Gadgets

If a sign tells you not to take photos in the courtroom, that includes ones taken with cellphones, too. That’s the lesson taught to 49-year-old Jean Johnson, who took an unauthorized shot in Judge Vincent Gaughan’s house of R. Kelly (there for his kiddie porn case) and ended up with a custodial sentence.

Or, rather, here’s the real lesson: be a wealthy man accused of owning nasty photos of little girls, and you get to stay out of jail for five years waiting for your trial, even after failing to turn up in court. Be a grandmother taking photos before the same ego-mad judge, you go directly to the cells and get your property confiscated and destroyed.

Can’t afford an expensive gadget to encrust with real diamonds? Just grab a cheap gadget and encrust it in Swarovski crystals. Oh, wait, $275, you say? For a $1 item battered with glue and rolled in crushed glass?

British scribes have unearthed a patent that raises the specter of Apple adding automatic volume control to future iPods. The proposed system would monitor how long the user has been listening to music at what volume and gradually decrease the volume when it determined hearing damage was imminent. The system would also calculate a period of "quiet time" between when the device is turned off and restarted, after which one could gradually increase the volume. According to the patent:

Since the damaging effect on users’ hearing is both gradual and cumulative, even those users who are concerned about hearing loss may not behave in a manner that would limit or minimize such damaging effects.

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Apple may torment iPhone hackers with brick-filled nightmares, but it’s not stupid. To whit, it has hired one of the big kahunas of unofficial iPhone software development to help create the official iPhone SDK. Lucas Newman of Delicious Monster, who worked on the first iPhone-native game and created an unofficial SDK for the stupendabrick, will come onboard the good ship Cupertino as an "iPhone engineer."

Apple hires author of the unofficial iPhone SDK [iPhone Atlas]

Mobile blogging and multimedia are fine for fake-ass playas, but you Herbert Kornfeld types know accounting is where the real action is at. So you’ll no doubt be tripping on news that Intuit has come up with an online version of Quicken optimized for use on the iPhone. It launches Jan. 8 and costs $3 a month. Versions optimized for Blackberries and other mobile devices are in the works.

A Quicken exec says the service is meant to appeal to teenagers, who supposedly would love to do some light-duty bookkeeping but can’t be bothered to install software.

Little LED screens will be the next big thing in cosmetic gadget frippery: the slowly-lowering price of the Optimus Maximus over the next few years will chart this inconsequential revolution. In the meantime: concept art! How do you like de groene banaan’s "visualized" hard drive, which shows you the contents in abstract, arty form on the intergrated LED?

In practice, I think, commodity color displays, when they get sufficiently cheap, will actually be put to good use: anything with a hard drive will have a file browser and media player built in.

Is this going to be a slow news week in Blogistan? For an answer, look no further than The Unofficial Apple Weblog, which fills space today with a side-by-side comparison of a Mac Mini to a HoneyBaked Ham. Ostensibly meant as a parody of increasingly desperate "product smackdowns’ at other outlets, the piece falls short by not declaring a clear winner.

While high-level executives are busy sexing up their iPhones, Fortune has a useful compilation of reasons your IT department is not going to let people like you get on the network via the Love Slab. Items include no support for data encryption, no way to lock or wipe a lost handset with sensitive data on it and that whole "send us the phone and wait" battery-replacement strategy.

Which makes us wonder. Have any of you valued readers had the slightest bit of success in getting your IT department to accommodate an iPhone?

Annalee Newitz knows that almost all gadgets are trash, assigned prices far in excess of their value. But, by Kenneth Eng, God, she still wants a Wii.

"I want toxic Chinese toys covered with paint that will make me hallucinate. I want a sparkly-crap mobile phone that will break within a week and turn into circuit-board garbage that cannot be recycled and will therefore be shipped to developing countries where it will be hacked and resold. I want a media device that’s wrapped in so many layers of plastic and nonrecyclable material that the very act of opening it is like smashing my carbon footprint onto the face of Mother
Earth. I want a useless gizmo mass-produced by machines that stole jobs from nonunionized workers who stole jobs from the natives.

In short, I want a Nintendo Wii."

So do we! So does everyone…

Remember the Keyport ? That $300, six-in-one key key holder with the decidedly dodgy business model which requires you to send off your cash and keys along with your home address? Well, it looks like the Keyport people have run out of richer customers and are bringing the sliding fob to the cheaper end of the market.