Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

Ambient Devices, known for their unique radio-data information tools, such as the Ambient Dashboard, have announced the upcoming release of their new Ambient Umbrella. The LED lighted handle of the umbrella pulses at different frequencies to indicate the forecast weather conditions in your area (based on real-time data from AccuWeather.com).

Toshiba just announced the first combination HD DVD burner/hard disk recorder. The recorder has a massive 1-terabyte drive, allowing for up to 130 hours of high-definition recording, with the ability to archive up to 230 minutes of high def content to a single HD DVD disc.

Samsung has unveiled three new phones, the X820 (6.9mm thick), the D830 (9.9mm thick) and the D900 (12.9mm thick). The X820 is a one-piece design, while the D830 is a clamshell, and the D900 is a slider.

The Bose Quiet Comfort (QC) headphone series has always been my favorite of the noise cancelling headphones out there. Now before you start saying “no highs, no lows, must be Bose…” or “they’re totally overpriced…”, I’ll give you my take.

Today T-Mobile announced the Sidekick 3. Upgrades include a 1.3 megapixel camera, EDGE data, Bluetooth, a miniSD memory card slot, and a music player application. They guys at MobileBurn have posted a full review and highlights video and more pictures.

DivX and Sony have partnered up to release a new DVD Walkman player, capable of playing high-quality video content encoded in DivX format. (The player should also support DVD, DVD

Belkin has just announced their new Tunedeck accessory for the iPod Nano. The Tunedeck combines a cassette adapter with a a swiveling iPod Nano mount, so you can just plug it into your cassette deck, and the Nano will sit nicely at eye-level with your stereo.

The folks at Cytonix Corporation claim they’ve got a solution to rainy/snowy-day satellite dish outages with their new WX2100 spray-on coating. According to the company, “WX2100 is a long-lasting, super hydrophobic coating that repels rain, snow and ice, keeping satellite dishes and radomes dry even in heavy precipitation and preventing the buildup of snow and ice.”

Artcoustic offers custom made in-wall speaker systems which can incorporate specially manufactured acoustically-transparent grills. These allow you to hide your speakers behind a work of art without affecting sound quality. Artcoustic offers a variety of beautiful designs or you can even submit your own design for incorporation into your speakers.

For those who absolutely need have to have EVERY channel, DirecTV has introduced its Titanium package The package includes every premium channel, every movie channel, every pay-per-view movie, every sport channel, every adult channel every HDTV channel and up to 10 HD DVRs.

Griffin Technologies, has just introduced their new iTrip for the PSP. For those of you not familiar the original iTrip series, these devices enabled your iPod to wirelessly (using FM) transmit to your car stereo, blending in seamlessly with the design of Apple’s ubiquitous music players.

Apparently, it’s official. Robbie Bach, who oversaw development of the original Xbox, is now working on a device and music store combination to try and grab up market share from Apple’s iPod and iTunes services. Supposedly they’ll be doing more to inject a sense of community into the music/video store experience than Apple has, so that MIGHT be interesting, but it wouldn’t take long for Apple to do the same.

Microsoft’s announcement from E3 that they would be making portions of the XBox Live system available through other mobile devices was cryptic at best. Now, we see exactly what Microsoft was talking about. At the 2006 Qualcomm BREW conference, it was revealed that the Live Anywhere service will be running on non-Microsoft platforms, and a variety of intriguing screenshots have now been posted at QJ.NET.

Here’s a strange one for all you USB device freaks… The head comes off, and you plug the neck into your USB port. Everyone should have one of these. Read More [via The Raw Feed]

Three companies in Germany demoed their prototype Cinevision 2006 digital movie theater system yesterday with a 10 megapixel resolution.

Time magazine has selected the recently-released Nintendo DS Lite as their favorite gadget this week. By pushing hard on brain teasers like Soduku, Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, it looks like they’re trying to broaden their demographic appeal to an older audience, and potentially more women.