What do you get when you decapitate Master Chief and turn his head into a vacuum? No, not another questionable Highlander sequel that sucks. What you get is this Samsung vacuum that is obviously inspired by Halo.

Samsung’s new bagless vacuum cleaner was just released, the Silencio SC9540. It boasts sophisticated and powerful tools, and they claim that it’s also quieter than ever so you can clean at any time of the day or night. The Silencio features a Multi Chamber suction system, which is more powerful than conventional vacuum cleaners and maintains a high level of suction power no matter what surface you are cleaning. With the Silencio’s Silver Nano technology and HEPA filtration system, you’re protected against harmful dust particles and mites, even if you are a pet owner.

Etch-a-Sketch is finally coming into the 21st century. The Wired Etch-a-Sketch is the digital version of the classic toy that has entertained children as well as bored adults for the past several decades. The TV Etch-a-Sketch takes the toy to the next level.

It has a wide variety of new modes, like Cool Drawing Tools, Trace A Pic, Super Sketch and Connecting the Dots. The controller has the two classic Etch-a-Sketch knobs to keep the nostalgic feel of the original. What about shaking it and clearing what you’ve drawn? That’s the most classic part, after all. Yes, it has that feature too. Just shake the controller and the screen will clear.

Sure it’s nice to be able to get the same functionality of your electronic gadgets into a smaller package, but smaller isn’t always better for everything. Having a pocket-sized GPS mounted to your dash can sometimes be like an eye chart test for finding destinations and points of interesting while driving your vehicle in traffic. Due to this Garmin is debuting a larger line of GPS units with a big 5.2-inch touch screen, and is packing it with features.

The big screen makes viewing and interacting with the touchscreen easier at arms length, and since they had the extra room they threw in quite a few extra tools. For starters you still get the voice-prompted turn-by-turn directions, but it will also save up to 10 routes, keep track of where you have been, find points of interest as well as school zones and safety cams, shows terrain info and you can even have a little vehicle icon instead of the generic arrow representing your car. A couple of other pretty nifty features include an external video input which lets you have video connected to the GPS, such as a back-up camera on your big rig and an FM transmitter so you can listen to the MP3′s loaded on the device through the car’s FM stereo, not to mention the loaded games and audio books owners can take advantage of.

iPhone owners can now take advantage of Google applications online through a new, easier to use interface that integrates the different tools into a single interface. The new interface is available for iPhone users through the Safari web browser and will come up automatically when they visit Google’s home page.

From the newly integrated page users can navigate quickly to applications including Search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, Docs, GOOG-411, SMS, News, Photos, Blogger, and Notebook. According to Google the pages will download to the iPhone faster than before and comparable to using them on a desktop computer. This interface was made specifically for the iPhone but Google says that they will be “optimizing” its applications for use on other popular mobile devices as well in the future.

The BodyGard Self-Powered Emergency Tool is like a high-tech Swiss army knife, without all the knives. Consider it the MacGuyver of emergency tools. You get 12 devices in one, along with a hand crank, so you can generate power when and where you need it, on the spot. Never worry again about your flashlight, MP3 player, cellphone or radio running out of juice.

It also comes with a flashing red light, a panic button for emergencies and a motion-activated security alarm that alerts anyone around you in the event of an emergency. They obviously took advantage of every square inch of the device. It even has an integrated storage compartment for pills, matches and other tiny items.

Lawnmowers are one of those manly tools that have not really undergone much change over the years. The reason for this is simple. Depending on how you dress it up, you can either look really cool mowing the lawn with your concept mower, or you can look like a total tool. I think they got it right here.

You have to keep it looking like a powerful object after all. The F1 is obviously inspired by the F1 racer. It’s a concept design from Kadeg Boucher. And it’s not just a shell put over the engine. They went all out. It features a full race suspension, rear view mirrors, vintage John Player Special-style livery and a steering wheel with an LCD gauge display. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see geeks racing these things in the near future.

Stanley, maker of all kinds of hand tools, has launched an funny, interactive website dedicated to the FatMax Xtreme FuBar utility bar, a mult-purpose tool made primarily for “breaking s#!%“, according to ToolMonger. To show off the tool’s destructive powers the site has some construction workers on hand that will use the FuBar to destroy objects that you select, allowing you to watch with the regular camera angle or through a dizzying helmet cam view.

