Archive for February 15th, 2009

If you thought you hated George Lucas for crimes against your childhood, you haven’t seen this image yet. Yours—or mine—is not hate. This is true Dark Side hate. Check the big picture and his explanation:

I got this tattoo about 8 months ago. I believe it perfectly sums up my feelings towards George [Lucas]. I love Star Wars, but I wish George would retire and leave the series in better hands. Just thought you should see it. I love you guys! Keep up the good work at Giz!

Kevin sent us that message along with the photo of his tattoo when he saw our Should Goerge Lucas Be Condemned for Crimes Against Our Childhood post. I edited the really harsh words out of his message, but I share the feeling completely. [Thanks Kevin G]

While I think the Surfster Double Black looks like a head-on date with a tree waiting to happen, it does have one redeeming quality. That quality being it conveniently doubles as a two-person body board.

That means once you get out of the hospital and finish your rehabilitation in the late spring, this thing will be inflated and all ready to go for summer at the lake house. Where, presumably, you’ll experience yet another head injury or concussion. At which point, you’ll recover and this thing will be ready for, well, you get the idea. $80 and whatever your ER co-pay might be and this is yours.

If the open face design is keeping you from screaming down the slopes on one of these things, then perhaps the slightly less deadly Slegoon is more to you liking. Either way, it goes well with our reader meetup at Lake Tahoe. [Cheetah Trading via Coolest Gadgets]

newVideoPlayer(“/gijoe_duke.flv”, 506, 423,”"); This is Accelerator Suit Duke, and he’s been deemed the “most advanced action figure of all time.” Watch him run, watch him shoot, watch him ruin your childhood’s conception of everything that is good.

Jack pretty much nailed it after the trailer premiere during the Super Bowl: “it doesn’t really feel like G.I. Joe, you know?” Accelerator Suit Duke is about as extreme in that direction as you can imagine, but I must admit, that running-man action is pretty sweet. He’s $70.

Thankfully, there are of course some classic 3 3/4-inch Joes accompanying the movie’s release. And they have a new, $100 Pit playset to play in that’s pretty fantastic-complete with 70-some foot anchors for Joes to stand on (the old ones are compatible), an elevator, and even Ping-Pong table that folds out from the packaging!

And If you’ve always wanted to see Dennis Quaid in G.I. Joe form as General Hawk, your wait is over. That’s him on the left, and you can only get him packaged with the Pit playset.

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[Toy Fair 2009]

Nerf just can’t stop. Last year it was Rambo Jr.’s Vulcan Gatling gun, and now they’ve raised the bar again—the CS-35 shoots 35 darts from a rotating drum magazine with pump-action auto fire. Holy shit.

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As you can see, it’s autofire that still depends on your pump-action to squeeze out the darts, and you can switch between single shot mode and the 35-dart drum-emptying automatic mode. But with no batteries to change or electric mechanisms to break, this is the rapid-fire gun dart of choice at the moment. Nerf just unveiled it here at Toy Fair, and it’s the best thing they’ve got by far.

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Word is you can also detach the drum mag for use with the other N-Strike gear. Modular Nerf guns! Nice! It’s coming in the Fall of this year for $35. [Toy Fair 2009]

Some official pics discovered today have taken the lid off two new Samsung phones, the OmniaHD and its musically inclined sibling, the BeatDisc.

The folks at Samsung Central are somewhat perplexed by the big reveal, however. The UI looks very Windows Mobile, when what it should resemble is the S60 5th Edition.

The OmniaHD’s screen also doesn’t look very “HD” either, they say, although it’s just a render so we’ll have to wait for the real deal. The saving grace could be the “widgets” that the OmniaHD is confirmed to use, although that could just mean weather and stock prices on demand. We’ll see.

As for the BeatDisc, it’s a phone that’s designed to play music and make calls. More to come on these two handsets as MWC gets underway, I’m sure. [Samsung Central]

In what will be an unholy union to some, and completely expected move to others, LEGO has teamed up with Disney to produce new kits based on upcoming movies.

The press release is brief, and details are scarce, but what we do know is the deal encompasses three Disney properties: Toy Story, Prince of Persia, and Cars. As part of the deal, LEGO will have access to these three licenses, and will create themed sets, due out sometime in 2010.

Given the Star Wars, Batman, Indiana Jones and other LEGO crossovers that already exist, this is, like I said, hardly a surprise. Let’s just cross our fingers and hope that these kits retain that LEGO edge we so love here at Gizmodo. [MarketWatch - Thanks, Ponies!]

For it’s 20th anniversary (I can’t believe Super Soakers are 20 years old!), Hasbro is bringing back the classic Soaker, complete with poignant 1989 neon, back to market. Will kids today respect the best?

