Maplin has something special for those who can’t live without watching TV. The company today released a new 7 inch portable LCD color TV that offers the ability to store and receive more than 250 analog and 999 digital channels. This portable gadget can act as a digital receiver for larger TV sets and provides connectivity options to connect with the camcorder or DVD player. Priced at £100, Maplin’s Portable LCD Color TV also comes equipped with a remote control and a vehicle cigarette power adapter, so you will be able to watch your TV programs while on the move. [Pocket-lint]

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Continue reading Ben Heck apprentice strikes again with DarthCast

Himax Technologies, Inc. announced today that their Suga Video Pico Projector won the 2008 Gold Award in the portable electronics category of Hong Kong Electronics Industries Association (HKEIA) for outstanding innovation and technology products at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair. The projector uses an LCoS display panel, developed by Himax and is able to project images up to 60 inches diagonally. Himax created the projector to demonstrate the capabilities of the LCoS panel, which is also being used by more than ten other manufacturers. Himax noted that the pico projector would be ideal to use with a variety of multimedia devices such as iPods, mobile devices, digital cameras, notebooks, and PDAs. The Gold Award recognizes and rewards companies that produce outstanding new products excellence in design, technology, and service features.

[via Global Newswire]

This morning started as it always does: gritting my iPod-white teeth, I fingered the open trephine hole of my auxiliary port, smelled my fingers to detect any spillage and then — untangling the knots of the buycrime detecting umbilical that slithers out to my desk from Big Boinger's central hub — inserted the massive Cat-5 into my Thalamus.

But nothing happened. Something should have happened. My brain should have been awash in the matrix of morning deals; the Morning Reverie should have blared into my brain; electro-chemical orgasms should have been induced, again and again, as I had the bodies of the latest product revisions raped into my brain, leaving me as spent and without free will as a man who has just ejaculated his entire limbic system onto the floor. At the very least? The curious sensation of smelling overloaded synapse ozone from within the vacuum of my own skull. But there was nothing. Big Boinger just wasn't there anymore.

I looked over at my two colleagues. Minister Wang simply rocks back and forth muttering regulations, folded in on himself like some sort of spindly, fetal praying mantis. Minister Touchpreaux's reaction is more interesting: what once was a golem of listless oatmeal has now transformed into a manic marionette of enthusiasm, playing with strange blob-like creatures gelatinously inhabiting his iPhone and whistling to himself, only pausing to scatter off a burst of prose so discordantly uncouched from the Fifth Edition of Infomercia's NuPR Lexicon and plosively mouth "Yes. Yes!" to himself.

Of course, there is a procedure to follow in situations like these. Hardware fails... it's supposed to. I took out the emergency PR pack from under my desk, its cover stenciled with the Checkbook font, and broke the seal; from within, I removed the Portable Big Boing Mainframe, and turned it on.

>HELLO. NOW SPELL ANYTHING.

"EMERGENCY PROTOCOL," I queried.

> INCORRECT. NOW SPELL PROBLEM.

"Marvin."

>CORRECT. NOW SPELL MAKE.

"Make."

>CORRECT. NOW SPELL CRAPGADGET.

I thrilled. This is a forbidden word. "Crapgadget," I typed.

>CORRECT. NOW SPELL MEATBOMB.

My indoctrination continues. Big Boinger isn't here anymore. Marvin has stepped right into the machine. I'm plugging him in now.

Virtual Big Boinger Field Kit [Official Site via Red Ferret]

Here's a curious thing: A citizen has taken several state-issued items, disassembled them, and reassembled them into a new item that performs a function only slightly different than the original core object.

While almost certainly illegal — it's difficult for me to quickly look up the regulations this "Hailrazer" fellow is violating without the assistance of our umbilical custodial daemons in parsing our glorious two trillion lines of Infomercian legal allowances — I cannot help but wonder if this project, in which a Sega Dreamcast has been crammed into a Lazer Doodle toy case, does not in some way comment on the industrious and creative spirit that, when properly shepherded by the loving hand of our state, lives within the minds of every Infomercian.

Still, what a bafflement! This "DarthCast" project seems only to replicate the ability of our official Dreamcast entertainment nugget (now deprecated; if you have a lingering unit that has not reported itself to a local sub-node, please incinerate manually). Why would a citizen take all the time to create this non-standard device when its functionality has already been replicated with newer, official products many times over? It must be a desire to taste a small portion of the pride felt by Minimac itself when it imagines a new item for each of to enjoy.

I hope to answer these questions and more when interviewing Hellrazer, who was corralled and seized for reprocessing at 0721 this morning, along with several cohabitants of his vine when they objected to the mandatory quarantine and incineration of their housing modules.

DarthCast .My next portable started. FINISHED :) [Forums.BenHeck.com]

Apple released a few MacBooks yesterday at the Apple Event, and the new 13-inch MacBook one has been the one that’s been most talked about. (Info on the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is on a separate post.)

Apple’s new 13-inch Macbook is thinner, lighter, durable and comes with the new, solid-aluminum unibody enclosure. As you can imagine already it is designed to be portable, slipping in your briefcase or backpack and pull it out wherever and whenever you need it.

The new 13-inch Macbook is powered by 2.0GHz or 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed, 2GB (two 1GB SO-DIMMs) of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM; two SO-DIMM slots support up to 4GB and comes with 13.3-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display with support for millions of colors, 8x slot-loading SuperDrive (DVD-R DL/DVD-RW/CD-RW), illuminated keyboard and 160GB or 250GB hard drive.

As you can see there’s no button at the trackpad, this new MacBook featured new trackpad doubles up as a button, just press down anywhere and consider it clicked, now that’s really fancy technology for a laptop! This new multi-trackpad supports two-finger scrolling, pinch, rotate, three-finger swipe, four-finger swipe, tap, double-tap, and drag capabilities and it is made from wear-resistant etched glass!

The two new MacBooks will cost differently according to the specs which you choose:

• 2.0GHz with 2GB DDR3 memory and 160GB hard drive
• 2.4GHz with 2GB DDR3 memory and 250GB hard drive

They will cost £949.00 and £1,149.00 respectively.

Click on the screenshot below for more details over at Apple…

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Apple reveals latest 13-inch MacBook at Apple Event!

It really is a work of beauty, isn't it? We've seen portable Dreamcasts before, but this one just looks so much better. Created by Hailrazer on the Ben Heck Forums, it brings tears of both joy and sadness. It's such an awesome piece of work, yet it just brings back bad memories of the Dreamcast's untimely demise.

Sigh. [Ben Heck Forums via BBG]

Maplin has rolled out a new 7" portable LCD color TV which targets people who can't seem to live without their favorite TV programs (and boy, do they have a ton!). Featuring the ability to store and receive more than 250 analog and 999 digital channels, chances are you won't run out of entertainment options with this. In addition, it can also double up as a digital receiver for larger TV sets, featuring a host of connectivity options to hook up to camcorders and DVD systems among others. The remote control looks rather tacky though with its garish colors, but then again at least you don't have to reach out very far to make adjustments with it. Thanks to a vehicle cigarette power adapter, you are able to continue watching your TV programs while on the move - assuming you're not the driver, of course. Maplin is selling this portable TV set for £100.

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