Gadgets

USB keychain drives are great, but I seldom have a need to carry less than a gigabyte of files around. I have a drawer full of these things that were given to me as PR tchatchkies over the years, but more often than not I still just e-mail files from place to place; and if I really need more storage, I’ll stick the files on my iPod. Now Transcend’s new 8GB JetFlash drive looks like a pretty solid alternative to both methods.

As many Gear Factor readers had predicted, the Saturday release of the Gizmondo in the United States came and went with little more than a tired sigh from the American gaming community. In spite of its wealth of interesting specs, the $229 GPS-enabled gaming handheld has drawn only harsh criticism from just about every corner of the market. Buggy performance, bewildering content offerings, and a lack of focus on its core competency have conspired to make the Gizmondo a failure on two continents — not unlike the equally doomed Nokia N-Gage that came before it.

Awww. How can you look into those big blue eyes and not love this little guy? Domo is a fully articulated humanoid torso bot similar in many respects to NASA’s Robonaut. But unlike his spacewalking counterpart, he’s strictly a research robot.

Designed at MIT by Aaron Edsinger-Gonzales and Jeff Weber, Domo runs on a six-node Debian Linux cluster and has an arm span of more than five feet.

[Thanks Dr. D.]

Today at CTIA, Pantech announced its new PCK-6000 biometric handset. Using fingerprint recognition, the PCK-6000 keeps interlopers from jacking all your wireless minutes when you lose your phone. This isn’t the first fingerprint phone, of course. Earlier this year Pantech introduced the GI100 (pictured) to mixed reviews in Europe and Asia. The PCK-6000 will hit shelves in Korea first, and I seriously doubt whether any U.S. carriers will be likely to pick it up anytime soon.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that pretty much everybody already has a reasonably good mobile handset, cell phones remain one of the most commonly stolen items in the world. Maybe if phones could prevent unauthorized use, tweakers would stop smashing people’s car windows to take them. Or is that just wishful thinking?