Freestyle Audio has made one super tough MP3 player that’s built to handle just about any extreme activities you can dish out. They show examples of using it while surfing, swimming and they have a video below showing it being dropped off of a 3rd story building onto concrete (they drop and iPod nano as well). The results of the video shows the Freestyle MP3 player turn on, but it really doesn’t say if it still plays music. Either way the fact that it didn’t break apart and still powered up is impressive.

Features of the Freestyle MP3 player are nothing spectacular – On/Off, Volume and skip ahead songs in the loaded media. It has associated software for managing music and works with a Mac and a PC. The DMP comes is capacities of …

Gone are the days where you had the daunting task of writing the date on an open container in your refrigerator and then being forced to conjure up the current date and calculate the difference between then and now. The DaysAgo Digital Day Counter now counts the days for you to end all question about just how old that casserole is.

The DayAgo counter can stick onto something either with a magnet or a suction cup and counts up to 99 days. Once it’s done it can be removed and reused on something else by resetting the counter and sticking it on. At a glance you can then see if your opened items or left-overs have been “in there” for a couple days or a couple weeks.

The DaysAgo website shows many examples that actually seem pretty practical, from measuring time that foods in the …

Nokia has come up with a plan to help out the environment by saving some energy when your not charging your mobile phone.

According to Kirsi Sormunen, Vice-President of Environmental Affairs at Nokia, “Around two-thirds of the energy used by a mobile phone is lost when it is unplugged after charging but the charger itself is left in a live socket. We want to reduce this waste and are working on reducing to an absolute minimum the amount of energy our chargers use. The new alerts also play an important role, encouraging people to help us in this goal by unplugging their chargers.”

This seems like a good idea, and most people have no idea that electricity is still being used by chargers that are plugged into a socket but not plugged into any device. I would imagine that electricity might …

Now that the Simpsons have a new feature film heading for the big screen Fox has teamed up with Microsoft to make a shiny yellow Simpsons-themed Xbox 360 to help promote the movie. The 360 case and controller have been given a glossy coat of Simpsons-yellow paint along with a big picture of the top half of Homer’s head on the side.

For those of you that are Simpsons collectors or Xbox Collectors, actually getting your hands on one of these Simpson’s Xbox’s might prove to be difficult as Microsoft is only making 100 of them. The units that they do make will be used to be given out and different events and promotions for the Simpsons movie.

According to Engadget the Simpsons game will actually not be coming with the unit as you might think, and Microsoft has skimped a little bit on the …

We’re not sure that this will actually help improve your gaming but it probably couldn’t hurt, and it might help keep your wrist from hurting, too. Genius has a new keyboard replacement product out targeting PC gamers called the ErgoMedia 500 Gaming Pad.

The name implies that it should help put your hand in a comfortable position for long durations of gaming, and the design does look like it would be a comfortable and natural position with a soft pad for your wrist. To us this particular image looks like it might be designed for a left-handed player since it might be easier to use that mult-direction button with your thumb. When looking at the product page at Genius they don’t seem to have different models for right or left handed use.

Some of the key features of the ErgoMedia 500 include a back-lit keypad …

According to a recent study, iPod music players can cause implanted cardiac pacemakers to malfunction and produce false reading while monitoring heart rhythms. The study was done by a 17-year-old Michigan high school student in conjunction with a team from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, and presented to the Hearth Rhythm Society’s annual session in Denver.

In the study no other portable music players were used, only iPods. After testing 83 individuals with pacemakers by holding the iPod device 2 inches in front of the subjects chest for 5 to 10 seconds, almost half of the pacemakers produced electrical interference causing the device to either misread the heart’s function or to not read any heart function at all. In one instance the pacemaker stopped functioning completely. We have to wonder if the same results would …

Those that are game obsessed in China have a new gadget to keep their eyes glued to their mobile phone and it’s a blast from the past. The Century Sutra 1688 phone looks like any other generic mobile out there until you slide on the gamepad and turn it into a SNES thanks to the emulator chip inside of it.

Yup, now you can play Super Mario Bros. and other old school Nintendo games while killing time and your button mashing will be made a lot easier. The company gives you 1,500 ROM titles when you pick one of these up and it skirts around copyright issues by saying that you should only have all those warez if you also own the originals…which of course we all do, don’t we?

The phone has the popular touchscreen, a 1.3 megapixel camera, dual …

If you want another way to have your family and friends relive every moment of your vacation besides the usual photographs and home movies the Trackstick II gives you what you need to bump your travel journal up to the next level.

The size of a USB drive, the Trackstick II maintains contact with GPS satellites and keeps a record of your movements and records the information on its 1 MB Flash memory stick. When you get back home all you need to do is stick it into the USB port on your computer, load up Google Earth and voila, your exact route that you took will appear on the map on your screen (and there’s no extra fees for using this service.)

