Gadgetstronics

Megapixels aren’t everything, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to have more. Leaf’s 56-megapixel AFi 10 camera subscribes to that philosophy quite heavily.

Even cooler than its astronomical pixel count is the AFi 10’s Verto technology, which rotates the picture for you to snap portrait shots. This way, you can maintain stability more easily.

The AFi 10’s also equipped with a fancy 56×36mm sensor, so it shoots medium-format pictures. Oh, yeah –  it’ll only cost you about $44,000. What are you waiting for? Who really needs two kidneys, anyway?

Product Page [Leaf]

56 Megapixel Leaf AFi 10 [Photography Blog via DVICE]

One of my favorite Windows Mobile software companies just sent word of their new web 2.0 service for online task management: Task2Gather. According to the company, you can put your tasks and projects online and invite family members, colleagues, or clients to participate in the tasks with you.

Online task management is nothing new, but sharing out the tasks / projects with others is an interesting twist. They’re also working on iphone and Windows Mobile clients to go along with it, so soon you’ll be able to manage your tasks on the web and also on your handheld.

Testing
In under a minute I signed up and created a project called reviews. I then created a task tree with three sub tasks, and then subtasks within those. Next, I clicked Share, typed in an email address of the person I wanted to share the task with, and then resumed my work. Moments later an Invitation ticket arrived in the inbox of my friend’s mailbox.

Overall, the process and interface is pretty intuitive, aside from me typing over my task a few times while I got used to the interface. I can definitely see myself using this as a reviews manager, and a number of other things, especially since the company will have iPhone and Windows Mobile clients that are compatible with it soon enough.

Task2Gather is currently free so check it out at Task2Gather.com.

KNGT has just announced the launch of their MK1 in Korea. The MK1 is an in-car multimedia PC which is powered by Windows Mobile. This just goes to show that regular CD / DVD players don’t cut the mustard anymore. The MK1 will blow them away with its 6.95-inch touchscreen, 800 x 480 (WVGA) display and on-screen keyboard. The MK1 also supports wireless internet via wireless service providers such as SK, KT and Nespot. Since the MK1 is going to set up shop in your car, it also supports navigation by utilizing an internet map.

Move over, iPhone 3G. Should the Plica phone concept actually be realized, it will surely overtake the iphone’s popularity in no time thanks to a dual screen display (hello, DS Lite!). One of those screens is a touch screen keyboard while the other functions as a touch monitor. You can also choose to view an entire web page on a single display or have them spread out across both. It would be interesting to see what kind of battery life the Plica offers, and will it boast even more functionality to rival that of a netbook? Hopefully designer James Piatt’s idea will hit a chord with a hardware manufacturer somewhere and actually roll off production lines.

Worried about people accessing your computer when you’re not around? The Biometric Fingerprint Encrypted Mouse might just solve your problem. This mouse has a couple of security features, such as PC-Lock, Web bank, Virtual Disk, and File encryption/decryption. Said features would be able to prevent users from using the computer when you’re not around, remember personal data such as passwords, hide sensitive files, and also encrypt files. The mouse will be going for $116, which isn’t too high a price to pay for security, though it’d be interesting to see what would happen if someone nicked the mouse.

Sanyo announced a new sleek, slim high definition dual camera Xacti DMX-HD800 that can take both stills and videos. Sanyo Xacti DMX-HD800 sports a compact and light-weight body, and easily saves data onto SD/SDHC memory cards for convenience. The DMX-HD800 will take stills and videos used on a personal computer or from the Web, houses a new three-dimensional digital noise reduction (3DDNR) filter, and adds the ‘Face Chaser’ for both stills and videos with an active scanner visible on the monitor.
The Sanyo DMX-HD800 has not only has it been designed to be sleek and stylish, but it now offers our unique three-dimensional digital noise reduction (3DDNR) filter, which allows clear, beautiful images with simple operation of a dual camera offering high resolution stills and HD videos in a single unit.
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Now is this a weird looking fireplace or what - it comes in the form of a briefcase which sends a message that this is highly portable, handle and all. Perfect for the upcoming winter (better be prepared than never, I say), the Travelmate makes it a snap for you to stay warm no matter where you are. No idea on what the Travelmate uses for fuel, but it is highly possible that it uses some sort of alcohol gel that other smokeless fireplaces make do with. Magnets will keep the glass sides in place, so you’ll have to remove those before you light it up. Make sure the glass sides are placed back in order to prevent any untoward accidents. The Travelmate fireplace ain’t cheap though as it retail for $3,300 a pop.

Product Page via BBG

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We first saw the UTStarcom TXT8010 hit the FCC back in mid-April using the codename of Elvis, since then it seemed to have disappeared, that is until now. The TXT8010 has resurfaced with Verizon and is now known as the Blitz.

The handset details are coming courtesy of a leaked Verizon Wireless Equipment Guide and what that means is we have some nice clean images, but lots of details are still missing.

The Blitz is a slider style phone that offers a full (albeit small looking) QWERTY keyboard, 1.3-megapixel webcam, stereo Bluetooth and a microSD card slot. It looks like the Blitz is headed for the prepaid market, and its expected to be launched at Wal-Mart on August 8 and Best Buy on September 28. No mention of pricing, however it does not look like a handset that is going to break the bank.

Via [Engadget Mobile]

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What you see above is the UnMouse Pad that is currently on display at the Microsoft Research Summit, where it will use Force-Sensing Resistors which results in a gargantuan mouse pad-sized circuit. It is just amazing to see how many input points the UnMouse Pad is able to track, and the inclusion of rising bars to indicate the amount of pressure applied at individual points will go a long way in increasing the useability of the device. I wonder when will the first commercial devices to feature the UnMouse Pad roll out. After all, the creator did mention that manufacturing the UnMouse Pad is pretty cheap, so it ought to arrive in consumer electronics pretty soon.

SD Time has had access to Microsoft documents that provides the outline of a future operating system (OS) called Midori that would achieve backwards compatibility with Windows and run either natively, in the cloud or as a process (sounds like emulation). The networked nature of the system might allow it to share the data (or even itself?) among multiple machines of different types (desktop, laptop, phone…). This new distributed model is known at Microsoft as “Asynchronous Promise Architecture”.

It sounds very interesting and if you’re a bit technical, you might want to read the rest of it at SD Times. This project is pretty far-off, but it is very ambitious and could be the next big thing or the next big flop, it just hard to tell.