A Bond Without Gadgets?!

a blopper to casino royale

OLPC XO Laptop 2.0 Has Dual Touchscreens, Looks Amazing and Future-y

At OLPC's Global Country workshop today, founder Nick Negroponte unveiled the next-gen XO Laptop, and it totally blows the original away. About half XO 1.0's size and more like a foldable book, it does away with the keyboard and trackpad to go totally touchscreen—that's right, dual touchscreens, straight out of the future, like a kid's book in Minority Report. Folded all the way out, the displays work like a single continuous one, for say, a sweet game of pong. Like XO 1.0, the display by Pixel-Qi will look fine indoors or in bright sunlight. Unfortunately, it really is from the future: Due in 2010, they're aiming for $75 and one-watt power consumption. Update: High-res shots and full press release, and they're calling it XOXO, or XO-2.

6 Takes On The Netflix Player

While our own Brian Lam already published Gizmodo's review of the new Netflix Player by Roku—a $100 streaming media box allowing unlimited downloads of 10,000 movies with a Netflix subscription—apparently there are other news outlets in existence who had opinions of their own. (I know, totally tacky on their part, right?) Here's the quick version of the first six reviews of the Netflix Player.

Caysea Knows Best (7/10)
On the technical end, this small set top box is dead simple to configure and use with my existing Netflix account. Plug it in, hook it up to the HDTV with an HDMI cable, plug in an Ethernet cord, and then use a confirmation code to link it to your account. I was running within five minutes.

CNET (7.7/10)
The load time for videos isn't exactly "instant," but depending on the speed of your Internet connection, they buffer and launch in less than a minute. What adds a little time is the innovative way Netflix is enabling fast-forwarding (and rewinding). Since there are no chapter breaks, you're forced to zip forward and back...through a series of hundreds of snapshots of frames in the film...The system works well...

Iron Man, Now Powered By LED Arc Reactor

We know way better than to actually buy this 1:6 scale Iron Man "Fine Art Statue" that is coming this September, but we can't help but ogle a bit. The model is a tiny replica of the Mark III armor according to Marvel's specifications, and it will feature an LED-powered Unibeam, along with glowing LED eyes and Repulsor Ray palms. We hope you understand what we mean when we say that this thing isn't worth $179.99, but it's totally worth $179.99.

Robot Climbs Walls With Static Electricity

This unnamed robot by SRI International has a useful trick—it can climb walls using the principle of electro-adhesion (what we generalized as "static electricity" as kids, when we'd rub balloons on our heads and stick them to walls). But what's most promising is that the robot needs only a "very small amount of power" to stick to surfaces that can be covered in dust and other debris. The link has a video of the robot in action. SPOILER ALERT: robots climbing up drywall is more boring than you'd think.