Side impact crashes have increased dramatically over the past 20 years, and have proven to be the deadliest kind of crashes for children in the world - the vast majority of these fatalities are due to head trauma. Dorel Juvenile Group, the largest youth products manufacturer in the US, yesterday announced "Air Protect", which it claims to be the most innovative and groundbreaking safety feature to ever be offered in a child car seat.
Air Protect is designed to protect children in side impact collisions, putting a state-of-the-art layer of air protection around the child's head. Through the precise release of air during a collision, Air Protect compresses and shields children from side impact intrusion, and immediately reduces crash forces to the head - where the child is most vulnerable.
This technology will be available in "Safety 1st" products soon, with pre-orders of a US$249.99 model available starting from tomorrow.
Bike lanes are an effective means of improving safety for motorists and cyclists, and can be found in most western countries. Unfortunately, building bike lanes on all roads, especially in Brunei, can prove to be quite costly. The LightLane, a concept device that is currently in "beta phase development", uses lasers to project a virtual bike lane to help keep cars away from you while you're cycling.
LightLane was originally created for a design competition, but although it did not win, the response since its unveiling has been overwhelming, encouraging its inventors to continue development.
The device uses two high-visibility DPSS (diode-pumped solid state) green lasers mounted alongside traditional bright red LEDs to crisply mark a broad path on the road.
The 'Dev-Team', the world's premiere iPhone software hacking team, has done it again, releasing hacks that enable all 1st-generation (original) and 2nd-generation (3G) iPhone users to use the amazing new 3.0 software with any mobile carrier (including those in Brunei).
The iPhone 3.0 OS was officially released by Apple last Wednesday, adding long-awaited functions such as cut, copy & paste, landscape keyboard typing, MMS, Spotlight search, Internet tethering and more, but the millions who've been using un-sanctioned Apple mobile carriers have not been able to use the software.
Apple's iPhone line is available in many countries all over the world, but subscribers are usually restricted to only using SIM cards from the mobile carrier they bought their phones from. This has therefore resulted in the underground development of software hacks which successfully enable the phones to be used using any mobile carrier.
The Dev-Team has finally announced Ultrasn0w, a full unlock for all iPhones, excluding the newly released iPhone 3GS.
If you're technically inclined, unlocking your iPhone with Ultrasn0w seems to be quite straightforward:
1. Ensure you have upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0 2. Jailbreak your iPhone 3G using redsn0w or PwnageTool (this will also install Cydia/Icy) 3. Run Cydia or Icy 4. Please add the repo repo666.ultrasn0w.com to Cydia or Icy. That last “o” is actually the number zero “0”! If you use the letter “o” you’ll get an error. 5. Search for ‘ultrasn0w’ in cydia or icy and install ultrasn0w 6. Reboot your iPhone 3G 7. Enjoy
If you're not technically inclined, then we suggest you contact your phone dealer and ask them to do it for you.
An estimated 1.7 million people in the USA contract hospital acquired infections each year - infections they did not have before they entered the hospitals, but contracted during their stay. 50% of all these infections are caused by the transmission of germs from a patient to another via the hands of health-care workers. It is therefore a must for health-care workers to make sure their hands are washed regularly, but as you all might know, such practices are often easily ignored.
A new sensor has been developed by a company called Xhale for hospitals and other medical facilities that could help reduce the number of patients who get life-threatening infections while receiving medical care.
The 'HyGreen' is an intelligent hand hygiene solution that uses sensors to smell the presence of soap on clinicians' hands. The system also automatically keeps track of who washed their hands when and where, and lets them know if they need to wash their hands before they see another patient.
Here’s how it works: The health-care worker squirts sanitizer gel or soap into his or her hand before passing it under a wall-mounted sensor. A wireless signal from a badge worn by the worker activates a green light on the hand-washing sensor. When the worker enters a patient room, a monitor near the bed detects the status of the badge, and flashes green if the person has clean hands. If the person has not washed, or too much time has passed between washing and approaching the patient, the badge will give a gentle “reminder” vibration.
