Shortly after the iPhone was announced questions rose by many about the ability to write 3rd party applications on the OS X platform similar to what is done for the Mac. In a couple of interviews Jobs let us know that OS for the iPhone would not be open to developers to the dismay of many.

Today at the WWDC 2007 Jobs released some information and demonstrations of Apple’s new Leopard OS along with news to developers about the iPhone. Opening up the platform while still maintaining a secure environment has been a challenge for Apple, but they made what Jobs described as a “sweet” compromise. They didn’t open up the OS, but will let developers build applications that run on the Safari web browser engine on the iPhone.

This will allow developers to build web …

Sony has some new VAIO notebooks added to their lineup, this time in some new glossy colors including sangria, cosmopolitan, dove, indigo and black. Adding to the personalized colors that dress up the new VAIO CR series notebooks, they also have an optional matching bag and mouse, a custom keyboard configuration and font, and a unique matching wallpaper.

The CR’s are 14.1 inch notebooks weighing decent 5.5 pounds so it won’t require any super-human strength to carry it the length of the airport terminal. The notebook is powered by Intel’s Core 2 Duo CPU (1.8GHz) along with 2GB of RAM. It also has a built-in web-cam, optical drive, the latest 802.11n wireless LAN, an S-video port and media slots for SD cards, Memory Sticks and ExpressCards.

Pricing for the Sony VAIO CR notebooks start at $1,350 and won’t ship until …

Western Digital announced today that they are expanded their My Book lineup of external storage devices to include larger capacities of 750GB and 1.5TB.

With all the multi-media content available in higher HD quality and at more reasonable prices, the desire for more storage increases as well. This external drive can be used for to keep HD movies, photos or just for backing up computers or data. The My Book line from Western Digital has a plug and play setup and the My Book World Edition has a feature that allows secure, remote sharing of the drive content directly through the internet, even when the computer is powered down.

The new 750GB and 1.5TB My Book external drives are available now and the whole lineup has suggested prices ranging from $279 up to $699 depending …

The Financial Times has just reported that Apple has been in talks with major movie studios about launching an online movie rental service. Currently Apple allows users to download movies through iTunes to own, but only has agreements with Disney and Paramount as most studios have been reluctant due to the hit the service could have on regular DVD sales.

Studios may be less hesitant with an online download rental service since it’s less likely that it would affect the sale of DVDs. The rental term of each film would be for 30 days at $2.99 and the file would come with a DRM that would prevent the films from being copied but would let it be transferred from the computer to at least one other device such as a video iPod or the upcoming …

The USB Mini-Fridge definitely has its advantages, but slowly cooling down one can at a time sometimes just won’t do the trick to keep up your caffeine high through a full night of gaming.

When your ready to make an upgrade you can take a look at this Koolatron can-shaped fridge. This little Coca-Cola Fridge is 20 inches tall, 13″ in diameter and will hold up to eight 12oz cans or two 2-liter bottles. The fridge can both cool and heat, bringing the temperature down to 40 degrees below room temp, and up to 149 degrees F. A USB power source won’t cut it for this much cooling and heating, but this fridge does have a 12-volt cigarette lighter power source for your car or can run on the 120-volt outlet in your …

Pikachu, one of the most popular Pokemon characters, will be gracing the cover of some select Nintendo DS Lite’s along with spreading its bright Yellow color on the whole system, even the stylus.

This Pikachu Nintendo DS Lite is going to available in limited numbers in Japan, but even the Japanese will have some trouble getting their hands on one. Potential recipients will need to bring themselves to the Pokemon Center in Japan and enter their name in for a lottery drawing. The lucky winners then don’t exactly win a Pikachu DS, but they do win the opportunity to buy one for 16,800 yen ($138). That seems like a little much, but I guess its no worse than people standing in line for hours to get a Wii.

IGN via Engadget

Microsoft isn’t the only one looking to make some changes in order to keep up with rival Nintendo in the game console wars. Sony said last week it plans to cut some jobs in its gaming unit in the U.S. as well as Europe and Japan as it works to keep up sales of its Playstation 2 and Playstation 3 with the Nintendo Wii. The Wii has been the leader in the latest generation of game console sales for the previous four months in a row, and even beat out the previous generation Playstation 2 in April. Sony had enjoyed a decade of being the top in game console sales with the Playstation and Playstation 2 until the launch of the Nintendo Wii in November, 2006.

Kotaku reported last Wednesday that …

Coming toward the end of this month is a new hifi CD player from Opera Audio called the Forbidden City Ping featuring a solid-state 100 watt 2-channel amplifier, and a LED display and an AM/FM tuner. They’ve designed a linear style player with an interesting color pattern that comes in red or gray that almost looks like peg-board.

