These awesomely Thriller-esque headphones made their debut at the Nokia design competition this year. Rumor has it you can get your own pair at the Nokia store in London. [via Shiny Shiny ]

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Headphones inspired by Thriller

Sony’s NW-A840 has a 2.8″ OLED display and is 7mm thick. I like the physical controls, unfashionable as they may be, when it comes to PMPs: when listening, I’m typically looking at something else (e.g. the road) and don’t want the distraction of having to look at a touchscreen. Source [Sony Insider]

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Walkman NW-A84

In case you haven’t heard already, Norah Jones was the surprise musical guest at the Apple announcement this morning. I love her red guitar, the black roses on her guitar strap, and the red heels. So classy.

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It’s only rock and roll with Norah Jones

Here are a few pics of Steve Jobs announcing the new Nano and its sweet new features at this morning’s Apple event, taken with my G10. (Not bad for a point-and-shoot!) This is what the Genius Mixes will look like. This was from a demo of the new video camera on the Nano. The resolution is awesome, but a quick hands-on after the announcement revealed what in my opinion is a pretty big design flaw — the camera is right behind the control pad, which means you really have to make an effort not to cover the lens with your fingers while shooting. This is a screen shot from a new ad, which you’ll probably see on TV soon.

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Photos of Steve Jobs and his new Nano

It’s that time again, one of those rare few days of the year when all gadget bloggers leave their home offices and head out to downtown San Francisco to bask in the excitement that is… an Apple event! This year, I’ll be joining the flock too, congregating with the rest to see what’s in store. Our heads are filled with important questions that will only be answered in the secret no-video-allowed conference room in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts between 10 and 11am — Will the original iPod go extinct? What will the new Nano look like? Could this be the debut of the enigmatic tablet? Will Steve Jobs make a comeback? Who could the musical guest possibly be at an event titled It’s Only Rock and Roll ? And perhaps most importantly, who will live blog the fastest? Will it be Gizmodo or Engadget or Ars or GDGT or…. well, it definitely won’t be us, because we’re not live blogging it, but I will be live-Tweeting the important details — plus some random trivia, factoids, and observations on the whole fiasco — from ground zero. So keep up-to-date by following me on Twitter or checking back here for updates to this post. Join me as the mysteries unfold — it’s gonna be fun! Follow our live-Tweetage of the Apple event

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BBG’s Live-Tweeting the Apple Event today

The Shanghai Corporate Pavilion, which will be part of the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, has a facade made from thousands of plastic tubes that were originally CD cases. [via Inhabitat ]

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Building in Shanghai made out of CD cases

I took this photo of a Kindle 2 hacked by Jesse Vincent at Foo Camp this past weekend. Apparently, aside from being a popular e-book reader, the Kindle is like Lego for Linux geeks. Here’s Jesse’s description of what we’re looking at: What you see there is a Kindle 2 with the Ubuntu 9.04 port to ARM running in a chrooted environment. On the screen you see xdaliclock in front of an xterm with the remains of a “top” command and a few mildly embarrassing typos. To open up the Kindle, I used the USB networking debug mode Amazon left hanging around when they first shipped the Kindle 2, a statically linked telnetd and a cross-compiler to bootstrap myself. From there, I built a daemon that can convert DRM-free PDFs and ePubs into something Amazon’s reader on the Kindle can deal with. After that, I started to get curious about what else might be possible. It only took a few evenings to get a moderately usable Ubuntu environment running. Mostly, the Kindle is a lovely little Linux box. Getting X working took a bit of hacking, but everything else “just works” with very little configuration. Got that? Okay.

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Kindle Hacking: It’s a "lovely little Linux box"

Artist Yoshihiko Satoh designed this cute little iPod speaker, which looks and functions as a small tote bag. It’s the modern, minimalist equivalent of carrying a boombox around. [ Product page via Spoon & Tamago ]

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Portable iPod speaker looks like a cute bag

Sony’s recently-announced new lineup of Readers was launched this morning in New York. The top item: a “Daily Edition,” offering similar 3G wireless capabilities to the Kindle alongside a 7-inch touchscreen display. It’ll be out in December, for $400–cheaper than Amazon’s own large-format model, the DX. Two other models will also hit 8,500 stores nationwide in the coming weeks: a basic $200 pocket-sized reader, and a $300 touchscreen edition that lacks the built-in wireless connection and giant display of the flagship model. A touchscreen, useful for scribbling notes or turning “pages” by hand, isn’t offered on the latest Kindles. Moreover, Sony plans to differentiate itself by embracing open formats, in contrast to Amazon’s aggressive and much-criticized DRM scheme. Sony earlier responded to Amazon’s missteps by cuddling up with Project Gutenberg, the online repository of public domain texts. An always-on internet connection to Sony’s online library gives these moves sharper teeth. The new models will be fully compatible with Apple’s OSX as well as Windows, unlike previous editions that offered only basic file transfers on the Mac unless customers got additional third-party software. It also announced a social networking site for readers, WordsMoveMe ; a partnership with the New York Public Library; and a range of pointless accessories. Sony has achieved something remarkable: it’s delivered exactly what was wanted of it, in timely fashion, at a competitive price, without losing its way on the design front. This Christmas is going to be a good one for electronic Reader gadgets.

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Sony assaults Kindle with new touchscreen 3G reader

This is the second BBG review of Audio Technica headphones, following the active noise canceling ATH-ANC3s (which I loved). In contrast, the ATH-CH7 are a noise-isolating set. They proved to be a very good product, and an instructional one. My observations while testing the ATH-CH7: 1. I know what impedance does now. Impedance is one of those words that seems terribly important to stereo salesmen but makes no audible difference at home so long as your speakers and components are decently paired. In portable headphones, impedance takes on a much different bent, because it ultimately affects the volume of a device’s audio output. High impedance levels make it hard for, say, an iPod to provide the right power to the headphones. When I first tried the ATH-CH7s, I was cranking the much volume higher than I’m comfortable doing, which confused and concerned me. Then I did a bit of reading and discovered these headphones have a 90 ohm impedance. Ninety is way high: Apple’s standard iPod earbuds have an impedance of 32 ohms. (The Audio-Technica ATH-ANC3s have the same impedance as the CH7, but the power boost of the active noise canceling compensates for it.) Thus informed, I cranked up the volume dial. 2. Audio-Technica loves bass. Specifically, they’re big on replicating the good low-end thump one gets from a home or car stereo in their headphones. This is a markedly different technique from companies like Etymotic and Shure, which aim for reproduction accuracy first and foremost. Me, I like bass, so the ATH-CH7s made me happy. Audio quality is good across the board, but the ability to get hearty low-end at low volume levels makes a difference. 3. Headphones have learning curves. I brought these headphones on a family vacation, and traded with my music-loving relatives, who had over-the-ear Bose noise-canceling headphones. I figured the hearty bass response of the ATH-CH7 would be an interesting variant to the cleaner Bose sound. Two people tried them, and both returned the headphones to me with scrunched noses, saying: “They’re tinny.” Which, to me, was crazy: the ATH-CH7’s bass is as good as any of the models I’ve tested. But I had the large-size silicone ear cushions in place, and I didn’t show my relatives how to make a seal to maximize bass response. I’m used to it, but noise isolation definitely requires an instruction manual. As for the headphones in question, ATH-CH7 is a solid performer, best at minimizing distortion. It’s a moderately good noise isolator, although the active noise canceling in the ATH-ANC3 blows the CH7 away (excluding wind, that is). They’re also quite comfortable to wear. I’m 2 for 2 in enjoying Audio-Technica’s headphones.

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Review: Audio Technica ATH-CH7 headphones