Oh! Gizmo

By David Ponce

You guys have been asking for it, so we’re doing it! We’ve decided to partner up with Splitreason and print us a T-Shirt. And we want all y’all to help us get a great design. So what better way than to get our overproductive, blog-readin’, gadget-addicted, OhGizmo-lovin’ readers involved? And if we choose your design, here’s what you’ll get:

- $200 to be paid out to you any way you want… As long it’s not an annoying way, or a stupid way, or any sort of way that would involve you trying to be some sort of funny.

- The Oberon Watch from our good friends at Tokyoflash. Long time readers of the site will know they make the most attention grabbing, impossible to read, wrist-worn conversation starters money can buy. That’s a $145 value. By the way, our man Paul at Tokyoflash would like to inform readers that they’re offering a 1,000 yen discount to everyone who plays their Hanami game and makes a purchase by April 7th.

- One Neuros OSD. It’s an awesome little device that allows you to extract all video content from any source and digitize it. That way, you can backup all your VHS, home videos, etc. for later enjoyment, or you can simply transfer them to a mobile device in a variety of formats. That’s a $180 value.

You should also know that once the design is selected, the winner showered with presents and the T-Shirt starts selling like hotcakes… we’ll donate $1 per shirt from the first production run to a charity to be chosen by you guys.

Now, since this involves money and all that, we need us some rules. Recently, Joystiq did a similar T-Shirt contest, and we liked their rules so much, we’re swiping them and modifying for our use. So hit the jump for the nitty-gritty.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Evan Ackerman

This week over on BotJunkie, we started out by meeting a little Lego Mindstorms bot named Phobot who’s terrified of big things, found out that it’s a lot easier to give commands to robots if they’re capable of making smalltalk, took a look at a flying robot toy that you control with your hand, saw an awesome video of a little bot that wanders around with a pair of drumsticks and plays rhythms on whatever it bumps into, decided that we probably didn’t want to pay $5 for robot art made out of a small wooden block even if it’s quirky, questioned whether the new and improved version of BattleBots returning to ESPN2 is really new and improved, waxed philosophical about NASA’s recent threat to scrap one of the Mars Exploration Rovers (and enjoyed a bunch of cool Mars rover pics), checked out a round robot from Toshiba that wants to be your new voice activated universal remote, and lastly, nearly lost it while watching a spoof of BigDog’s latest antics.

[ BotJunkie ]

By Evan Ackerman

Our robotic sister site, BotJunkie, has been going strong since last year’s launch… There’s almost more cool robot news than we can keep up with! We kicked off this week with a video of a humanoid robot keeping itself (and us) entertained on a swing set, checked out the latest video of Boston Dynamics’ BigDog robot mule that looking damn funny keeping its footing on ice, watched a dachshund play fetch with a robotic tennis ball slingshot, saw the fastest industrial robot in the world stacking sausages, and got introduced to the Samsung Hauzen VC-RE70V vacuum robot, which could be a serious contender in the currently Roomba dominated robot vacuum arena. Oh, and in case you haven’t been keeping up, we’ve also recently posted about the latest Wall-E trailer (a must-see, trust me), watched the Army’s Crusher UGV drive over cars without noticing, and enjoyed (somewhat skeptically) a demonstration of a robot designed to massage your boobs.

[ BotJunkie ]

By Luke Anderson

I used to have a Helio Ocean, and honestly it’s one of the best phones mobile devices that I’ve ever used. That’s not to say that I don’t love my Mysto, I just miss that wonderful slide-out QWERTY keyboard. That, and I was able to run a hacked version of Opera on it. I always wondered why Helio wouldn’t just offer it as an alternative browser, but apparently they were already thinking along the same lines.

Opera and Helio have teamed up to release a custom-tailored version of the Opera Mini browser to the Helio Ocean, which I must say is a brilliant move. “We’re always looking to give our members their choice of great applications so we’re excited to be the first service provider in the U.S. to make Opera Mini an on-deck option,” said Doug Britt, Vice President of Service Management at Helio. “Opera Mini is a tremendous mobile browser. Optimized for Ocean and running on a nationwide 3G network, its a combination that’s tough to match.”

As I said before, I’ve used the hacked version of Opera Mini that was released by the Opera team in August of last year, and it ran wonderfully. I can only imagine how much better it will run now that they’ve had the opportunity to work with the guys at Helio.

What’s awesome is that this is the direct result of Helio listening to the desires of the community. After Opera released their own version of the browser last year, people have been crying out for Helio to work with them to make things official. Also very awesome is the fact that Helio is the first US service provider to officially offer Opera Mini as a browser on a handset.

This looks like it will be the beginning of a wonderful relationship between the two organizations. I can only hope that this will lead to more such handsets that work with the browser.

By David Ponce

About a year late, we’re getting on the Twitter bandwagon. If you want to follow us, hit this link. I’ll try to post “behind the scenes” stuff that relate to OhGizmo!. We’ll also use it whenever we’re at a conference or whatever event that warrants its use.

[ OhGizmo! On Twitter ]

It’s that time of the month again, when thank some of the folk that make this site possible. This particular company is behind a slew of services, like URLBrief, Blog In Space and the potentially market-disrupting Social Spark.

That company is IZEA.

Thanks for your support, guys.

By Luke Anderson

I was rather disappointed when I heard about Apple’s big new laptop, the Air. Honestly it just had too few features for an outrageous price. Sure, it was tiny, but that’s one of the few things that it had going for it, and certainly not worth the asking price in my opinion. However, one feature that I found interesting was the multitouch trackpad. Thankfully that feature is no longer exclusive to the Air.

Apple announced the release of new MacBook and MacBook Pro models. The MacBooks simply received a processor refresh, memory increases and hard drive upgrades. The Pro models got much of the same, though they also made the GeForce 8600GT available with up to 512MB, up from 256MB. The big news, however, is that all MacBook Pros will have the same multitouch trackpad featured in the Air. If you’ve been holding off on a new Apple notebook, now is probably your best time to get in on one.

VIA [ Apple ]

By Luke Anderson

All around the internet people have been pronouncing HD DVD dead. The past week I’ve seen it on dozens of sites, however, it really hasn’t been official. Until now. Toshiba finally issued a press release announcing the discontinuation of HD DVD business.

I really hoped that HD DVD would pull through, as their pricing was far better than the competition. Alas, it really came down to the movie studios. In the release from Toshiba, they mentioned that they will “reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008.”

You can imagine that glasses are being raised over at the Blu-ray camp as we speak.

VIA [ Press Release ]

It’s that time of the month again, when we decide to thank some of the folk that make this site possible. One company is behind a slew of services, like URLBrief, Blog In Space and the potentially market-disrupting Social Spark.

That company is IZEA.

Thanks for your support, guys.

By Luke Anderson

I finally upgraded my digital camera to a DSLR, so naturally I had to pick up new memory for it. Since my old camera is all but retired, I have a couple of decent-sized SD cards that are just sitting around not being used. I’d like to think I could utilize their storage capacities in a new camcorder, but they’re not that big, or fast. Now if I had one of these new Panasonic 32GB SDHC cards, it would be a whole different story.

The huge card won’t go on sale until April, but it is well worth the wait. The card is labeled a class 6, which has transfer rates of 20MB per second making it the fastest card at this capacity. Unfortunately you’re going to have to pay a hefty premium for that speed, as the card will set you back around $700 when it debuts.

VIA [ CNET ]