Smallist

Engadget had this funny picture of future iphones, accompanying a rumor that cheaper iPhone versions will be coming after the initial success. Meanwhile, Merlin Mann is completely sick of iPhone talk. Will the tech world survive the next week?

Jack PCsits right in your wall socket. It runs Windows CE, has 4 USB ports, and 128 MB of ram. The chip should run at the equivalent speed of a 1.2 ghz computer, although it’s an AMD RISC chip. And it runs IE 6, which sounds a little behind the times (no firefox?), but that oughta be enough to run web applications. 200 pounds will get you one.

It’s so power-efficient, it can also be powered directly from an ethernet jack. More information here.

The next best thing to the iPhone might just be Opera Mini, a new free browser for cellphones. It has the same zoom-in to the page effect (minus the animation) as the iPhone Safari browser, and their website sports an Mac / PC parody ad, which wasted about thirty seconds of my life.

Ah, the dilemma of the klutzy smallist. The smaller your gadget, typically the more frail. I wait in excitement for the Apple iPhone, yet somewhere deep down, I know it will snap like a twig in my jeans pocket.

Not so with the GoBook MR-1, a ruggedized UMPC capable of government levels of klutziness (MIL-STD 810F and IP-54 ratings, the military upper limit of “why we can’t have nice things”). It also has some nifty features like a 16-32GB solid-state drive, fingerprint reader, and something called “stealth-mode keyboard.”

Alas, it costs $4,450. So you might be better off gluing a bicycle helmet to the bottom of your iBook.

The Register covers Via’s new “Mobile ITX” motherboard, and a laptop based on it. The CPU draws 3.5 watts while working, and .25 idle, and the rest of the mobo pulling another 3.5. The NanoBook will cost about $699 and it’s pretty much a tiny laptop, which seems a bit more versatile than the other UMPC’s out there. It also has a strange usb snapin area next to the laptop screen, so you can plug in a portable gadget like a cellphone.

More info at Laptop Logic.

The Vatican has decided to put solar panels on the roof of one of the Vatican’s newer buildings, a hall built in 1971. Their scientists expect very high efficiency for the panels, since the sun revolves around Rome.

Via Treehugger.

J’sha, the artist previously mentioned here, has created his latest nanoartwork. NanoLite is an image of a lighthouse 0.4 millimeters tall.

Via Make Magazine, a tutorial on how to make tiny, solar powered robots from cheap parts:

SMS Australia has just introduced the M500 Mobile Phone Watch, a GSM phone with pretty decent talk and standby time (200 minutes / 80 hours). More info here. It looks a little hard to dial on, but the availability of bluetooth means you won’t have to talk into it like David Hasslehoff, as long as you don’t mind looking like middle management. It’s a tough call. Also, it texting might be a real pain in the ass on this. The things Dick Tracy didn’t think of.

Benchmarking the ‘86 Mac Plus against an AMD Dualcore. Turns out when you just count basic tasks (spreadsheet, word processing, bootup), the Mac Plus wins. Among the more amusing statistics? Windows Vista takes up 15,000 times the disk space as System 6.0.8. Of course, good luck trying to browse youtube on this thing.