I am not sure why so many of the recalls in the electronics industry are the faulty of defective batteries. You would think when all of those laptops were recalled over bad batteries the industry would have learned its lesson. Apparently not, Coby Electronics recalled over 19,000 portable DVD players today due to a fire hazard from faulty battery packs.

The DVD player in question is the TF-DVD-8501 DVD/CD.MP3 players with an 8.5-inch screen. The batteries covered in the recall will have a serial number starting with the letters HY. The serial number can be found on a white sticker on the battery.

Is that a WikiReader in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? Openmoko has launched a new hand held device that puts Wikipedia in your pocket. I guess no one told them how easy Wikipedia is to access on most devices. But hey, if you are an information junkie, why not?

The WikiReader is basically a palm sized electronic encyclopedia housing over three million English language articles from Wikipedia. No internet connection? No problem. The content can be accessed anywhere even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

Who has time to learn a new language? Most of the time visits to foreign countries mean just a short stay, so why bother? We’ll the Trinvo talking translator lets you translate your speech into 12 languages.

No matter what you want to say, you should be covered. Whether you need to find a bathroom or some good food. The dictionary holds over 2,500 words and 750 common phrases in all 12 languages. That should help you avoid laughter from the locals as you screw up their language.

Somebody loves the Gameboy so much that they took it from vertical to horizontal. It’s still fat, but a little more sexy. The knock-off supposedly has a sharper image than the original. Sadly, details are scant on this baby.

All we really know is that it showed up in a Photobucket set. If you’re nostalgic and like your GB wide rather than tall, you’ll have to scour the knock-off district of the internet in search of one. Then tell us where we can get one.

We’ve seen our share of gaming and gadget rip-offs, but this is one of the most blatant knockoffs we’ve seen in a while. Look familiar? Why it looks exactly like a Sony PSP. And while the PXP-900 clones the style, it doesn’t bother with the titles, instead, sticking to retro gaming ROMs.

The PXP-900 can handle classic titles from the NES, Famicom, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Super Famicom and SEGA MegaDrive. Onboard storage is 2GB, and it functions as a PMP too, playing up to 25fps 320 x 240 video in a bunch of formats on a 4.3-inch display.

This is the best lie detector ever. I mean, who better to tell you if someone is lying than the devil himself right? Who knew that the devil’s nose grows like Pinocchio with each lie? The Spion Portable Lie Detector uses voice tension (and the cartoon devil) to indicate true or false answers.

This thing is bound to be totally accurate. Never before has a company used Satan/Pinocchio technology to gauge truthiness. The nose knows. Only $79.95.

Chinavasion’s latest offering is a retro portable gaming system: The Multi Platform Portable Gaming Entertainment Station. It sure doen’t look like the standard DS. This handheld will handle ROMs from NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Game Boy Advance, Neo-Geo and selected Capcom arcade systems thanks to its 4GB internal memory.

The device sports a miniSD memory card slot for expansion and a 2.8″ display at 320 x 240 resolution. Not that we are condoning ROMs, which are illegal if downloaded from the Net. ROMs are bad. Just say no.

Somehow everybody missed Compulab’s exeda at CES. It’s a crazy device designed for the enterprise market and is distinctly squarish. Some features include: a 3.5-inch sun-readable VGA touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, and a capacitive touchpad that will acts like a mouse.

Like some other Asian Android handsets, the exeda can boot Windows Mobile 6.1 on its 520MHz Marvell CPU with 128MB of RAM, and the radio setup is flexible. Resellers have their choice of quadband GSM / GPRS, CDMA, and 3G UMTS. Oh, and the exeda has a 10/100Base-T Ethernet port as well as WiFi.

Here’s something you don’t see everyday. A Windows CE 5.0-powered handheld device which a gamepad featured over the traditional keyboard. The Seabright PC430 features a Samsung 2443A 533MHz processor, Maximum 4GB of internal memory, SD memory card slot, USB 2.0 port, Optional Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS navigation, Webcam and a 4.3″ display.

The D-pad is on the left while the A, B, X and Y buttons are on the right. The Seabright PC430 also comes with multimedia playback capability, email support, Pocket Microsoft Word and Excel, PDF reader, Skype and MSN.

The DataWind PocketSurfer2 will come with some updated features like a touchpad, integrated GPS receiver, improved display, and better Vodafone network coverage. The PocketSurfer2’s US counterpart, the PC Edge, hasn’t really made a big splash here and so hasn’t been updated but the price has been reduced by $100. In the U.S. it will cost $200 for the unit with a $24.99 monthly fee, while those living in the UK will pay £200 with 20 hours of free surfing each month for the year. After the first year, UK owners can choose a £40 annual fee or a one-time £60 fee for the Immortality Plan which provides unlimited surfing for lifetime of the device.

Anyone who travels frequently has ended up at the airport digging around for one of their gadgets or a charger only to realize it’s not there. If you are on business and are missing something like your cell phone charger — you could be in serious hot water.

Best Buy has officially announced a new Best Buy Express kiosk pilot program that will put Best Buy kiosks in airports around the country. Items inside the kiosks are said to sell for the same price the item sells for in the retail store — so no gouging. Best Buy says it teamed with ZoomSystems to launch the test.

Back in the day Sega’s Megadrive boasted superior graphics to the NES, not that Mario and Luigi seemed hurt by it. Now Blaze will be unleashing a 16-bit Megadrive handheld this month, so you can relive your youth and play Sega Megadrive classics like Sonic and Knuckles, Golden Axe, Shinobi and Ecco the Dolphin.

Other games include Alex Kidd - Enchanted Castle, Alien Storm Altered Beast, Arrow Flash, Crackdown, Decap Attack, Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Ecco Junior, Flicky, Gain Ground, Jewel Master, Kid Chameleon, Sonic Spinball and Shadow Dancer. It’s powered by 3 AAA batteries and will retail for £29.99.

So the Predator is loose in your city, half your men are dead and it keeps making that eerie noise as it stalks you. Carl Weathers and Jesse Ventura were no help at all. Unfortunately, Predators have state of the art camoflage, so chances are, you won’t live very long to tell the tale…Unless you have something that can show you his heat source. Like this Handheld Thermal Imager for instance.

It combines a visible light digital image with an infrared one, producing a single view that lets you get an immediate visual temperature map of whatever you aim it at. It’s priced at about $7500. These thermal imagers are designed for heavy-duty industrial troubleshooting and safety applications, but there’s no reason you can’t use it to snag yourself a Predator before it detonates an atomic bomb from it’s wrist.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to play hockey with Donkey Kong. It’s just a dream of mine. I’m a geek. I know he wouldn’t perform well on the ice since he’s so big, so I know I can save the Princess. I’ll finally get my chance.

The Micro VS System was released in 1984 and is one of the earliest consoles that let’s you play against another player and with DK. With the console’s two handhelds, two players can join a game by sharing the screen between them. They are pretty hard to find, but the good news is that Play-Asia.com got hold of a limited quantity of brand new factory sealed consoles. Better hurry.

We’ve seen our share of Nintendo NES clone systems, but as far as we know, this is the first mass-produced portable that can actually play those huge cartridges from the classic 8-bit gaming system. The FC Mobile portable plays original NES game carts. Take it and your huge cartridges everywhere and play.

You can play on the built-in 2.4-inch LCD screen, or on your television with the included AV cable. It takes three AA batteries, and plays audio through internal stereo speakers or using the headphone jack. Despite the obvious Famicom reference, seems like the console plays North American NES games, not Japanese Famicom games. Get one in black/silver or red/white. Sure, it looks silly playing NES games on a small portable, but what the hell.