Panasonic announced today the launch of the Toughbook 52, which replaces their venerable Toughbook S1 of year’s past. As with previous Toughbooks, it’s designed to withstand spillage and droppage — this one can take drops of up to 2.5 feet on all sides without cracking a crack.

However, this one improves over the last-gen by giving you some Santa Rosa chip action, a built-in carrying handle, a wider screen and optional built-in 3G wireless (courtesy of Verizon EV-DO).

Buy it in July for $1,699 (standard config) or $2,499 if you want it “optimized for improved video and Vista performance.”

Panasonic Toughbooks

With the launch of every new search engine or cell phone, there is inevitably a torrent of exclamation mark-filled press releases and boasts proclaiming the new release to be REVOLUTIONARY!!! and LIFE-CHANGING!!! The truth, of course, is that they almost never are.

Still, such pleas might have been at least a tad bit convincing only a few years ago, when certain aspects of the technology world, or at least the public (and media’s) understanding of it were still in their infancy. That is, back when we were young and innocent enough to believe that a few cool features and a lower price was all that was needed to take on the iPod.

Today we know better. Here are the new rules of the technology industry. That is, the ineffable truth and gospel that will shape the tech world for the next decade and beyond. Companies that try to circument or ignore these rules will meet certain failure (or at least profit losses.)

Read More

There’s nothing more frustrating than manually clicking through a list of networks on your Macbook’s Airport, desperately trying to find that one open one with a decent signal. No longer. With Apple’s just-released WiFind app, a click to Airport automatically tells you which networks are unlocked and how strong their signal is. Stealing your neighbor’s Wi-Fi officially just got a whole lot easier.

[WiFind 1.1]

When T-Mobile began shipping the Wing (made by the good folks at HTC) just the other day, they earned bragging rights for being the first provider to give us a Windows Mobile-6.0-loaded phone.

So how does the gadget hold up? I’ve spent a good deal of time playing with the brand-new T-Mobile Wing, and am now ready to pass judgment on it. Click the jump for a full review and lots of up-close photos.

Read More

Much of a phone’s form factor is a result of the need for the device to, above all else, work as a phone. That is, it must be held against your face.

Of course, this is changing. The past few years have seen Bluetooth headsets spread from middle managers to nightclubs. In a few years, the idea of actually talking directly into your phone will be as archaic as a rotary dial. That’s not to say that phone devices will ever completely do away with built-in microphones and speakers (at least not in my lifetime), but they will eventually be little more than a backup for when your headset lands in the washer.

The point is: once the primary means of interfacing with your phone moves from the built-in speaker to some other method (Bluetooth or otherwise), designers will be liberated from the typical cell phone design, and will finally have the freedom to break through the mold of stale candybars, clamshells, and sliders.

Read More

JesusPan

You know those people who find the face of Jesus in their grilled cheese sandwich and sell the holy melt on eBay for $20,000? Well here’s your chance to hit the big time in the religious pizza market. Bake a pie using this pan and every bite will be a religious experience.

[JesusPan]

Read More

Thanks to the Copyright Royalty Board, beginning in mid-July, all Internet radio stations will see substantially higher royalty fees. Fees so high, that it isn’t difficult to imagine vast swaths of the musical Internet becoming dead air overnight.

Most frightening of all is the prospect of losing Pandora — one of the truly great things to come from the entire Interweb. I had the opportunity to interview Pandora founder Tim Westergren about a year ago, and the way he put it, the service is purely a labor of love born from his affection for expanding his own musical palette.

Right now. Pandora is under siege. In order to survive, it will likely have to evolve. And it will have to go mobile.
Read More

Some gadgets are good-looking — chances are the look of your cell phone was a major concern when you went shopping.

Then again, some gadgets are ugly. Very, very ugly. We’ve found the ugliest gadgets ever made, so you don’t have to. Some you’ve likely seen before, others you thankfully haven’t. Just believe us: You’ll never take your iPod for granted again.
Read More

In an effort to “save bandwith”, the Department of Defense is blocking access to pipe-hogs like YouTube and MySpace on official computers. Lots of employers put up such filters, but this is different:

Troops and families living on U.S. bases will still be able to view the sites through private Internet networks, but the move leaves service members in Iraq and Afghanistan who use the popular picture- and video-sharing sites with little or no access to them.

Read More

Paranoid types are going to have to start burning their documents if this thing catches on. Researchers in Germany have developed a software program to undo paper shredding. The project was undertaken to reassemble about 45 million shredded pages of police documents torn to some 600 million scraps 18 years ago.

