Wired News on how even two years after being discontinued, Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube still has a dedicated following of users who are upgrading them with faster processors, bigger hard drives, extra RAM, and DVD drives.
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As you may know, we're quite fond of those USB-powered gadgets, but we've discovered another one that we fear some people might become a bit too fond of: a USB-powered "personal massager" from GrandTec. Definitely something to ease the stress of being hunched over a PC for ten hours a day. By the way, that was the most "family-friendly" picture we could find of it.
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Some photos of Sony's new PlayStation Portable.
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Review over at BargainPDA of Sharp's Zaurus SL-C750 handheld, the one that runs on Linux and has an LCD touchscreen that swivels around to reveal a small built-in thumb keyboard. They love it:

Well, to be quite honest, this device blew me away along with all my iPaq and Axim-toting co-workers, the moment I unpacked it... The SL-C750 is a clamshell design with a rotating screen, allowing the device to be used in landscape (where it looks like a very small notebook) or portrait mode (where it looks more like a generic PDA). In landscape the screen resolution is 640x480, and the brightness and clarity of this screen is absolutely outstanding. This is by far the best display I've seen on a handheld device.

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New DVD burner from Plextor to support both of the competing recordable DVD standards, DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW. We still think it's freaking ridiculous that there are two competing standards in the first place, and that people have to shell out extra cash for these dual format drives.
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You gotta hand it to eMachines. For being a budget PC manufacturer, they keep coming out with laptops laden with features that you'd expect from more high-end manufacturers. Their new M5310 doesn't just have a 15.4-inch widescreen display, it also comes with built-in 802.11g (the higher-speed cousin of 802.11b), a 40GB hard drive, 512MB of RAM, and a combination DVD/CD-RW drive. Read

More details have emerged on Sony's new PlayStation Portable. The PSP will have twin processors (one for media, the other 3D graphics), 8MB of RAM, and play special 1.8 gigabyte "Universal Media Discs." The PSP will also support playback of MPEG4 video files, and Sony says they'll be able to fit up to two hours of video on a UMD. But probably the most exciting about the PSP is that it'll have built-in WiFi for head-to-head competition with other PSP owners. Still haven't seen a photo of this yet.
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The FCC's just granted Handspring approval to sell both the GSM/GPRS and CDMA versions of its new Treo 600. We hadn't realized this before, but there is actually a slight difference between the two versions. Both have the same internal specs (32MB of RAM, 144MHz processors, Palm OS 5.2.1), but the CDMA model (pictured at right) has a different casing and weighs slightly more than the GSM/GPRS Treo 600. As far as we know, Sprint is still set to carry the CDMA version this fall.
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A new digital camera from Casio which can power up in just one second, and an image record lag time of 0.01 seconds. The four-megapixel QV-R4 also has a 3x optical zoom lens.
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Gizmodo's one year anniversary is coming up in a couple of weeks (can you believe it?) and we're looking for both potential sponsors and potential venues for the party. Or actually parties, as ideally we'd love to have one in New York and one in San Francisco (sorry, everywhere else). Anyone interested, email me at peter@gizmodo.com.

Some high-resolution photos over at Mobile.Burn of Sony Ericsson's forthcoming P900, which is also known as the P810. There'd been speculation the P900 would have a 1.3 megapixel digital camera built-in, but it looks like it'll just be a more commonplace 640x480 resolution camera.
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JVC's slick-looking line of high-end Pocket PCs should be out on September 15th (Amazon is already taking pre-orders). The MP-PV131 and the MP-PV331 are designed specifically with multimedia in mind, and come with special audio and video software player that plays MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, and MPEG4 files. Both have 400MHz processors, 128MB of RAM, 32MB of flash ROM, CompactFlash and SDIO expansion slots, and 3.5" transflective displays. The MP-PV331 also adds built-in WiFi to the mix and a USB host port for connecting directly to a JVC digital camcorder without a PC.
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Verizon's fixed a major bug in their text messaging website that let anyone find out a subscriber's phone number and view their private messages. Apparently the problem has been around for months, and Verizon only just now got around to doing something about it:

The glitch exposed the information like this: An exploiter would send a text message to the cell phone of a Verizon customer through Verizon's website. The site would then send a confirmation back. The confirmation message included a unique identification code. By altering one or two letters of that code and typing it back into the website, the exploiter could gain the telephone number of yet another customer. An experienced hacker could also use the code to retrieve text messages sent through the network.

