Stress is a killer, apparently, which is why we want our Gizmodo readers to know that we’ll hunt down and cover just about any silly gadget that promises to pop that deadly stress bubble.
Meet the Beating Heart Stress Relief Pillow. Yes, it’s weird, but cute looking. I’m guessing the tattooed ‘tough guy’ in the photo is meant to make it OK for us guys to squeeze beating heart-shaped pillows too.
This is what the official marketing spiel reads like:
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I’m not sure just how you want your remains dealt with when you croak, but now us gadget-obsessed have our own range of geek-themed coffins to take to the grave.
As you can see above, the possible coffins are quite something to behold and I’m sure there are those ‘fans’ that queued outside Apple stores for a week in the cold for their iPhone that are placing their orders for the iPhone coffin right about now. Probably using their iPhones too.
That said, Creative Coffins have many other ways to house your carcass in style before the worms get to you. Just tell them what you want and their bespoke machine will get busy. T3 threw together some mock-ups to see what’s possible for the gadget brigade.
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Yes, I know, more Star Wars gadgets but then, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see an end to them so it’s time to make your peace. This time out it’s the Star Wars MP3 player boasting a big photo of His Darkness himself, Darth Vader.
There’s another with him posing all dangerous-like with his flapping cloak and lightsaber too. If that’s stoked your inner Force in the right way, then prepared to have it doused with some of the most pathetic specs in the MP3 player universe.
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HMV is extending to its high-street stores a controversial VAT-avoidance scheme that it currently operates solely through the group’s website, which is based offshore. The move will offer shoppers discounts and free delivery on out-of-stock titles, at the expense of Treasury coffers.
The retailer is planning to install instore “HMV Delivers” kiosks in its 250 stores. Customers will be able to place orders for CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and console games and avoid the 17.5% VAT charged on conventional instore purchases.
The terminals bring a ballooning offshore tax ploy, already exploited by major music and DVD websites including HMV.com, to Britain’s high streets. The ploy is a fundamental challenge to the government’s direct taxation regime. If copied by other high-street chains and supermarkets, it could divert hundreds of millions of pounds from the Treasury. Woolworths is also testing similar terminals in three stores.
HMV’s new terminals offer “free home delivery” not from the group’s London distribution centre, but from its base on the Channel Islands tax haven of Guernsey. The extra expense of postage is paid for many times over by avoiding VAT.
HMV initially refused to answer questions on its Guernsey operations, telling the Guardian that VAT-free transactions were blocked on all store terminals. But sample purchases at a number of stores showed this was not the case. HMV then said that after trials of various pricing strategies in a few stores, it planned to restrict VAT-free purchases on terminals to products the customer is unable to find on shelves because they are out of stock. This will “remain a convenient, but very marginal channel for customers and sales,” a spokesman said. He added the main function of the terminals in the future would be to offer digital downloads.
The tax ploy, which is not unlawful, works by exploiting a VAT exemption on goods priced below £18 that are imported by individuals into the UK from outside the European Union. Known as “low value consignment relief”, it has been enshrined in European law for 15 years. But the arrival of online retailing has seen the relief, originally designed to ease the administrative burden on marginal trade, exploited on a scale that was never anticipated.
Initially, HMV was slow to exploit the VAT ploy on the web, seeing cut-price internet retailers as a threat to its stores. In recent years, however, the group has been catching up fast with the pioneers of the VAT relief scheme, such as Jersey-based Play.com. HMV.com gets 1m hits a week.
In March 2007, new chief executive Simon Fox put HMV Guernsey at the heart of his strategy to turn around the struggling retailer. He pledged to expand online sales through the group’s Channel Islands base from 6% of HMV’s UK sales, to 20% by 2010, and promised to double spending on marketing the website.
HMV told the Guardian its VAT-free sales for the last financial year amounted to about £50m. The loss to the Treasury in unpaid VAT was £8.75m.
HMV’s parent company, HMV Group, incurred a total UK corporation tax bill for the same 12 months of £11.4m. More than £8 in every £10 of sales from HMV.com for the last financial year related to VAT-free purchases. Of the 200 bestselling CDs and DVDs available on HMV.com, 196 titles qualify for VAT exemption.
Analysts at Lehman Brothers, the group’s corporate broker, have suggested HMV will have to grow web sales to more than £200m by 2010 if Fox is to meet his target of generating 20% of earnings online. The Guardian estimates HMV’s Guernsey website may be costing the Treasury more than £30m a year in lost revenue in two years’ time.
The British government has put pressure on authorities in Jersey, who have taken actions against a small number of operations deemed to have set up in the island purely for the purposes of exploiting the relief. Officially, ministers and the tax authorities have for years had VAT relief operations under “close review” and have said they will consider cutting the £18 threshold or removing exemption from CDs and DVDs.
Last month, the Treasury’s financial secretary, Jane Kennedy, was asked in parliament to clarify the scale of low value consignment relief not just on CDs and DVDs, but on health food supplements, contact lenses, flower deliveries and all product categories. She pointed to official estimates in 2006 of around £90m a year in unpaid VAT - a figure tax campaigners believe is out of date, and too low.
