On Gear Live: Samsung S95C: The OLED TV You Can’t Afford (to Ignore!)

  • STICKY POST

Find Our Latest Video Reviews on YouTube!

If you want to stay on top of all of our video reviews of the latest tech, be sure to check out and subscribe to the Gear Live YouTube channel, hosted by Andru Edwards! It’s free!

simplehuman Trash CanSteve Rubel, PR extraordinaire, made mention of the simplehuman Trash Can on during his talk at Gnomedex. Interestingly enough, he said that it is a $200 trash can, which sparked some applause from the audience. Going even further, he said that the lid opens and closes “like a Lexus”. I know that is has a wide opening, and it is brushed stainless steel, matching all the Mac gear you have in your office. There is even a noise dampener on the lid to make sure no one hears you trashing anything, and the liner lifts out for easy cleaning.

Read More | simplehuman Trash Cans


Advertisement

iTunes PhoneAlthough there has been a lot of debate about whether or not the Motorola iTunes phone would ever see the light of day, it now seems that we are closer to an actual ship date.  Mark Sue, an analyst with RBC Markets, claims that “Motorola’s iTunes phones are now ready to ship according to our sources, with Apple working out the final details with Cingular for revenue sharing.”  This could just be more speculation about the first iTunes phone, but Sue believes that Motorola ended last quarter on a high note (due in part to the fact that 3.5 million RAZR phones have been sold) and that releasing the new phone could only continue to raise Motorola’s sales as the next quarter passes.

Read More | GigaOm


Hobie is new to the world of blogging.  He has found that it allows employees to communicate with each other, and customers. The company is 11 years old, growing mostly by word of mouth. Client based application, currently only PC but will have Mac version in a year.

People don’t think linearly. A lot of the tools on the market are linear, whereas MindManager allows you to think. It is a branch structure with which you can drill down. As opposed to a PowerPoint slide, it is almost like a Visio layout. It can be published as a PowerPoint or Word, or export as XML. It is the place you go before you use your apps - the place you go to think about things.

Demo: Design a floating bike. He asked the audience to throw out ideas, and it became a frenzy as he was giving away free copies of the $350 software for good ideas. After entering a bunch of random ideas, we were able to drag-and-drop then into three separate categories - features, materials, misc. Very, very cool the way it worked. You can even put an RSS feed into a bubble, and expand it to see the actual entries.

You can even put search results into a bubble, and drill down whenever you want to see those search results. There is an IE icon within it which allows you to go to the search result page. This includes local PC search results (desktop search).

Did a drawing of the pedal in a new sketch category. Showing an idea of how you can also manage visual thinking. Copied the drawing a couple of times and added different aspects to it. Again, all is collapsible. You can now define task info, how long each task would take, the resources needed for each bubble, start date, due date, etc. There is an ink-to-text converter, which actually worked very well. There were just a few errors, but it was obvious that it was just a letter or two in a complicated word.

I asked about the IE icons, and if they were for IE or the default browser. They were IE launch icons, but the API is very configurable.

Hobart (Hobie) Swan is Manager of External Affairs for Mindjet and co-author of The Cancer Code, the story behind the creation of Mindjet, the company, and MindManager, its software. Before starting at Mindjet, Hobie produced health programming for CBS Radio’s The Osgood File, and was a freelance writer and video producer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has since left that burgeoning megalopolis for the wide sidewalks of Boise, Idaho. On a Tablet PC, Hobie will be presenting “Mapping the Floating Bicycle: An audience participation presentation using Mindjet’s MindManager to design the next extreme water sport.

Click to continue reading GnomeDex 5.0: Hobie Swan MindManager Summary


Latest Gear Live Videos

Coldplay SolioFans of the band Coldplay may be excited to know that they have hooked up with Solio and come up with a solar powered iPod charger with designed in the same vein as the album art from Coldplay’s recently released album, “X & Y”.  The charger retails for £79.99 - a little less then $150, at the Coldplay Shop.  Only 200 of the things were made, so if you want one you better get it now before they’re all gone.

Read More | OhGizmo!


ZelleStyleLove electronics so much you wish you could wear ‘em?  Probably not, but just in case you ever get the urge, check this out.  From a gold microprocessor “Bling” necklace, to a diskette handbag, to an alluminum wallet, they’ve come up with some pretty creative stuff for both men and women.  If you’re interested, you can check out www.fractalspin.com to purchase a few pieces.

Read More | ZelleStyle


DescriptionMeet the VR3 MP3 FM Modulator.  While there are quite a few FM transmitters on the market today, the VR3 has the ability to turn any flash drive into an audio player.  Simply load your flash with as many songs as you can,  plug it into the VR3, then plug the VR3 into your cars’ cigarette lighter port and listen to your favorite songs on any FM frequency you desire.  It also has an audio-in jack if you feel the need to listen to DVD’s, CD’s, or any other audio players while you’re on the open road.  A similar model came out last year in Japan that sold for $115, but you can get this model for only $30 and finally have a use for those extra flash drives you’ve got lying around collecting dust. 

Read More | engadget


Tiny PS3 ControllerThe forums over at Gamespot are abuzz with a new photo of the Sony PS3 controller. The shot makes it look like the controller is about half the size of most of todays controllers. There is a lot of discussion as to if this is all a trick perspective shot, with the gloved hand lending to that theory. Is it a farce, or could the PS3 controller end up being half the size of the Xbox 360’s?

