Nerf’s New Vortex Blasters Shoot Discs! And They’re Awesome!
When I was growing up, one of my all-time favorite toys was my Nerf Super Soaker. Every summer, the other neighborhood kids and I would take off on our bikes, Super Soakers strapped to our backs, and have a full-on water war. It’s been a solid decade since I’ve raised my not-so-dangerous weapon, but the other night something magical happened. I got to go to Nerf’s unveiling of its Vortex line of blasters, and realized that these things aren’t just for kids.
There are four new models in the Vortex line, and while they look pretty similar to older Nerf blasters, these sexy beasts have something totally new up their magazine sleeve: discs. Yep, little green discs fly out of these bad boys, and if you saw it happen, you totally wouldn’t believe that it doesn’t hurt to get hit. → Read More
Fake Apple Store Is Now The “Smart” Store
MICGadget has some action shots of the Kunming “Apple” store that raised so much Internet ire and mirth a few weeks ago. Although the insides are the same, you’ll notice one big difference: the apple is still there but the text has been replaced by a nail-salonesque sign dubbing the shop the “Smart Store.” They still sell Apple products, but now they’re smarter.
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Review:TheAudiA7,ATransformerInDisguise
The Audi A7 is different. The executive five-door fastback sits nearly atop Audi’s lineup, starting out at $59k with my tester wearing $80k on its window sticker. Excluding limited run sports models, a fully decked-out A7 is the third most expensive car Audi sells, placing only lower than the massive A8 sedan and R8 supercar. Still, even looking like a modern and practical station wagon, the A7 is a niche car but perhaps one with a broad appeal. → Read More
Daily Crunch: Mainframe
Here are a selection of yesterday’s Gadgets stories: → Read More
Skimming Jonathan’s Card For Fun And Philanthrophy
If you’ve been reading the internet regularly this week, you’re probably familiar with Jonathan’s card, a “social payment experiment” amounting to a public Starbucks gift card. You might have bought a coffee with it. You might have contributed to it. You might have suspected it of being a Starbucks viral (it isn’t).
What you probably haven’t done is set up a script to skim money off the card in order to use it for your own nefarious purposes. And by “nefarious purposes,” I mean feeding starving children in Africa. Here comes the ethics! → Read More
Video: Lockheed’s “Samarai” Drone Spins Like A Maple Seed
Anyone who lives near a deciduous forest knows the joy of the maple seed, or as we called them when we were kids, helicopters. Their single wing spins the seed, slowing its descent — so why shouldn’t a similarly-designed wing be able to spin faster and actually fly upwards? Lockheed Martin has demonstrated a new drone platform, not quite a nano air vehicle but still simple and light, that does just this.
Check out the video inside. → Read More
Microsoft Patents Flat-Slider Phone Form Factor, Multi-Touch Gaming Mice
We’ve seen a lot of interesting patents from Apple over the last few days, but Microsoft loves to patent things too — and they’ve just been granted a nice little pack of designs for mobile phones in a special slider format, and some Kinect and mouse tech to boot.
They’re not patenting a plain slider, of course. They’re patenting a few specific designs of sliding mechanism by which, once you finish the sliding action, the keyboard and the screen are “positioned in a substantially similar plane.” That is to say, mostly flush. Check out the designs inside. → Read More
Review: Audyssey Lower East Side Speakers
Short version: A solid pair of laptop or desk speakers, unremarkable but warm and powerful, with an understated and attractive design. More attention to detail would help justify their price, though. → Read More
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Canon Lens Shot Glasses, For Drinkin’ And Shootin’
Lens-related ephemera seems to be a soft spot of mine. Canon thermoses, Canon mugs, Nikon Mugs, Nikon bracelets — the fun never stops. Or, alternatively, it never starts, if you’re a Pentax user. All you get is great cameras and an amazing lens selection.
For the photographer who likes a tipple now and then, or just loves things that look like lenses, consider these twee 24-105mm zoom shot glasses. → Read More
Sprint: Yeah, About That 4G BlackBerry Playbook We Announced? It’s not happening.
Waaaay back at CES in January, Sprint and RIM announced that they were cooking up a version of the BlackBerry Playbook that played friendly with Sprint’s 4G network. And then… nothing. Months went by, with nary a mention from either of the companies involved.
Alas, it looks like the Sprint 4G Playbook will be buried before it’s even born. Blaming a “lack of demand from business customers” (read: everybody who wants a tablet right now probably already has an iPad or a Xoom), Sprint has killed off plans to launch the device. → Read More
Samsung To Finally Debut The Galaxy S II In The U.S On August 29th
It’s coming! It’s finally, finally coming!
