Gadgets

It’s Friday, which means I’m cranky enough to pick apart an ill-conceived concept design. This week we take a look at Ziv Lichi’s Kettle and Mug, aka Hoffee, a rather pretty piece of kitchenware that puts a tea/coffee mug inside the scalding interior of an electric kettle.

It works like this.

Do you have €400,000 ($562,000) lying around? Well, you might want to do something about that, especially if it’s on the kitchen table, you have windows open and it’s a breezy day. And if you’re a complete moron, I have just the thing to waste it on: Jean Michele Jarre’s AeroDream One, aka “The ultimate tower station for iPod, iPad and iPhone.”

Possibly the best thing about the AeroDream One is the publicity photo, featuring a grinning Jarre climbing a (built-in) ladder to put his iPad into the top of the 11-foot behemoth. Why the hell is the slot on the top?

The answer is that this isn’t the real AeroDream One.

BERLIN — HTC unveiled two new smartphones at the IFA electronics conference in Germany on Thursday, the company’s first devices to run Microsoft’s revamp of the Windows Phone mobile platform, codenamed ‘Mango.’

First, the HTC Radar is a stylish white smartphone made with social networking in mind. Mango’s interface keeps you connected with every friend, contact and follower you have all around the world, with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn integration.

Izon is a “remote room monitor” which beams video across the Internet and onto the screen of your iPad, iPhone or iPod. It might also be described by a more cynical person than myself as a kind of lifestyle spy camera.

The Izon is a white plastic stick which swivels on its dome-shaped magnetic base to be easily pointed at whatever you want to spy on.

Samsung has announced the release of their Software Development Kit for bada 2.0, Samsung’s own mobile platform. The operating system is expected to be released next month alongside three new Samsung Wave smartphones.

While most of North America isn’t familiar with Samsung’s proprietary OS, phones running already running a beta version of bada have a small market presence in Europe and Asia.

The foldable F.O. Clock concept is inspired by two Japanese art forms. Furoshiki (literally “cloth wrapping”) was popularized by cartoons in the eighties and nineties. The other stems from the Japanese art of folding paper, or Origami.

When folded, the F.O. clock is sleek, shiny and could fit right in at a modern art exhibit. When unfolded, the F.O. shows off its carefully crafted rib structure.

Straight from the brain of New Zealand designer Shiping Toohey, the F.O clock is composed of 18 tessellated pieces and a digital clock unit whose LEDs are readable from a shiny, semi transparent covering.

Energizer’s iSurge travel charger offer the highest density of power outputs I have ever seen. One small block of black plastic has three regular AC outlets, two USB ports (with 2.1-amp outputs so you can charge an iPad in less than a day) and a 30-pin dock up top for your iPhone or iPod.

Round the back the prongs rotate 180-degrees to fit any socket and underneath there is a nightlight (which can hopefully be switched off). Phew. It’s almost like carrying your own mobile power station with you.

The handy little brick will go on sale in October, and will cost a hefty $60, although it might be worth it just for the cables it will eliminate.

Portable speakers are awesome. And while I’m not sure if Scosche’s BoomCan is awesome without testing it, it’s not going to cost much to find out: the little pocket-sized speaker is just $25.

The BoomCan has a single 35mm driver, mounted in a cylinder and pointing upwards. It hooks up to any device using a 3.5mm jack, and runs for up to seven hours on its rechargeable li-ion battery.

Google has intervened in an ongoing intellectual property dispute between smartphone application developers and a patent-holding firm, Wired.com has learned, marking the Mountain View company’s first public move to defend Android coders from a patent troll lawsuit that’s cast a pall on the community.

The company says it filed a request with the United States Patent and Trademark office Friday for reexamination of two patents asserted by East Texas-based patent firm Lodsys.

By drawing energy from vibrations, tiny sheets of piezoelectric material can provide free power to anything that moves or shakes. The battery-less sensors can take the motion from a car on bumpy asphalt or a loaded clothes dryer, for example, to give supplemental energy to a device.

Piezoelectric technology has been around since the late 19^th century and can be found in microphones and phonographs working under simple principles. Under kinetic stress, crystals on a sheet of piezoelectric material become electrically polarized, which produces energy.