Read More

| Gamespot


Syndication is powerful and amazing. Microsoft tried with Active Desktop and Channels in IE 4.0 and 5.0 back in 1997. He jokes about the success of Active Desktop. In 2002 Don Box blogged on GotDotNet.com, and in 2003 they hired Scoble. In 2005 feed are everywhere. MSN Spaces has 15 million users, 1500 MS employee blogs, MSN Search feeds on every query, and hundreds of feeds on microsoft.com, MSDN, and other Microsoft sites.

This all started with browsing, with the blue underlined text. After browse came search. Search is still being innovated to this day. Today, the thing is subscribe. Subscribe is more than a feature, it is really a new approach. I can subscribe and say what is interesting to me, and the machine will bring me what I like. People will keep browsing and searching, but it is how they will find more things to subscribe to. Compared to the first time someone sees a TiVo. It changes the way you use the Internet. Full summary after the jump.

Click to continue reading GnomeDex 5.0: Longhorn Hearts RSS, Dean Hachamovitch Keystone


Dave is the opening Keynote at GnomeDex, and he believes that it should be done non-conference style. His idea is that his Keynote should be more like a discussion rather than a speaker/audience type of relationship.

In the mid-90’s he wrote an essay called Bill Gates vs The Internet. The Internet has changed the way software vendors do business, as it has simplified the way a lot of the things that we do today are done. eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon all competing with each other in one way or another, yet the platform they use is the same - the Internet. None of these companies developed the platform, so it puts them all on an even keel. That is the power of the Internet.

Talking about eBay, they thought they would be absolutely dominant, going so far as to purchase PayPal to keep everything internal. Nowadays, people are realizing that they don’t need eBay as much as they thought they did. I actually agree, as nowadays everyone I know uses the free Craigslist rather than going to eBay to pay their exorbitant fees.

Dave says the W3C was ineffective. There has not been any effective evolution of the web. Not that they are stupid, but rather the dominant Internet vendor had the power to say whether the net would evolve or not. This is why the people took the power back through things like RSS.

After about 20 minutes of not being able to grab an IP address from the wireless network (too many PC’s!), Dave was finally able to get on the network. Now he begins his demo - an OPML based blog publishing tool. Shows the backend of ScriptingNews. He can edit an OPML file, and it edits his website in realtime, and it is ridiculously quick. He then showed how he edits his Smart Blogs area, again just using an OPML file and clicking save. It really has the look and feel of just typing in a text editor and clicking the save button - it’s that quick. Even changing the header graphic is as simple as browsing to a file and clicking on it. Refresh the browser and it is there. Truly amazing.

Even better, Dave added an MP3 Podcast to the blog simply by browsing to and selecting an MP3 file. The blog publishing software then creates the RSS feed with all appropriate enclosures. This really looks like it will allow anyone to do these things that previously only us techies have been able, or willing to do.

The network is once again down, so Dave discusses why this is open source - which is fantastic news. Users can add on features, such as a spell checker. Dave thinks this is the next phase of the web. News changes, but there are plenty of things that don’t change, such as the names of the Major League Baseball teams. He is trying to develop a tool for both needs - changing information as well as information that does not change. He does not think that you can get top of the line development for something like this from a corporate environment. Open source is the way to go. There are about 60 testers using this - he hoped to launch it at Gnomedex, but it isn’t quite ready. He will open the doors when he knows that at least 80% of those who download will have a great experience with it and be excited about it. They are working on both a Windows and Mac version - Windows is farther along, but they will have both.

Someone asks a question about why Dave doesn’t have permalinks, comments, trackbacks. Dave responds that he does have comments, but only on posts where he wants to allow them. Usually, they are all flames. Flamers want to get you entangled in their mess. He doesn’t want to put up with that, but he doesn’t have an objection to trackbacks, comments, etc. on a blog.

Someone asks what Dave was demoing, invoking laughter. He forgot to name the product. It is called “The OPML Editor”. Someone else asked about the name. No one knows what OPML means, less than 1 out of 100 people. That could be a turn off. Dave says that people don’t know what RSS is either, but if you use NetNewsWire, you don’t need to know what RSS is even though you are using it.

After talking about The OPML Editor a bit more, Dave ended the keynote by having everyone sing Yellow Submarine. No, I did not participate. Not a Beatles fan.

Click to continue reading GnomeDex 5.0: Dave Winer Keynote


Internet Explorer 7 RSS

Okay, I just snapped these pictures while sitting here at . Check this out, what you see above is Internet Explorer 7 running on a very new Longhorn build. When you visit a website that has an RSS feed, an orange and white RSS button will appear in the toolbar. If clicked, you will then be brought to the screen you see above. You can increase and/or decrease the size of each post, as well as subscribe to the feed. IE 7’s visual implementation of RSS is what I would call extremely similar to Tiger’s Safari 2.0. That being said, I am really happy about the fact that Longhorn will be featuring a central feed location. In layman’s terms, any feed subscribed to will be stored in a central location within the OS. The beauty of this is that any application can be written to access this feed with your permission. As an example, Dean Hachamovitch showed how the Longhorn screen saver displaying a slide show of images downloaded from an RSS feeds enclosures. When showing the images, there was a caption on the bottom right which consisted of the first paragraph or so of the blog post in which the images were sent in. Read more at my post on Venturus. Here is an image of the Longhorn screen saver using RSS:

Longhorn Screen Saver


Advertisement