Sony, and just about everyone else, has been fooling around with OLEDs for quite some time, and they’re starting to come up with some pretty clever applications of the technology. Flexible OLEDs have been in the news this year, and Sony’s getting into that game, too. In this short video we see a 0.2mm thin OLED display being gently bent back and forth, while actively showing content on its surface.

Sharp has on display a number of fun new gadgets at CEATEC. As is all too often the case, these things are for Japanese release only (at least for now). Maybe we’ll see them in a couple years. Read on for details on a dial-by-photo phone, newspapers on TV, solar-charging cell phones, and the Sharp Netwalker!

ALPS, the folks that mainstreamed the touchpad way back in the day, are continuing to innovate. Now they’re playing with electric field transmissions, which allows the human body to act as a communication medium. Video inside!

All the big players are here at CEATEC showing off their latest iteration of 3D televisions. They’re bright, and colorful, and pretty, and impressive. And it looks like they all require the use of special viewing glasses. Come on, guys, I saw this stuff last year at IFA: have you really made no substantial progress on easy-to-watch 3D displays? I almost walked past the Holoart booth, and I’m glad I didn’t. They’re taking a unique approach to 3D viewing.

Augmented reality is all the new buzz, I guess. I don’t know, because I only have an iPhone 3G — mine’s missing that important “S” indicating it’s the new model on which augmented reality can actually execute. But at CEATEC today I saw some Sekai Camera examples in the real world. My experience wasn’t entirely positive: find out why.

Way back in March I wrote about the HRP-4C robot that walks and talks. At CEATEC today I saw this thing in person. And now it sings! Watch the video!

Matt wrote about Wink Glasses a couple of months ago. He was skeptical of their value. I found them on display at CEATEC 2009, and just had to try them out! In the photo above, you can see them in the “active” state, helpfully reminding me that it’s time to blink. Click on through for a thrilling video of Wink Glasses in action! HOT!

Greetings, from the Land of the Rising Sun! You missed a wonderful meetup in Tokyo last night at the Ebusu Beer Station. We had about two dozen folks sharing food, drinks, and conversation. Although most were living in the Tokyo area, at least one fellow traveled several hours from Kyoto to join us! Many thank to the TechCrunch Japan crew for coordinating this, and thanks to everyone who made it out. Click on through for photos and more!

The GorillaMobile — Joby’s bendy stand thingie for handhelds — uses a suction cup to hold the phone to the legs. Or it did, until today! Now there’s an updated version of the GorillaMobile that uses four little hooks to keep your phone — i or otherwise — safely secured to the bendy legs.

I don’t use my garage very often, but I am a pretty forgetful person. So it’s not uncommon for me to leave my garage door open all night, revealing its precious contents to passers-by. Thankfully I haven’t been burgled yet. And now, thanks to a new instructable, I can make my own “Hey dummy, you left your garage door open” reminder system!

Great news, everybody! I’ll be in Tokyo, Japan next week for CEATEC. Let’s have a meetup! A successful meetup requires good people, good conversation, and good beer. I think we can manage all three, don’t you?

Behold, the Pioneer BDR-205! Thrill to the 12x write speeds on double layer Blu-ray media! Marvel at the 50Gbytes of storage capacity! Be amazed by the low, low price of $250 United States dollars! Click on through to read the entire exciting press release!

Smartphones are great. Ubiquitous data access is great. Mobile computing is great. Unfortunately, each smartphone represents its own little walled garden of convenience. Apple’s iPhone is tied tightly with iTunes and various other Apple services. Android is tied tightly with Google services. Each manufacturer makes a modicum of effort to allow their smartphone to sync with someone else’s services, but as is too often the case, such integration is usually lacking some important functionality. After all, there’s little business incentive to allow your users to use someone else’s services, right? Enter Funambol, and their open source mobile cloud sync.

Storage is cheap, and just keeps getting cheaper. I remember buying my first 250 megabyte hard drive, and paying just under a dollar per meg. Now we’re approaching multi-terabyte drives at retail stores for extremely reasonable prices. The age old problem, though, is how to protect all that precious data. RAID solutions have been around for a long time, but the consumer-grade products haven’t been all that great, and the commercial-grade products have been way too expensive. Things are starting to change, though, and the iStoragePro iT4UFER is a good indicator of what’s to come. Read on for a complete review, and a chance to win a $100 Starbucks gift card!

