this concept video, we get to see the potential for portable displays which can be rolled up, act as a touchscreen interface, and even let you see through them and interact with the environment around you. Here, check it out:

Pretty slick, eh? I for one can’t wait until I can finally buy a device which can be rolled up like a piece of paper. Not because it’s any more practical than a hard surface, just because it’s the stuff of science fiction, and that’s the sort of gadget I just have to have in my collection. While it’s doubtful we’ll see anything as sophisticated as what Samsung shows off in the video in the next few years, they do expect to start producing flexible OLED panels which can be attached to curved surfaces sometime in 2012.

[via OLED Info]

Hug-chan is based on RIC (Robot In Character), a promotional robot made by RT corporation. Watch the endearing scene below:

…and then it tightened its grip and crushed the little girl. Seriously though I think the ad didn’t squeeze the most out of Hug-chan. I wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung takes the robot around Japan to hug more people. Except Apple employees.

Thanks to Poly Bug for the tip!

[via Plastic Pals]

The application shows that the name will be used on different devices including smartphones and tablets. Once the Nexus launches early next month the next device will quite possibly carry this product name. The trademark in question is serial number 85480030 and it was filed on November 23, 2011.

Samsung has offered up no official comment on the name or when we might see the devices come to market using the name. What do you think we will see? My money is on a thin, quad core tablet with 4G, running Android 4.0.

[via Fusible]

The 16.1MP Samsung MV800 features a 3-inch flip-out adjustable LCD screen, that can rotate up to 180 degrees so you can even look at yourself for self-portraits. The camera comes with a Schneider lens and three shutter options. The optical zoom is 5× and has image stabilization built-in. It can capture and watch 720p/30fps HD video, and pipe it out via its HDMI port. There are a number of integrated filters, special effects, and customizations available directly in the camera’s OS.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

It can even shoot 3D photos, which is kind of cool, but pointless if you don’t have a 3D HDTV set. The MV800 camera sells for $279.99 (USD) directly from Samsung.

[via designboom]

If you happen to be in Germany, you can check out the Samsung Series 7 Chronos laptop on September 1st, which is tomorrow, at IFA Berlin.

[via Geeky-Gadgets]

Wi-Fi is a must for these Chromebooks, because you can’t do much unless you get access to the cloud with a live Internet connection. There are even Chrome Zone lounges where you can get comfy with your loaner. However, you’ll need to give a credit card deposit if you want to try one.

Chromebooks are being offered on flights between San Francisco, Chicago O’Hare, Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth. There’s a similar loaner program offered at the Ace Hotel in New York City.

[Virgin America via TechCrunch]

The NC215S will be available in the US starting next month. It’s a netbook, and will come with a 10.1 inch screen that has 1,024×600 resolution, 1GB of RAM, and a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N570 dual-core processor. Apparently, every two hours of sunlight gives users an extra hour of battery life. Now that’s not bad, considering the alternative. It makes lugging laptops around that much lighter, since you don’t have to carry around a power adapter or an extra battery.

According to Samsung, the netbook has a battery life of 14 hours under ideal conditions. That may seem like a lot, but I get about that amount with my MacBook Pro 17 pretty consistently (no Flash installed, brightness to the max, browsing and reading). The NC15S will be available starting in the week of July 3rd for $399 (USD).

[Liliputing via Ubergizmo]

The image is the one you see above. It’s a shot of the little Android mascot that everyone will recognize. Rather than its typical green look it’s dressed up in a costume that looks like Ironman with the Flash logo on the front. What should we call this little guy? Irondroid? Flashman?

Ironflashdroid man perhaps? This is very strange indeed and apparently at some point during the process of creating the ROM for the smartphone one of the devs had extra time on his or her hands. What would you call this new superhero?

[via Paul O'Brien]

And it is that exact moment that Junior decides he wants to pull your hair or scream for ice cream or look the other way as the picture gets snapped.

So to decrease (since it’s probably near impossible to aim for eliminating them completely) the odds of this happening at the next family gathering or vacation, Samsung has announced that they’re making 21 oh-so-adorable camera animations available for download for free to display on your camera LCD so your kid will find something worthwhile to look at while they’re photos are being snapped.

