Gadget news

Sony says holiday sales have been better than expected this season.

Sony Electronics President and Chief Operating Officer Stan Glasgow said Monday during a media roundtable in New York that this was due to his company's decision to avoid deeply discounting its products on Black Friday, according to a Reuters report.

"We are not a promotional company--Sony is a premium brand and we don't become the loss leaders in the industry," Glasgow said. "We generally don't expect to have a very good Thanksgiving or just-after Thanksgiving. It's been better than we expected and … Read more

When you hear Los Alamos National Laboratory is disabling its computers' USB ports to prevent people from toting away flash memory drives filled with classified nuclear weapons information, it's not a stretch to imagine that there might be a market for thumb drives with a bit of security.

Enter Lexar's SAFE PSD S1100, a product line announced Monday geared for use at corporate or government customer sites where there's a need to keep the lid on sensitive data.

The drives offer built-in 256-bit file encryption and a mandatory password to gain access to the data. The encryption … Read more

A recent study claimed that cows produce more milk when listening to music. Will American kids practice better dental hygiene if they have a musical toothbrush? Hasbro is willing to give it a shot.

After spending about two years developing the product, the company has released a toothbrush that plays two-minute excerpts of songs. And it's not elevator music. Hasbro has been working with some of the big record labels, including Interscope Records, Sony-BMG and EMI-Capital Records. Songs such as Let's Get It Started by the Black Eyed Peas, as well as hits from Kelly Clarkson, Destiny's … Read more

Kevin Rose might be getting a phone call from Steve Jobs today.

On the latest espisode of his weekly Diggnation podcast with Alex Albrecht, Rose claimed--in between swigs of what appears to be a 24-ounce bottle of the Crave-approved Racer 5 IPA from Bear Republic--to have the dirt on Apple's long-rumored iPhone combination cell phone/iPod device. There's no shortage of blogs and Apple watchers predicting the imminent arrival of the iPhone, but MacRumors.com notes that Rose accurately predicted the news from last January's Macworld and also called the iPod Nano, so we're willing to … Read more

Look, we dredged the series of tubes for you! Here's some other Craveable stuff that's going on around the Web.

-- PREVIEWS: Halo 3 reminder: Commercial and public beta today (Joystiq)

-- NEWS: Boston rails getting cellular access (CrunchGear)

-- ONLY IN JAPAN: The Japanese Super Safe Wii Safety Manual (Kotaku)

-- GADGETRY: Bluetrek's precious pink G2 headset (GadgetCandy)

-- ONLY IN JAPAN: Strange 4-Legged Scooter (MAKE Blog)

-- PEOPLE WHO WIN STUFF: Top 10 robots selected for Robot Award 2006 (Pink Tentacle)

Are you one of those people who needs a new digital camera but who's a little insecure about where to plonk down a few hundred bucks? Perhaps you should let the wisdom of crowds chart your course.

Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo-sharing site, provides a Camera Finder site that details what cameras are most popular among its users and which produce the most photos on the site. The company bases its figures on camera data that's embedded in about two-thirds of photos.

The answer, if you're curious: The Canon Rebel XT, a digital SLR, wins hands down, … Read more

From Germany comes an apparently serious effort to develop the first spray-on condom. I say "apparently" because the "Spray Kondom" site is only in German and I don't trust Google's translation tools to render foreign text with sufficient subtley to reveal tongue-in-cheekness. But Reuters bit.

The idea is to spray on a latex coating that cures in 5 seconds, ready to roll. The spray can is actually a sort of housing in which the whole disturbing process takes place, rather "like a car wash," the inventors muse. That's not helping.

Spray … Read more

The battlefield medic is a staple of war movies, but rarely depicted is one challenge that goes beyond dodging bullets: noise.

U.S. Army acoustical engineers have developed a new stethoscope that can outperform its electronic predecessors by detecting a human heartbeat in intensely noisy environments, such as inside a military helicopter, according to LiveScience. Unlike others before it, the new stethoscope has a special head that can generate ultrasound waves, or sound frequencies that can cancel out external noises as high as 120 decibels.

Background noise on ambulances, helicopters or within crowds typically render electronic and traditional stethoscopes useless. … Read more

So that's the reason: We have an "overactive mind," and that's keeping us awake at night, not the three triple lattes.

This, at least, is the thinking by the people behind "GLO to Sleep," a product designed to cure your insomnia. (Full disclosure: They didn't actually mention the lattes.) GLO is essentially an eye mask lined with glowing bars of "photoluminescent pigment" that supposedly lets you "fall into the relaxed alpha-waved state and eventually into dreamland," according to Chip Chick.

If you're still having trouble nodding off, we … Read more