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Here's something you don't see every day: water bouncing. GE has developed some pretty incredible superhydrophobic surfaces in it's Global Research Nanotechnology lab, and they've captured the results with super-high speed cameras.

Hello everyone, I have some exciting videos that I want to share with you! Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, we can finally capture the details of the water dancing on these amazing superhydrophobic surfaces. We discovered that even when the surfaces had the same contact angle for stationary water droplets, their ability to resist the wetting of impacting droplets could be totally different. In the following three videos, the contact angles of a stationary droplet on all three surfaces are ~150 degree. When an impacting droplet (with the same impact speed) hits on the surfaces, the droplet can either stay on the surface.

Look at the way the water droplet spreads, recoils, breaks into satellite droplets, and completely lifts off... that's what we really want for an impacting-droplet resistant surface! You might wonder what we can do with a cool thing like this? Imagine applications that involve high speed water droplets, such as wind turbine blade, airplane wing, or even just your car in motion. These are just a couple of the exciting possibilities that we are looking at.

[Make]

If you’re very particular about the positioning of lighting, you’ll love this bendy lamp.  It has several points at which it can bend down and around so that it’s at the perfect spot for you.  I doubt anyone would be in dire need of a lamp that can spotlight its own base, but it’s still a cool idea.  Even better is the quirky lamp comes in plenty of colors, so it would fit in great with any kids room.

Since it does bend so low to the ground it’d also be helpful to short ones playing on the floor.  They could even spin it around to make sure it’s shining brightly on your clean white wall as they color it with crayons.  The lamp comes in multicolor, orange and gray, red and white, black, as well as red and blue.  Unfortunately these lamps are a bit expensive, as most of the unique lamps are.  You can pick it up on Made in Design for £526.31 or about $777.

If you're looking to start your kid off with both a tough-guy attitude as well as an air of entitlement, you can't go wrong with the ludicrous Oakley Roddler stroller. While it's a concept that's apparently "inspired" by Oakley, it looks more inspired by a combo of overpriced strollers and military aircraft.

galleryPost("oakleystroller", 10, ""); [Serious Wheels via NotCot.org]

I don’t know what it is about the movie Minority Report which compels me to write so many articles on devices that are plucked from that movie. About a month ago, I reported on the iPoint Presenter, a gesture based interface designed by Franhofer HHI.

Today’s offering from the Cruise/Spielberg flick is the G-Speak, designed by Oblong. I think of all the reports that I have done on gesture-based interfaces, this one is the closest to Minority Report so far.

As you can see, the user has the gloves, just like Tom Cruise. There is even that cobalt blue effect that was the film’s most featured color. Of course, the similarities should come as no surprise, because one of Oblong’s founders served as on Spielberg’s “think tank” for the 2002 film.

So, it will appear that gesture based computers are going to be a reality soon. That’s good, because when I saw Minority Report, I kept saying to myself: “I want Tom Cruise’s computer”. Back then, I just assumed his gesture-based controls were just special effects and not actual technology. I also wondered how much Cruise was seeing when he was making weird gestures.

So, what is it about Minority Report that keeps us coming back to it? Is it a science fiction classic like Blade Runner? Drop me a comment if you agree or disagree.

Source

In the midst of the financiapocalypse, with consumers stuffing money in mattresses and sprinkling themselves with holy water to avoid the layoff plague, you might think companies like Sony would slash and burn their typically premium prices to move whatever HDTVs and Blu-ray players and cameras they could. Nope. We talked to Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow this morning about why Sony is holding steady on prices and staying out of the low end, even as consumers are obviously looking spend less. He also dished about Circuit City's fairly grim prospects, Blu-ray sales not meeting expectations and why Sony knew the economy was going deep into the crapper in February, before Alan Greenspan.

Blu-ray
Glasgow didn't drop specific numbers, but he did mention that Blu-ray sales weren't meeting their original expectations, thanks to the economy. So you might expect Sony to cut the price on its entry level BDP-S350 below its current $299 MSRP. But they're not—Glasgow says they're holding firm on that price as their low-end through the holiday season, though he said you can expect $249 before too long, which jibes with what he told me in the Spring. I couldn't get him to commit to $199 next year. (BTW, You actually can pick up the S350 for $249 right now at Amazon, but going below $299 is entirely a retailer's prerogative.) All that said, Sony is optimistic for Blu-ray overall because it's the kind of "family gift" people buy in a recession when they're staying home more—besides, they fully expect (as we've seen) players below $200, even under $150 from lower end manufacturers. They don't see the adoption timeline slowed down either, as long as prices fall with their projections.

