The Concorde was a marvellous plane which could take passengers from London to New York in just a few hours. However, due to a couple of problems it was taken out of service in the last few years. Not to worry though as a new version could be built and in service in 15 years time which should be able to take passengers from Brussels to Australia in about 4 hours. The new version will fly at Mach 5 (about 3400mph). It will carry 300 passengers and run on liquid hydrogen to lower carbon emissions. The real name of the plane will be the A2 and has funding from the European Space Agency and EU.

It’s designed to leave Brussels International Airport, fly quietly and sub-sonically out into the North Atlantic at about Mach 0.9 before reaching Mach 5 across the North Pole and heading down over the Pacific to Australia.

Although it sounds like quite a crazy project, it is definitely the way forwards. Dropping Concorde out of service a few years back might not have been the best step forwards, but now that this is making it’s way we can forgive them for dropping it’s Dad.

For more details check out the DailyMail.

The iPod has become extremely popular since it’s launch and a number of accessories and other 3rd party things are made for it. The latest is the VCommunicator which is a very useful translation device which has an intuitive menu system which you can scroll through to translate various phrases in to another language. Connect it up to a loud speaker and entertain crowds of people also. Currently it is used by the army and assists them in communicating with foreign speakers they come across.

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Is the MacBook Air too expensive for you? If so then why not print yourself one of these “free” versions. It is named the MacBook Paper or really it could be a MacBook Notepad if you really wanted. I doubt you will get much thinner then this for the next few years!

The print out is available over at APCommunity and even allows you to print the sleeve out too if desired.

Found at: GearDiary

Sound and Vision magazine have run a nice comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of OLED, LCD and Plasma screens. With all 3 types of screen being an option it does make you wonder which you want to purchase with your hard earned cash. CES which has just passed a few weeks ago had a lot of TV’s on display which tends to make the choice even more overwhelming.

OLED (organic light emitting diode) is fairly new to the TV scene. The most noticeable feature with OLED’s is the contrast. This is due to OLED being a self-emitting display technology which requires no back light. Each OLED pixel can be switched on as needed because the tiny cells respond instantly. Also OLED screens happen to be wafer thin too which is an added bonus as well as having a wide viewing angle like the plasma screens. Mix this with HDTV resolutions and the large screen and you are on to a winner. On the downside, screens are not that big yet and the prices are quite high. But with the screens only really appearing over the last year there is no doubt that prices will go down while screen sizes increase.

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A Patent for Apple was filed August last year and approved yesterday. The patent is for an Illuminated Touch Pad which appears that the light panel will be capable of emitting light in localized areas of the input surface. What this means is basically visual feed back which when you touch the scroll wheel on an iPod, the touch wheel will light up under your finger to visually show what just happened with the light actually following your finger around the dial. As well as the touch wheel being illuminated, the button in the middle will also light up too to show the actions on what it is doing.

Via: Patent Applications

By using Bluetooth, a mobile phone and it’s built in camera, developers have created a cool 3D mouse type application. It works kind of like a Wii remote control, although it uses no accelerometers which means it needs to use the video from the camera to work out what needs to be done. To interact with the computer you move the phone around or rotate it in front of the screen. You can interact with objects by clicking a button on the phone when the camera is pointing at it.

Tests indicate that it does work ok, although I think I would prefer to stick to my mouse right now unless they can convince me otherwise. It just seems a bit too fidgety trying to set it all up and hold your phone in the air.

Via: TechLivez

When dressing up for the weekend I bet the last thing on your mind is “I better not forget my power glove”. Well, looking at the above shop window shot it seems like the Power Glove is now “in”.

Via: GeekSugar

The 103 inch plasma screen beast that was launched by Panasonic back in 2006 has now topped a mass total of 15 units being sold. The TV costs $80000 and due to the size of it, I am not too surprised that only 15 were sold. 5 of those 15 went to one customer also.

It does make me wonder if it was really worth it for Panasonic to push the boundaries to a size that most people couldn’t even fit in their house.

Via: Gadgetell

Panasonic have created Evolta which is a mega battery. The battery is a step up from Oxyride. If you remember Oxyride, they are batteries that run at 1.7V (for the AA versions) which is slightly larger then normal. Two of those batteries powered a car with a light passenger for 1.23km trip. So, they are fairly powerful. It makes you wonder what kind of output the new Evolta’s will give out.

Another step up is that Evolta batteries have a shelf life of 10 years. They will not lose any power or performance if sat there unused.

No details are readily available yet, but expect to start seeing these batteries around April time.

Via: DigitalworldTokyo

USB 2.0 is way cooler then the previous version as it could run up to 480Mbps. However, that is going to be smashed through soon due to the release of the USB 3.0 standard. This new standard will be capable of transfer speeds up to 4.8Gbps which is a HUGE leap of 10 times. The 3.0 specification should be with us early this year with products arriving in 2009 – 2010. USB 3.0 will be backwards compatible with 2.0 and 1.1. Also it will feature some more efficient protocols which will shut down to preserve power when not in use. The cables will be parallel optical which allows for the higher speeds. Bring it on!

Via: TheGadgetBlog

This tiny Micro SDHC memory card can cram 12GB of data on to it. That is actually quite incredible. For those who thought they were cool sporting the slightly older 8Gb versions you now need to sell them on eBay and get one of these.

Unfortunately there is no info on pricing yet, but in good old computer ways the 8Gb are surely going to drop in price to make way for the 12Gb big brother.

Product Page Via: Ounae

A Google Street View car was spotted recently in Christchurch, NZ. It was spotted by Bevan over at Bevan’s Blog and he was able to snap a few pictures of the car, GPS unit to keep track of where the 360 degree images were taken and all the necessary computer equipment in the car.

Check out the pics over here.