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Hong Kong gadget flea market: a blast from the past
If you've seen our Hong Kong feature from awhile back, then you would've already heard about my favorite gadget hangout Sham Shui Po. By chance, my post-flight stroll in said district yesterday coincided with Apliu Street's Chinese New Year flea market, which featured many vintage items like jade figurines, paintings, jewelry, video tapes, vinyl records, etc. Naturally, what really caught my attention were the old gadgets that were literally piled up along the street, and from just HK$30 (US$3.85), you could easily pick up an old classic such as a Sony Clié, an HP iPaq, a WonderSwan Color, an original GameBoy, a MiniDisc player, or even a proper old school laptop or camera. Hell, some guy even had a couple of Nintendo Micro VS Systems (Donkey Kong Hockey and Boxing)! The catch? Well, there was obviously no warranty for these old timers, plus the broken screens or the lack of compatible batteries for some meant that most were more suitable as collectibles. Regardless, we took a $6 gamble with a Sony Clié PEG-NR70 Palm PDA with docking station and boom! It works! Well, except for the battery that only lasts for an hour, but I'll figure something out. %Gallery-115754%
Phone guitar: iPhone OS, Windows Mobile and Android got all night to set the world right (video)
What can you do when no one's got a phone to jam with you? Why, you can be a geeky one-man band, of course! Web developer Steffest (just one name, like Sting or Madonna) managed to do just that by strapping a couple of Android devices (possibly an Archos 5 and a HTC Desire), a couple of WinMo handhelds (looks like a HP iPAQ h1940 and a HTC Touch Diamond), and an iPod touch on top of a portable speaker. All this just for a forthcoming presentation on mobile cross development -- Steffest had to painstakingly write the same audio program "in Java for Android, in C# for Windows Mobile and in Objective-C for iPhone." Oh, and it doesn't just end there -- turns out this dude can also pluck tap away a good Neil Diamond classic on this five-way nerd-o-strummer. Get on board and check out the video after the break.
HP's Obsidian becomes iPAQ Glisten, officially comes to AT&T
Wow, talk about digging deep in the memory bank. The same phone that we spotted way back in July (known then as the iPAQ K3 Obsidian) has finally emerged in official fashion on AT&T. Dubbed the iPAQ Glisten, this all-business smartphone boasts a vanilla coat of Windows Mobile 6.5, a 2.5-inch AMOLED display, 3.1 megapixel camera, 256MB of SDRAM, a microSD expansion slot, A-GPS, 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, a QWERTY keyboard, 802.11b/g WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. 'Course, you'll still be dealing with a resistive screen and a dated OS, but if you're turned on in some weird way, it'll be "available in the coming weeks" for $179.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and 2-year agreement.
HP's iPAQ rx4000 gets a big brother: the rx5915
This new line of consumer-oriented HP iPAQ devices is growing into a family right quick. We just saw the rx4000 a couple of days ago, and now we're catching wind of at least a couple rx5000 devices. The rx5000 types go with the "Travel Companion" moniker, since they include a SiRF Star III GPS receiver for a bit of navigation action. WiFi seems to be optional for the rx5000 units, but the rx5915 has it, along with a 3.5-inch QVGA touchscreen, 2GB of flash memory, 64MB RAM, Bluetooth 2.0, SDIO slot, standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a 400MHz Samsung processor. Hopefully these specs give us a better indication of what HP is packing in the rx4000 units, and the flash memory size does appear to be a variable, so we're guessing we'll at least get a 2GB option in rx4000 land. The Travel Companion iPAQs feature a traditional 9-way direction pad, along with 2 Windows Mobile buttons, but none of the rx4000's jog dial action. As for price, the rx5915 weighs in at a hefty, if almost reasonable, $600. We've been hearing some rumblings about whether or not these new iPAQs were going to make it to the States, but we can at least say that the documentation we've seen shows off the rx5000 nav features gallivanting around North America, so we've got that going for us.