You thought Eyefinity was pretty cool, huh? What could be cooler? How about a gigantic 10×4 setup of seamless monitors, for super-high resolution visualization. That’s what you’ll find at KAUST! I’ll let this video speak for itself. Note the resolution values being shown in the bottom corner

Yesterday I introduced CORNEA, the CAVE system at KAUST. CAVEs are great, but they require a huge investment: you need to build a facility around it, or renovate a space to accommodate it. Then you need to spend enormous amounts of money to buy and install the gear. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have an immersive 3D environment without all that effort? Researchers at KAUST, in conjunction with folks from U.C. San Diego, are doing just that with NexCAVE, a scalable, modular immersion system.

In addition to NexCAVE, there’s several other great visualization projects underway at KAUST. Video and more inside.

I’m in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the inauguration ceremony of KAUST, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. This is a 30-square kilometer state-of-the-art research institution with faculty and students from all over the world. For the next couple of days I’ll be getting some behind-the-scenes access to technology in use here, both for education and research, as well as the tools used to bring this place together. Read on for my initial impressions of some of the tech here.

The jig is up, and the Silver Penguin award has been presented to the winner of the Fake Linus Torvalds competition! Before you learn who won, though, you need to know who was actually playing. As you recall, four famous people were pretending to be Linus on Twitter and Identi.ca, and the community selected their favorite. Click on through to see who the fakes were, and which one won the competition!

The word for the day is “malvertising”. It’s a linguistic mashup that means “malicious advertising”. Not deceptive, or antagonistic, but actually harmful. You know, the kind of online advertising that delivers a virus payload that jacks up your sister-in-law’s computer and then she calls you and you have to try to troubleshoot it over the phone and she doesn’t listen and just keeps clicking that damned mouse — you can totally hear her clicking clicking clicking — while you’re trying to be methodical and solve the damned problem. You know, that kind of advertising. Well Microsoft has had enough, and they’re finally going to do something about it! They’re filing lawsuits against malvertisers! Thank the maker!

Convergence. That’s the word that comes to mind when I watch the fancy demonstration of the HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart web printer. We’ve all seen the all-in-one PC design, a la the iMac, but how often do we see a printer and a computer in one package? HP is bundling a teeny little touch-interface computer with their latest set of printers, allowing you to access stuff from the Internet without using your PC at all! Some of the examples don’t seem particularly useful: I don’t think I’m likely to go to my printer when I want to buy movie tickets, for example, but letting kids print out their own coloring books seems like a pretty good idea to me. And printing Google Maps will be helpful for those Luddite friends of mine who don’t have GPS units.

Microgravity researchers at NASA have used a superconducting magnet that generated a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside a mouse, effectively simulating weightlessness for the rodents, right here on earth! The first floating mouse didn’t seem very happy about the ordeal, so subsequent tests involved sedating the test mice. As should be expected, the doped up mice had a much better time floating around.

Ice doesn’t get me very excited. I rarely get ice in my beverages because it’s merely “delayed water”. But some scientists have been studying ice, and have created a completely flat sheet of ice only two molecules thick. Apparently ice normally forms in a “puckered” layered formation. Thrilling! All you need is some graphene, platinum, a vacuum, and the ability to lower temperatures to 125 kelvin (about negative 235 F, or the temperature on the dark side of the moon).

While the developed nations of the world spend huge amounts of money trying to eek out just a little more efficiency from traditional solar panels made from silicon, an industrious young lad from Nepal has figured out how to use human hair to get 9V of electricity from the sun. The fine articles are a little light (ha!) on the science, but even if there’s some hyperbole in these reports you’ve got to admit that it’s still wicked cool to use human hair to convert solar rays into electricity.

Microsoft, will you stop at nothing to protect your hegemony? Your “Linux Facts” campaign from a couple years ago was poorly executed, and trumped up a bunch of selective information to make Windows look better than Linux. You killed that, and replaced it with a Windows Server “compare” site, but it’s still a bunch of selective data points that don’t tell the whole story. Now, you’re even trying to get the sales drones at Best Buy to steer folks away from Linux!