Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

Samsung has shown the sweet looking new X838 mobile phone for release in China. In addition to being a GSM phone, there’s an onboard MP3 player with an iPod-esque click wheel interface and 1GB of memory for storage of tunes.

[UPDATE 10/31/2006: The Kondo KHR-2HV Robot is now available from importer AudioCubes.] For those adventurous types, the Kondo KHR-2HV is a complete kit to build your own autonomous walking robot. The robot features 17 servo motors to control arm, leg and head movements and a lightweight aluminum alloy frame.

While there are plenty of hard-disk based music streaming systems available these days, none is quite as schmancy as the Sooloos. The Sooloos is a complete home media management system in a very elegant package. There are three components to the system, the Store Series, The Control Series and the Source Series.

Can’t wait to get your new Nintendo Wii so you can download and play classic NES games? Over at vNES, you can get a head start by playing 395 games from the old Nintendo online, right now.

PLEN, the Desktop Hobby Robot is a little (9-inch tall) robot from Japan which is capable of balancing itself on a mini-skateboard or to skate on its own included rollerskates. Here’s a video of the robot in action: PLEN’s 18 joints can be controlled remotely using a Bluetooth phone and can run for about 25 minutes on a single charge.

Somehow the idea of placing electrodes into a water-filled orb to seems like a bad idea. However, artist Scott J. Franklin has designed a series of glass lighting fixtures that do just that. The WET Lamp from NON Design is a glass orb with a 10-watt xenon light bulb in the center, then filled with water.

Looking for a portable radio with some real style? Check out the Dolmen Mini Radio by LEXON. The radio channels retro style but modernizes it with electronic tuning and an LED band indicator which changes color from red to green when you switch from AM to FM.

Looking for an exotic finish for your case mod or do you just want to pimp your ride? Look no further. The folks at ALSA have developed some amazing paint finishes including one that has the ability to change colors temporarily when heat is applied.

At this week’s CEATEC show in Japan, Toshiba showed off their TDP-ET20 front projector which is capable of projecting a 100-inch diagonal picture from about 4 feet away from the screen, or a 60-inch diagonal picture from just 2 feet away.

These 3D cubes by James Clar & Associates display 3-dimensional images across an array of 1000 LEDs arranged in a grid structure. Previously, the designs were only shown at galleries and exhibitions such as Wired’s NextFest.

In the future, you’ll be able to customize more and more products to your own liking, and why should beverages be any different? This new technology from Ipifini, called “Choice-Enabled Packaging,” provides bottles of soda with multiple flavor “buttons,” which can be pressed to create your own customized soft drink flavors.

While these LEGO salt and pepper shakers don’t necessarily belong on my tech blog, I just thought they were too cool to not feature them. Just $4.99 (USD) buys you this pair of shakers that resemble the classic LEGO heads.

If you’re the type of person who can’t go anywhere without their iPod, you can even lie down with it in your bed and cradle it softly. The MP3 Pillow, is a small pillow ( 9″ x 15″ x 6″) that looks like a giant music player.

Looking for speakers that really make a statement? Dutch designers Sander Mulder, Dave Keune from Buro Vormkrijgers have created these surreal speakers that are so wrong, they’re right. I’ll just let the picture do the talking (or woofing).

Gaming blog Aeropause asked players who got to play a demo of the highly-anticipated Xbox 360 exclusive Gears of War last night in Chicago to report on their individual experiences. With virtually no exception, the early reactions were extremely positive.

The new Nokia 5500 Sport XpressMusic is a GSM/GPRS mobile phone is designed for the active user in mind. The phone comes with a 512MB microSD card for storing up to 375 tunes, as well as a sports belt, armband, bicycle mount and sports headset with a special remote which lets you quicky switch tracks through a series of taps.