You can make a cell phone call from the top of Mt. Everest. They’ve got internet on the ISS and even further. So it seems like the only places left that you can’t have something more important that you should be doing are caves, and the ocean, but Ocean Reef has gone and ruined a whole bunch of that with their underwater cell phone. Learn how, after the jump.

I mean, seriously now. An underwater cell phone? Why on earth in the water would you want or need something like this? Okay, I can understand that maybe it would be nice to be able to talk to another diver, assuming you bought a couple of these systems and got decent cell reception wherever you happened to be diving. But what do you really need to say besides, “come look at this fish!” Or “wet enough down here for ya?” Or “gadzooks, I seem to have been eaten by a shark!” ‘Course, if that last one had happened, it probably would have severed the cable that connects you to your phone, which sits safely on the surface. Yeah, there’s no super cool technology here, just a glorified underwater Bluetooth headset that’s attached to your cell phone (voice dialing only) with a 40 meter long cable. Your phone, meanwhile, gets its own little waterproof case and life preserver and floats comfortably on the surface, where it’s likely to get seasick and throw up its SIM card.

This convenience (or whatever) doesn’t come cheap at about $1800, which doesn’t include the cost of the phone itself. If I were you, I’d spend that amount on a sweet BCD, regs, and wetsuit… Or for that matter, a trip to someplace like Fiji.

[ Ocean Reef ]
[ Skymall ] VIA [ RGS ]

By Evan Ackerman

You don’t generally expect much from a cell phone that costs less than sixty bucks, and with the Samsung E1107, you don’t get much. It’s got a 128 x 128 display, an FM radio, and a built-in flashlight. The reason that you’d buy it is the solar panel the takes up the entire back of the phone, promising up to 10 minutes of call time per hour in the sun. While not the most efficient way of charging your phone, it’s a million times better than an iPhone 3GS at out of power performance, and at least gives you an option for mobile charging.

The other reason to get this phone is that it’s good for the Earth: it helps reduce global warming. Not in the way you’re thinking, that would be too obvious. No, I’m talking about how having a solar panel out in the sun absorbs photons, preventing them from imparting their horrible energy into the ground and making everything just a little bit cooler. If everybody was using solar powered cell phones, not only would we be saving energy charging them, but charging them would actually cool the planet by some fraction of a degree that I’m just going to go ahead and call significant and important! Yay solar power!

So far, the E1107 is available pretty much everywhere except the US. Why must they taunt us so?

[ Newswire ] VIA [ Samsung Hub ]

By Evan Ackerman

Cell phones are arguably separated into three categories: iPhone / Palm Pre / BlackBerry, phones that suck are functional for people who don’t care, and everything else. In the everything else category, what distinguishes one phone from another is often (for better or worse) looks, and a company called Kent Displays may have trumped that category with a phone that changes color.

The entire outer surface of this prototype phone is actually a display, called a cholesteric liquid crystal display. Sounds tasty, right? It is tasty… The display is durable, can be molded into any shape, and (eventually) will display 4,000 colors at a high (but unspecified) resolution. A jolt of electricity changes the color, and that’s all it takes: once the color is set, no power is required to keep it up.

This is, of course, the type of thing that you’re not likely to see anytime soon, but it does exist. Is it cheap? No idea about that either, but I’d be willing to pay a premium for a phone that I could set to match my mood. I’m feeling mauve today, how ’bout you?

[ Tech-On ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

By Evan Ackerman

We don’t generally go all bananas about rumors and hearsay, but when someone whips up a handy color-coded graphic that explains everything that might show up on the next generation iPhone, it provides a concise way to summarize what you might have to look forward to if you’re one of those people who feels sad and lonely and inferior without an Apple logo embossed on something expensive within immediate groping range.

This graphic was put together from many different rumors by TGR; the numbers next to the features denote a source for the rumor and there’s a key available here.

[ The Green Room ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

Everybody knows that girls are attracted to guys with dogs. This is why, if you’re desperate, you can rent dogs by the hour. But what kind of dog is most effective at picking up chicks? This is the burning question that the Puppy Pulling Power experiment was designed to answer. Five different breeds of dogs (a Border Collie, a Pug, a Samoyed, a Staffy, and a Yorkie) were outfitted with a Sony Ericsson C510 camera phone (with smile detection software) on their collars, and whenever the dog lifted up its head to receive the attentions of an adoring female, the phone would snap a picture when (or if) she smiled. As you might expect, the dogs had a rather, uh, advantageous angle, so I’m going to go ahead and call the following trailer slightly NSFW due to cleavageness.

