The Verizon BlackBerry Storm is now available for better or worse to the general public. Price starts at $199 on two-year contract after mail-in rebates and a nationwide e-mail plan. There was a ton of commotion yesterday as reviewers were left cold in the wake of the Storm, but there are still OS updates to come which should smooth out the experience, right? … Right? Not everyone was completely enamoured with the clickable SurePress touchscreen either, but I remain optimistic based on my experience at the BlackBerry Developer Conference. For the full tour, be sure to check out our BlackBerry Storm Video Roundup and hands-on picture gallery, but considering all of the mixed impressions, the only real way to know if this smartphone is for you is to get your hands on one and try it yourself. Still interested? Swing by your local Verizon shop, or check out verizonwireless.com/storm.

Related News from IntoMobile:

• BlackBerry Storm Video Roundup
• BlackBerry Storm now available on Vodafone
• Verizon BlackBerry Storm to Appear at BlackBerry Dev Con!
• Yet Another Verizon BlackBerry Storm Commercial
• BlackBerry Storm 9530 goes live on Verizon - sort of

Solar car battery charger

You can use your car less and not have to worry about coming back to a flat battery as this little gadget will ensure it’s always topped up. It’ll also work on motorbikes, boats and other small vehicles.

The full post can be found on Decide What to Buy.

3G iPhone Accessories - Incase Power Slider Case

Incase has revealed a new version of their Slider Case for the 3G iPhone, the Incase Power Slider Case.

This isn’t just your ordinary iPhone case, this new one features a built in battery pack that will double the battery life of your 3G iPhone.

The full post can be found on iPhone Sync.

Desktop Cotton Candy Maker

Cotton candy at home? I can feel the sugar coma coming on. You simply add sugar to the heating chamber and it produces cotton candy. Everything is removable for easy cleaning.

The full post can be found on Kitchen Contraptions.

HP TouchSmart tx2 notebook: Swiveling Magic!

The 12.1″ widescreen display swivels into a tablet, and lets you use two fingers to expand and pinch graphics, rotate and move objects around the desktop, drag things around and double tap to open

The full post can be found on Elite Choice.

Scotsman Beer Dispenser Pours Ten Pints in Ten Seconds

The Scotsman Trufill beer dispenser takes a different approach to filling pints, by filling from the bottom up. In doing so, it is able to serve beer at the alarmingly fast rate of ten pints in ten seconds. One would assume that a specialized cups or glasses are required in order to make use of the bottom-up filling method, but if it gets us beer faster, I am all for it.

The full post can be found on Uber Review.

Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife

If this doesn’t take the cake, it will at least slice it in 67 different ways. The Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife features a staggering 85 implements and is capable of performing over 100 tasks. It comes complete with double-cut wood saw, laser flashlight, universal wrench, golf divot repair tool and of course, what Swiss Army Knife is complete without a flashlight? It does weigh 1.5kg though, so you may not want to put it anywhere flimsy. Like a pocket.

The full post can be found on Gaj-It.

Faucet with Built In Electronic Thermostat

The Blok is an awesome new minimalist faucet mounted to a large shelf. Embedded within the shelf is a glowing digital display showing the water’s temperature. You can view the thermostat to instantly know if the water is too hot or too cold without having to do the tried and true water touching method.

The full post can be found on Craziest Gadgets.

Thanks again to all the sites for their submissions now over to you guys for voting (don’t forget to leave a comment with your reason for a chance to win a $50 Amazon voucher) and tell a friend about this contest to possibly win another $50:

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If you write for a gadget themed blog and wish to be included in next weeks contest check out the CGOTW instructions page.

PARO has many effable qualities, and among them include :-

• Paro has been found to reduce patient stress and their caregivers
• Paro stimulates interaction between patients and caregivers
• Paro has been shown to have a Psychological effect on patients, improving thier relaxation and motivation
• Paro has improved the Physiological effect of patients vital signs
• Paro improves the socialiazation of patients with each other and with caregivers

Specially designed to look like an adorable baby harp seal (at least you can be sure that this pup won’t be clubbed to death), the PARO robot comes with integrated intelligence that enables it to possess psychological, physiological, and social effects via physical interaction with human beings. PARO imitates animal behavior (not all though, good thing you don’t have to feed it, bathe it or clean up its poo), being more than capable of responding to various external stimuli including light, sound, temperature, touch and posture. Over time, PARO will develop its own character, so no two are ever alike - hmmm, sounds pretty much like the Pleo, eh?

