By Evan Ackerman

It’s funny how this thing is supposed to be some kind of anachronism, with a CD player built into a phonograph case. The little sensor-arm thingy with the laser in it is a nice touch. (Yes, I know it’s not actually called a “sensor-arm thingy,” but it’s ancient technology, give me a break.) Anyway, what I found funny is that I’d say CDs are also a dead medium, making the entire thing pretty much useless. Look for it in 6 months for about $150.

By Evan Ackerman

These corkscrewy cables are Flexicords, which can stretch out to 10 feet from their coiled length of about 1 foot. It’s designed to help keep things neat and tidy by keeping excess cable from lying around all over the place for you to trip over and fall and smash your head open. Flexicords aren’t sproingy; rather, they have “patent-pending Memory Cord™ Technology” that holds the cord in whatever position you bend it into, which opens up all kinds of exciting cordy art project possibilities. To recoil the cord, the Flexicord packaging includes a “simple recoiling tool” which is basically just a tube that you wrap the cable around.

You can get Flexicords in HDMI, S-video, composite, CAT5, and four flavors of 6 foot USB cables. They’ll be for sale in February online for a little bit more than you’d pay for an equivalent non-Flexicord cord.

[ Flexicord ]

By Luke Anderson

[ The following concerns a paid campaign currently running on the site. ]

CES may be in full swing now, but as you might have noticed, I’m not in attendance this year. Someone has to hold down the virtual fort here at OhGizmo. Not to mention there are still plenty of questions coming in over at the Laptop Experts, which I have diligently been answering all week. I’ll be answering 6 per day from now on, so feel free to head over there and ask away.

Just to give you a taste of what’s been going on, here is a sampling of what I’ve been up to. Some people have been curious whether or not they need to plug in their laptop all the time when using it, and why their new battery is taking so long to charge. Another’s computer is shutting off whenever they plug it into the wall, and someone else is having trouble with their wireless after a water spill.

There are always plenty of questions to be answered over at the Laptop Experts site, and several experts taking a crack at them each day. If you have a question, or feel like answering those that have already been asked, just head on over to the site.

[ Laptop Experts ]

By David Ponce

Traveling can suck. It’s much more gratifying to sit in your leather throne in your corporate office and order your minions from a distance. Enter QA, from AnyBots, a $30,000 telepresence self-balancing robot that can take you (virtually) to your Singapore child labor camp precocious workforce facility and see how things are going without ever having to leave the comfort of wherever you call home. Once powered up, you log into QA and move it around at will. You face shows up in its chest, your voice is heard through its speakers and more importantly the look of abject subordination is seen (and transmitted back to you, live) on the face of your cowering middle-managers through its soulless camera-eyes. You can make it bend and look around, and even has a laser that you can use to point to things that need to be done.

QA has a battery life of 4 to 6 hours, depending on usage and can move around at speeds of up to 6mph. Currently the company is small and is looking for investors, or any sort of financial help that would allow it to streamline their manufacturing process and drop that kick-in-the-gut $30k price tag.

[ AnyBots ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Besides jumping on the netbook bandwagon, at their press conference on Wednesday Sony announced that they’d be entering the cheap and easy-to-use hi-def web video camcorder market with their new ‘Webbie’ cameras. Both models capture high-def MPEG4 video or 5 megapixel photos and come with “PMB portable software” making it easy to upload your shots or clips to online sharing services like YouTube. The MHS-PM1 Webbie pictured above (available in April for about $170) has a vertically oriented body and a rotating swivel lens making it easy to take self shots, while the MHS-CM1 pictured below (about $200 available now) has a more traditional camcorder body with a 5x optical zoom and a 2.5-inch swivel LCD screen. And both are available in your choice of orange, eggplant or silver color schemes.

By David Ponce

We spent a good portion of Thursday morning listening to HP’s execs talk about their new products with an enthusiasm of near onanistic intensity. Sure, their lineup of laptops, printers and desktops is slick and all, but we here are OhGizmo! tend to stay away from the “Bigger, Faster and Slimmer” school of technological innovation. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to hear HP had been working on an application for the iPhone which allows you to print any pictures you take directly from your phone, on any of HPs WiFi enabled printers connected to your network. We’re not talking revolution here, but it is an added bit of functionality that’s more than welcome on the iPhone.

It will print pictures up to 4″ by 6″, and is available right now from the App store. I saw a demo, and it works just as advertised.

One side note. I’m amused by the fact that HP refers to the “App Store” with quotation marks on their web page. I guess they’re still “getting used” to this whole “iPhone thing”.

[ iPrint Photo (direct download) ]

[ HP's Website ]

By Andrew Liszewski

The classic Polaroid might be dead, but the company still feels there’s a demand for a quick and easy way to spit out a hard copy of a photo, even if taken on a digital camera. And that’s basically what the Polaroid Pogo is, and does. On the digital camera side of things it’s pretty basic with a 5 megapixel sensor, 3-inch LCD display, SD card slot and a handful of software post-processing options like cropping, color corrections and red-eye reduction. But instead of only being able to view your shots on the LCD display or a computer, you can actually print out a copy right from the camera thanks to its built-in ZINK printer.

The ZINK paper refills used by the Polaroid PoGo camera are roughly the size of a business card, 2×3 inches, and have an adhesive backing allowing you to use them as stickers, which apparently boosts the ‘fun factor.’ The paper is an advanced composite material that’s embedded with color dye crystals that are heat activated. Depending on the temperature and length of the heat applied, the crystals will turn either cyan, yellow or magenta which end up producing a color photo. While the prints apparently have a life of about 10 years, they’re not ‘set’ when they come out of the camera which means you can actually do additional post processing and experimentation by throwing it an oven or microwave.

I can’t say I was that impressed with the sample that Polaroid printed for us at the booth, but I think an over-zealous flash on the camera resulted in a photo that wasn’t that great to begin width. So I’m going to hold off on a verdict until I see a few more printouts.

By Andrew Liszewski

While I don’t think putting a computer in the hands of every child on the planet will solve all of Earth’s problems, I do believe in the idea that educating the young’ns won’t hurt us in the long run. The 2 biggest supporters of this cause have been the OLPC project, of which I’m a big fan, and a consortium of various hardware and software companies who put together the original Classmate PC. The new Convertible Classmate PC Tablet, which was officially unveiled today, is the 3rd generation of the hardware, and while it’s been designed with schools and kids in mind, it’s basically another netbook. But a netbook with tablet and touch-screen functionality, which makes it even more appealing to a wider audience.

It’s powered by an Intel Atom processor running at 1.6GHz, and the 8.9-inch touch screen display has a pretty decent, and usable, resolution of 1024×600. It comes standard with a 60GB hard drive, though it’s easy to swap in an SSD or even flash memory instead, 1GB of memory and an SD/MMC card reader that can be used as a boot device. There’s wi-fi 802.11 b/g/n, and if you choose the Linux OS option instead of Windows XP you can even add open mesh support. The touch screen display works as well as any other touch screen hardware I’ve used before, and one feature I particularly liked is a built-in accelerometer that will automatically re-orient the OS GUI depending on how you’re holding the tablet.

The Convertible Classmate PC Tablet is available now from select OEMs like CTL, who have it listed on their site as the ’2go Convertible Classmate PC’ for $599.

By Andrew Liszewski

I shot this from a shuttle bus while waiting in traffic after the show yesterday. I’m all about trying new things, and who am I to argue with a taxi cab advertisement? (Actually, I spent 25 minutes arguing with a taxi cab advertisement just the other day.)