::: Star Weekend Magazine :::

Sci-tech

EgoKast brings videos to your belt buckle. Really.
While wearing EgoKast's video belt buckle, you'll have a new way to "show the world what's on your mind" - that is, if your mind is located just slightly above your crotch and comes preloaded with fragmented, stoned-out video clips and one-word declarations like "Ibiza" or "Space". Fortunately the retail price of USD 289 includes a 512-MB SD memory card to store your own personalised transmissions. The stainless steel-encased, 3.5-inch LED screen has 320 x 240-pixel resolution and supports most standard video and audio formats (MP3, AVI, WAV, MP4), enabling the EgoKast digital media player to double as both a personal advertisement and a music player. With an additional slideshow function, you could easily arrange for a steady stream of family vacation photos to play just below your studded navel for about five hours. With digital media technology becoming more and more integrated into our daily clothing, it's only a matter of time until our personal identity, marketing campaigns, and popular iconography will be synthesised into one fluid skin of light, colour, and sound.

Black Box phone concept is one big touchscreen
This slick little number is a concept phone from BenQ that's basically one big touchscreen. Dynamically changing based on what application you're using, the Black Box looks pretty stunning. A keypad appears onscreen if you want to make a call, while a viewfinder appears when you go to take a picture, and so on and so forth. One issue keeping touchscreen concepts like this from becoming a reality is the tactile-feedback issue, meaning the fact that you won't be able to feel when you push a button. That seems like something I could get used to if I had a phone as hot as this, but that's just me. But the Black Box is, like most insanely cool things, just a concept product, so don't expect to see it popping up with your local vendor anytime soon. But I hope they'll figure out how to get similar products (like a touchscreen iPod, perhaps?) out to us in the near future.

USB to warm and cool your drinks
Drinking nothing at room temperature is cool these days , and USB Geek makes it easy with the Peit Hein Drink Cooler and USB Mug Warmer. The drink cooler is a stainless steel ball with a "super-secret liquid core", and you put this shiny orb in the freezer for an hour and then it can chill down that glass of coke really quickly. It supposedly keeps drink frosty for a lot longer than ordinary ice without watering down your drink. The USB mug warmer is a variation on similar items we've seen before, but now you can keep that bottomless cup o' Java toasty warm and use its two-port hub for two other weird USB attachments.

Suzuki's Latest Concept
An employee of Japanese automaker Suzuki Motor displaying the company's concept fuel cell vehicle called "Ionis", a four-seater fuel cell mini car at the EVS22 electric vehicle exhibition in Yokohama, suburban Tokyo.

The 'Upside Down'
Good ol' Bang & Olufsen is making some noise with the Serene, a clamshell cellphone jointly developed with Samsung. Unlike other cellphones on the market, the screen is on the bottom and the buttons are up top. An interesting turn of ideas wouldn't you say.

Tiny jet engines to power future laptops?
Ajet-powered laptop may sound like the sort of gadget Q would give James Bond for his next adventure, but Professor Alan Epstein at MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has been working to make the concept a reality. According to Epstein, a tiny gas turbine no larger than a quarter along with a fuel supply could replace the traditional battery in small, power-hungry portable devices like laptops, delivering five to ten times the endurance of a similarly sized battery pack. Espstein and his team are building the first engine using a sandwich of six silicon wafers that are bonded together at an atomic level, and plan to power it with liquid butane, the same stuff used in cigarette lighters, to avoid having the thing smell like an airport runway. Hopefully, this invention will be in used in another five years.

Compiled by IMRAN H. KHAN

Source: AFP and Gizmodo Onlined