by Nilay Patel, posted Jun 10th 2008 at 4:16PM
Steve might have finally made with the iphone 3G yesterday, but as we’ve mentioned before, would-be upgraders have a slightly bigger dilemma than just shaking down the couch cushions for an extra $199: getting their user data securely erased from their old iPhones. Simply hitting “restore” still leaves your data in an accessible state, and while we’ve covered ways to do a three-pass wipe with iTunes playlists, Jonathan Zdziarski has posted up a set of instructions for getting at your flash from the command line and wiping it directly. Sure, you’ll have to jailbreak your phone and it’ll take at least an hour or so — but hey, you’ve got a month to kill anyway, right?

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by Donald Melanson, posted Jun 10th 2008 at 11:32AM We’ve seen tactile displays of all shapes and sizes, but none quite like this latest creation from a group of researchers at Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University and the University of Nevada, which promises to be at your disposal whenever you need it. That’s possible thanks to the electroactive polymer material the display is based on, which consists of eight layers of tiny actuator films that have been sprayed with electrodes in a specific pattern, allowing the skin to be stimulated without any additional electromechanical transmission. In addition to making it possible to wrap the display around your finger like a band-aid, that also makes the system extremely power efficient and, apparently, cost effective and easy to manufacture. As with other tactile displays, the researchers say this one could be especially useful as a braille display for the blind, although they don’t see any shortage of other potential applications, with them foreseeing it being used in everything from virtual keyboards to tele-surgical gloves.

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Epson, has now brought out the world’s first short throw distance WXGA 3LCD Projector. Offering you 16:10 images that are 30% larger than 4:3, Epson PowerLite 400W Multimedia Projector comes with a built-in closed captioning decoder. Enjoy watching bright and natural images with the 3-chip 3 LCD optical engine of Epson PowerLite 400W Multimedia Projector.

Features

• Built-in 10 W speaker.
• HD ready – native WXGA resolution.
• Optional wall mount for efficient installation.
• Up to 4000 H lamp life for low cost of ownership.
• Brilliant images without glare at 1800 lumens.

Epson PowerLite 400W Multimedia Projector comes with a two-year limited warranty with road service. The box content of Epson PowerLite 400W Multimedia Projector comprises of Epson PowerLite 400W Short-throw WXGA Projector, Power Cable, Batteries, Quick Setup Sheet, User Manual CD, Password Protection Sticker, Easy Management CD, PrivateLine Support Card, Computer Cable and Projector Remote Control.

Price and Availability

Epson PowerLite 400W Multimedia Projector is available at a price of $ 1,399.00.

Source : Epson

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by Paul Miller, posted Jun 10th 2008 at 1:19PM
HP decided to show off its new wares in Berlin — which is a rather strenuous yacht trip from the Engadget HQ, or so we hear — but was kind enough to throw up a few pictures of the new gear in action. The TouchSmart 2 is a particularly interesting product in light of Microsoft’s newfound emphasis on touchscreens in Windows 7. This could be a sign of things to come, or just a fun little approach to the all-in-one desktop for the here and now, but either way we’re rather curious as to what makes a second human necessary in the operation of this unit. What is your purpose, Mr. Blue Shirt man?

Gallery: TouchSmart 2 in the wild

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Offering you a display resolution of 320 x 240, COBY DP-5588 Digital Photo Frame with Clock lets you display all your favorite photographs in a stylish way. This CE and FCC certified photo frame from COBY, sports a 5.6” TFT LCD color display. COBY DP-5588 Digital Photo Frame with Clock offers menu language support in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Polish.

Features

• AV output for use with home theater systems.
• Full-size USB port for use with flash memory drives.
• Plays MPEG - 1, - 2, - 4 (AVI, XviD) video files.
• Integrated stereo speakers.
• SD, MMC, MS, xD, CF card slots.

COBY DP-5588 Digital Photo Frame with Clock sports a beautiful wooden frame with analog clock. It comes fitted with calendar and clock with alarm timer. Be it MPE or WMA audio files, COBY DP-5588 Digital Photo Frame with Clock can play it all for you. It is also capable of displaying JPEG image files.

