Gadgets

No porn’s allowed in Apple’s App Store, but a clever developer has managed to flash some flesh through an image-viewing app.

Called forChan, the app specializes in viewing image boards on the web. The app comes preloaded with images of nude dogs, but with a few tweaks you can customize the app to view naked ladies.

The steps, provided by iPhone app review site Krapps, are as follows:

Step 1: Download forChan
Step 2: Via your iPhone, visit iHustleApps.com/iPhone and press the “forChan” button
Step 3: Select one of the 15 “adults only” categories
Step 4: Copy the displayed URL to your clipboard
Step 5: Paste the URL in the Store URL section of forChan

And just like that — bow chicka bow wow — you’ve got porn! (We’ll spare you the screenshot since we trust you’ve been educated in human anatomy.) Though you could forego all these steps by simply launching Safari and loading a porn site.

LAS VEGAS — Motorola launched its third Android smartphone, an attractive, compact device with some surprising hardware innovations and a user interface that aggregates social networking feeds, e-mail and contacts.

The phone called Backflip has a 3.1-inch touchscreen, a QWERTY physical keyboard that opens up in an unexpected way, a touch-sensitive navigation panel on the back and a nifty mode that allows it to be positioned on the tabletop to act like an alarm clock.

LAS VEGAS — Rumor has it the much anticipated Apple tablet will be a blown-up iPhone with a 10-inch screen. While we wait for that fabled device (presumably in late January), take a gander at Lenovo’s S10-3t — a 10-inch part-time netbook, part-time tablet running Windows 7.

The “t” stands for tablet, and that’s because this 10-inch netbook (aka notbook) features a swivel touchscreen that can be rotated for use as a tablet.

Flavor haters rejoice! The bland, tasteless-but-hot emissions from the microwave, chosen by the puritanical over tastier frying, grilling, roasting or even baking for “health” reasons, can now be taken on the road. Yes, lucky penitents can abolish the last holdout of the red-blooded American and swap the grill for tasteless, molecule-flipping radiation.

Next time you are tailgating, beware anyone who wants to bring along a WaveBox portable microwave (great name, by the way).

When we brought news of the concept MP3-playing Mint Cube, with its retro-styled dials and pocket-unfriendly shape, some of you loved it and some really hated it. So we have good news or bad, depending on your tastes: Korean manufacturer Dodona has popped out its own cube-shaped player, and it is actually a real, buyable product.

For “just” $170, you get a 4GB, 2×2x2-inch box with an FM radio and a digital – not analog – OLED display, capable of playing MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA and FLAC tracks. There is also a microphone for voice recording and a speaker on the back so you can “entertain” your friends. In short, it does everything a dollar-store MP3 player would do, only it costs almost as much as a video-shooting, movie-playing iPod Nano with four-times the capacity.

The one analog part that might be found on the superior (and non-existent) Mint Cube is the volume switch, although rather than being a satisfyingly hefty knob is is just a little, twistable plastic nubbin.

With the year coming to a close, marketing research company Nielsen has compiled its list of top mobile phones in the U.S. market. The no. 1 phone in the United States is Apple’s iPhone 3G, with 4 percent of the market, according to Nielsen’s January-to-October calculations. Research In Motion’s Blackberry follows in a close second with 3.7 percent, and the Motorola RAZR stands at third with 2.3 percent.

I have mixed thoughts about Hammacher Schlemmer’s Airplane Seat Back Valet. On the one hand, it looks completely perfect for a long haul flight, keeping everything to hand without taking away precious knee-space, and looks like it could be easily rigged to hold a media-player in front of your eyes for some non-censored in-flight entertainment.

On the other hand, it is monstrously dorky, and spreading out all of your belongings for your fellow travelers to see is akin to traveling with your pants off, a kind of physical TMI.

Some smart students at MIT have figured out how to turn a typical LCD into a low-cost, 3-D gestural computing system.

Users can touch the screen to activate controls on the display but as soon as they lift their finger off the screen, the system can interpret their gestures in the third dimension, too. In effect, it turns the whole display into a giant sensor capable of telling where your hands are and how far away from the screen they are.

UC Davis (my alma mater) is getting into iPhone apps, too. The university is offering its first iPhone app development class, similar to the course taught by Stanford.

Granted, the Davis course is taught by professor Ken Joy, and Stanford’s is led by Apple employees. Still, it’s great to see more computer science programs teaching code for newer platforms. Hopefully we’ll hear about a slew of Android development courses as well.

The retro-styled Chopper2 headphones from Aerial7 may look familiar. Anyone who has seen the wonderful (and hugely popular, if my local high street is anything to go by) Panasonic RP HTX7-K1 will instantly recognize the large earpieces, the adjustable steel-wire sliders, the leather-covered pads and headband and the single-exit cable. Even the recommended price is almost the same, at $70 to the Panasonic’s $60.

Apart from the dubious color schemes, the Chopper2 has one important addition: an in-line mic, for use with compatible cellphones (the iPhone and BlackBerry both work, for example). They don’t have the inline remote to control an iPod, as that requires Apple’s magic chip to work, but for yakking on the phone you’re good.