Here is some serious French testosterone in a watch. Made for or influenced by the special, elite operations branch of the national French police known as RAID. The highly secretive special force is interesting because they often recruit people directly from the public, as opposed to existing police or military personnel. The purpose of the group as part of the national police, is to combat and investigate major crimes and terrorism. RAID stands for “Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion.” In English, “Research, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence.” They seem to kick enough ass to get a watch made for them with their logo on it.

The 3D hype is now entering the toy market as well. Takara Tomy announced [JP, PDF] the so-called 3D Shot Cam today, a simple photo camera with two lenses. This “toy version of Fujifilm’s FinePix REAL 3D W3” is aimed at children aged 12 and older who have to use a special viewer to view images shot with the camera in 3D (see below).

Oh boy. 799€ ($1030) for the Tab is definitely a whole bunch of money for something you probably don’t need. It’s still a better deal than $150 for the new Apple TV! You could also buy a mac and actually do stuff with it. Or netbooks for the whole family.

The G-Drive Mini has a lot to offer for people who need FW and USB connectivity. This of course comes with a price of $250. $1 for each GB is obviously not satisfactory for someone who needs a normal portable HDD. For this price you can get two Toshiba Canvios and get 2 TB of storage. What can the Mini offer? Click to read my review.

so much depends upon. a brown margarita machine. glazed with tequila. beside the white tortillas.

It seems that one of the beta testers for Google TV couldn’t keep all that goodness to himself, and has posted several pictures and some video of the near-finished interface and hardware. It’s a brief and not particularly shocking video, but seeing it running on a home TV and hearing a regular guy expressing legitimate (if subdued) excitement make it a lot more real.

We’ve been fans of Klipsch’s Image line of headphones for some time now, so we welcome the latest updates with open ears.

The ones I’m most excited about are the Image S5i Rugged. When you live in Seattle, you spend a lot of time worrying about whether you’re going to get rained on, and it’s nice not to have to worry about your electronics.

Apple has been granted nine new patents, and I thought I’d take a look at the claims therein and see whether they match up to the descriptions, and whether they seem (to this humble blogger) like realistic items for which to gain exclusive rights. I’ve included links to all the patents, but the USPTO office is behaving strangely, and often returned an error when I tried to pull up documents. Those guys ought to claim a method to buy some new servers, whereby I don’t have to submit the patent number five times before it comes up.

I’m not going to get in the habit of analyzing in detail every patent that comes our way, but in light of recent lawsuits and all the noise being made about software patents specifically, it seems worthwhile to take a closer peek now and then.

StealthArmor, the fancy skin for your iPhone or iPad, is now available in red, pink, blue, yellow, orange, purple and green. I know you’ve been itching for a green iPad. If you want the boring carbon fiber look, you can have it, but that’s pretty old fashioned. We’ve got three to give away to lucky readers!

Not content to stick to the cheap imitation of tablets and other computers, the clever copiers at Abiko have produced a “homage” model of the Dyson bladeless fan. Keep in mind that the knock off isn’t of the newest models, but rather the 10-inch desk fan that we reviewed last year.

Verizon’s got this crazy challenge going on over at the teaser page for the R2-D2 Edition Droid 2, wherein users are given clues that lead to special codes. Once one person finds and inputs one of these special codes, everyone gains access to a new section of the site, and the original finder scores themselves a free handset.

Fortunately for D2-devotees everywhere, the force was strong with a gent known only as David H.