The animations are only available for the Samsung ST700, PL170 and PL120 though, as announced at CES 2011, so if you’ve already got one of these in your camera bag then head on over to Samsung’s site in a few weeks to get the animations.

[via Akihabara News]

It’s safe to say that Samsung’s D9500 3D 75-inch HDTV will be snatched up by people who want the biggest flat screen on the block. This recently announced TV [KOR] comes with LED backlighting and its panel offers 1080p resolution and a 240-Hz refresh rate. The TV has Smart TV, which is a feature that includes built-in WiFi, so users can Skype, play games, and access the web. Of course, users will need to wear 3D glasses to get the 3D experience.

This July, Samsung will release this monster in Korea for approximately $17,600 (USD), which is likely because it’s the first TV of it’s size and the panels aren’t mass-producible yet. Personally, I’d rather have Sharp’s 70-inch Aquos for about $2,800.

[via Akihabara News via CrunchGear]

Keyloggers track your keystrokes and can be quite malicious since they can expose all of your passwords, logins, etc. Hassan found the StarLogger program in the C:\Windows\SL directory. If you’ve got a Samsung laptop, check if you’ve got it installed. After a period of time, StarLogger will automatically email this information.

Once he cleaned up the laptop (an R525), after a while, he experienced some hardware problems, so he returned the laptop. He upgraded to a higher-spec model (an R540) from a completely different store. This laptop also contained the same program in the same directory. When confronted about this, Samsung didn’t deny the claims. The customer representative confirmed that Samsung had installed the keylogger to  “monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.” Really?

Samsung has reportedly launched an investigation as a result of these findings, but that definitely shouldn’t make you feel any better if your laptop already has been running the software.

Update

It looks like this was a false alarm. The scanning software used detected a Microsoft language pack located in the C:\Windows\SL and this produced a false positive. Samsung posted information on the Samsung Tomorrow blog with results that they were able to duplicate what happened to Hassan. There is no malicious software installed on Samsung laptops.

[via Network World]

The 13.3-inch Series 9 comes with 128 GB of SSD storage and 4 GB of RAM. Startup time is quoted at a zippy 15 seconds, and battery life for the notebook is rated at up to seven hours. It starts shipping today (March 17th 2011) for a rather pricey $1600(USD), and can be ordered over at the Microsoft Store now. The 11-inch model will be available in April. Instead of the Sandy Bridge Core i5-2537M, it will have an i3 CPU, 64 GB of SSD storage and 2 GB of RAM.

This makes this little laptop a serious alternative for the ‘ultraportable’ laptop consumer – until Apple upgrades the processors of the MacBook Air, that is.

[via CrunchGear]

Apparently, the update wasn’t so fixed after all since some users are now getting another error that makes the update fail. The error message reportedly comes after step 7 in the update process where the phone reboots. The error pops up in Zune it seems.

The error was confirmed by WinPhoneSupport via Twitter and they are looking into the issue. I would say that if you own a Samsung Windows Phone 7 handset you need to just skip the update for now and wait until all the issues are ironed out.

[via WindowsPhoneThoughts]

The iPad 2 starts out at $499 (USD), but that’s just for the base model. The 64GB 3G+WiFi version will set you back a cool $829. Apple’s main advantage is that this is the second generation of their tablet so they’ve had time to polish the device even further. The competition is just playing catch-up.

Will you get an iPad 2? I might since I don’t have one, but I don’t like how closed iOS is. I prefer to be able to do what I want with my computers, not have Apple decide what I can install.

That’s right, Samsung has opted to use the awesomely fast Tegra 2 SoC inside some of the phones and not others, and they are not telling which devices have what SoC inside. The devices that don’t use Tegra 2 will pack in Samsung’s own Exynos SoC.

Apparently, Samsung can’t make enough of its own product, hence the need for some NVIDIA help. The rub for geeks is that we know the Tegra 2 SoC rocks, but the Exynos is a lesser known, so I personally would rather have the Tegra 2 version.

[via ITProPortal]