Dinner parties are great and all, but you don’t often have a hand free if you’re drinking and devouring some hors d’oeuvres and appetizers. That’s where Mantara comes in. It’s a great solution for keeping one of your hands free.

It has a groove to hold your wine glass, a place to secure the spoon/fork and the dish holds the appropriate proportion of food. Keep it all in one hand so you have one free to point and laugh at those who do not have a hand free. It’s like the Go plate, but for snooty types.

Tokyo-based designer Mac Funamizu is at it again. This time he has come up with a concept design for a phone that Wonder Woman would love to have in her invisible jet. The Glassy Glassy cell phone concept.

The entire phone is transparent until you turn it on. That’s when the screen and keypad light up so you can press the buttons accordingly. It’s sure to get lost easier and blend into its surroundings. Where the battery is, I have no idea. Hopefully, its stronger than glass.

If you are looking to drop a ton of dough on speakers, it should probably be on speakers that you won’t drop and shatter in a million pieces. These Harion speakers are made of Heat-resistant glass and are pretty sweet looking despite their fragile nature. They’ll cost you $168,000.

You get a center speaker, a sub woofer, a couple of tweeters and mid-range speakers. It took three years, eight months and 23 subcontractors to dekiver a finished product. Which probably explains the cost. No word on what they sound like, but we have an idea. We’re guessing they sound like any other glass that’s ever hit the floor, followed by you weeping and wondering why, dear God, why did you have to pay so much for something so fragile?

I’m not sure if Superman is a Mac or PC guy, but I do know that this QWERTY Glass Keyboard would look right at home in his fortress of solitude. Clark Kent on the other hand would have nothing to do with this. It’s called the No-key Keyboard by Kong Fanwen and it looks awesome.

Aside from being the flattest full-size QWERTY keyboard yet, it would be easy to keep clean. If it ever comes to market, you get the full glass surface, camera and lighting that uses motion capture technology to translate finger movements into characters on the screen. Of course, you’d want to treat it like the delicate piece of glassware it is, and be careful. And remember, it’s not a novelty plate to serve snacks on.

Some good news for sound. The Sony Tubular non-directional speaker concept has now become a reality. The speaker is being released on June 20th, 2008 and it measures 325mm x 1845mm x 325mm and 12.5kg. The “Sountina” speaker is a transparent and organic glass tube that vibrates to expand sound a full 360 degrees.

You’ll get a frequency response of 50Hz – 20,000Hz, an input line, 13cm subwoofer speaker, 7cm medium speaker and the tweeter which is also made from organic glass. It’s priced at around €6500. If they add some color, every Jedi in the galaxy will be using them and matching colors to their lightsaber.

Some of you might have seen this amazing robot on Good Morning America a few days ago. The Stickybot robotic lizard is modeled after the gecko, and is capable of climbing up glass surfaces with ease at a meter per second. The Pentagon is super interested. It could be a great robotic spy, after all. I guess it could also be used to watch people getting their freak on too.

This robot is such an excellent climber thanks to nano-scale hairs on it’s toes. In the future, they can no doubt make it resemble a gecko more closely, but he’s a pretty cute critter as he is. In time, they would make him move more naturally as well, though he does an impressive job already. You just have to keep in mind that it’s all fun and games until you see swarms of these things crawling all over Skyscrapers. And so it begins…

This lamp from Andromeda has an awesome look. Andromeda is the company name, but this one could have just as easily come from the Andromeda galaxy. The Drop Lamp combines Murano glass mastery and engineering in a suspended lamp that looks like a droplet of water frozen in space. It has an organic, futuristic look that is simple and elegant.

The natural characteristics of Murano glass means no two lamps are identical. They are all unique works of art. Well, as they point out, if you drop them the result is always the same, a million shards of broken glass and a huge chunk of money out of your pocket to replace it. These have a really cool design and they actually do look like they are about to drop, which might make you a bit nervous.