Archive for the ‘Phone Gadgets’ Category
Saturday, October 11th, 2008 |
<-125x125 Button - left->
It’s been a while since I’ve written my last article on a diamond-encrusted device, maybe because I got tired with all of those expensive products that regular people wouldn’t be able to buy not even in a couple of lifetimes. Though it might have come as a surprise for some people, along with the Apple iPhone and iPod has been released a wide range of accessories and other products to pair with your device, leaving us with lots of merchandises to sort through and evaluate.
This is the reason our eyes reached the point where they’re forced to see something like this: diamond-encrusted iPod earphone covers. Yes, you read this right, they’re some kind of precious covers. Actually, precious might not be the word, just because it’s not enough in order to express the astonishing price of $60,000. Ok, I agree, if you want some diamonds clipping onto your standard pair of iPod earphones, you should be open-handed, because this stones are known to be very expensive, but come on! $60,000?!
Industry veteran Steven Goldstein, the co-founder of Goldkenn and one of the great confectionery successes in duty free, is making his return to the sector with New-York based luxury accessories brand DEOS. Founded by jewellery designer Allison Lee Zeiss, DEOS offers interchangeable diamond- and crystal-encrusted earphone covers for the Apple iPod and iPhone.
DEOS earphones come in three collections – DEOS Diamond, CVRZ with Swarovski crystals and the CVRZ aluminum range – each targeting a particular price segment. If you run on a virtually unlimited bank account, then you should go after the diamond-studded earphones, made of titanium and encrusted with colored diamonds, yellow, pink and black. Each piece is handcrafted and hand-set – at a price. “With the titanium and diamond collection, the sky is the limit for people who are discerning and have the means to spend. The pieces are unique, the colors of the stones are perfect and wearing those earphones is definitely not for everyone. Yet they are not over flashy and show both good taste and wealth of the wearer”, Goldstein said.
The CVRZ crystal earphones are covered with hand-selected Swarovski crystal in a myriad of colors and it’s retailed at about $110 for the half-covered to $200 for the fully-covered line. As far as the CVRZ plain colored aluminum earphones, targeting “students and younger people who also want to make a fashion statement”, but don’t have the means in order to purchase the higher-end ranges, they are available for $20. One can choose between red, blue, green, yellow and orange.
Goldstein said that “today there are more than 152 million earphones in the world. It’s a marvelous way of making a fashion statement. When you meet someone, the person sees first your face and then looks at your ears. The range of earphone covers is perfect for all types of customers as Allison has made products for all price levels”. True, but in the context of these economic hard times, some down-to-earth prices for, well, down-to-earth devices would be just what the doctor ordered.
(Source engadget.com)
Posted in Phone Gadgets | No Comments »
Sunday, September 28th, 2008 |
<-125x125 Button - left->
Your eyes begin to sparkle brightly when you pronounce Porsche, the name of the world’s most prestigious automobile brand. It’s not me who dares make such a statement, it’s the result of a survey realized by Luxury Institute, New York, back in May 2006. More than 500 households with a gross annual income of at least $200,000 and a net worth of at least$720,000 were questioned. Therefore, it’s the ultimate recognition, so much the more coming from wealthy people who afford to purchase such a high-class product. Yes, indeed, there is no substitute for a Porsche, but only when you spend your vacation in luxurious hotels among other extremely demanding travelers who consider themselves, just like you do, to belong in the elite.
Therefore, the name stands for everything you wish for in a lifetime: sophisticated design, exquisite quality and most importantly extreme speed. Back in June 2007, Porsche Design presented its first mobile phone, the P’9521, made in collaboration with French-based Sagem Communication, which brought the know-how technology as it has expertise in the field of biometrics.
Today it’s P’9522’s turn. Porsche Design Group announced on September 26, 2008 the release of its brand new candybar phone, which was made, of course, together with Sagem. The fashionable cellphone is carved into a single block of brushed aluminum and a glass plate.
As far as the technical section is concerned, P’9522 is provided with enough features to make you fall in love with it at first sight. It has the standard Porsche font and style, a 2.8-inch touchscreen, an integrated GPS system, a 5-megapixel photo camera and a fingerprint reader, which clearly identifies the user and thus ensures secure access to personal data. The phone features also an WiFi connectivity (802.11b/g) rather than a 3G network which is the main disadvantage. On the other hand, P’9522 has only 5-MB of internal memory, but luckily the phone comes in package with a microSD memory card of 2GB and it will be able to read cards with 8GB capacity.
The Porsche P’9522 it’s expected to ship in November for a price of about 600 Euros ($875), half the price of the previous Porsche device.
(Source Dvice)
Posted in Phone Gadgets | No Comments »
Saturday, September 27th, 2008 |
<-125x125 Button - left->
Smartphones are more and more popular nowadays because they offer advanced capabilities beyond a typical mobile phone, often with PC-like functionality. If some people define the smartphone as a phone able to run complete operating system software providing a standardized interface and platform for application developers, others consider it like a simple phone provided with advanced features such as e-mail and Internet capabilities and/or a full keyboard.
But how multi-functional a smartphone can be? Does it cook your breakfast, at dawn, and then politely serves it to you in bed? Is your smartphone capable of making your morning coffee? Because if it’s not, then you should reconsider the choice you’ve made.