Stanley FuBar

Google has plans to announce the highly rumored “Google Phone” today which is likely going to be an open platform, Linux-based operation system that runs on mobile phones and is catered to Google applications rather than being an actual specific handset. The latest list of speculated partners for providing the phone include Sprint, Motorola, Samsung and NTT DoCoMo although these are just rumored partners as everyone involved with the deal has kept very quiet about it at Google’s request. Verizon and AT&T have both had talks with Google but reportedly are still leery of the Google-centric plans.

The new Google Phone system is expected to be Linux based with the open source Java development platform laid on top with tools that Google would “give away” to developers to allow them to openly create applications to run on the G-Phone’s platform. The phone has is also being rumored to provide internet access at speeds as fast as you might find on your home computer, but all navigation would be through Google, of course.

Only on Thursday Google had made the announcement about its new OpenSocial platform and already news in cropping up of developers taking advantage of this open, common platform. In their announcement we knew there were going to be a number of social networking sites that were already onboard with the new API’s, including Salesforce.com, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, and of course Google’s Orkut but we weren’t expecting the giants like MySpace or Facebook.

As it turned out MySpace actually is going to take advantage of OpenSocial along with Bebo, another large social networking site. The one clearly left out of this picture was Facebook, in which this launch echoed a mighty blow to with many of the more significant social network sites in the world taking part in a common platform without them. According to Wired, Facebook representatives maintained that they had “still not been briefed on OpenSocial” despite Google stating that they had, and Facebook employees showing up at Google’s developer sandbox event.

Just nineteen more sleeps until you can run out to your local video games store and pick up a copy of “Unreal Tournament 3″ for the PC. Midway Games announced today that their highly anticipated first-person shooter has gone gold and is scheduled to arrive in retail shops on November 19. Two versions will be available, the regular one ($49.99) and a collector’s edition ($59.99) that comes with an art book and bonus DVD that shows behind-the-scenes material of the making of the game as well as toolkit video tutorials.

Only yesterday we saw Google bring their YouTube online anti-piracy tool to beta to help combat the illegal posting of copyrighted videos. Today an announcement by a group of technology and media companies suddenly sheds some light on the significance of Google rolling out the service when they did.

A group consisting of Fox, CBS, NBC Universal, Walt Disney, MySpace, Viacom, and Microsoft (note the absence of Google) has announced a copyright protection agreement for rules that they …

After Apple iPhone developers have already had a couple of volleys with hackers who want to run 3rd party applications on the new phone Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, has today let the hacking community know that they can stop, or at least slow down for a few minutes. Jobs has announced that Apple is going to open up both the iPhone and the iPod Touch for third party application development on the device in February of 2008.

Prior to this the only way to get any third party applications on the iPhone was through an “open” platform on the Safari web browser which runs on the device and was still fairly limiting. Jobs attributed the these development restrictions to security issues stating that open development increases risks of viruses. He also states that these security risks are also why it will take until February to release an SDK for developers.

The Nissan NV200 concept vehicle gets you from your home to the office in under 10 seconds flat. That’s because your entire office IS the van. Instead of driving to work, you will instead, drive your work everywhere. It’s obviously designed for those people that work literally, all over the map. The entire back end of the van slides out, which gives you a nice roomy office inside, while exposing the exterior storage areas that are fully customizable.

For the 2007 Tokyo Motor show, they decked it out as if it belonged to an ocean photographer, complete with the storage area full of various tools of that trade. They even put in an editing station and a remote control panel for a spider camera. I think I’ve found my new office. Next time you read me, I’ll be on the road…

Today Google has announced the beta launch of YouTube Video Identification, a new antipiracy tool that we heard about in July during a copyright infringement lawsuit with Viacom. The new system is a result of a number of angry video owners, Viacom being one of the angriest, complaining that YouTube was supporting users uploading and sharing illegally copied video content.

The new system will use a “fingerprinting” type of technology which provides a unique identification to each video. With Video Identification users will still be able to upload any videos they would like and have the instantly appear on the site as before, but once uploaded YouTube will then be comparing the uploaded content to legitimate videos provided by the owners. When matching videos are found the owner’s can choose to automatically have the video removed, promoted or in true Google form they can even take advantage of the uploaded content and monetize the video for copyright holders who chooses to license their videos.

This past June we wrote about Casio’s tough G’zOne Type-S mobile phone when it was released and we recently got a chance to get our hands on one to see just how tough this thing really was and what “water resistant” really meant. What we found is that the G’zOne Type-S lives up to its hype on standing against the elements and also had some nice surprises we were not expecting.