A new half-size laptop that weighs less than a pound and is just one inch thick from Vulcan, a company owned by that other Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen. The Mini-PC will run Windows XP, and have integrated WiFi, a 5.8-inch screen, a 20GB hard drive, and a built-in mini-keyboard.
Read

[Gizmodo]

New flagship CLIE handheld from Sony. The PEG-NZ90 has a 320x480 pixel screen, built-in 2-megapixel camera with flash, Bluetooth, and an expansion slot for 802.11b. Ok, so the NZ90 looks great, and is well-designed, but the cost? $800?! For that kind of money you may as well buy a top-of-the-line Pocket PC, which will almost certainly come with integrated 802.11b, a heck of a lot more memory, and use something other than Sony's horrid Memory Stick for extra storage. At most this should cost $400. Sometimes you can't get by on looks alone.
Read

[Gizmodo]

ng an ink-jet printing technology to do just that. The research at the University of California in Berkeley will allow fully assembled electric and electronic gadgets to be printed in one go.

The idea was revealed at a December workshop on robotic algorithms in Nice. Instead of creating a casing and then laboriously filling it with electronic circuit boards, components and switches, the plan is to print a complete and fully assembled device.

The trick is to print layer upon layer of conducting and semiconducting polymers in such a way that the circuitry the device requires is built up as part of the bodywork.

When the technique is perfected, devices such as light bulbs, radios, remote controls, mobile phones and toys will be spat out as individual fully functional systems without expensive and labour-intensive production on an assembly line.

Three-dimensional printers are already valuable tools for making prototypes of newly designed products. They deposit layers made from droplets of smart polymers, which gradually build up into 3D shapes. Such printing techniques have become so sophisticated it is now possible to print working prototypes with mechanical parts that move as they would in the final product.

But Berkeley's crucial addition to this art is to allow the electronics to be included in the printed device, rather than being added at great cost later on....

Once they have developed ink-jet cartridges that can handle all the polymers needed for casing and circuit printing, Canny predicts they could make, say, a remote control for a TV....

But there is a downside. When a flexonic device breaks, it will be irreparable, because none of the embedded components can be replaced. So the technology will fuel the throwaway society." [New Scientist]

It would be pretty cool if I could just re-print a remote every time I lose one.

[The Shifted Librarian]