The first production lot of 300 PAROs for the US market will be out in January next year, which means it will miss the lucrative Christmas shopping season. I suppose that doesn’t really matter since PARO comes with a price tag of $6,000, placing it well out of reach for most people but the well-heeled. Pre-orders will be taken from December 1st onwards by phone, fax or e-mail.

Press Release

A protective glove system that is currently being used in Iraq by the military is now being made available to civilians. Expect plenty of gear heads, wannabe heroes, and disaster preparedness aficionados to add them to their must-get Christmas wish list.

Outdoor Research’s latest Modular Gloves are highly useful flame resistants and have proven integral in the battlefield because of their temperature versatility -- they can handle extreme cold and super-hot flames just the same. Made out of a tough, abrasion-resistant exterior fabric called 'Wolverine' that is also lightweight, the gloves team up with a three-layer soft-shell fabric for improved comfort. The user is supposed to mix up the different glove layers as the need demands it.

The glove system is peculiar because the light, Nomex-based material also stretches four-ways, allowing the user a greater range or motion than usual. It also sheds light precipitation and has a soft, wicking interior. Most gear with a high level of flame protection is so inflexible that they make people look like chubby cousins of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man. And you don't want your firefighters to stumble around in narrow spaces while their immediate surroundings come tumbling down in flames.

According to OR, the $1100 Modular Glove System is currently used by all active SOF operators, including troops serving in the Middle East. With the dangerous increase of MID attacks (and their inevitable flying shrapnel), they've proven more than useful and have saved plenty of limbs from potential burns.

So while we won't recommend that anyone should, in fact put his or her hands in a fire, it's good to know that if you absolutely had to (like an emergency), there's some gear out there that can handle that dangerous task.

So what did the press think? They loved it...and they hated it...depending who you talk to.

CNET
...its 3.25-inch VGA glass display also demands attention for its sharpness and brightness, showing 65,000 colors at a crisp 480x360-pixel resolution. We weren't as impressed with the Storm's screen as the BlackBerry Bold, but it's still beautiful.

PCMag
A solid voice phone, the Storm has fine reception, and earpiece and speakerphone volume are both very loud. There's also some pleasing in-ear feedback of your own voice. Transmissions sounded steady on the other end, with just a little background noise coming through, thanks to the phone's dual-mic noise cancellation.

Laptop
One thing’s for sure: The Storm puts the iPhone 3G’s speaker to shame. When playing Keane’s "Perfect Symmetry," the sound was quite loud even at medium volume, and the music application displays large album art that nicely takes up most of the screen.

Wired
When you want to select anything, be it a multimedia app or the number five, you have to press the screen down a millimeter, it's roughly the same sensation you get when clicking a mouse. But that small press makes a huge difference. Text messaging is amazing — pounding out a long-winded SMS (with a lot of compound words and no abbreviations) is just as easy as typing one out on a MacBook's keyboard. This is the single killer feature of the Storm and if not for a few glaring flaws a good reason to go out and buy one right now.

PCWorld
The decision by Research in Motion to differentiate the Storm by giving its capacitive touch screen a mechanical component (the entire screen functions as a button for confirming selections or initiating actions) turns out to be more confusing than helpful. Ultimately, the Storm's touch interface feels like a failed experiment.
Popular Mechanics
With a little practice, we were able to get used to [the virtual keypad] and speed the typing along, but it was never quite as fast as typing with a real mobile keypad, or even with the iPhone's virtual keypad.

The Wall Street Journal
The Storm also has a keyboard oddity that I found annoying, and that may put off others. It presents you with a full virtual keyboard only when you are holding it horizontally. When you hold the Storm vertically, you get a mashed-up keyboard, like the one on the narrower BlackBerry Pearl, which has multiple letters on each key.

