Into Tech

Golf has got to be one of the most gimmick-ridden sports around when it comes to gadgets and accessories designed to enhance your game.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, you’ll find a whole bunch of ways to pimp out your golf bag but of course the real money is in stuff that will actually make you a better player.

The grip is one of the most important things to master before you can take things any further, with experts frequently touting that ‘less is more’ when it comes to how tightly you should hold the club.

It’s a little publicised fact that extended periods sitting in an office chair or car is going to make certain parts of your anatomy soar to critical temperatures.

Short of flashing your colleagues or, giving your gran a stroke, as you attempt to ventilate your privates, you may need some technology to help you out. OK, a brief stroll outside at regular intervals might do the same trick but then you wouldn’t be able to spend £42 on another gadget.

This is the Suzukaze (a.k.a.”Cool Breeze”) air-conditioned cushion that keeps you elevated and your underpass cool in the summer months of hard work and even harder online gaming.

Are you having trouble with your digital camera or pulling your hair out at the sat-nav you can’t get working properly? Then you are not alone because there are hordes of stumped gadget owners out there, letting modern technology fry their brains.

Research has just revealed that more than a quarter of Brits have no idea how to use digital cameras properly, 21% can’t get to grips with their sat-navs and 1-in-5 don’t know what many of the functions on their mobile phones do.

The survey from online consumer review site Reevoo, polled 2,000 Brits to discover what the most confusing gadgets are. Jump now to see the Top 10:

I’ve now tried five of the new mini-notebooks, and the Acer Aspire One is one of the best. It offers good quality at a low price. But the Linpus Linux Lite version 0.5 that came preinstalled almost drove me batty, so I’d go for Windows XP instead. The Aspire One is very similar to the Asus PC Eee 900, with its 8.9in screen, but the case is almost an inch wider. This is enough to transform the keyboard from being very hard to use to one big enough for fast touch-typing - though it’s quite not as good as the one on HP Mini-Note.

The Aspire One feels much nicer than the Asus machines, with rounded corners and a glossy top. It has plenty of connections, including three USB ports, two SD card slots, an Ethernet port and an external monitor port. It also has an 8GB Flash drive and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, though not Bluetooth. But at 249 x 170 x 29mm, the Aspire One is still small and, at just under 1kg, light.

I was apprehensive about the performance, given its skimpy fixed 512MB of memory, 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and built-in Intel 945 graphics. However, I found it worked very well for the sort of tasks subnotebooks are aimed at, such as word processing, email and browsing. It had no problems playing videos, including .wmv, DivX and YouTube.

Acer’s Linux has a simple front end for instant access to a dozen applications including the Firefox 2 browser and the OpenOffice.org word processor and spreadsheet. Several other applications are sourced from Acer, including the media player, messenger program, calendar, contacts and Aspire OneMail. The simple file manager is horrible. I’d much rather have had Thunderbird, VLC etc but there is no obvious way to change them, and I couldn’t find any help on Acer’s website.

My main problem was that hovering the cursor over things activated them very quickly. It should be easy to fix, but I could find no way to slow it down or stop it. Constantly worrying about the cursor position was no fun at all. Also, the Aspire One didn’t suspend/hibernate on closing the lid.

At Amazon.co.uk prices, this base version looks very good value at £219.99. The more attractive top-of-the-range model has 1GB of memory, a 120GB hard drive, and the more familiar, more capable, Windows XP Home for £299.99. There are several options in between.

Pros: Small, attractive design, good screen and keyboard, light, cheap

Cons: Short battery life, 0.3MP webcam, hard to change

acer.com/aspireone

The iPhone may already be an iconic device and, while purists may get their ass in a knot about messing with the preferred, official black and white colouring, we’re all for a bit of experimentation here at Gizmodo UK. That’s why when you want to pimp your gadgets, it’s hard to top Colorware.

The company already does a fantastic line in custom-painted Nintendo DS Lites and now it’s the turn of the iPhone 3G. Since money is little object to those iPhone fans, £75 for a superior paintjob on the back is something that shouldn’t worry them too much. For an extra £10, you can have the button and frame customised too.

Colorware explains:

We all have little Bond fantasies, especially those who claim to hate Bond. From the gadgets to the girls to the cars, there’s some little piece of fantasy life lurking in there for everyone. Well blokes, anyway.

But what do you do if you can’t afford the real Aston Martin DB5? You make one from cardboard, of course. And, we’re not talking some cut-up cereal boxes for a school project either.

UK artist, Chris Gilmour, likes making 1:1 scale objects from just cardboard and paper - nothing else. In a world when fans can make F1 cars from almost a million matchsticks, then this is probably considered tame but, nevertheless cool.

Not so long ago, HD camcorders were luxury gadgets sporting eyebrow-raising price tags that left most people out of the HD revolution.

Today, Toshiba has decided to make the VW Beetle of HD camcorders with the introduction of its £180 Camileo H10. This attractive little unit also comes with some decent features, that belie its bargain basement price tag.

The H10 has a 5X optical zoom and can record video in 720p HD, storing the MPEG-4 format video it captures onto SD and SDHC Cards, which are now cheap as chips. And, being MPEG-4 means it’ll be easy to upload the embarrassing moments of others to YouTube or social networking sites.

Dear oh dear. Ok, Transformers are pretty cool in a nostalgic kinda way, and we guess it was inevitable that a string of transforming tat would appear after the movie’s release.

We’ve already seen stuff like MP3 players, speakers and headphones, but shoes? Seriously?

Yes, unfortunately it now seems like you can pick up a pair of Nikes that are capable of fighting for the future of the planet when they’re not getting sweated on by your hoofing great feet.

Dear oh dear. Ok, Transformers are pretty cool in a nostalgic kinda way, and we guess it was inevitable that a string of transforming tat would appear after the movie’s release.

We’ve already seen stuff like MP3 players http://uk.gizmodo.com/2007/07/18/the_transformers_mp3_player.html , speakers http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/05/16/gadgets_in_disguise.html and headphones http://uk.gizmodo.com/2007/08/06/transformers_headphones_fight.html , but shoes? Seriously?

Yes, unfortunately it now seems like you can pick up a pair of Nikes that are capable of fighting for the future of the planet when they’re not getting sweated on by your hoofing great feet.

Unless this is some elaborate ruse, we’re actually quite impressed they managed to cram a robot into the sole of something that looks just like a regular trainer, though of course you’ll probably have to sacrifice comfort for the privilege.

They’re available for just $27 (though you’ll have to order them from the US) and come in a range of guises aimed at boys and girls.

Nike has actually gotten involved so we don’t think it’d put its name to something that’ll end up being a laughing stock, unless of course they just wanted an excuse to produce the rather cool advert below. - Paul Lester

[Geekologie] http://www.geekologie.com/2007/04/nike_shoe_transformers.php

[Gadget4all] http://www.gadget4all.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=00331

transformers shoes gadget

There are many terms that could be used to describe Iron Man and the man underneath, billionaire inventor Tony Stark: gadgety, shiny, colourful, womaniser, right-wing, trigger-happy and tubby. Sorry, tubby?

Check out the geek in the suit above from the latest Comic Con event in San Diego, California where comics’ uber-fans wear their gadget love on the outside, which is not always a good thing. The Iron Man above has managed to pull off something that even big-brain Stark hasn’t yet managed - the invention of stretchy metal, so that it can cope with Iron Man’s new diet of pizza and beer.

Still, if you think that’s ruined your superhero lunch, check out another Comic-Con attendee after the jump, and prepare to avert your eyes. Possibly NSFW but certainly wrong.