As Bertram Nickolay of the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology put it to Nature mag:

The pieces of torn documents are scanned on both sides, and the digital images are then analysed by a cluster of 16 computers for 25 features, including colour, shape, texture, handwriting and typeface,

It’s only a matter of time before the IRS gets their hands on this and the whole CrunchGear house of cards comes tumbling down.

(via Nature)

There’s an old episode of The Simpsons where the designers of Barbie stand-in Malibu Stacy are gathered in their smoky room trying to come up with a killer app to take on a new competitor on the block. Their idea: stick a hat on the old doll.

The ever-wise Lisa, who sees through such marketing shenanigans, says something along the lines of: “It’s still the same old doll, they just stuck a hat on it.”

To which Malibu Stacy aficionado Smithers enthusiastically replies: “But it’s got a hat!”, before grabbing as many off the store shelves as his four fingers can carry.

Fast forward to a few days ago when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously (that’s 9-0, for those keeping count) that it takes more than simply tacking on a new hat to score a patent on an innovation.

You see, for years, the tech industry’s dirty little secret has been that the single most profitable sector is not the sales of MP3 players or video games, but patent squatting. It’s basically a Get Rich Quick Scheme: Come up with an idea that is certain to come into play down the line, scoop up a patent, and threaten to put any company whose natural course of innovation intersects with your patent out of business unless they throw down hundreds of millions of dollars.

Such schemes nearly put Research In Motion (and your beloved BlackBerry) out of commission for good, and have made gazillionaires out of some of the tech industry’s sleaziest slime.

Thankfully, these days may finally be at an end. And while lazy millionaires might be growling, innovation will surely be howling. And, in the end, it might even signal a sign of things to come for those other super-stubborn innovation-haters: copyright purists such as the MPAA and RIAA.

Read More

As a general rule, journalists (particularly us of the tech stripe) go gonzo when trying to proclaim something a new “trend.” We take one example of a hit YouTube video and proclaim it to be the death of TV.

The stories are usually the same: Lead with an example of a internet video that became part of the geek cultural canon (take the anti-Hillary Clinton/Apple “1984” mash-up video, or perhaps the whole Lonely Girl15 thing), talk about how this sort of thing wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago, and proclaim the death of the boob tube. The tube may be sick, but plasma and LCD are to blame—not the Interweb. Cell phone-bound videos, Tivo, iTunes, and anything else that “changes” the way people watch Heroes isn’t either.
Read More

Cell phones — everybody’s got them. Even your 12-year-old nephew whose parents keep tabs on him via the inboard GPS carries a RAZR. So what’s next in this omnipresent device?

In this week’s column, we take a look at what the future of the iPhone, and what we can learn about Apple’s upcoming Macbooks by looking at it, as well as why we can expect to see the Blackberry OS everywhere before long.

Read More

It wasn’t so long ago that the only way you could talk to your friend down the block was over a landline. In a flash, nearly the entire world became blessed with the gift of wireless, and cell phones became standard procedure. Today, if one so desires, they can eschew their rotary phone altogether, and go VoIP (if having just a mobile doesn’t cut it.)

Such diversity and choice is great — the availability of multiple technologies should keep prices down and innovation up.

However, unfortunately for freedom-loving technophiles, and just about anybody who wants to order a pizza or call 911 without any hassle, a series of recent developments involving our friends over at Verizon suggests that they are none-too-happy with consumers having such options. In fact, if they keep up what they are doing, it would seem they are not only out to completely monopolize the nation’s telecommunication services, but may even be set on destroying much of our nation’s telephone infrastructure in the process.

Read More

Back when our country was new, kids were given big wooden wheels and rolling sticks and expected to have a good time. More than likely, our little Ezekiels and Wilberforces probably had a ball rolling those wheels down the grassy hills. Of course, it goes without saying that if you gave a Wii-addicted kid such simple pleasures and they’d wonder where the USB hook-up was. Toys have come a long way over the years, and it’s easy to say that kids (and I suppose adults as well) don’t have the time or attention span for simple toys in days when you can get

So what fate lies ahead for the old games that you may (or may not have) grown up with? This week, The Futurist looks at a couple of categories of toys and sees ways modern technology has tried to dip its ugly head, and whether this tech infusion has made the toys more fun, or merely added a few batteries to the boredom.
Read More

Mark this down in the “Obvious” bin: more and more cell phones are using real names in recent years. It was only a few years ago that virtually every cell phone was identified by a serial number-esque stream of numbers and letters that, while I’m sure they made plenty of sense to a company’s on-hand staff of engineers and marketing pros, were more likely to leave consumers scratching their heads.