DVICE
Why would BlackBerry addicts want to give up buttons for a touchscreen typing system that is almost, but not quite as good? The trade-off is for the big, beautiful screen that you get when you're not using the keypad. It's far better for reading emails, using GPS or playing BrickBreaker than any BlackBerry that's come before.

JKOnTheRun
...the web browser on the Storm, new to OS 4.7, is very good. I wouldn't say it's as good as the browsing experience on the iPhone but it's pretty darn close, certainly close enough. Web pages are rendered quickly in full page mode and when you double tap on the screen the browser zooms in to column mode...Simply hit the Back hardware button and you instantly zoom back out.
InfoSync
The camera on the BlackBerry Storm should have been much better. After all, with auto focus, a 3.2-megapixel sensor and plenty of advanced settings for shooter, you might expect the camera will take decent photos...[yet] colors seemed sapped out of even the most exciting scenes, as Times Square and our little hot pink action figure were both rendered drab. Noise was somewhat of a problem, though there was a nice amount of detail in pics when the auto focus was doing its job correctly.

Bonus Take: Gizmodo
I think that the Storm falls short of what RIM was aiming for, and ultimately what all the hype is driving people to expect. Some of this is fixable: The damn thing needs to crash less often. But SurePress is not the end-all, be-all of touchscreen technologies—it's not really an evolutionary step forward, even.
The Storm will be available tomorrow (November 21) for $200 after Verizon rebate.

Let's give credit where credit is due to Dr. Kathy Hudson, founder and director of Johns Hopkins University's Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., for coining the great phrase in the headline above.

I saw it for the very first time ever in today's fascinating USA Today story by Rita Rubin about the prospect of future presidential candidates having their DNA stolen and then analyzed for evidence of susceptibility to debilitating diseases which would prevent them from carrying out their duties.

Here's the article.

Could a politician's DNA be abused in a campaign?

In this year's presidential race, John McCain's campaign made sure voters heard about his mother, still sharp and energetic at 95, while Barack Obama's campaign staff kept relatively quiet about his grandfather's death from prostate cancer, a history that suggests an above-average risk of prostate cancer.

Family history is one thing, but what if voters had access to detailed genetic information about the candidates themselves? Could candidates be doomed politically if the electorate learned they carried genes that raised their risk of lethal diseases or psychiatric conditions?

That idea might not be so far-fetched, scientists suggest today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Although only a handful of humans have had their entire genome sequenced so far, the price of doing so is dropping, and DNA is pretty easy to obtain, especially from someone who shakes a lot of hands and eats a lot of rubber chicken, says lead author Robert Green, a professor of neurology, genetics and epidemiology at Boston University.

Last month, Complete Genomics, in Mountain View, Calif., announced it plans to sequence 1,000 humans' genomes in 2009 for $5,000 each — about 1/20th the current cost. And enough DNA to sequence can be obtained from "coffee cups, discarded utensils, or even a handshake," say Green and coauthor George Annas, a Boston University bioethicist.

"There are some legitimate things you can learn," Green says, such as whether an older candidate has a higher-than-average risk of Alzheimer's disease. But, he says, a 20% higher risk of breast or prostate cancer or diabetes isn't very informative when the average risk is fairly low to begin with.

"People can be fooled by numbers and how numbers can be spun," Green says. "We are heading into an era where there's going to be more and more information, and, for a little while, it's going to be more difficult to interpret." For the "foreseeable future," he and Annas write, genome sequencing "is likely to result in large numbers of false positive findings."

Dr. Kathy Hudson, founder and director of Johns Hopkins University's Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., says she's "not particularly concerned" about a presidential campaign disclosing its own candidate's genetic information.

Hudson says she is concerned about what she calls "genetic paparazzi," people who surreptitiously obtain someone else's DNA and have it sequenced. "We've actually been looking at the various laws at the state level that are relevant to unauthorized collection and analysis of DNA."

"The Man With the President's Mind," Ted Allbeury's 1977 novel (top), is a compelling exploration of a Cold War Soviet Union's creation of a Russian double of the president of the United States, who thinks so like him that the Russians can then use their man to predict the future actions and responses of the actual president and act accordingly with this foreknowledge.

Superb story, and it would make a sensational movie.

Ridley Scott?

Bueller?

Anyone?