KIOSGEEK

As it turns out, there are quite a few uses for a $100 off-the-shelf computerized scale, above and beyond getting fit — Nintendo’s Wii Balance Board is now providing a mechanism by which college football teams at Ohio State University and the University of Maryland can cheaply determine whether players are suffering from concussions. Taking the place of force plate machines that can cost tens of thousands of dollars, the white plastic boards measure students’ balance (using yoga poses) and coordination (in Table Tilt) before a game, to provide a …

Kodak just kicked out a pair of devices with its Playtouch pocket camcorder and EasyShare M590 point and shoot. Kodak’s $229.95 Playtouch is capable of shooting image stabilized 1080p video with stereo audio to SDHC cards. A 3-inch capacitive touchscreen gives you plenty of room to edit your pics (or extract a still) on camera before flipping out the USB arm for a quick PC transfer. Otherwise, an HDMI jack lets you pump that digital keepsake right to the living room television without the PC assist. Rounding things …

In February 2009, Arron La’s $0.99 Advanced Task Manager was one of the first paid apps on Android, allowing T-Mobile G1 users to do what was then a novel thing — close applications. (We immediately bought a copy.) Today, the app is all but obsolete, its functionality baked right into Android’s core, but Arron’s still making thousands of dollars a month. Why do we bring this up? Because nine months after Arron released the pay-first version, he unleashed an ad-supported variant as well… and since that day, each has contributed …

Whether you’re still lugging around that old Dreamcast, or you have a new-fangled mod or an emulator of some sort handy, have heart: you’re not the only one keeping the dream alive! If the kids at Redspotgames have their way, they’ll keep publishing games for the venerable (and defunct) console — that is, according to marketing and sales director Adrian Loudero, who spent some time chatting with Joystiq at Gamescon last week. “We have seen some stuff on the PC, and we [are] talking to to the companies to see …

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

This week we saw the shattering of a new record as NYC’s high-tech One Bryant Park skyscraper achieved LEED Platinum certification, making it the world’s greenest office tower. We also turned over a new high-tech paving stone that can absorb airborne pollution and visited a hyper-efficient solar city in Germany that is able to produce four times the amount of energy that it consumes.
The world …

Sure, the Samsung Vibrant’s a T-Mobile device and the Samsung Captivate belongs to AT&T, but there’s no longer any reason you can’t swap them around — all you need is a simple script and a USB cable to completely unlock your phone. Dagentooboy of XDA-Developers discovered that Galaxy S unlock codes aren’t kept in a secure remote server, but merely stored in a .BAK file on the device itself, which you find with a hex editor and key right in when inserting a new SIM card of your choice. We …

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

The introduction of the third generation Kindle has reignites the debate over the role of dedicated vs. converged devices. Five years ago, device segmentation was …

As annoying as continuous Blu-ray player updates are, usually having the latest one is the best way to play more movies. Unfortunately the opposite was the case for Samsung (again) with the v2.09 update posted recently for its 2009 BD-Px600 line of players. Forum posters on CNET and AVSForum report the upgrade blocked them from playing Universal and Warner Bros. movies, which conveniently lock up after displaying the title image. Samsung’s rolled back to an older firmware version (v2.07) on its support site that should fix things for now, but …

Thought the page-turning Macallan was nifty? You ain’t seen nothing yet — The Astonishing Tribe (the brains behind the look of Android) aims to give you billowing, rippling cloth-like curtains of clever interactive content with their concept Velvet UI. Pull out a widget or Google Maps query, and a sheet of your desired result waves with the virtual wind, before stretching out flat for you to more comfortably interact with. Running on MeeGo (and apparently possible on Android) it’s built with the company’s proprietary UI framework, so don’t expect it …

It’s a sad day for fans of Android, brushed aluminum exteriors, and retina-searing AMOLED displays. Bell’s HTC Legend seems to have come to the end of its days, the provider moving the phone to “end of life” status due to “ongoing supply constraints from the manufacturer.” Phandroid speculates this is due to AMOLED shortages slowing down HTC manufacturing, and that certainly seems like a reasonable conclusion. We also checked out some other suppliers of the phone and they too are not listing it in stock, so this could be a …