The interesting part about this hifi CD player/amplifier is it’s a USB 1.1 connection to your computer. Using a SpAct interface through USB the Ping player can play music on you computer hard drive or any other mounted drive, and works with Mac and Windows (English and Japanese versions). The SpAct architecture recovers the audio clock from the USB packet data. This enables the playback on the stereo to happen with low clock jitters in the music.

The price tag for the Forbidden …

Assuming that you open a bottle of wine without finishing it for some reason, this little gadget actually creates a vacuum in your bottle and seals it up to enjoy later in an attempt to keep it fresh.

It activates just by putting the Wine Bottle Vacuum Seal over the top of the open bottle and the little vacuum pump inside will start up and seal the bottle. Release the negative pressure by pressing the button on the front. It also has a digital temperature gauge on the front that shows the current temp of the wine along with some optimal serving temperatures on the back.

The device must stay on the bottle to keep it sealed so you can only do one bottle at a time which wouldn’t work for your Winepod batch, but for those of you …

Similar to gadgets like the iDog, iFish and the I-CY Penguin, Sharper Image has moving and flashing robot, Transformers-style with the Beatmix Bumblebee Speaker. Connect the Beatmix Bumblebee to your iPod or other MP3 player and it moves its arms, flaps its wings and its eyes lights up bright. It also plays some music back to you distinctive of sounds from the Transformers movie.

Bumblebee is one of the main characters in the 2007 Transformers movie set to premier July 4th. This “dancing” speaker stands about 10″ tall, runs on batteries and goes for $59.99.

Yesterday the Morning Paper posted a grainy black and white photo of a new product to be coming from Palm called the Palm Gandolf, showing features of an integrated camera, Bluetooth, EVDO and a Micro SD slot.

Today the have another smaller photo, this time in color (looks photoshop to us) along with some more details about the device, stating a price point of under $200 and an availability date of sometime in Q4 of this year. Also it has a full QWERTY keyboard and runs Palm OS.

About the time we were wondering just how real this rumor is some more info popped up from PalmInfoCenter showing a poorly focused shot of something that looks a lot like the Gandolf images we’ve been seeing but in white instead of black. (Why a person cannot combine the skills of spying on …

For a few weeks there has been a fair amount of talk about a new PSP design coming from Sony. Now Kotaku is reporting from inside sources what they believe to be the final specs for what they are calling the “PSP Slim”, although an actual name hasn’t been released.

The new PSP2, or whatever it will be called, isn’t a total redesign and will be using the same hardware from the existing PSP, but it will sport a “much slimmer design”. The battery life is expected to quadruple partly due to a more power efficient LCD screen, and they’ve also found a way to make the UMD games load a little faster.

The new PSP design will have some built-in internal memory with it instead of having to rely on an external Memory Stick. In fact it will house …

There’s been quite a bit of buzz in the kid community lately regarding Webkinz plush toys and their associated social website for kids. The basic run-down is that you buy one (or more) of the three dozen different types of stuffed animals, and each one comes with a unique special code. You can then log into the Webkinz website using the special code to “adopt” your Webkinz pet.

Once an account is created there are a number of things to do in the “Things To Do” menu, such as hang out at the Clubhouse, play games or visit friends online. Each user is represented as the plush toy that they purchased as they navigate to different rooms or to rooms of their friends.

One of the common concerns of parents is the interaction allowed and the fear of online predators, but …

Should your requirements in a media player include thin and stylish, competitive specs, large capacity, a decent price and not an iPod then you may have found your perfect solution. Meizu’s M6 SE is only 7mm thick (only half a mm more than the iPod nano), has an impressive 8GB Flash capacity and runs for only $130.

It sports a nice 2.41″ QVGA display screen and supports playback of MP3, WAV, OGG audio and MPEG4, MPEG2, WMV9, H.263/264, and RM(VB) and video. You can also use a TV out jack to push those movies to your television at a 720 x 480 resolution. The battery will support up to 30 hours of music playback or 5 hours of video. The Meizu M6 SE also has a built-in FM tuner.

Unfortunately we’re going to have to wait a little while for this one since they …

Sony’s latest HDD camcorder features a whopping 100GB internal hard drive along with some real convenient features, but for a price.

Camcorders that store their media on hard drives work very nice to allow quick access to recorded content on the camera since each time you stop and start it creates a separate file, and in Sony’s case has an icon showing the first frame to identify the clip. Transferring the data to your computer is as simple as connecting any external drive and as quick as the USB interface will allow. This model also comes with a one-toch disc burn feature with supported software to burn DVD’s through your computer.

Along with that 100GB’s of storage the Sony HDR-SR5C camcorder features a wide 2.7 inch touch panel with menus on the screen to navigate settings along with viewing and managing recorded …