John Brownlee

UMID rebrands latest UMPC/MID as "mini-netbook"

Korean manufacturer UMID's latest touchscreen UMPC has all the gorgeous, unergonomic allure of the best pocket electronic dictionaries, but instead runs XP, VIsta or Linux on an Atom chipset instead, with 1GB of memory and up...

Best Buy follows Target's lead with built-in speaker gift cards, but misses the point

By no means is Best Buy's new gift card as cool as the Target digicam gift card of yesterday. While Target's built-in camera allowed for some amount of personalization in an otherwise impersonal and lazy gift, all Best Buy's...

The whimsical rationale behind tech's best branding

CIO has posted a pretty good feature (at least for perusal during the standards usually set by groggy, early-morning coffee slurping) about how ten famous technology products were named. Some of them are pretty interesting,...

Quintuple bladed herb scissors

These sharp, quintuple bladed herb scissors make for fine, easy dicing, and would also make a superlative prop for a horror movie about an insane mohel who wants to forcibly convert the goyim and, what the heck, maybe he's also...

Toyota Corolla advertises with ninja cats

Toyota's latest Australian advertisement for the Corolla features a showdown between one lone modern-day feline shogun and a constabulary of anthropomorphic ninja cats, whose illicit sardine production facility is deftly robbed...

Mgestyk's gesture-based interface lets you play shooters with your own finger gun

Mgestyk's gesture-based interface technology turns the wax-on flick of a wrist into a rotation, the wave of the hands into a scroll and a thumbs up into a press of the Enter key. It's all done with a 3D camera that translates...

Clarity: Bare Bones Cellphone for Elderly Users

A cellphone designed for the elderly might sound patronizing, but there is certainly a need for something easier to use than your usual whizz-bang mobile -- hell, even I have trouble geting these new-fangled telephones to work,...

The Onion takes on Snow Leopard and Windows 7

The Onion turns its eye to next summer's Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7 showdown, and heaps scorn upon both in equal measure. "Weird Euro-Internet cafe" may be the most pitch-perfect dismissal of the Windows target market I've ever...

Clarify C900 cell phone for Ludditical codgers (god bless 'em!)

The Clarity C900 is a cell phone aimed at seniors. That concept itself seems smug at first, but there's more to it than just marketing to the perceived Ludditical befuddlement of those dottering old pension codgers: in truth,...

Don't say "Reboot": Android OS executes every word you type

In what may possibly be the most bizarre bugs to ever ship, Google's Android OS attempts to carry out every single word you type as a command: When I first read this I didn’t believe it. Then I read it again, and again, and...