The first Android smartphone has lots of features, as does the HTC Touch HD, but I’m sure they can’t make coffee. Designer Francesco Lerro spotted the lack of such a characteristic and make it available on his Mokia 8015 concept phone. I suppose he needed an impressive imagination and he must be addicted to this delicious beverage, in order to come up with such a device. As for us, the rest of the ordinary mortals, we must prove a great sense of humor to imagine that, one day, smartphones will be able to serve espressos.
Francesco Lerro turned out to be a very ingenious guy, as he named his concept “Mokia”, which seems to be a pun intended at mocking Nokia or even all smartphone brands. But who knows? Maybe one day we’ll attend the release of this witty concept phone and it will be possible for smartphones to pour espresso coffees into cups. The Bluetooth headset doubles as a spoon for stirring the coffee.
We have had all sorts of smartphones: multimedia centric, camera-centric and music centric. Therefore, why shouldn’t we have a coffee centric smartphone also?
Even if its designer is the self-proclaimed Italian “espresso junkie”, I wonder if such a concept phone will ever make it on market. Moreover, I’m pretty impatient to see what manufacturer will have the guts to fling Mokia 8015 into the mass production! I’m looking forward for something like this to happen! And I bet it won’t be a bargain, whatsoever!
(Source concept-phones)
Posted in Phone Gadgets | No Comments »
Thursday, September 25th, 2008 |
<-125x125 Button - left->
Great inventions such as telephone, radio, television and computer have always been a subject of controversy, as many inventors who did pioneer experimental work on voice transmission over a wire credited themselves with the paternity of those devices. Their contribution could never be questioned, there’s no doubt about it, and every discovery they’ve made was one step forward, an improvement on each other’s ideas.
When it comes to the history of telephone, the scenario looks exactly the same and it’s a confusing morass of claim and counterclaim. From Innocenzo Manzetti who first mooted the idea of a “speaking telegraph” (id est the telephone) to the first successful telephone transmission of clear speech, when Alexander Graham Bell said “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” and Watson heard each and every word, the telephone has gone through some important changes, evolving to digital telephony and IP telephony.
We witness today more and more innovations concerning not only the technology and the network behind the telephone, but also the instrument itself which changed a lot after the touch tone replaced the dial in the 1960s.
We see ingenious devices which seem to have landed from future outer universes, being pink-high-heel shaped or featuring bright and shiny colored quartz crystals instead of the traditional button pad.
In a world of outstanding wacky devices, the Pappa Phone, Hulger’s first new phone design for almost three years, it’s also the world’s first wooden VoIP phone. You might raise your eyebrow, sign of the difficulty you come up against in understanding how a piece of wood could ever help you hear your mother’s voice. It spreads simplicity all over the place, as there are no buttons, no dials, not even a display. The Hulger phone is as sleek as it gets and the functions of the computer interface can replace the buttons and the phone-screen menu.
These luxury phones are handcrafted by Furni, in Montreal, Canada, from a single piece of sustainable American walnut, so that the grain of the wood flows from the handset to the base. In addition, the Pappa Phone features a piece of solid hand-polished bras. On Hulger’s official website, they give you information on how the brass should be taken care of. If you want to restore the phone’s lustre, you can use high quality furniture polish or Danish oil to the wooden parts. As a matter of fact, when it was manufactured, the same Danish oil finished the execution of the phone, which was designed to naturally “wear in” with age.
The Pappa Phone works with any VoIP service on both Macs and PCs (therefore, works on Windows and OS X platforms) such as iChat, GoogleTalk, Vonage, Yahoo and Skype and there is no software installation required. The device isn’t wireless and features a handset cord which is 1,5 meters long.
A disadvantage consists of the fact that, being handmade, it takes from 6 to 8 weeks for the phone to be built and delivered. Anyways, the Pappa Phone is available to order at Fulger’s online shop and it’s priced at $300.
(Source gizmodo.com)
Posted in Phone Gadgets | No Comments »
Friday, September 19th, 2008 |
<-125x125 Button - left->
Every time I think I’ve seen it all, an unexpected and most of the times eccentric device shatters theories I considered being indestructible. I’m convinced now that the world of gadgets is always surprising and that all sorts of crazy and unattainable ideas (at first sight, at least) become reality one way or the other.
However, I just couldn’t describe the grimace I had when I first saw this shoe-shaped phone. Ok, maybe I should have expected it – there are, after all, bracelet or ring shaped cellphones – but the image of a pink shoe with some numbers inside it struck me on the spot. Yes, it’s a shoe indeed, maybe the one Cinderella lost in the story, but a phone? That’s weird.
The High Heels Phone is designed for the like cool ladies: they either have their closets full of way too expensive shoes or manifest a strange foot fetish. And, of course, they made it pink. Because women love pink as much as they love high heels shoes. The phone helps the user get rid of those confusing and nerve-racking buttons and features found on any other type of phone. Therefore, it’s perfect for ladies everywhere, as they love pink things and hate complication. This must have been designed by a man, there’s no doubt about it.
The High Heels Phone can alternate between tone and pulse and comes with a pause/flash/redial button. It measures 180 x 170 x 75 millimeters and weights 260 grams.
If you want to be talk of the town whenever you hold the pink high heel to your head, you can find the device on Gadget4all at a price of just $22.
(Source Dvice)
Posted in Phone Gadgets | 2 Comments »