They’ve made one slight change-no longer can you completely unscrew the lime green bottle for a quick dump-over-the-head grenade attack; it’s permanently attached, and refilling goes through a screwtop behind it. In all other ways though, it’s the same classic. No battery-powered backpack reservoirs or any other similar ridiculousness in sight.

Man, it feels really good in my hand. You can buy it this spring for 15 bucks; sadly, a year too late for our epic water gun Battlemodo Royale. [Toy Fair 2009]

Sony Ericsson kicked of the MWC show a bit early today with a press conference for a slick new phone: The enigmatically named Idou.

With an OS based on Symbian, the Idou continues the cameraphone megapixel pissing match with an impressive 12 megapixel camera/Xenon flash combo.

Once you snap those gorgeous cellpone photos, they’ll be presented to you on a sizable 3.5-inch 16:9 touchscreen that Sony Ericsson claims is capable of “full media consumption” (so it eats all media? Interesting…).

Idou is just a codename for now, Sony claims, but the release window is certain: Second half of 2009. Did I say certain? I mean hazy and ambiguous, like all long-term tech release dates.

[BGR, Sony Ericsson]

I got some quality time with a Garmin Nuviphone G60, riding around Barcelona in the back of a jet-black Mercedes limo. My hands-on impression: This smartphone-meets-GPS-meets-media-player feels like a winner.

I don’t know what it really is: A cellphone that is a GPS or a GPS that is a cellphone. Of course, the cellphone has everything you can expect from a such a device these days, including a 3-megapixel camera (with a real shutter button, like it should be) and a music player, everything tied to the GPS. This seems to be the main point of the Garmin G60: Everything revolves around geo-location.

Physically, the Garmin G60 has a good size: A good feeling on your hand, thicker than you-know-who, but light and comfortable. The thing is made to be integrated on your car dashboard—it comes with a cradle with a suction cup—but it works in your hand as a smartphone just fine.

The first thing I noticed was the complete lack of buttons, except for volume and camera shutter on the right side. On the front, there are no physical buttons whatsoever, just a nice, colorful 3.5-inch touchscreen.

As you can see in the video, the Linux-based operating system is quite agile and appeared solid, although the full HTML browser stalled forever trying to load a page-which is probably a fault of the 3G connection rather than the G60 itself, even while it is still a beta prototype.

The interface seems polished, it feels fast and responsive, very bright and clean, with colorful icons. It’s centered around three main icons, which I’m sure are the ones Garmin wants to emphasize: Call, Search, and View Map. Call and View Map are quite straightforward, with Search giving you several options, from consulting the six million points of interests—already pre-loaded with the North America or European maps built-in the G60—to the on-the-fly Google local search application. This section feels very much like one of their previous GPS, giving you access to Favorites, Contact, or Recently Found addresses, and allowing to visit or calling any place on one click.

On the side (or bottom, if you are in landscape mode-the Garmin G60 has an accelerator to know this, although it didn’t feel very sensitive while I was trying it) you can see a scrolling list of icons, which gives you access to the other features of the G60, from the camera to the web browser to the Ciao! geolocation based social service to widgets like weather. While the main three buttons can’t be changed for the ones in the side list, the whole user interface is well organized and easy to use.

My impression from the hands-on is that Garmin has made what they know to do best—a GPS—and they combined it with a 3G smartphone is a smooth way. The result is a nicely balanced unit that has the advantage of having everything you expect in a GPS and all the features you expect in a modern smartphone, all under an easy to use interface.

We will give you a more extensive verdict once we get a final unit, which is supposed to arrive in the first half of 2009.

I guess that if the Garmin Nuviphone G60 is a GPS smartphone, the Garmin Nuviphone M20 Windows Mobile is a smartphone GPS. It’s quite smaller than the G60, but the demo didn’t work quite right.

It seems that the Garmin Nuviphone M20 we tried—which still doesn’t have a release date—is an early prototype. As a result, we couldn’t try the customized GPS-based search and maps programs: Every time we tried, it kept giving a location services initialization problem. We were told look very similar to the G60, but you just can’t see it in the video. The rest of the phone-developed by Asus-seems OK after our brief hands-on. Garmin has created special skins to mask the furrible Windows Mobile interface.

Physically, the cellphone feels light and compact on your hand, with a nice, colorful finish. The fact that it requires a stylus—even while you can actually use your finger or nail, if you are Ming of Mongo—made it quite awkward to me, although that may just be my personal preference after hours of iPhone fingering.

We will have to wait for a more mature unit to give you our full impressions.