Best Buy's Anti-Ipod, the Insignia Amigo Audio Player

Insignia Amigo Audio Player

A very decent audio player from Best Buy house brand Insignia, this 2GB Amigo [product page] flash player features a reasonably sized 1.2" OLED display on a compact body. Built-in FM tuning, MP3/WMA(and DRM) audio support, Jpeg image support, USB 2.0, 5 EQ presets, and 18 hours of battery life are all included. The player measures up at 3.1" x 1.3" x .5" and weighs 8 ounces, and it's priced really well. Trust Best Buy? | Via dapreview |

Fhybrid hydrogen + Li-ion scooter

Hybrid Scooter Would Run on Hydrogen



An industrial design student in The Netherlands has built a prototype scooter that is designed to be run on hydrogen.

Crijn Bouman of Delft University of Technology designed the scooter for use in inner cities.

He calls it the Fhybrid.

"The look and feel of the scooter are aimed at selling the clean technology inside," he said in a statement today.

The scooter has an electric motor powered by a (Li-)ion battery. If the Fhybrid is ever put into production, the idea is to charge the battery with a fuel-cell system, which would derive its energy from a tank of hydrogen. While scientists are working to make such systems more efficient, obtaining hydrogen (by splitting it out of water) is for now too costly to be practical. Scientists disagree whether it will ever be viable.

The prototype scooter uses a simulated fuel-cell to recharge the battery.

"A special course and various permits are required to build a hydrogen-powered engine. It wasn't possible to achieve this during the time period of my graduation project," Bouman explained. "The faculty is now trying to assemble all the necessary means to fully develop the hydrogen-powered scooter."

The scooter also recharges the battery by snagging energy during braking.

Since two-wheeled vehicles rely primarily on front-wheel braking for efficient stops, Bouman's scooter is front-wheel drive—better to capture the braking energy, he explained.

The Fhybrid has a top speed of 40 mph. Bouman says it accelerates faster than regular scooters and could travel approximately 124 miles on a tank of hydrogen

By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 26 July 2006
10:53 am ET

Color E-Paper, the world isnt Black and White after all! By Hitachi

Now that monochrome e-paper is a pretty standard affair, those at the forefront of e-ink technology have moved on to perfecting the real killer app, which is full-color displays. We've already seen a tiny color model from Fujitsu, and a larger, but only two-color offering from Bridgestone, and now Hitachi -- maker of the black-and-white Albirey e-paper -- is showing off a 13.1-inch version of this product will an impressive 4,096-color palette. Apparently the power-saving "RGBW" filter enables the device to display bright whites as well as deep blacks, but the trade-off is the unit's rather underwhelming resolution of just 512 x 384 pixels. Therefore, we probably won't be seeing color eBooks anytime soon, but the low res should be adequate enough for certain types of signage that would benefit from the paper's ability to hold a picture in the absence of power"

[Via MobileRead]