Oh! Gizmo

By Andrew Liszewski

Instead of fumbling with handles while your hands are dirty, spreading the mess everywhere, Delta’s new Pilar faucets feature the company’s Touch20 Technology which lets you simply tap or touch them to turn the water on or off. The faucets use two capacitive touch sensors in the handle and the spout to detect when you’ve touched them, but are smart enough to know when the handle or spout have been grabbed instead so you can adjust their positions without turning the water on or off. A chrome version of the Pilar faucet will set you back $495 while the stainless steel model is a bit more at $547.

[ Delta Pilar Touch Activated Faucet ] VIA [ Popular Science ]

By Evan Ackerman

We’ve heard it all before: fuel cells are going to power the devices of the future. They’re going to put out more power for longer and be instantly rechargeable with disposable cartridges. Sounds great… But obviously, this hasn’t happened yet. At CTIA last year, though, we were introduced to a company called Medis, who is producing a portable fuel cell charger that you can actually buy right now. It’s between 25 and 40 bucks on Amazon, and we’ll let you know whether this new technology is worth the money in our review, after the jump. (more…)

By Andrew Liszewski

While the Apple Newton was really the first gadget to introduce handwriting recognition to the consumer world it was far from perfect. From my own experiences the technology really only became useful with the Palm Pilot’s Graffiti system but even then the user had to learn a special variation of the alphabet and could only write the characters on a designated area of the screen. It was definitely far from true handwriting recognition but it was still quite usable. (My trusty Handspring Visor still sits on my desk to this day.)

Fast forward to today and most stylus driven PDAs and tablet PCs contain a fairly robust handwriting recognition system but at the same time they’re not exactly cheap. And that’s why the FLY Fusion Pentop Computer was so intriguing to me since it offered a certain level of handwriting recognition in a small form factor and at a reasonable price.

After playing with the pen for a few weeks now I’ve come to the conclusion that some of its features will appeal to a younger demographic while other features might be useful for the older crowd. You can check out my full review of the FLY Fusion Pentop Computer after the jump.

*Update: In my original review I claimed the FLY Fusion was not capable of recognizing or converting cursive writing, and could only be used with printed text. Upon further testing I’ve discovered this was not completely correct and I’ve updated the review, including my conclusions, accordingly.

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