Why Sony Won't Go Cheap
President of Sony Electronics Consumer Sales Jay Vandenbree said that Sony has never really played in the low end (in HDTVs or otherwise), and they won't now. Why? Because, he says, during a recession, people stay home and actually trade up to better quality stuff since they're holed up, which Sony thinks puts them in a great spot. Question for you guys: Is this true? Are you skipping vacation and getting a TV instead? To that end, Sony's actually enforcing prices on some of its premium products like XBR7 and XBR8 HDTVs and its Alpha DSLRs, so that they're same price at every single retailer—it's not just a minimum advertised price, retailers cannot actually sell these items for cheaper than Sony says. It's an interesting bit of psychology to maintain the premiumness of the brand during the recession, to say the least.

Circuit City
How bad is the Circuit City situation? Glasgow put it this way: No one in their industry has ever survived a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, especially not on that scale. He's hopeful they'll bounce back, and thinks they could, but it's going to be "hard."

Sony Knows
Lastly, an interesting bit of trivia: Sony knew the economy was going to hell back in February. How? Camcorder sales fell like a rock. Camcorders are the proverbial canary in the coal mine, plunging before everything else. (All of their vast historical data over the last few recessions back this up.) It's because, Vandenbree says, there's "nothing more discretionary than camcorders," so it's the first to go when consumers feel a crunch, making it an early warning sign.

Unfortunately, there's nothing that'll ring the opposite direction, when everything's about to get better. Everything gets better at once. So we'll know life's good again when it actually it is.

The ubiquity of iPods has led to a ridiculous glut of accessories, some useful, most not. The best of them have essentially become a seamless part of the iPod experience, but they'll all cost you — and it really starts to add up. The expansion of the iPod universe, however, is twofold; more official products are followed closely by nearly as many unofficial ones. In other words, you can fully accessorize your iPod or iPhone, old or new, pretty much for free.

Cases
A case will usually be the first thing people buy for their pods, and the first thing they'll lose. Luckily, they're just about the easiest thing to replace yourself. The most obvious solution is a custom-tailored sock, chosen to suit your taste in color and aroma and fitted to suit your choice in iPod. For a more refined look, sewing together some inner tube and suede will make for a stylish pouch, while utilitarians can opt for the quick, versatile rubber-only approach. If you're just too quirky for a regular case, the venerable Altoid Nano case might get the attention you crave, while the legitimately natty cut-up record sleeve case will do the job just as well, if not better.

Speakers
If you're handy with a soldering iron and have some old audio equipment lying around, there's no reason to dump dollars on a full-fledged iPod speaker dock when you can just build one yourself. Construction homemade unamplified speakers — which sound surprisingly good — is much less of an ordeal. Disposable cups and sheets of printer paper make great little megaphones for your earbuds, and lend themselves well to mounting as a part of a kid-friendly makeshift home stereo.

Docks and Stands
Apple gives iPod/iPhone buyers just about everything they need to throw together a huge variety of charging and sync docks — even the commercial ones are pretty much just the sync wire with some plastic trim. This hack starts small: fantastic iPhone and iPod Touch docks can be made with nothing but a binder clip. The possibilities for LEGO docks are limitless, but generally end up looking like an iThrone. This paperclip box dock provides a good template for chopping an iPod cable into just about anything of a similar shape. The paper clips themselves can be twisted into a 20-second stand, just as a business card can be origamically (?) reshaped into the same.

Other
In the commercial world, this space is inhabited by the shrouded likes of Brando. But who doesn't love that stuff? If you're looking for a jury-rigged AA iPod charging solutions, there's no reason to surrender your credit card number to an iffy Chinese e-commerce site. The same goes for the iPhone 3D image viewing apparatus, though I'm not even sure there's buyable analog for that, Chinese or not. iPhone macro lenses are cool, but almost certainly not worth paying for. Last, and probably least, even though you can't put a price on security, you can reduce the cost of paranoia.

Hat tip to Lifehacker, MAKE and Instructables.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

While most smartphone manufacturers have released at least one fancy touchscreen model, RIM has pretty much stuck with their Blackberry's standard businessman-pleasing form, a squat candybar design with QWERTY and a tiny screen. That was, until they announced the BlackBerry Storm, the first full touchscreen Blackberry on the market—and also the first smartphone to transform a normally cold, lifeless touchscreen into one big clickable button.

So what did the press think? They loved it...and they hated it...depending who you talk to.

CNET
...its 3.25-inch VGA glass display also demands attention for its sharpness and brightness, showing 65,000 colors at a crisp 480x360-pixel resolution. We weren't as impressed with the Storm's screen as the BlackBerry Bold, but it's still beautiful.

PCMag
A solid voice phone, the Storm has fine reception, and earpiece and speakerphone volume are both very loud. There's also some pleasing in-ear feedback of your own voice. Transmissions sounded steady on the other end, with just a little background noise coming through, thanks to the phone's dual-mic noise cancellation.