Yeah, it seems pretty fake to me too (they were sponsored by Sony Ericsson), but I don’t think that necessarily invalidates the results. Have a look at those after the jump (including some of the pics that you really want to see), but here’s a spoiler: the Samoyed wins by a cute widdle nose.

There’s a gallery of the “best of puppycam” girls here.

[ Puppy Pulling Power ] VIA [ Hacked Gadgets ]

By Evan Ackerman

This video might not mean much to you if you’ve never played Myst. But if like me you were one of the early adopters of the CD-ROM drive, this footage probably brings back a heady mix of nostalgia and frustration. Myst is now available in re-rendered (but still old school) glory for the iPhone and iPod Touch, packaged in a 700 mb download that requires a massive 1.5 gigs of free space to install. It’s been long enough since the original that I’ve reliably forgotten how to solve most of the puzzles, meaning that this is an opportunity to pay $6 for the privilege of wasting countless more hours trying to figure out how to activate the damn rocket ship.

[ Myst ] VIA [ BBG ]

By Evan Ackerman

Cell phone are a necessary evil, we all know that. But what is just evil, and not at all necessary, is the behavior of people on cell phones in public. Now, you could just politely ask them to shut up and go away, or instead you could buy this gigantic cell phone jammer and shut them up all by yourself. With 45 watts of output power, it’ll block cell phone transmissions within an up to 400 foot (!) radius. The included antennas are highly directional, which means you can target specific people to disable their phones and and probably give them 10 different kinds of cancer at the same time while still using your phone just fine.

The Super Power GSM Cellular Jammer weighs about 27 pounds and includes 4 cooling fans to keep it running 24/7. I’d almost be willing to lug a couple car batteries around to keep this bad boy powered up while I’m on public transit… Plus a shotgun for those pesky CDMA users. It’s $3655.

Oh, and if it matters to you, cell phone jamming and shooting people who use Verizon are both probably illegal.

[ Super Power GSM Cellular Jammer ] VIA [ RFJ ]

This tiny little box is, in fact, a cell phone. Well, it’s half a cell phone. You stick a SIM card in there, dial it, and the box will silently answer and then transmit back whatever it hears going on around it. There’s a rechargeable battery inside, a single power LED, and no other configuration crap to mess with. $65 is kind of a lot for what is essentially a battery, microphone, and antenna, but for all of you vigilantes (or creepy people) out there, gathering evidence (or eavesdropping) doesn’t get much easier than this.

For an extra $1, Brando also sells the same sort of thing integrated into a working power strip.

[ Brando ] VIA [ BBG ]

By Evan Ackerman

Remembering and entering passwords in anything is a major hassle, which is why everything should have seamless biometric identification built in. Failing that, KDDI has come up with a gesture based system that at least eliminates annoying number codes. Using an accelerometer, the phone looks for a specific pattern of movements as you bring it up to your ear. These movements depend on things like arm length, muscle structure, and patterns such as holding methods and other habits. According to KDDI, the error rate is only 4%, which is easily good enough for casual use.

As far as I can tell, there’s no reason why something like this couldn’t be implemented into any phone with an accelerometer, even without KDDI’s fancy arm length etc. analysis software. You just have to turn the phone on, and shake shake shake it in a particular way, and it’ll unlock. KDDI eventually plans on taking this technique a little further, allowing you to use specific motions to run programs or unlock your porn folder.

[ Tech-On! ] VIA [ DVICE ]

By Evan Ackerman

It’s a sad fact: you can’t get cell phone reception everywhere. I can personally attest that you can’t get it here, or here, and especially not here. If you’re a very busy and important person like I am, this could be a real problem, but Elektrobit has the solution. Their “Satellite-Terrestrial Device” can talk to quad-band GSM/EDGE and tri-band WCDMA/HSPA, as well as 2G/3G networks, WiFi, and (for what it’s worth) Bluetooth. On top of all that, it also connects with TerreStar’s S-Band satellite network, which should let you make and receive calls just about anywhere you can see the sky.

The phone runs Windows Mobile and be capable of at least email (if not internet) and has a full keyboard and a touchscreen, along with a 3 mp autofocusing camera, 100 mb of internal memory, and a MicroSD slot. Oh, and GPS. The fantasy is of course having a mobile device that hops seamlessly from network to network to satellite when necessary, and can optimize itself for either bandwidth or cost. Speaking of, there’s no info on the cost of the unit, although it’s probably safe to assume that if you’re making international and satellite phone calls, the cost of the phone itself isn’t going to be that significant.

[ Elektrobit ] VIA [ TechFresh ]