As you might already know from our recent post about Incomm's Nokia N97 offer, the highly anticipated touchscreen phone is finally available in Brunei. After managing to get our hands on this super-cool device for just about a week, we believe that it's the most feature-packed, and most advanced phone Nokia has ever put out to the market.
So what makes the N97 truly in a class of its own from all other Nokia phones? Watch our Gadget,Ink Webcast below to get a brief look at some of the phone's functions that made us enjoy every second we've had with this device..
Gadget,Ink Webcast 004 - A brief first look at the Nokia N97
Notable Phone Specs: * Slide-n-tilt 3.5" 16M-color resistive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution * 5 megapixel autofocus camera with dual-LED flash and lens cover (VGA@30fps video recording) * Symbian OS 9.4 with S60 5th edition UI * Slide-out three-row full QWERTY keyboard * ARM 11 434MHz CPU and 128 MB of RAM * Quad-band GSM support and 3G with HSDPA support * Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS (plus 3 months of free voice-guided navigation via Ovi Maps) * Digital compass * Class-leading 32GB onboard storage * microSD card slot with microSDHC support * Built-in accelerometer * 3.5 mm audio jack * TV out * Stereo FM Radio with RDS * FM transmitter * microUSB and Bluetooth v2.0 * Full Flash and Java support for the web browser * microUSB v2.0 and Bluetooth v2.0 * Good audio reproduction quality
As you can see from the specs above and our video review, the N97 is packed with features that will let you stay connected where ever you go, but what makes it more exciting is that in the months to come, more and more 3rd party applications are expected to be released via Nokia's very own mobile applications store, the 'Ovi Store'. Nokia believes that this could be a solution that could rival Apple's superbly popular App Store.
The N97 does however come pre-installed with 'Guitar Rock Tour', a Guitar Hero-like game that rock fans will surely enjoy.
All in all, the N97 will be able to satisfy Internet-savvy individuals. The massive 32GB of internal memory too is more than enough for you to take your movies and music with you every where you go.
Nokia's flagship Nseries device also introduces leading technology, including multiple sensors, memory, processing power and connection speeds, making it a likely huge overall crowd pleaser.
This excellent smartphone is now available, in 'Transition Black' and white models at Incomm for an exclusive promotional price of just $970 when you present your DST Card from 19th June to 22nd June 2009 at its Abdul Razak Complex Gadong branch. Financing options are also available with HSBC, Standered Chartered Bank & Baiduri Bank all offering 0% installment plans.
New Mexico's forgotten stretch of cattle ranches and mountain ranges will become a gateway to space soon, with the start of construction of the world's first commercial spaceport tomorrow.
Spaceport America, a US$200 million project, will host commercial operations by private space travel companies, like Virgin Galactic.
Some 250 people are already lining up to pay around US$200,000 each to take a trip into space in as early as next year, and they will take off from this magnificently designed spaceport.
Spaceport America will feature a 10,000-foot runway where spacecrafts will take flight, attached to an airplane, then break free and rocket 62 miles into space. The expensive flights will last for around 2 hours, all of which would include 5 minutes of weightlessness.
The spaceport's runway will be complete by the middle of 2010, while its terminal and hangar should be ready by December 2010.
With the alarming, multiplying reports of home stabbings in the UK, resident John Carnock has designed an anti-stab knife, after his wife saw a TV report calling for a ban on long, pointed kitchen knives.
The first knife of its kind, which will go on sale in Britain soon, will work as normal in the kitchen, but has been designed to make it more difficult to stab someone.
The 'Newpoint' knife features a rounded edge instead of a point, and will snag on skin or clothing, making it an ineffective weapon.
There's probably never ever going to be a safe knife, but the idea of this product is that you won't be able to inflict a fatal wound.
The knife has been approved by the UK Home Office's Design and Technology Alliance, and will retail at around £40-50.
