If you liked the idea of being able to use your new kindle to listen to the books you buy, too bad. Even though you paid for the ‘text-to-speech’ feature, Amazon has caved in to the Authors Guild and authors, who will now have the right to block the audio feature being used on their books. Amazon has bowed to pressure from the Authors Guild and will allow authors and publishers to disable the controversial text-to-speech feature on its Kindle e-reader.

Insiders say the move by Amazon was intended to smooth relations with authors, not avoid any lawsuits.

You use Best Buy for TVs, washing machines, computer peripherals and cell phones, so why not use them to shop for a $12,000 electric motorcycle? Why the hell not? Brammo and Best Buy have plans to sell the $11,995 Enertia electric motorcycle at five West Coast Best Buy stores in May.

Eventually Brammo would like to sell bikes at every Best Buy location around the world, but they want to see how the initial test works out. They should probably have pimply faced geek squad dudes drive around on them for promotion. And so they are diverted from touching anyone’s computer.

Motorola has done it. With the upcoming Motorola i465 iDEN they have created a full-QWERTY phone that is uglier than the ugliest thing beat by an ugly stick. Well, maybe it’s not that bad. Specific details are sparse but it will likely have a VGA camera, Bluetooth 2.0 and iDEN PTT.

The main selling point seems to be iDEN connectivity with a QWERTY keypad thrown in for messaging friends. No word yet on when Motorola will actually launch the i465, but this should happen via Sprint Nextel in the US.

This remote has us asking a single question. Why? It’s bizarre. Even so, couch potatoes will love it. It’s a cube that flips open to reveal the control buttons. It even has a retro-looking speaker on top.

It has that look about it that says, “I’m an evil genius taking over the world. But right now I need some TV time.” It certainly looks like it’s capable of opening trap doors and remotely flying helicopters, so I guess it has a purpose. You can get yourself this cube controller for just $41.

The VPC stands for “Very Personal Computer”. Most Netbook manufacturers are working on upping display size and adding more graphics power, but not Fidelity who is offering a first-generation Netbook for the price of $199.

It’s weighs only 1.5lbs, has a 7″ display, USB, Ethernet, WiFi, 2GB of memory, and Linux. All for $199. An Asus Eee 701 will cost around $259 today. So let the cheap Netbook battle commence. Fight!

It wasn’t long after the Blackberry Bold went on sale in Japan, that DoCoMo had to pull it off the shelves after reports of early adopters having possible overheating problems. Of the 4000 units sold, DoCoMo was notified of about 30 such complaints.

The numbers don’t seem that big, but DoCoMo is being cautious and halting sales, pending an investigation from Blackberry . You see, unlike this country, service is big in Japan. So far Blackberry has been able to deduce that the problem is not with the battery and says that this issue is limited to only Japanese Bold phones.

Last summer Iomega unveiled a product providing what many DVR owners find themselves needing much sooner than they thought — more storage space. The Iomega DVR Extender is an external 500GB hard drive that connects to DVRs via eSATA.

Iomega announced today that users of Pace set-top cable boxes can now use the DVR Expander to add up to 300 hours of storage for standard def programs and up to 60 hours of HD content. The most interesting part of the announcement is that if users have Pace boxes that lack a hard drive, the DVR Expander will turn them into full featured DVRs.

When we thing of camcorders the normal cameras that consumers across the globe use to record videos for YouTube and home movies come to mind. However, many professionals use camcorders to record documentaries and other content, albeit much higher priced camcorders.

JVC announced a new camcorder in its professional line today that is called the GY-HM100 ProHD camcorder. As the name suggest the camera can record in 1080p, 720p, and 1080i resolutions and features the proprietary JVC 35Mbps MPEG2 encoder.

Samsung has by many accounts one of the better netbooks on the current market with its 10-inch NC10 machine. Many manufacturers are blurring the lines between netbook and notebook by unveiling netbooks with large 12-inch screens and Samsung has joined the pack with its NC20.

The netbook has a 12.1-inch screen and VIA has announced that it uses the 1.2GHz Nano processor along with the VIA VX800 system media processor. Features of the NC 20 include a 12.1-inch 1280 x 800 resolution screen, VIA Chrome9 graphics, 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a 160GB HDD for storage.

Each time a new Halo game launches sales records are set. In fact, the last time a Halo game launched the title went on to make more money than many of the year’s biggest movies. I still can’t believe that they pulled the plug on the Halo feature film… dumb asses.

GameStop announced that it would be hosting midnight launch events at many of its locations around the country. The festivities will kick off at most locations at 10pm on Monday March 2 and will include Halo 3 tournaments, Warthog races, character dress up contests and trivia challenges.

Getting ready for a long night of playing World of Warcraft? Do it right. Have some brew ready and pour it in these nerdgasmic World of Warcraft Steins. Your drunk will level up with every sip.

Plus, next time you are at one of your conventions, pull this out of your bag and impress some wizard ladies. All your geek friends will be envious. It might even score you some elf babe with a huge treasure chest. These fancy geek cups will cost you $89.99 to $174.99.

Let’s be honest, these serve no practical function. That said, they are completely awesome. We want a pair. Your emails will be unreadable and your ipod un-usable, but they have some benefits. Some dude giving you trouble? Slap him in the face with these steel gauntlets and challenge him to a duel. Since they are steel, he will fall to the floor immediately and no duel will be required.

Rule with an iron fist, but first wear these steel gauntlets. At only $59.99 from Think Geek, you’ll feel like you’ve just leveled up.

How many times have you heard your gamer friends say that they can’t play FPS games on a console because it’s not as good as a mouse and keyboard? Probably a lot. They’re always whining about it. Well, this new controller for the PS3 cuts all the wires, making the experience more like the Wii. You can even program it.

There isn’t a ton of info, but we know that it will drop in about 90 days. This should be interesting to use. Hopefully it will shut your whinny friends up too.

This Steampunk lamp would be right at home lighting up the desk of a 19th century mad scientist. It’s basic,simple and unlike some Steampunk creations, isn’t overdone and overly thought out. Creator Michael Pusateri made it from an old wooden cigar box, two 60 watt bulbs, a handful of copper wire.

He admits that he got “a little fancy” and painted the ceramic mounts with textured copper paint. And he acknowledges that he could have thrown much more steampunk at the thing, but likes the simplicity. Check out a video below.

Today the LG Versa has been officially announced. To recap, the phone features a 3-inch(480 x 240)touch screen, an attachable QWERTY keypad, a 2 megapixel camera with autofocus, and flash.

The phone also boasts a music player that can run while you are performing other tasks, a microSD slot capable of holding up to 16GB and Bluetooth 2.1. Some other features include mobile IM for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, web browsing with Flash compatibility, VCast music and is VZ Navigator-capable.