Wired
When you want to select anything, be it a multimedia app or the number five, you have to press the screen down a millimeter, it's roughly the same sensation you get when clicking a mouse. But that small press makes a huge difference. Text messaging is amazing — pounding out a long-winded SMS (with a lot of compound words and no abbreviations) is just as easy as typing one out on a MacBook's keyboard. This is the single killer feature of the Storm and if not for a few glaring flaws a good reason to go out and buy one right now.

PCWorld
The decision by Research in Motion to differentiate the Storm by giving its capacitive touch screen a mechanical component (the entire screen functions as a button for confirming selections or initiating actions) turns out to be more confusing than helpful. Ultimately, the Storm's touch interface feels like a failed experiment.
Popular Mechanics
With a little practice, we were able to get used to [the virtual keypad] and speed the typing along, but it was never quite as fast as typing with a real mobile keypad, or even with the iPhone's virtual keypad.

The Wall Street Journal
The Storm also has a keyboard oddity that I found annoying, and that may put off others. It presents you with a full virtual keyboard only when you are holding it horizontally. When you hold the Storm vertically, you get a mashed-up keyboard, like the one on the narrower BlackBerry Pearl, which has multiple letters on each key.

DVICE
Why would BlackBerry addicts want to give up buttons for a touchscreen typing system that is almost, but not quite as good? The trade-off is for the big, beautiful screen that you get when you're not using the keypad. It's far better for reading emails, using GPS or playing BrickBreaker than any BlackBerry that's come before.

JKOnTheRun
...the web browser on the Storm, new to OS 4.7, is very good. I wouldn't say it's as good as the browsing experience on the iPhone but it's pretty darn close, certainly close enough. Web pages are rendered quickly in full page mode and when you double tap on the screen the browser zooms in to column mode...Simply hit the Back hardware button and you instantly zoom back out.
InfoSync
The camera on the BlackBerry Storm should have been much better. After all, with auto focus, a 3.2-megapixel sensor and plenty of advanced settings for shooter, you might expect the camera will take decent photos...[yet] colors seemed sapped out of even the most exciting scenes, as Times Square and our little hot pink action figure were both rendered drab. Noise was somewhat of a problem, though there was a nice amount of detail in pics when the auto focus was doing its job correctly.

Gizmodo
I think that the Storm falls short of what RIM was aiming for, and ultimately what all the hype is driving people to expect. Some of this is fixable: The damn thing needs to crash less often. But SurePress is not the end-all, be-all of touchscreen technologies—it's not really an evolutionary step forward, even.
The Storm will be available tomorrow (November 21) for $200 after Verizon rebate.

Apple has patented a new display technology that will allow their iPhones to have always-on displays with almost no battery cost whatsoever. This doesn't mean the whole display would be lit at all times. In reality, only part of it would be activated using a secondary backlight system located under the main one. According to Apple, the objective is to give feedback to the user at all times, even when the main display is turned off:

The primary backlight system may block light from the secondary backlight system except for those one or more regions. Thus, the size and shape of the status indicator may be set by sizing and shaping the transparent or semitransparent regions of the primary backlight system. In addition to setting the size and shape of the icon, the color of the icon may also be set by adjusting the color of the light provided by the secondary backlight system.

For example, each indicator may have a particular color, blinking speed, or light intensity. These properties may be programmed into the electronic device by the user, or may be hard-coded or hard-wired into the system. Thus, when the secondary backlight is turned on, the properties of the light provided by the secondary backlight system may depend on the status of the device. Also, if the status of the electronic device changes while the secondary backlight is on, the properties of the light provided by the secondary backlight system may change to reflect the new status.

To avoid depleting the battery, these icons' backlight system will be low-power. Don't get your expectations too high, however. The patent doesn't clearly explains how the icons themselves may be displayed. By the look of the diagrams included, they may not even be actual pixel-based icons, but cut-outs illuminated by individual LED lights shining through the main display.

But of course, you know that this may be something completely different from what the diagram shows, since the drawings included in patents always seem to be drawn by a monkey on drugs. At least, I want to believe this thing is more like the illustration I did, because if it's just little icons—like every other single cheap clamshell cellphone out there—I won't be very excited. [Apple Insider]

Why do companies ship products they know are mad buggy? Apple did it with the iPhone, RIM did it with the BlackBerry Storm, which locked up and crashed on me plenty during the review period, even after it was delayed precisely to make it less buggy. RIM, however, is at least admitting they screwed up off the bat (before it lands in most consumers' hands, even), promising a software update "within weeks." I hope that besides plugging holes and squashing bugs, they also shake off the lag and sluggishness I experienced to make the Storm feel a bit springier. (Kill the fade transitions!) Guess we'll see. [Gearlog]

Indeed, Nintendo and Everlast have tag-teamed in the retail ring to knock you out with these new boxing glove accessories. And while your down they plan to steal your wallet—because this is an obvious attempt to milk gamers for every last cent. The gloves are available for $30, but I think I'll be saving my pennies for the return of the Power Glove. [NYT via Kotaku]