The Trackstick uses 2 AAA batteries which will give it the power it needs to run on for a …

Usually when you or your doctor take your pulse you would use a blood pressure cuff, a clip on one of your fingers or even just counting the beats on your neck the old fashioned way. Taylor Gifts is bringing the pulse counting business into the 21st century with its heart rate monitor ring so you can always tell what your rate is with just a quick glance.

While its bright red design won’t win any style awards it does get our approval for displaying your pulse in large enough numbers (between a range of 30 to 250 beats per minute.) If you want to use the ring in conjunction with an exercise routine the ring also features a stopwatch mode and a timer mode so after you do your workout you can check back and see what your vitals are like.

The FDA approved …

These Garmin RINO GPS handhelds are really some pretty cool gadgets. Not only is the RINO 530HCx a powerful GPS device, but it also acts as a two way radio.

You really need two of these devices to take full advantage of all the features, and with two of them the parties can communicate up to 14 miles away and see not only their own position but the position of others you know also who are also using a RINO product. This communication combined with locating is a great feature for safety on hunting trips, skiing outings or really any outdoor activities or jobs where you might be temporarily separated.

The RINO 530HCx model also has a seven channel weather receiver with the ability to catch weather alerts, and has a built-in compass and barometer (altimeter). A microSD card slot loads …

One thing that really makes it difficult when trying to rough-it in a camp site is the noticeable lack of frozen drinks. Sure you have plenty of ice in the cooler, but what if you want to blend up a margarita or other frozen concoction?

Well, it’s a good thing Coleman is looking out for you with their rechargeable blender. This camping gadget is able to blend up a 48 oz pitcher of drinks in about 30 seconds and can mix up as many as 30 pitchers in one charge, which should get most people through a weekend of mixing it up with nature.

The cordless blender has two basic settings: “blending” and “not blending”. It comes in a silver stainless steel finish and the pitcher locks into the base for easy and safe transporting. We’re not sure if it would hold up to blending …

After spending some time searching, the folks over at Crave have found a boombox for the iPod video that has a built-in video screen and an actual dock made for the iPod, plus more.

This iPod video boombox has a 7 inch video screen that comes in two different design models, one mounted on the front and another with a flip-up screen as shown here. This device makes it easy for iPod owners to take their player to the beach and share their music and videos with others, using the convenience of a boombox with a dock specific for the iPod.

We mentioned the “more” part because this boombox also plays CD’s, DVD’s, can pick up television signals and of course what would a boombox be if it didn’t get FM radio? The “iMep” series iPod video boombox is available from Boston Innovation retailing for …

With age often comes some degree of hearing loss, and I’ve been witness to households where I’ve heard repeated forecasts on the weather channel at a volume higher than it ever should be.

The Clarity C120 is a wireless TV amplification device that allows those that are hard of hearing to better listen to the television without making the volume unbearable for anyone else in the house, or sometimes on the block for that matter. The headset runs on batteries and uses a wireless infrared signal to transmit the sound which means it does require a line of sight to the transmitter, but if used while watching TV you will more than likely have a line of sight anyway.

The C120 headset will also pick up the volume at movie theaters or any events where the sound is broadcasted via …

Along with the preview of the N81, RingNokia also got a look ahead at the Nokia N82. The model number is only incremented by one, but we have a feeling price will be incremented a fair amount more.

The Nokia N82 is also quad-band GSM supporting Bluetooth and WiFi, but only has 100MB of memory built into it. You can add your own though, with an included 1GB microSD card or your own card (hot-swappable no less).

Some additional features round out the N82 to be a pretty nice system, including a GPS receiver, TV-out, and FM tuner and the relatively high quality cameras it houses. One for still photos at 5 megapixels with a XENON flash and another for VGA recording at 30 frames per second.

Most of our curiosity regarding the N82 now focuses on the price tag. I can’t imagine a package like …

We found this preview of the Nokia N81 slider phone at RingNokia, showing a new sleek looking multimedia-focused device, which according to their source is expected to be available to consumers in the 4th quarter yet this year.

The N81 is quad-band EDGE which also supports WiFi and Bluetooth and has a nice 8GB of internal memory to store your media. WiFi connectivity and lots of internal memory are a big plus for any handheld device in our book. The Nokia N81 also houses two cameras and a 2.4″ QVGA screen at 240×320 in 16M colors.

The battery it ships with is expected to give 3-4 hours of talk time or up to 3-4 hours of gaming time. Oh yeah, and apparently this phone has some “dedicated keys” for gaming and navigating music but we’re not seeing them in the photo. The listed dimensions are …