Infotainment

There was a time when every day seemed to herald the opening of a new  hotel in  the United Arab Emirates, each one pushing the envelope of acceptable taste further and further in an orgy of cartoon rococo gold mouldings (real gold) and marble for miles. Developer Jumeirah was responsible for its fair share of crimes against design. That time is over it seems as Jumeirah opens its latest  hotel in  the Etihad Towers in Abu Dhabi - Dubai's more sensible, and richer, uncle. The stunning modern towers enclose an interior that is a sophisticated and dare one say, fashionable, Euro-Arabic fusion.   The hotel occupies one 280 meter (920 ft) tower out of the five that make up  the building . The others consist of office space and 800 apartments with the four-floor podium containing conference rooms, restaurants and boutique shopping. Etihad is the UAE state airline and  the building  was developed under the control of Sheikh Suroor bin Mohammed Al Nahyan, a member of the

They clearly like a coffee over at Californian sports clothing company Virus. While its employees might order a mocha latte, the company is interested in the grinds. Virus' StayWarm line uses what it calls Coffee Char, or coffee charcoal in the construction of the fabric. The grounds are recycled and processed into a natural fiber to produce a comfortable base layer fabric that traps heat close to the skin. According to Virus, tests have shown that the garments' heat trap increases surface temperature by 10 degrees Fahrenheit and no chemical treatments or applications are used to provide these insulation properties. While Stay Warm keeps you warm, it still wicks moisture away from skin. When body heat turns up the temperature and perspiration levels, additional features of the garment kick in. These include UV shielding and anti-odor properties that fight stink - a function that the company says is due to the selection of compounds woven into the fabr

OSIM, better known for its advanced  massage chairs , has begun selling a US$170 thumb-sized USB massager which uses  Electronic Muscle Stimulation  (EMS - the same technology you first witnessed in biology when your teacher made a dead frog's leg twitch using electrical current), to deliver a suite of specialized massage programmes from your laptop. It's a pretty good fit of technologies because you can synch the massage to your computer's music player and massage away stress, and  tone  up using the tapping, squeezing and kneading of the uPixie on specific muscle groups ... while you are working. There are four set programmes on the uPixie, but you can also write and develop your own routines,  opening up  a whole host of possibilities. The Osim uPixie is actually fairly rudimentary as far as EMS machines go. I picked up a full blown TENS machine while I was at a Chinese Consumer  Electronics  Fair last year, paying US$20 for a machine that quite amaze

If you’ve ever ridden on a city bus, you know what an…um, “interesting” assortment of people you’ll find there. And that’s just on a regular city bus – imagine how many more extreme personalities could fit on the Superliner Youngman JNP6250G, the world’s largest public transport bus. At 82 feet long (39 feet longer than standard buses), the monstrosity can fit 300 passengers. With two accordion ribbed sections, the bus can turn on the same radius as a regular, non-gigantic bus. It was designed to make up the entire Bus Rapid Transit service in both Beijing and Hangzhou, cities with large and ever-growing populations that demand sensible public transportation solutions. And since the mega-buses will have their very own highway lanes, urban travelers will have another reason to leave their cars at home and let mass transit take them wherever they need to go.

Having relatively large egos and short tempers, we tend to get very annoyed when sitting in any shared- armrest kind of situation. Airplanes , movie theaters , waiting rooms…they’re all enough to cause conniption fits. The Paperclip Armrest concept from designer James Lee is a surprisingly simple answer to the widespread problem of who gets the armrest. The clever design has two levels, letting one person put their arm on top and the other on the bottom. Of course, you still have to be uncomfortably close to the other person in order for this concept to work. Like, high likelihood that your arms will touch kind of close. But if you’re desperate for a place to put your arm or just don’t care about the possibility of literally bumping elbows with your chair neighbor, this is maybe the best advancement to hit chairs since padded seats.

Maybe putting your shoes on seems like a reasonably simple task, but for some people it is impossibly difficult. Those who are disabled or have back pain or arthritis might be completely unable to bend down and pull on even a simple slip-on pair of shoes. A group of designers fashioned this odd-looking solution as an entry in the 2011 Red Dot design competition. Aptly named Topless Shoes, the invention is – for lack of a better comparison – sort of like sinking your feet into twin tissue boxes and walking around with them on. There are small gripping parts inside each shoe that hold onto your feet and keep you from walking right out of the shoes. The interior of the shoes is flexible enough to expand slightly to allow the foot in, then it contracts around the foot to hold it securely. However, it doesn’t look like the interior material comes across the top of the foot completely, leaving it exposed. This fact may make the shoes unsuitable for certain weather or