Hence the rise of the RAZR, the Chocolate, and the Treo—instantly-recognizable brands that bring up images that have been finely crafted through millions of dollars of advertising and marketing muscle.

But there’s a logical end to this name game. And it can be summed up quite simply as “more of the same.”

Read More

This is a shocker from Seoul–apparantly LG has gone all throw-back on us and reverted their name back to Lucky-Goldstar. A bewildering statement issued by the company states: “We have evaluated current marketplace trends and our focus groups tell us that ‘retro’ is the only way we can survive in the ever-crowded consumer electronics marketplace.” More news to follow on this breaking story as it comes in…

iRobot, makers of all things Roomba, has pulled the curtain back on its newest house-cleaning tool: the iWoman Depending on which model you get, the iWoman ranges in size from about 4′11″ to 5′11″, and cleans all messes around the house. The best part: You don’t need to plug it in, meaning you save on your electric bill. Instead, it runs on food, water, and oxygen.

If your house is anything like the CrunchGear Mansion, it’s filled to the brim with gadgetry and electronica. And with all this newfangled convenience comes an equal dose of frustration. Like when your cell phone clock goes dead the second the A train pops underground. It’s almost enough to make you strap on your old Mickey Mouse wristwatch.

So this got us to thinking — what are some common problems that ruin our gadget-loving experience, and how can we fix them? If any companies are interested in the following ideas, I’ll be standing by.
Read More

If Sony is to be believed, the verdict is already in: HD-DVD is a non-starter, and their cross-Japanese Toshibian rivals are toast. They may very well be right: Blu-ray is certainly outperforming HD-DVD in terms of sales and support, and may be headed for the victory stand when it’s all said and done. But in order to get there, Sony may be setting themselves up not only for only a glimmer of glory, but also a high-Richter disaster that could send the giant’s movie and gaming divisions reeling.
Read More

TomTom, France’s top GPS maker, have made the Go 715 nav unit real. The killer app: a SIM card slot lets you tap onto the power of the data transfer medium known as the internet, for sending and receiving data. This could be cool: Easy updating of maps and points of interest is the most obvious application, but there are others, such as SOSing and reading gadget blogs on the road.

[via Gizmodo]

So I’m here in Scotland with Audiofile Mike. It turns out that this home of The Highlander and hooliganism not only takes credit for bringing the world television, penicillin, and cloned sheep, but is now a steaming hotbed of new nanotechnology research. We spent the past week checking out bleeding edge nano, including ways of using OLED lights to smooth out skin cancer, microscopic machines that defy gravity, and digestible pills capable of making Innerspace-like trips through your bowels.

As Ottilia Saxl, founder of the Institute of Nanotechnology here put it, “I call nanotechnology science faction — like science fiction, but factual.”

This week we’re taking a look at the next wave of nanotech research that should change how we do just about everything.

Read More

This year’s CES featured a super-secret demo (read: no media) of a tech that just might save DLP: 3D. According to our source, the 2007 Samsung Slim DLP HDTVs will be capable of handing “future 3D games, movies, and other programming via compatible glasses and hardware.” That’s fine, but not if it’s no better than playing Rad Racer on the NES with those awful 3D glasses.

Luckily, our demo-attending source tells us the tech is “mind-blowing” and “literally one of the coolest things” he has ever seen.

The postman rang once today, and he came bearing that oh-so-sweet-sounding BlackBerry 8800 (aka… the Pearl with a full-QWERTY keyboard.) Even though the Pearl’s SureType has improved drastically over previous generations, there was still a very loud group of ‘berry addicts who were screaming for a super-thin QWERTY to make their thumbs happy. And, as announced, Cingular’s got first dibs at this one.

Other than the keyboard, the only real update over the Pearl is the built-in GPS functionality, making the mapping programs especially awesome. I just got this thing, so I haven’t had a chance to seriously put it through the grinder yet, but it appears to be just as blazing as previous ‘berries (that is: much more stable and much, much faster than Windows Mobile.) Like the Pearl, it comes with a media player, EDGE (I’m getting the feeling RIM is allergic to 3G), and a pocket-friendly profile that keep your Middle Manager belt clip safely stowed in your drawer.

Full unboxing photos below the fold…
Read More

I had no sooner thrown up a story referencing a fictional article on the “Top Ten Apple-Related Customer Service Horror Stories”, when I realized that such a story might be kind of fun.

So give us your best and worst Apple-related horror stories — customer service or otherwise. Either throw them in “comments” or shoot me an email at seth (at) crunchgear.com . If they rock, we’ll compile them into another story that will make Diggers drool.