Posts by: Nick Hide

Inamo restaurant is the future of eating out

Nick Hide, Rory Reid, and Drew Stearne | Mar 21, 2009

CNET UK visits a London restaurant where the tabletops are interactive. (Credit: CNET UK)

The CNET UK team recently went for dinner at Inamo restaurant in London, where interactive touch-sensitive tables take your order. Each table has an overhead projector and a mouse trackpad, so your dining surface is effectively a PC monitor. You can customize your "tablecloth", play a videogame against your companion and order a taxi to get you home.

When you're ready to order, you can browse the menu, with each dish projected on to your place setting. When you've chosen, you can even see a live Webcam feed of your chef at work. The restaurant's founders say the concept evolved from the simple idea of 'Wouldn't it be cool if you could just hit a button and a waiter brought you another beer?' Watch the video for more.
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Filed under: Future Tech
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Ideazon Merc Stealth: N00b-hunting keyboard

Nick Hide | Jan 30, 2008

Ideazon had a hefty hit with PC gamers a few years back--the innovative Zboard keyboard, which offered different keysets for specific games. It was rather clunky, but it succeeded in making PC gaming slightly friendlier--the Battlefield 2 keys were certainly very handy. Now Ideazon's back with the altogether sleeker Merc Stealth keyboard.

Instead of a swappable keyset, the Stealth has an extra-wide chassis with special gaming keys built into the left side. These are basically a second set of the keys you use most when playing FPS-type PC games, such as W, A, S, D, Shift, Space and so on, but in a much more user-friendly design. It means you still use the key presses that are hard-wired into your shooter brain, but with less RSI and fewer mistaken keypresses. The W key, for instance, is exactly above the S, unlike on a normal keyboard, and both are much wider than your run of the mill key.

Other features include a backlit keyboard so you can play in the dark--very cool if you're playing something scary like F.E.A.R.--which can change color at the press of a button. Red, blue and purple lighting are available for your customization delight. Ideazon also bundles a very easy-to-use software tool to assign functions to each key, which brilliantly includes mods for dozens of the most popular games.

Testing the Merc Stealth out on a few of our favorite titles, we found the gaming keys responsive and very comfortable. The build quality is very high and (although obviously we haven't been hammering it for months) we imagine it'll last a good deal longer than a bog-standard keyboard would.

The only downside we could find was that the design has squashed the right-hand side of the keyboard together, so the cursor keys and those you'd normally find above them (Insert, Home, Page Up and so on) are all part of the number pad. This can be irritating if you plan to use the keyboard for more mundane pursuits.

The Ideazon Merc Stealth is available now online for US$89.99 (S$127.78).

Via CNET UK Crave

Filed under: PC & Peripherals
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