Beckham gets the golden (iPod) touch

Given the millions (in sterling pounds, mind you) that the Premiership soccer stars are being paid each year, one would have thought the English national team players would have gotten a sports car or a special-edition Vertu phone, at the very least. But it seems all they could come up with to celebrate David Beckham's 100th soccer appearance for England against France last week was... an Apple iPod touch.

At least there's been some attempt to jazz this up with specially customized gold plating as well as Beckham's name and the England soccer team's emblem engraved on the back. Did we mention that the £600 (US$1,196.50) player comes with 32GB of memory? Not that it really matters to the former England captain.

Via Telegraph
Picture credit: Telegraph

"Super lens" for phone photographers?

Any kind of photographic quality claims attributed to phone cameras and other combo devices should be taken with a pound of salt, but the trend probably won't be going away anytime soon. But little did we know that people would go to great lengths, literally, to give their phone cams more lens power.

The latest example is a kit from Japan-based Green-House, which includes a super lens that it claims has an 8x zoom along with a handset clamp and tripod, according to Gadgetell. Yet if this kind of unwieldy appendage really becomes popular, we wonder if it just makes more sense to design a camera that adds a phone and other functions, rather than the other way around.

Via Crave CNET

Nokia's Prism gets new angle: A clamshell

It's been several months since we first saw Nokia's geometrically influenced Prism mobile phones, and we're still not sure how we feel about those odd triangular and diamond-shaped buttons. And just to make matters more confounding, the handset maker has come out with a clamshell model that looks even weirder.

The 7070 Prism is a more affordable version of its high-end siblings, which even acquired some French artistry earlier this year. MobileWhack says the US$80 clamshell isn't all that different either--other than the folding form, of course--including such features as a built-in speaker, voice recorder, and support for MP3 ringtones.

Pricing aside, the next iteration seems obvious: An entire handset shaped like a triangle.

Via Crave CNET

Musical waterbed: Perfect for 1970s disco

So maybe that iPod stool wasn't such a dumb idea after all. That, at least, is what we thought after seeing this musical waterbed.

Believe it or not, it's actually not the first of its kind we've seen, though there are far more traditional non-aquatic iPod beds, of course. But the Akva Sound Music Waterbed stays focused on its main purpose of delivering audio, resisting the temptation to build in every other known form of media and technology.

Rather than some cheesy glued-on portable speakers, according to Slippery Brick, it has a dedicated place for loudspeakers that's strategically positioned for "the utilization of the water's unique properties as a carrier of sound and oscillation". But if you insist on enjoying music in the water and want to save some money, you can get an even more direct effect by going for a swim with the SwiMP3 headphones.

Via Crave CNET

Sony unveils its smallest 1080i AVCHD Handycam

Sony calls its latest Handycam HDR-TG1 "the lightest and most compact AVCHD camcorder available in the market today". And it's not hard to see why. The TG1 comes in a handy 32 x 119 x 63mm, which is about the size of most compact still cameras today and weighs just 300g, thanks in part to its lightweight titanium chassis.

It's not just the tiny size of the TG1 that has captured our attention. Scroll through the specs sheet and you will find a plethora of onboard features, from 1080i video recording and 4-megapixel still image capture to Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound recording. It also sports a BIONZ processing engine (that is used on the Sony Alpha dSLRs) and Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar 10x optical zoom lens.
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