Gadgets

The future of underwater videos and photos is likely to be the exact same as the future or all photos and videos: they’ll be take with your phone (in a waterproof case, of course).

But until then, we have cameras like Contour’s ContourRoam, a rugged sports-cam which isn’t scared of water. Well, water shallower than a meter (three feet) that is.

These are likely to sell out in no time, but if you’re in the market for a beautiful old Polaroid camera, then Photojojo has managed to round up a small batch of SX-70s and will let you have one for $290.

The SX-70 was “The original, wondrous, never-to-be-topped SX-70. The first folding SLR, the first camera to take integral instant film, only made up until 1977.” Photojojo acquired them through Hong Kong-based MINT, who presumably constructed a time machine to go back and pick these up, and then restored them so they’re as good as new.

If you take so many self portraits that you actually buy a camera designed for the purpose, then you might want to pay a visit to my psychiatrist, Dr. Narcissus. And if you have any cash left over after paying his frankly outrageous fees, take a look at Samsung’s new MV800.

It’s a camera which folds in half. Or rather, it unfolds, like a book with only two (very thick) pages. This not only lets you see the screen from the front of the camera, for easy self-portrait framing, but it lets you partially unfold the rear panel and prop the camera up at any angle.

You’re still going to look like a total dork if you wear it, but at least you won’t go crazy with frustration when you use the new JawBone Icon HD Bluetooth headset, and its accompanying dongle, the Nerd.

The Icon HD is the same as the existing Icon, only with a bigger, better speaker inside — hence the “HD” moniker. You can connect to two devices at once (like JawBone’s JamBox speaker), letting you stream music from your laptop and also answer incoming calls from your phone.

If you can’t beat them, assimilate them. This seems to be the message coming from Apple, which has just hired JailBreakMe.com author Nicholas Allegra as an intern.

Allegra, aka Comex, Tweeted the news today (or yesterday, depending on where you are in the world). “So, the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple,” he wrote.

It’s the quintessential image of a classical composer: the gifted musician sitting with a thousand-yard stare at his piano, quill and paper ready to be inked with a new concerto or symphony. Today’s equivalent could just as likely be a musician staring at a computer screen.

Nodal, a new program designed to create and visualize music, aims to have the same sweeping impact on music composition that the Information Age has had on other creative domains.

Developed by researchers and musicians at the at Monash University in Clayton, Australia, Nodal allows you to visualize the musical structure (i.e.

It certainly wasn’t poorly performing software that killed the TouchPad.

Sources at The Next Web reports that HP’s webOS team hacked an iPad 2 to run the software — and it ended up running more than twice as fast on Apple’s tablet as on the TouchPad.

Even before the TouchPad tablet or Pre smartphone were officially released, the webOS developer team was so fed up with HP’s lackluster hardware that they “wanted them gone.”

HP rocked the tech world yesterday when it announced the company would no longer be producing webOS hardware, including the TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphones, after acquiring Palm last year for $1.2 billion.

Samsung’s new 830-series SSDs are blisteringly fast and also offer curiously redundant good looks. The solid state disks don’t speed themselves up with any radically new internals. Instead, they are using the SATA 3 interface to talk to the computer in which they sit, which is itself enough to potentially double the data throughput.

Remember your first cellphone? If you’re old enough, that memory will include a pull-out antenna of some kind, a vestigial RF tail whose genes were passed down from walkie-talkies and field radios of old. And it seems that Apple, presumably before building its multi-zillion-dollar antenna lab, was also experimenting with pop-up antennae on its old MacBook Pros.

I know what you’re thinking. You saw the words “MacBook decal” in the headline and almost passed this post by. “I know it’s August,” you tutted to yourself, “but is news really that slow today?”

Well, yes, it is a slow news day, but take one look at the decal and you’ll see that it’s the best MacBook decal, like, ever:

OK, so you probably had to take two looks.