Price and Availability

COBY DP-5588 Digital Photo Frame with Clock is available at a price of $ 101.95.

Source : Coby

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The 360 has nothing to do with Microsoft’s console, but is instead an extreme sport concept item from designer Francesco Sommacal that embraces the world of skateboarding, in-line skating and snowboarding. The wheel openings will hold the rider’s feet as he/she learns to balance as if on a skateboard. It has a wider repertoire of tricks too thanks to the larger wheels and enclosed feet section, along with the added ability of being able to travel on both gravel and grass. Would you actually pick one of these up if it ever materializes?

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Epson has recently launched a new line of all-in-one printers that is geared for household printing needs, and to kickstart this new printer series, Epson has also launched its flagship model, the affordable NX400 all-in-one printer. And when we say affordable, we mean dirt cheap with a retail price of $99.99.

But don’t worry, despite its cheap price, the NX400’s features don’t seem to be cheap at all. The NX400 is a full-featured printer that utilizes Epson’s DURAbrite Ultra ink for a smudge-free print. In terms of performance, the NX400 delivers as well with 34ppm for black and color text printing. You can also have a 4 x 6-inch borderless photo printed in just 26 second. In addition to this, the printer also integrates a one-touch standalone copying feature for photos and documents, as well as an option to reduce and enlarge black and white or color copies from 25 to 400 percent.

The NX400 also boasts of other features including MicroPiezo print head technology, individual ink cartridges, high-speed multi-purpose card slot, auto-photo correction, easy photo fix and PictBridge compatibility.

And like we said, this all-in-one printer retails for $99.99 and it should currently be available in major retails stores as you read this.

Product [Epson] Via [Crave]

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Western Digital keeps it coming with a new line of hard drives under the Caviar Black range, bringing yet another 3.5″ 7200rpm SATA hard drive to the fray that targets not only desktops but workstations and multi-drive systems as well. It will come in capacities of 750GB till 1GB, and will be made available from next week onwards. You can’t get any cheaper than this when it comes to MB-per-dollar, with the 750GB and 1TB models retailing for $199 and $249, respectively. Each purchase comes with a 5-year limited warranty, but don’t you go smashing that hard drive around just to take advantage of it.

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If you think that the battery life on your mp3 player is pretty phat, think again. Wolfson’s new WM8903 chip could further lengthen playback time by up to a whopping 120 hours - of course I believe that number is achievable only when the volume is turned down to the minimum and flash memory is used in your portable media player. Apparently handsets which ship from next year onwards featuring NVidia-based processors ought to see the inclusion of the Wolfson WM8903 as well.

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Who do you think has the fastest computer in the world? Bill Gates? A university? That one guy from the LAN party you were at 5 years ago? Wrong. The answer is obvious, the federal government.

Engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM unveiled the machine today and it’s quite a whopper. They’re calling it the Roadrunner, and for good reason. Consisting of 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron processors, 12,960 Cell processors and 80 terabytes of memory, the machine can be used to do just about anything. But its main purpose will be to do some pretty heavy processing for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

It took a team of engineers over six years to put together the 57 miles of fiber optics and 500,000 pounds of equipment that span over 6,000 square feet. What’s really remarkable about the Roadrunner is its computing capacity. Considering it shares the same heart as a playstation 3 x 12,960, in both tests and real-world applications the system was able to achieve a petaflop of speed therefore dwarfing all other supercomputers. CNN does a good job of putting this into perspective:

If every one of the 6 billion people on earth used a hand-held computer and worked 24 hours a day it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.

The machine is being moved to Los Alamos soon, and will begin work performing unclassified duties for a few months while it gets put through its paces. Eventually, it will be used to perform some classified duties such as maintaining U.S. weapons stockpiles. Other big problems will also get some time with it; specifically, it may actually be used to help find a cure for HIV or to “understand the origins of the universe“.

Read more at CNN and the U.S. Department of Energy

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