Sungale’s recently unleashed a WiFi-enabled, widget-having digital photo frame -- the ID800WT -- and the fine folks over at Zatz Not Funny have taken it for a little spin. The 800 x 600 resolution touchscreen boasts 512 MB of internal storage, and widgets for weather, news, Picasa, YouTube, Gmail, and Internet radio. The reviewer didn’t find the widgets to be particularly awesome, in many respects -- their implementation, for instance, made the Gmail app "nearly useless" because it displayed only a few lines at a time, and many had trouble connecting to the internet properly. It wasn’t   read more

Verizon is making no secret about which Android device it wants to make waves this week -- that’d be the DROID from Motorola -- but there’s another model that’ll be available the same day with one-tenth the fanfare: HTC’s DROID ERIS. Codenamed Desire ahead of launch, the phone is essentially Verizon’s custom remix of the venerable Hero as found on Sprint and various GSM carriers around the world, featuring a 5 megapixel camera, 3.2-inch capacitive display, WiFi, 3.5mm headphone jack, and microSD expansion up to 16GB. Check it out in your local store hiding somewhere in the shadow of   read more

Just because a Samsung vacbot never cleaned your floors doesn’t mean they’re not out there somewhere, attacking dust on hardwood and carpet -- and apparently Egyptian cotton too if the above picture is anything to go by. This Tango is the latest from the company, following in the tracks of the Furot and Hauzen and sharing their dual spinny brush design. Tango is said to use a 30fps camera to tell where he’s going, a gyro to keep a sense of direction, and crash sensors that now can detect furniture and feet from up to 2cm away. Prices will range from ₩500,000 to ₩700,000 and, though that   read more

Roomba not sucking the way it used to? Samsung sure hopes not, as it has just recently pushed out a robotic vacuum cleaner of its very own. Quietly showcased during IFA earlier this month, the Furot II packs an oh-so-familiar design and sports an integrated camera and mapping system that enables it to find its way, remember its course and clean your floors with practically no human assistance. There’s also an array of sensors that keep it from slamming into this and that, and the rechargeable battery keeps it humming for around 1.5 hours before petering out and making a beeline for its charging   read more

Samsung’s no stranger to automated floor sucking creatures, but the latest from the outfit is looking to give your Roomba a real run for its money. The Hauzen VC-RE70V sports a fairly attractive shell along with a built-in camera to "see" where it’s going; better still, it can reportedly snap pictures of rooms as it goes in order to build a map of your domicile in its "brain" and keep things quick on subsequent cleanings. Just like your Automower, this thing will also automatically move to its recharging station when it feels weak, giving you one less reason to even roll out of bed the day   read more

The WD TV is still more or less the king of the tiny media player boxes, but now Viewsonic is getting into the game at a lower price point -- and minus the whole network compatibility bit. The VMP70 is a "direct connect" media device, so it will play content from your choice of USB-compatible storage, pumping it at up to 1080p to your display over HDMI or component cables, also sporting composite for lower-def fare. It packs an S/PDIF port to get clean audio, and supports a slew of formats including the usual suspects (DivX,Xvid,H.264) along with some slightly less usual ones (RM/RMVB, DTS, OGG).   read more

Boy, we sure do love our early glimpses of pre-release hardware, and today we have not one, but two sources of purported pictures of the Sony Ericsson Kurara. Touted as a sibling to the Satio, the Kurara is mooted to have a 3.5-inch AMOLED touch-sensitive screen, 8.1 megapixel camera and, wait for it, 720p video recording. The image above seems to confirm this with a big "HD" inscription next to the camera lens, but that label is missing in the gallery below. We’ll just put that inconsistency down to the extremely early samples on show, and start getting all frothed up in excitement over the   read more

Here’s a report mixed with a cold hard fact and some wild speculation. We’ll start with the factual bit: despite promises of an August unveil and November availability, and despite lots of leaks over the summertime, Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad MID tablet thing still isn’t upon us, and on top of that we haven’t heard a thing about it in months. The wild speculation relates to the question of why, with Silicon Alley Insider conveying a string of possibilities ranging from the likely (wildly escalating hardware costs making the product unprofitable) to the somewhat less likely (it’s   read more

Thanks to a slip of the fingers on Posterous (and Robert Scoble’s serious Twitter addiction), new images of Michael Arrington’s pet Internet-tablet project -- the CrunchPad -- have shown up looking very, very close to a finished product. As you can see in the gallery below, the (supposedly) $200, WiFi enabled pad has gotten dressed up in multiple colors and been shoved into some fairly handsome looking packaging. There’s no telling if this means the device is any closer to a buy-able reality, but one thing is for sure: a microblog is no place for secrets.   read more

We heard earlier this month that the first official CrunchPad units would arrive soon, and it seems like Mike Arrington and company are making progress -- here’s what looks to be semi-final hardware and packaging on video for the first time. Interestingly, the device is still plastic and somewhat chubby, not the 18mm-thick aluminum we’d heard earlier -- and whoever’s in charge here won’t boot it, so we’ve yet to see the custom Linux / WebKit OS in action. It’s all due to drop in July, so we’ll know what’s what soon enough -- for now, check out the vid after the break.Update: Looks   read more