BREW Ninja, who readily (and oddly, for a ninja) admits that he's a mobile QA engineer over at Yahoo! Mobile, just scooped 3x phones in this quickie 4 and half minute video. The HTC Coke -- a variant of the HTC Touch Pro -- and tiny LG Lotus with full QWERTY for Sprint (AKA, LX600) are both interesting, but it's the hands-on video of RIM's touchscreen Thunder that blows our doors. At about 2:50 in, he reveals the BlackBerry Thunder for Verizon (AKA, Storm 8350) saying, "I don't like it, it's, it's an ok phone." His biggest concern seems to be the touchscreen (something we've heard before) which acts like a button -- you have to actual push the screen, hard, unlike most capacitive touchpanel devices. See for yourself after the break.

[Via Crackberry]

How anyone could think that a cloth vending machine would fool even the stupidest of criminals is beyond us, but we guess if the convertible skirt / vending machine is going to be made somewhere, it might as well be in Japan. The New York Times has the write-up of Aya Tsukioka clothing designs, intended to provide the vulnerable with ways of avoiding thieves and other evil folk: beyond the Coke machine, there's a purse shaped like a manhole, and a child's backpack that looks like a fire hydrant. Here, we just carry guns.

[Thanks, Ross M.]

And you thought non-stick chewing gum was the heat. Turns out, Coca Cola may be plotting a new version of Sprite that actually chills itself upon opening. Apparently, the drink has to be kept at a specified temperature before being snapped up, and once the oh-so-thirsty consumer pops the top, "a mechanism inside creates ice made from the drink, so it is not diluted." Reportedly, the beverage would sensibly be called Sprite Super Chilled, and if it does indeed hit the UK (and prove successful) by "early next year," the technology could then be passed along to Coke, Diet Coke or even "super cold alcoholic drinks, particularly beers."

[Via Tech Digest]

Even though the U.S. government may want nothing to do with its computers, Lenovo's still got so much love for the red, white, and blue that it's releasing a special-edition notebook branded with one of the most recognizable American icons: everyone's favorite tooth-decaying soft drink. Oddly enough, the company's Coca Cola-red, Pentium M-powered F20 was designed in honor of the 2008 Olympic Games -- which are not only two years away, but taking place in China, and not the U.S. (where was this lappy in 1996 when the Games were held in Coke's hometown of Atlanta?). Anyway, besides the snazzy paint job and stick-on Olympic rings, this version of the F20 is pretty much your run-of-the-mill 12.1-inch laptop, sporting an ULV 1.66GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, integrated graphics, an 80GB hard drive, and all the ports, wireless radios, and card readers you've come to expect from notebooks these days. Obviously priced in yuan, this model is going for the equivalent of $1,575, but since Lenovo knows that you can't possibly resist drinking a Coke while you're using this machine, they're throwing in some of that high-tech Batmobile-style armor plating on the house.

[Via I4U]