Japan has been a pioneer in the roll-out of digital television. The Bluedot set is a portable digital TV; as you’d expect its a small but high quality television set with a 4-inch screen. Digital television in Japan is based on the ISDB standard which is used in some Latin American markets and some Asian [...]
Back in the day many audio books and language course used to come in a book sized molded plastic sleeve lined with four or six cassette tapes. There would be a sleeve that would take a cover on the outside like a DVD film case (or a VHS film case before it). The boxes were [...]
I have bought a couple of series on iTunes out of convenience and been comparing the experience with having DVD box sets. I didn’t miss the hokey menu designs for DVDs that provided a wide variance in user experience. By comparison iTunes doesn’t usually have a lot of the ‘extra’ content that’s on DVDs for [...]
Oakley has a giant store on the edge of Covent Garden. It has tricked out the store with some really interesting things like ejector seats from a Boeing B52 bomber: Here’s the seats The thing that caught my attention was a chandelier made of Frogskin-like sunglasses, which was impressive in this scale and method of [...]
Madrid-based artist Julien Denoyer customises thin Moleskine pads with client unfriendly slogans that ache being on a desk. You can get hold of these here.
Like most people I have a rats nest of power cables and connectivity going on behind my computer and hi-fi set-up so knowing what goes where would be a relief. Dotz cord identifiers stuck me as being a particularly elegant solution to this debacle. They clip around the cable securely with a label and you [...]
I was chatting to my friend Ian over lunch putting the technological world to right over the hour or so that we had. That coalesced some of the ideas that I have been thinking about for a while and posted about in fragments on this blog at different times. So what about the headline? I’d [...]
French back to basics device reseller Lëkki have managed to get hold of some of the legendary Motorola StarTAC Rainbow handsets. In the late 1990s the StarTAC was cutting edge. My friend Ian who worked in the city as a developer at the time had three of them. The hinge on the device kept breaking [...]
I was chatting with my friend Ian about things technical both wired and wireless and we came up with a list of things that we felt Apple had to address in order to be successful: Business What is Apple doing about mending customer fences? Apple has done well in a number of markets, but it [...]
Early January means CES in the tech calendar as the media gives its full attention to the consumer electronics sector. With some 2,600 exhibitors there was a lot of news coming out of the event. But I was more interested in some of the more macro trends that you could see from the coverage and [...]
Kurt Anderson wrote an essay in Vanity Fair where he argued that product design in everything from fashion to homewares has stood still over the past two decades. It was an interesting that got me thinking about hypothetical reasons why his theory maybe true. There were a number of possible factors that I came up [...]
Interesting advert from SKY – a mobile phone brand from Korean handset manufacturer Pantech. The advert features a woman answering here phone by moving her hand in front of the phone without touching it to answer a call. The handset: the Vega LTE uses simple gestures to control call answering and the music player on [...]
Belgian luxury goods brand Delvaux teamed up with designer Bruno Pieters to come up with a slim brief case ideal for a laptop and a small amount of paper work. The bag has a soft leather interior to ensure it doesn’t scratch your laptop or tablet and comes with a zip that opens wide enough [...]
I picked up this design by the Wayward Gallery before Christmas. Nothing like a bit of old school brandjacking parody for a t-shirt design.
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