It's amazing to know that it was not that long ago that we were transferring files on floppy disks, all of which could only store a few megabytes of data. The introduction of Kingston Technology's 128GB USB Flash Drive, however, means that it has never been easier to carry your important, large files everywhere you go.
The DataTraveler 200's robust storage capability will let you store as much data as you would in a 'basic' computer nowadays, and with a password protection feature built-in, it could be a great solution for business owners.
There probably is one downside though - it retails at an expensive US$546!
The Japanese have just concluded the assembly of an amazing 18-meter tall, 35-ton full scale Gundam statue in Odaiba, Tokyo. The enormous figure not only just stands there, but also entertains onlookers by moving its head and shooting light mist from 50 points on its body.
The statue, built to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Mobile Suit Gundam series, features an incredibly attention-to-detail body that comes to life after sunset.
Unfortunately, the figure will only be up for two months.
It's quite normal nowadays that every new touchscreen phone will be compared to the iPhone, and the LG KM900 Arena was no exception. After playing around with it for a couple of weeks however, we can sum up that the Arena seems to handle its touchscreen capabilities very well, featuring functions that could give the iPhone a run for its money.
Watch our Gadget,Ink Webcast below to see just how good the Arena's S-Class Touch UI performs..
Gadget,Ink Webcast 003 - A brief first look at the LG KM900 Arena
Phone Specs: - 3" 16M-color capacitive TFT touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels) - S-Class Touch UI - Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support - 3G with HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) - Wi-Fi and GPS receiver with A-GPS - 5 megapixel autofocus camera with Schneider-Kreuznach optics, LED flash, geotagging - D1 (720x480 pixels)@30fps, VGA@30fps, QVGA fast-motion video and QVGA slo-mo video - 8GB built-in storage - Hot-swappable microSD card slot - Standard 3.5mm audio jack and TV out - USB Mass Storage - Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP - Accelerometer for screen auto rotate - Multi-touch input - 3D hardware accelerator - DivX and XviD support - Dolby for Mobile audio enhancement - FM radio with FM transmitter - Office document viewer - Smart dialing
All in all, it's packed with features for both business and casual mobile phone users. Its slick and shiny design makes it a phone that you'd want to be seen with, and at around half the price of an iPhone here, it's well worth getting.
The LG KM900 Arena is available at Incomm for B$748, with further discounts when you present your DST Card.
Heinz has developed a prototype which it claims to be the smallest microwave in the world. This tiny 7.4-inch tall, 6.2-inch wide and 5.9-inch deep 'Beanzawave' microwave is super portable and is powered by surprise surprise.. USB.
If this concept product does hit the store shelves, workers who are tied to their desk all day will easily be able to create a warm snack, or hot drink without having to travel away from their seats.
The simplicity and convenience of just plugging the device into the USB port of your notebook also means that you'll be able to enjoy hot snacks even when you're traveling on a train or on an airplane.
The key breakthrough of this product is the use of a combination of mobile phone radio frequencies to create heat to cook both on the outside and within in less than a minute.
The Nokia N97 smartphone, which was announced in December 2008, has been one of the most highly anticipated Nokia phones this year. Nokia's second ever touchscreen phone (after the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic) features a large 3.5-inch screen and a cool, slide-out QWERTY keypad. This sexy device will be available soon at Incomm, and DST Card members will be able to purchase the phone at a discounted price.
A special preview of the phone will be held from 19th to 22nd June 2009 at Incomm's Abdul Razak Complex Gadong branch, and anyone who flashes their DST Card during that period will be entitled to purchase the phone at an exclusive discounted price of just B$970.
Nokia N97 Video
A first look at the Nokia N97
Financing options are also available with HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank & Baiduri Bank all offering 0% instalment plans.
Hot off the heels of last Saturday's somewhat subdued Palm Pre launch, Apple has just announced an extensive range of new products, including the highly anticipated iPhone 3GS ("S" simply standing for speed), which it claims to be the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.
Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Philip Schiller, along with other Apple Senior VPs launched Apple's yearly Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco early this morning (1am Brunei time) with yet another keynote full of surprises, and some predictable, but still exciting new products.
Just like any other lead up to an Apple event, this year's WWDC generated a lot of hype on the possibility of a brand new iPhone, but the Apple faithful were probably surprised about the first few products that were introduced - an updated line of MacBook Pros that are now more affordable, yet more powerful than ever.
New MacBook Pros Less than a year after they introduced the unibody aluminum MacBook Pros, Apple have surprisingly introduced new updates to the whole range of their 'professional' laptops. Despite a more or less same look on the outside, the 15-inch and 17-inch models have received speed bumps internally, including faster processors, the ability to expand RAM to 8GB, and up to 500 GB of Hard Drive storage.
The new MacBook Pros now boast up to 7 hours of battery life and a display that has 60% greater color gamut, which means that you will be able to enjoy more vivid colors on your laptop.
A welcome addition to the notebook range is the inclusion of a somewhat standard in other laptops - an SD Card slot in place of the unpopular Express Card slot.
The new 15-inch MacBook Pro, which Apple claims to be the fastest laptop they've ever made, now retails at a starting price of just B$ 2,888, around B$300 cheaper than before, despite receiving an upgrade in features. The entry-level 17-inch model now retails at just B$4,188.
13-inch aluminum MacBook upgraded to MacBook Pro Apple made the great decision to upgrade the current unibody Aluminum MacBook to MacBook Pro status, making the high-end, powerful notebooks more affordable than ever.
The new 13-inch MacBook Pro features the same 7-hour battery life as the rest, an SD Card slot, up to 8GB memory and a maximum of 500 GB hard drive capacity. They'll also include the Firewire 800 slot, which was surprisingly removed from the previous MacBook.
The starting price? B$2,088! - even cheaper than the MacBook it replaces. The MacBook Pro range has never been more affordable, now being accessible to those who haven't been able to afford one all this while. Apple will however continue to sell their white, plastic MacBooks, which all have received speed and storage bumps too, at prices starting at just B$1,688.
MacBook Air finally affordable Apple's incredibly thin, light and sexy laptop too is now more powerful and more affordable too. We believe that with prices starting at just B$2,588, these 0.16-inch thin MacBook Air notebooks are finally worth what you pay for.
Snow Leopard Apple continued the keynote this morning by giving the world another sneak preview to their new Mac operating system, Snow Leopard. Building on the success of the current Leopard OS, this new operating system will feature tons of refinements, including a far better user experience, faster loading applications, and some cool new features, including an all-new 'Dock Expose' feature, that will give the upcoming Windows 7 OS a run for its money.
It will also include built-in support for Microsoft Exchange, a feature that's surprisingly not free on Microsoft's own Windows platform.
The 64-bit Snow Leopard operating system will also include the new, sexy-looking Quicktime X media player that among others lets you easily trim and share video from the player itself.
Snow Leopard will be available in September for an amazing price of only US$29.
Snow Leopard Sneak Peek Highlights
iPhone 3GS Apple finally confirmed the existence of a brand new iPhone by announcing the iPhone 3GS, their fastest, most powerful iPhone yet. Despite looking almost the same as the current iPhone 3G on the outside, the iPhone 3GS is packed with incredible new features including speed and performance that's up to twice as fast as its predecessor, improved graphics, and a longer battery life.
The phone features a 3.0 megapixel camera that boasts a 'Touch to Focus' function, which lets you easily focus an object just by touching it on the screen. The camera also features auto white balance, auto exposure, and an improved low light sensitivity. The built-in macro function too makes taking beautiful close-up shots a snap.
The iPhone 3GS can also shoot high-quality video, a feature that's long been on iPhone users' wish list. Videos can be edited on the phone itself, then be shared via MMS or even YouTube.
Surfing the web on an iPhone will be much more snappier thanks to the HSDPA connectivity, but its faster processor means that even apps will load twice as fast as the iPhone 3G.
