Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets.
Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com.
I’ve been mulling this concept over for a long while and it took Josh Helfferich’s single image to bring the concept into sharp focus. My thesis (and you won’t like this) is that every major “flagship” phone in the Western market is now made in the same mold, with the same trade dress, with one goal in mind: to fool the casual observer into thinking that everything is an iPhone. While you can argue on the outliers, the truth is right there. Every major phone released in the past four years has cleaved to this design for dear life. The trend began, popularly, with the Nokia 5800 (some would argue that Meizu M8 was the first) and hasn’t stopped since.
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You’re a start-up dude with carefully mussed hair. Your AWS is waiting. You’ve paid the designer. You and your family have created accounts. It’s been a mad dash. You’ve maxed out your credit cards. Your service is done. Now you wait.
And wait.
And wait. → Read More
Tabber is an upcoming Kickstarter project that essentially adds an LED light show to your guitar and, more importantly, allows you to learn to play chords and solos by following the lights on the fretboard.
The idea is definitely not new. The Fretlight guitar beat these guys to the punch and I wonder what patent issues they will have to deal with. However, as an idea, it’s pretty ingenious. The Tabber is a “sleeve” that fits over the neck of your guitar and it should work, as the folks at Tabber reiterate, on any git-fiddle in your possession.
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This complete project kit made by Adafruit allows you to print out things from the Internet. Want to print all your Tweets onto receipt paper? You got it. Want to print out your Facebook wall? Why the heck not! The kit uses an Arduino board and thermal printer and offers the opportunity for weekend hackers to pop together a cool little printer thinger and learn Arduino and Twitter programming. → Read More
Thank heavens: finally a Tokyoflash that you can read immediately without depending on a manual or detailed instructions. The Stencil is a fan design that uses for LCD blocks to display the current time and date in a very “bubble letter” sort of way.
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Like a line of hard-marching Lemmings (or a swarm of Patapons), Sony’s countless, niggling enemies would like nothing better than to distract and steal the company’s hard-won fan base. The Playstation has long been the gold standard in console gaming, despite the Xbox’s recent challenges to the throne. And Sony does a good job. Graphics are better, gameplay is or can be more immersive, and in the battle for RPG dominance the PS3′s library is peerless.
But now Sony is fighting against lots of great ways to waste your time. Stuck in a long line? Whip out the iPhone, RAZR, or Blackberry. Want to play something bigger and bolder? Pull out a tablet and rock a few hours of Civilization Revolution or Need For Speed. Want to watch a movie? Bring up Netflix on any device in the house save your kitchen blender. There’s not as much space for a dedicated gaming device out there as there used to be, and both Nintendo and Sony know it. → Read More
Clearly there needs to be a workshop or CBT or something on trademark in Cupertino because Apple simply cannot stop infringing! As you see here, the handsome icon for the Messages app looks a lot like a reversed version of the icon for HipChat’s group chat service. HipChat CEO Pete Hurley took it in stride, assuming that they would be the ones who would have to change their logo in order to appease the great Moloch of West Coast.
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Patent trolls – mere shells of companies that go after potential infringements in order to rack up some hefty legal fees and maybe a settlement or two – don’t have an institutional memory. Take the great iPad in China debacle. What you see above is ProView’s “iPad.” The eagle-eyed among you will note that is bears more than a passing resemblance to the old iMac, circa 1998.
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Have you ever wanted to shoot a stream of liquid powerful enough to propel a small car 35 miles an hour for a hundred feet? You know you have. This is the BeAmazing Geyser Car and we got an eyes-on at Toy Fair 2012 where this thing just about stole the show.
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It’s cold comfort to folks in China who want to pick up an iPad on Amazon.cn, but some digging has led us to discover that Amazon was never an authorized iPad retailer and, as such, should have taken down all the iPads on its site long before the Proview/Apple lawsuits popped up on the tech radar.
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