Month: May 2004

Gizmodo has got a pic of what could be the replacement for the Treo 610, reportedly called the 660. What’s convincing about the pic is that nothing is changed except the external antenna has been internalized. Other reported improvements are updated OS, better camera and other minor tweaks.

2004 is the year of the senseless electric vehicle, and here’s another entry into the class: the Easy Glider, which is an electric monowheel that drags the rider (?) behind it, traveling 15-20 miles on a charge. Designed primarily to pull people wearing roller blades or riding a skateboard, it can also be fixed with the “Char” (I’m not kidding), a two-wheeled platform reminiscent of a chariot. Imagine the fun you could have on one of these having races around the parking lot at work — especially if you used office chairs instead of roller blades! Cost is around $1000, with the first units arriving in Europe late this summer, arriving in the US probably never.

via Gizmodo

FriendTech Computer has got an absolutely awesome looking modded Xbox for sale: they open it up and pop in a 1.48 GHz Celeron, add S-Video Out, upgrade to Dobly 5.1 surround sound, throw in some extra RAM and do all the other modifications necessary to turn it into an out-of-the-box media machine. It’ll play back MP3, MPEG, DivX, Ogg and all that, and can do quite a bit more since it’s possible to load third party software on it. The only thing missing is a hard-drive, which can be self-installed up to 120 GB. And with just a flick of the switch the whole unit goes back to being an ordinary Xbox capable of playing ordinary games, with the only downside being that it doesn’t work well on Xbox Live. The upgrade costs $479, or you can just buy one for $579. Other kits are available from $70 up if you’re a DIYer.

Once hyped through a multi-million dollar ad campaign from Microsoft as the Next Big Thing in mobile computing, Tablet PCs have so far failed to catch on with most computer users. C|Net takes a look at tablet PCs success so far, and finds that the only real movement towards tablets is happening in “vertical” markets like medicine. While the tone of the piece suggests that there is strong growth potential in this area, I’m going to stick to my original position on tablet PCs and say that they are expensive, pointless, and ultimately will lose out to less expensive regular laptops in the consumer market, and lose out to handhelds in the vertical market.