Nevertheless, home delivery exports to the UK have become a major industry in the Channel Islands. Retailers are struggling to find staff and warehouse space on the islands to meet demand. Of the seven CD-selling websites most visited on the internet in the UK, as defined by web traffic monitoring firm Hitwise, all exploit import VAT relief.
HMV does not advertise the difference between many of their store prices and those available in VAT-free, home-delivery web deals. Here are examples:
Desperate Housewives
Series three DVD: instore, £27. HMV.com, £17.99. (All HMV.com prices include home delivery).
Prime Suspect
10 DVD boxed set: instore, £25. HMV.com, £17.99.
Brothers and Sisters
Series one on DVD: instore, £30. HMV.com, £17.99.
There Will Be Blood
DVD: instore, £14.99. HMV.com, £12.99.
Harry Potter: Years 1-5
10 DVDs. Instore, £25. HMV.com, £17.99.
Coldplay: Viva la Vida
CD: instore, £10.99. HMV.com, £8.99.
Duffy: Rockferry
Instore, £10.99. HMV.com, £8.99.
Paul Weller: 22 Dreams
Instore, £9.99. HMV.com, £8.99.
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In recent months we’ve seen some very cool Steampunk gadgets, from the sexy USB - yes USB - stick to the hugely creative movie reimagining with the Steampunk’d Star Wars characters. Now, we have one of the best Steampunk PC gadgets I’ve seen yet, a mouse so ornately transformed that it resembles one of those WWI tanks.
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Despite all the hours I spend in front of a PC screen, there a few hours a day I’m away from it doing other things while the PC sits there idly chugging power.
Of course, many people could just alter the PC settings to automatically have it go into power-saving mode after a few minutes of idleness is detected but, why do anything that sensible when you can buy a gadget to do it for you.
Meet Eco-Button, a green USB device that, when plugged in, allows you to put the PC into eco-mode at a singe tap.
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There’s a growing pile of subnotebooks by the side of my desk, and so far, Hewlett-Packard’s HP2133 Mini-Note is the biggest and the best.
It’s a full-spec ultramobile with a lovely brushed aluminium casing, excellent screen and a keyboard that you can actually touch-type on. As a Wired blog headline put it, it’s “what we really wanted the MacBook Air to be”.
But it’s quite a lot wider and chunkier than an Asus Eee PC900, it’s heavier (from 1.3kg), and it tends to be slow - at least with the Windows Vista running on the version loaned for review. (SuSE Linux is a cheaper option.)
The Mini-Note’s Achilles heel is the 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor, which rates a 1.7 on the Vista Experience Index. In other respects, the machine fares well, with graphics rated 2.9 and the 120GB hard disk scoring 5.2. With the new Via Nano processor, it would be a great machine. An Intel Atom would at least be competitive for its class.
HP knows this, of course. But it’s pitching the machine for educational use (RM is selling it, downgraded to XP), and it had to make deadlines for evaluation purposes.
Waiting for Atom might have meant missing a school year. However, HP may offer an upgraded version when new chips arrive in volume. The Mini-Note is very slow to boot and slow to load programs, but once up and running, the performance is good for its intended uses: word processing, email and web browsing. Vista’s Aero graphics system worked well in 2GB of memory.
The scratch-resistant 8.9 inch screen (same size as the Asus Eee PC900) shows 1280 x 769 pixels, which is in effect the same as the 1280 x 800 you get on the 13.3 inch Dell M1330 or MacBook Air. Everything’s smaller, but that’s fine for younger eyes. The keyboard is a big improvement on rival machines, but should be even better. The Mini-Note keyboard measures 10 x 4 inches, which is only slightly smaller than my IBM ThinkPad X31 (10.2 x 4.2 inches), which has a 12-inch screen. It is far better than the Asus’s 8.3 x 3.1 inch keyboard, but it should be as good as the ThinkPad.
The selection of ports includes ExpressCard (useful for 3G) and SD slots, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and an external monitor port. The Mini-Note also sports Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi .
HP’s website lists the starting prices as £299 plus VAT for the Linux version, and £349 plus VAT for the Vista Business version tested. Judging by appearances, you’d expect it to cost a lot more.
Pros: High-res screen; good keyboard; big hard drive; well made
Cons: Slow processor; big power brick
View the HP2133 Mini-Note here
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If you’re the type to occasionally jet-set around the world, particularly to hotter climates, you wouldn’t be very environmentally conscious if you didn’t invest in a solar charger to keep your gadgets in working order.
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While UK shoppers hop from foot to foot to stay warm in iPhone 3G queues waiting to get their mitts on a black iPhone, other users around the world will be getting their hands on the white version.
Not for me, I admit, especially not after I saw Chuck Norris in Good Guys Wear Black as a kid and it pretty much made everything black - from clothes to gadgets - really cool. There are many others though for whom white is the new black - something to go with their white iPod, iMac etc. etc. etc.
Down under, Duncan Riley has posted this unboxing video of the white iPhone 3G - the one that UK shoppers will not be getting - at least not yet.
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Perhaps this is rather bad timing considering we’re going through the worst weather in July since the last ice age, but if you’re optimistic about an Indian summer take a look at this high-tech deck chair, designed to offer those with gadget-filled pockets everything they need to help relax in the sun.
It’s a concept design at the moment, but despite looking quite unassuming at first glance includes a range of neatly tucked away connectivity and convenience.
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