For many people prepaid mobile phones are ideal. This type of phone is great for people who don’t want be stuck in a contract or for those with poor credit. Many parents also use prepaid phones as a way to keep the amount of minutes kids use in check.

Virgin Mobile announced today that it has added a new Kyocera handset to its prepaid line that carries a very low price. The handset is called the TNT and is a clamshell style phone with basic features. The best feature of the TNT is the price — which is only $20.

Not too long ago my dad had his old TV go out after a lightning strike, so he asked me to head to the local Best Buy with him to get a new TV. I realized two things straight away. First, the vast majority of employees at Best Buy are morons. Then I realized most Best Buy TV salesman use the lower lifespan of plasma TVs compared LCD TVs to talk shoppers out of going plasma. Personally, I prefer plasma to LCD because you usually get more contrast and a brighter picture.

Panasonic has announced new plasma TVs in its VIERA 1080p line that will make the lifespan argument against plasma TVs a moot point. Panasonic says its new 1080p plasma HDTVs are rated to last for up to 100,000 viewing hours before they dim to half brightness.

If Professor Xavier were wheeling down the street and saw a young lady sporting these wings, she’d be enrolled in his school for the gifted quicker then Wolverine can flick his claws. I have to say, these wings look striking and almost sexual in a geek sort of way thanks to the great pics.

The wings are made of carbon fiber and extruded aluminum and the light on the wingtips can be customized in red, green, yellow, purple, or white. Apparently the wings can extend or retract 7 times before the air pressure has to be recharged. That will take 5-10 minutes. For $1,000 they can be yours. I’m hoping that this catches on and women start flying around looking extra hot, donning their wings as fashion accessories and swooping down to snatch up unsuspecting men like a hawk. That would make me happy.

Continuing the attempt to make every future game like a Wii game Sony is working on a sword fighting game that will use 1:1 motion tracking. At least, according to a representative for Sony Computer Entertainment’s London Studios, who seemed pretty bitter about the success of the Wii.

It makes perfect business sense since everyone in the world owns a PS2 and they’ve sold 10.5 million Eyetoys. And since they wish they were the Wii in their hearts. They’re using new color tracking technology to enhance the EyeToy’s motion tracking for two new EyeToy: Play games that should be ready for the holidays this year. One of them is a sword fighting game that comes with a fluorescent toy sword of some sort.

To the most popular social networking platforms online right now are Facebook and MySpace. A large number of applications are available to allow users of these websites to add more functionality to their personal pages already. Another new widget has been announced today, this time from SRS Labs.

The new SRS Labs widget is called Photogram. It allows users to add sound effects to photos posted online. SRS Labs says the sound effects are easy to create and utilize its familiar SRS audio processing technology.

For a long time one of the things that drove users of cell phones to upgrade to newer devices was the addition of a camera. Today, pretty much every cell phone produced features a camera built-in. Typically, these cameras aren’t that high quality, but work in a pinch to take pictures on the fly. However, applications are starting to surface the take the use of a cell phone camera to new levels.

A good example is a new application available today for the Apple iPhone via the Apple App Store called ScanLife. The application allows iPhone users to take pictures of 2-D barcodes with the iPhone camera, and then link to more information about the product associated with barcode. According to Scanbuy — the maker of the ScanLife application — ScanLife can launch any URL address.

Gateway has been busy introducing several affordable gaming notebooks over the last year so. Typically, when you think about a gaming notebook, you’re talking about spending thousands of dollars to get the privilege of playing games on a notebook. Gateways FX series of gaming notebooks have been able to deliver the bulk of the performance of high-end and very expensive gaming notebooks — from the likes of Alienware in Dell — at a much cheaper price.

Gateway has announced its latest value priced FX edition notebook called the P-7811FX. This notebook is the first Gateway gaming notebook to feature the new Intel Centrino 2 processor technology. In addition to gaming, Gateway says this notebook is also great for entertainment as well as editing digital photos and video.

Hackers will get a machine to do all kinds of things that it should do, but doesn’t. Correcting the oversights of those damn lazy companies. We want things the way we want them. That’s why some Wii coders have made it so the Wii can have DVD playback.