After nearly four months of traveling around just about everywhere but the US, the Galaxy S II is finally set to make its stateside debut. Samsung will be holding a press event on August 29th to spill all the details.
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The Battle Continues: Samsung To Appeal Apple’s European Injunction
As expected, Samsung has decided to fight back against Apple’s preliminary injunction to ban sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 across the European Union (excluding the Netherlands). On August 25, the rumble continues, as Samsung will go to court in Dusseldorf, Germany to appeal the court’s decision, reports the Wall Street Journal.
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Today Is Cheap Nintendo 3DS Day
Just a reminder: today is cheap Nintendo 3DS day and, sadly, it is the end of availability for Nintendo’s unusual “ambassador” program. The device is now available for $169 – down from its launch price of $249 – and they will be launching the 3DS in “Flame” aka “Mario” Red this September. → Read More
1DollarScan Scans And Digitizes Your Books For You “For A Dollar”
Having old media digitized to get more space in the house, preserve them or simply make them portable isn’t exactly a new trend. But some startups, like Peggybank in the case of videos and photos, still find ways to stand out. And now a new company called 1DollarScan tries to do the same for books, documents, pictures and just about anything that’s printed on paper – through pricing. → Read More
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Coming In 2012 To Revive The Aging, But Still Awesome, Franchise
And for today’s news out of the left field, Valve is working on a new Counter-Strike game. Yep, the venerable shooter might soon get an update. Details aren’t exactly flowing at the moment, but it seems and feels as if this incarnation is going to be a niche game, aimed at the competitive gaming community. Still, it’s a new Counter-Strike game! Get excited!
Counter-Strike was released as a Half-Life mod 12 long years ago. It has since went onto be its own game and the most played title on Valve’s Steam gaming distribution service. It is and always has been, in a word, popular. A whole generation of gamers grew up on CS. Before Internet gaming blew up, Counter-Strike was the LAN party game. (and Starcraft) I had to retake a MSCE course because my time was spent tearing up Dust2 rather than studying. This was the FPS that defined team-based shooters. It was the Modern Warfare before Modern Warfare. The game never exactly disappeared. It took Valve making Team Fortress 2 for the game to lose its top spot. But it’s time for a refresh. → Read More
Japan To Invest $1.3 Billion In New Supercomputer
There is a list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, and the last time it was updated, back in June this year, Fujitsu’s “K” (pictured) came out on top, taking the No. 1 spot from Tianhe-1A (a supercomputer from China).
It was the first time since 2004 for Japan to get to claim those bragging rights, and now the country’s largest business newspaper The Nikkei reports that the government is already thinking about what will happen in 2020: by then, the plan is to develop a computer that handles exascale computing or, in other words, one million trillion operations per second (that computer would be 100 times more powerful than K). → Read More
Acer Iconia Tab A100: Dual-Core, Honeycomb, Starts At $329
If Acer’s previous tablet effort was a bit too weighty for you, then consider this: Acer has just announced that their 7-inch WiFi-only Iconia Tab A100 is launching today at retail stores across the country. → Read More
Daily Crunch: Mouse And Rat
Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Apple Patents Hint At Multi-Part Gestures, Touchable OS X
Designing a user interface for touch isn’t an easy thing to do. At least, it isn’t easy to do well. The great number and variety of gestures possible when four fingers and a thumb hit a touchscreen may well cause development and design paralysis. Yet the gestures we see implemented often seem so simple and intuitive that as soon as we perform them once, we wonder how anyone would have trouble coming up with it.
Apple’s early success with the simple and intuitive gestures on the iPhone has actually worked against it in a way, as adding gestures over-complicates a UI known for accessibility. On the other hand, it has prevented them from providing richer gestures like drawing shapes, creating spontaneous UI items, and so on. But I doubt they ever stopped looking into it. Some newly published patent applications, while questionable as far as patentable ideas go, is chock-full of interesting ideas and promising new UI concepts. → Read More
Sony Cuts Prices On Google TV-Integrated HDTVs
Google TV hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, and while we could argue all day about what exactly prevented it from achieving greatness, the expensive hardware has to at least be part of the discussion. Logitech bit the bullet two weeks ago and lowered the price of their Revue from $250 to $99 — and it seems Sony has decided they might take a bit of that medicine too. → Read More
