It may not have seen as much hype as it’s big brother, the Moto Droid, but the Verizon Droid Eris is still one helluva handset. Generally coming in at around $99 bucks, it’s one of the cheapest ways to get in on all this Android-hullabaloo – and for one day, it’s even cheaper. And by “cheaper”, we mean free.

Want a nice mic for recording your podcast? Talking on Skype? Laying down tracks for your magnum opus, Concerto for Swine and Dancing Girls? Get you a Go Mic. We’re giving one of these mics away to one lucky commenter.

HTC Hero owners, we feel your pain. Just months ago, you had the hottest Android device in existence. While it’s still one damned-slick piece of mobile on the hardware front, the software — now two builds behind — is beginning to show its age. You wouldn’t believe how many requests I get in the tips line asking if we’ve got any details on when the Hero’s getting the update treatment.

We still don’t know when, but it looks like we’ve now got a good idea of what the next Hero update will be: Android 2.1.

My first experience with solar energy was in Cub Scouts, when we made a solar-powered hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, solar technology hasn’t advanced terribly much in the intervening decades. At the consumer level, solar power still isn’t particularly useful for very much outside of a few niche markets. i.Tech has a couple of products that make a real effort to bring usefulness to solar power for the average user: the SolarVoice 908 Bluetooth headset and the SolarCharger 906 multi-device charger.

What we have here is somewhat self-explanatory. The two new Oregon Scientific weather stations provide clock functions along with weather info and are solar powered. Both models feature atomic clocks and a detachable solar panel that recharges the battery. This way, you can know what the weather will be like for your daily tree hugging.

What is the allure of cheating in video games online? Who takes team deathmatches so seriously that he needs unlimited ammo, no clipping, infinite life, and other assorted nonsense? It’s stupid, and if you try to cheat online you deserve to be banned. So forgive me for not giving a damn about the 2,500 people that were just banned from non-dedicated servers for cheating in Modern Warfare 2.

A pico projector with Windows CE OS 5.0 on board? Yes, there are devices like that. Japan-based Lancerlink announced [JP] one of these today, the MPJ-104WCE. What you get is basically an LCOS (3M) projector with a mini computer built into it (the Windows CE is an English version).

The projector produces 10-30 inch pictures with 640×480 resolution and 10 lumens brightness. There are also two 0.5W speakers built into the body. But sized at just 138.5×58.5×25mm, the device also sports a Samsung ARM 9 processor at 400MHz, 64MB of internal memory (up to 4GB with an SD card), a USB port, an SD card interface and native support for MS Powerpoint, Excel and Word files.

You know what’s not smart? Tweeting about being on the lam. Who would do such a thing? If you guessed former UFC fighter turned porn star War Machine you’d be correct.

It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.

Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.

In your face, parents all over the world. After pleading with your children to quit rotting their brains with non-stop video game playing, your suggestion of playing a board game instead has backfired on you with the Nintendo edition of Monopoly.

Today is Cyber Monday. It’s like Black Friday but with more indoorsiness. And while Black Friday is more of a brick-and-mortar, you’re-there-in-person type of thing, Cyber Monday is all online and there are far too many stores and deals to completely cover. Here’s a head start on some of the better deals from the bigger sites, though.

You’re going to have to wait a bit longer to pick up the $260 Nook in some Barnes & Noble retail stores. The lot that was earmarked for the brick and mortar retail market has been redirected to fullfill Internet pre-orders. Those damn early adopters always get all the fun.