It’s done by installing a hidden channel on the console, which gives it a DVD access library so you can watch all your favorite dvds with the MPlayer application, an open source media player. The install file works on both modded and unmodded Wiis. They are apparently experimenting with playing media from SD cards as well. Now you’ll be able to watch any DVD you want one last time before Blu-Ray creeps into your life.

The storage capacity of SDHC cards is growing greater all the time. I can remember only a few short years ago a 2 GB SDHC card was huge. Today that amount of storage will hold but a few full resolution photos from my DSLR camera. Things are even worse if you try to record HD video from my camcorder that uses SDHC storage.

Kingston announced the perfect SDHC storage card today for users of HD camcorders that record to SDHC cards. The new SDHC Elite Pro card from Kingston has 32 GB of storage. Kingston says 32 GB is enough storage for 6000 full 10-megapixel resolution digital images or over eight hours of full HD video recorded at 6 Mbps.

This rare Dark Knight Xbox 360 was spotted at the Microsoft game exhibition in Taiwan. Every self respecting nerd and his comic book dealer want to get their hands on it, but that just isn’t going to happen. Turns out there were only 110 made and it looks like the only way to get one is on ebay, where they seem to be going for $800 and up. It only comes with a 20GB hard drive and the same accessories as the $300 bundle.You better go find a money tree and shake it real hard. There’s always this thing.

Everything charges via usb whether we like it or not. That can be a real problem when you are in your car. So naturally you want a way to charge your phone, but the 12V outlet is already powering your GPS unit. That’s not a problem anymore.

This in-car charger is a nice solution, with four extra USB ports. Just plug in your iPod, mobile phone, digital camera, GPS device, or any other USB device. Chances are it’s more then you need to keep all your gadgets charged. And it only costs $23.

Until recently Lenovo was an exclusively business oriented notebook maker. Lenovo has sold consumer oriented notebooks and desktop computers in its native China for a long time. Recently, Lenovo has moved into the consumer market in the United States and other countries as well, but it is still better known for its ThinkPad line of business-oriented notebooks.

Today, Lenovo announced its newest ThinkPad notebook computer aimed at the mobile workstation market called the ThinkPad W700. The new ThinkPad features a 17-inch widescreen LCD and brings the industry’s first built-in digitizer and color calibrator to the mobile workstation market. The notebook also uses other new technology including the upcoming Intel mobile quad-core processors and optional dual hard drives with RAID Configurations.

H20 Audio, designers of things which  make your portable audio devices waterproof, is out with a new waterproof armband which supports a variety of devices. It is called the H20 Audio Amphibx and prices are set around $70 for a medium armband and $80 for a large one.

The H20 Audio Amphibx offers up a latch style locking closure which the company says provides a 100 percent watertight seal up to 12 feet underwater. This is paired with a touchscreen-friendly window which allows for operation even underwater.

Hitachi’s annouced it’s tri-format Blu-ray camcorder, the DZ-BD10HA, along with a list-price. It uses a 7-megapixel CMOS sensor that’s capable of both full 1920 x 1080 High Definition images and video. It can record directly onto either 8cm Blu-ray discs, the 30GB hard-drive, or onto an SDHC memory card.

One nice feature is that footage on the hard-drive or SDHC card can be re-dubbed to the Blu-ray drive without having to hook up to a computer, if you want to split, splice, delete, merge, and transition etc. It will also convert footage into standard definition and burn to a DVD if that’s what you want. There’s a lot to like here. Including the price which is a surprisingly reasonable $999. It will be available in September 2008.

If Donkey Kong were created today instead of hundreds of years ago, this is what Donkey Kong would throw at Mario. Since it’s a speaker, the Donkey Kong theme music could play right from the barrel as Mario jumps over it. But never mind the weird connections that my brain associates with certain gadgets.

This beer barrel thing is a portable speaker for your phone or laptop. For some reason. Very portable and a great accessory to bring with you when you travel, since it will fit in your suitcase easily. You can get it for $14.00 from Brando. If any Princess-napping apes are reading this, buy these and throw them at Mario. Because I’d really like to see that.