Finding your car in a huge parking facility can be a pain even when you have a remote fob to flash the lights and beep the horn. You usually have to be in the correct level of the garage to notice the light and horns, after all. The Car Compass is a concept for the absentminded among us. It’s a small device that guides you right to your car with a series of arrows on its tiny display. Unlike the standard method of wandering around clicking the “lock” button and trying to follow the sound of the horn and flashing lights (which is even harder when you aren’t the only forgetful soul there), the Car Compass would give you a definite route to follow to get back to your car. The concept, developed by AhhaProject as a case study for BMW, doesn’t say whether it would guide you up and down to different levels of a parking garage, but pushing the button and following the resulting directional light would at least get you to the right section of the facilit

Dual Snowboards delivers a unique twist to the world of snowboarding by cutting the traditional snowboard in half along the waist, giving you a board for each foot. With this simple move that effectively sees a lunch-tray-like board strapped to each foot, the company says riders get more freedom to move and conceptualize new tricks like ninja-like flip-n-kicks, but they'll also be able to pull off Gore-Tex-ripping splits, nut-demolishing pole wraps and devastating banana-peel falls. Proceed with care.       Ever since its conception and popularization, the snowboard has been one of the premier tools for speed, adrenaline and big air. What the snowboard has never been is all that maneuverable on the ground. Yes, once you get the hang of it, it is easy to turn, carve and stop, but a large board is difficult to move forward on flat terrain and can feel like a big, immobile plank to newer riders. Skiers have a little more freedom in having both legs pointed

Although it can't be denied that smartphones are ... well, that they're really smart, the fact is that not everyone wants to play games, shoot and watch videos, surf the web or use apps every time they step out their door. For many people, the ability to make and receive phone calls is all that really matters. It was for minimalists like these that Austrian electronics company emporia designed its very basic, large-keyed mobile phones. While they were previously not available to North American consumers, that changed with an announcement last week at CES. There are two phones scheduled for release in the new market - the emporiaCLICK and the emporiaSOLIDplus. The CLICK has a clamshell design, and incorporates features such as: Digital camera One-touch Call for Care emergency function - push to dial emergency services or up to five stored numbers until someone picks up SMS and MMS texts LED flashlight Incoming call alert with LED light, high-powered vibration

Despite the fact that it's getting more and more difficult to find someone who doesn't carry a smartphone with them at all times, the notion of the Dick Tracy style watch phone isn't dead yet. In the past few years, we've seen examples from companies such as LG, Samsung, Hyundai and Orange, just to name a few. This week at CES, watchmaker Burg officially added its Neon line of watch phones to that list by announcing two models that will be coming to the U.S. market. The basic model (called the Burg 9 going by the rather confusing information on the company's website) has a simple analogue clock face, with features that include the ability to make and receive hands-free calls, speed dial, voice count, and key lock and unlock. It also has GPS, which could come in handy if a child wearing the watch were to get lost. Prices for this model start at US$99. The other watch (listed on the site as the the Burg 11) is considerably more about the bells and wh

More from CES 2012, Sin City, where we've briefly had a chance to get familiar with the Nokia Lumia 900, the Finnish corporation's sacrificial offering at the increasingly cluttered LTE altar to the gods of 4G. The Windows smartphone features a large 4.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera with a wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens and seven hours of talk time, according to Nokia. First impressions? Really rather good, actually. With its announcement, the Lumia 900 becomes the central prong to the Lumia trident of Windows smartphones (between the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800), with which Nokia hopes to address its collapsing market share. A run-down of the key specs: Body: One-piece polycarbonate unit Dimensions: 5.03 x 2.7 x 0.45 inches (127.8 x 68.6 x 11.4 mm) Mass: 5.6 ounces (160 grams) Processor clock speed: 1.4 GHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon (the same as inside the 710 and 800) Key connectivity: LTE, 3G, WLAN b/g/n Touchscreen: 4.3-inch 800 x 480 AM

The folks at MakerBot Industries have not exactly been resting on their laurels since causing a stir at CES last year with the Thing-o-Matic 3D printer. Even though the original small object creation device would still see the jaws of most people dropping in wonder, the company has now unveiled a new model at CES 2012 called the Replicator that is not only capable of fabricating much bigger objects than its predecessor, but can also do so in two colors at the same time.   Rather than having some fabrication company on the other side of the world mass-produce millions of plastic shower curtain hooks, door knobs, or even chess pieces and then ship them to your local store for you to buy, desktop-friendly 3D printers like MakerBot's Thing-o-Matic allow users to create every day objects in the home, only when are were needed. Revolutionary! Now, I'm no stranger to side-stepping the world of big commerce to get what I need. There was a time in my not-so-