One cool feature that more or less sold the phone to us was its amazing Voice Control capabilities. Holding down the Home button will take you to a new app which lets you search and call anyone on your address book just by saying their name, or their numbers.
Voice Control can even be used to search songs on the phone's built-in iPod. For example, when you say "Play songs from Metallica", it will automatically play all your Metallica songs. Saying "What song is this?" will make it prompt you the track that its playing at the moment. Voice Control can also be used to pause, play the next track and shuffle your songs.
Video Demo of Voice Control
A great addition to the iPhone 3GS's features is 'Find My iPhone'. This service, that's exclusively available to Apple's MobileMe customers, will show you where in the world your iPhone is on a map, if you've either misplaced it or when it's been stolen. You will then be able to send a message to the phone, which you can probably use to scare the thief, then remotely wipe everything on your phone at the touch of a button. In the event that you actually get your phone back, you'll simply be able to restore it with all your previous information by syncing the phone to iTunes.
Video Demo of Find My iPhone
Unsurprisingly, the iPhone 3GS is packed with tons of features, including the hundreds of new features that are available in the upcoming iPhone 3.0 software release, making it even more crave-worthy.
The iPhone 3GS will be available from June 19th, while the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade will be available for free from June 17th 2009.
It's amazing what iPhone application developers can come up with these days - the DSLR Camera Remote from onOne Software could be shutterbugs' answer to taking difficult-angled photos.
This next-generation cable release, only currently compatible with quite a wide range of Canon EOS digital SLR cameras, can remotely trigger the shutter, or fire the camera. This app makes it much easier to take high or low-angled shots and self portraits.
Your iPhone or iPod Touch will also be able to wirelessly adjust camera settings, review image that you've shot, and even get a live viewfinder preview!
The 'basic' DSLR Camera Remote is available at the iTunes Store for only US$1.99, while a feature-packed 'pro' version is available at US$19.99.
For us amateur 'cooks', barbecues are a lot of fun - until we put the food in our mouths and finally realize that it's either overcooked or not cooked at all. Hopefully Brookstone's Grill Alert Talking Remote Meat Thermometer will end that once and for all and make us look and feel like professional barbecue cooks.
This innovative gadget lets you know when your meat is cooked, without you having to cut it open to see how pink it is.
The Grill Alert features stainless steel probes that you insert in your meat, a wireless transmitter, and a wireless receiver that will display the cooking temperatures, progress and more.
Simply insert the stainless steel probes into the center of your piece of meat, then on the receiver, select the type of meat and how you would like it done. You'll then be able to walk away from the grill to relax and entertain your guests.
A voice prompt will alert you when your meat is "Almost Ready" and "Ready" - barbecue-ing has never been this easy!
Electric toothbrushes have become more and more popular as of late, but they all seem to do nothing 'special' - they just vibrate and move faster than normal toothbrushes. Japanese company Omron Healthcare, however, will today launch a toothbrush that will know exactly what part of your mouth you're brushing and will then automatically adjust and control its vibration speed and direction accordingly.
The Omron HT-B551 looks like any other electric toothbrush, but it's claimed to be the world's first electric toothbrush that's equipped with a three-axis sensor - in other words it features an accelerometer, just like the sensors on an iPhone that detects when you move the device.
If the toothbrush is brushing the surface of the back teeth (which cannot be easily polished), for example, it will boost the vibration speed to 32,500 cycles/minute, while slowing down to when it's brushing the more sensitive parts of your mouth.
The bristles will also vibrate vertically when you're brushing on the area between your teeth and gums (periodontal pockets), so that the bristles will reach deep into the pockets, while they'll vibrate horizontally when you're brushing the sides of your teeth.
The features of this smart toothbrush don't end there though - it also includes features that encourage proper dental hygiene, like LED brush timers, and instructive grip dents and contours for a variety of hand shapes, strengths and sizes.
