Synaptics Fuse concept phone knows when you are squeezing the handset

Synaptics may not be a household brand like LG, Nokia and Samsung, but it's the company behind the full touchscreen interface on the Onyx concept back in August 2006. The Onyx never made it to market, but the UI was certainly ahead of its time. That appears to have provided good grounding for another concept outing with the Fuse announced today.

The Fuse, according to Synaptics, is designed to tackle the issues of single-handed usage and the need to look at the display on a touchscreen device. Its answer is a combination of force and capacitive sensors on the sides of the phone that lets you pan and scroll when you grip the handset, as well as a interface that lets you navigate the menu from the back of the device.
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Epson-styled "extreme" gaming

We wrote about the PicoP micro projector-based gaming system last week. Now it seems like Epson has cobbled together something similar, but on a different scale. The company has an poor chap "extreme gamer" strapped on a EH-TW450 projector and PS3 Slim to roam the streets playing Need for Speed: Shift on walls. While gaming on a giant screen has always been cool, there're many other display alternatives such as the stylish Vuzix Wrap 310 video eyewear.
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A Google Android smartphone called Nexus One?

A blog post from a Google executive on Saturday morning dropped hints that the company would release a Google Android phone of its own.

In the post, Mario Queiroz, a Google vice president of product management, said the company had developed a "mobile lab" device that "combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android." According to Queiroz, Google has distributed the device to Google employees worldwide so that they could test the new technology and help improve it.

Quieroz's announcement came only a few hours after reported sightings of the device. CNET TV Associate Producer Jason Howell, who had a very brief hands-on with the gadget Friday night and first relayed the news on Twitter, confirms that the "mobile lab" device is an HTC phone running the Android 2.1 operating system.
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Is it "game over" for Microsoft's consumer business?

The New York Times has given some online love to Mark Anderson, the influential writer of the Strategic News Service, who this week said that Microsoft is "not a place that gets consumers."

That's a pretty bold statement, considering that Windows has mad market share for consumer-based PCs and Xbox gets plenty of respect from that young online gaming crowd. (Techmeme, Mary Jo Foley, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes)

But, regardless of whether Anderson is on the money about this one or not, his comments are definitely worth pondering--not only in Redmond but on Main Street and Wall Street, too.

Read the full story at Between the Lines on ZDNet

Three-pin power plug redesigned

We blog about the latest gadgets on Crave Asia, but sometimes the best ideas come from redesigning devices that we use on a daily basis, for example, the standard UK three-pin power plug. That's exactly what Min-Kyu Choi from the Royal College of Art in London conjured up for his graduate show. His product design is a folding plug system which was inspired by the MacBook Air. According to Choi, the Air is "the world's thinnest laptop", but "we still still use the world's biggest three-pin plug".
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