Verizon's solution to the bug was a bit ham-fisted, and now they've made it impossible for legitimate users to get confirmation that their text message was sent to the right number.
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We were plenty impressed by Mustek's all-in-one gadget, the DV3000, but apparently they're already prepping its successor for release this November. The palm-sized DV4000 combines a tapeless digital camcorder that records to SD memory cards with a 3.1 megapixel digital still camera, an MP3 player, a digital voice recorder, and a PC webcam. The video quality isn't the best (the frame rate is a choppy ten per second at highest resolution), but for $199 what do you expect?
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The Smartphones keep coming, the latest is a clamshell design from Asus. The AGP-600, which will run the new 2003 version of Microsoft's cellphone operating system, is a GSM/GPRS handset with integrated Bluetooth, a built-in digital camera, 32MB of Flash ROM, 32MB of RAM, and a 2.2-inch 65,000 color display. Most likely just for the Asian market. But you never know.
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A Malaysian court has ruled that it's legal for a man to divorce his wife via text message:

Sharia judge Mohamad Fauzi Ismail declared that the divorce declaration was valid and that as such the marriage between the plaintiff Azida Fazlina Abdul Latif and defendant Shamsudin Latif was annulled, the Utusan Malaysia newspaper reported. Mr Shamsudin was said to have sent Ms Azida a text message saying: "If you do not leave your parents' house, you'll be divorced". Although such a notification of divorce may seem astonishingly brief to some, under Islamic law men are allowed to divorce their wives simply be saying the word 'talaq' - I divorce you - three times.

Read [Thanks, Mike]

Some bad news. Dell's patch for its slow-running Axim X5 Pocket PCs, which we reported on Friday as being imminent, has been delayed, possibly until September.
Read [Thanks, Christopher]

UPDATE: So it looks like a downloadable patch should be available from Dell's customer support website on Wednesday. But it still looks like a CD-ROM with the update won't be available for at least a few more weeks.

Palmtops.About.com review of the Duo, a combination pen/stylus/laser pointer:

You rotate the pen one direction for ink and the opposite direction for the stylus. Pretty simple huh? The cool part is the built-in cat torturer (aka laser pointer) on the end of the pen. This isn't one of those cheap laser pointers, this thing is pretty powerful so be sure to keep away from your eyes.

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The Register speculates that one reason why cellphones running Microsoft's Smartphone operating system have been so late coming to market is that the cellphone industry thinks that a PDA phone needs Bluetooth to succeed, and that Microsoft hasn't quite sorted out integrating Bluetooth into the OS.
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After numerous delays, the first Palm with built-in GPS, the Garmin iQue 3600, is finally out. As Forbes helpfully reminds us, the iQue 3600 runs on Palm OS 5, and has 32MB of RAM, an SDIO expansion slot, and, of course, plenty of GPS mapping software.
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We know this is sounds crazy, but doesn't Peter Eisenman's design for the new Arizona Cardinals football stadium bear an odd resemblance to Sony Ericsson's P800 cellphone?

Anyone else got any good "separated at birth?" gadgets? Email them to me.

As usual, in case you missed any of them, some highlights from the past week in Gizmodo:
Yamaha's MusicCast wireless digital audio system
Samsung's overstuffed Pocket PC Phone
The big deal about Sony's new Clie
The WebStation
It's official: Nikon's new D2H digital SLR camera
Pocket full of MP3 players
Chinese province bans sexual text messages
Motorola's new Smartphone
Creative's Nomad Jukebox Zen NX
Toshiba's 17-inch Media Center laptop
This Sound Machine has nothing to do with Gloria Estefan
Sony vs Sony Ericsson
The Corporate Fallout Detector

Brighthand review of one eagerly awaited gadget, SanDisk's miniscule new WiFi card for PDAs and cellphones that fits into an SDIO card slot. Even more exciting, a version of the card with 256MB of memory storage should be out in December.
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We're gonna resist the opportunity to engage in some crude humor (though I'm sure Nick will be disappointed), but someone's just patented a cellphone with a sensor for warning about gas leaks.
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Some (blurry) pics over at Mobile.Burn of two new Sony Ericsson phones, the P810 (the phone on the left) and the Z600 (the phone in the center). The P810 looks even better than its predecessor, the P800, while the Z600 is said to be a essentially a clamshell version of the well-regarded T610 (the phone pictured on the right).
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Dell says they've fixed the performance problems plaguing Axim X5 Pocket PCs running the new Pocket PC 2003 operating system, and are releasing an update tomorrow. You gotta give Dell props for quickly acknowledging the problem and doing something about it rather than stalling its customers and trying to pretend nothing is wrong.
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Another ingenious gadget from MIT's Media Lab, this one a "corporate fallout detector" that's meant to help consumers quickly gauge the social and environmental records of the companies behind the products they're considering buying. It functions sort of like a geiger counter, using a barcode scanner and information culled from databases about pollution and corporate corruption to determine how evil or benign a particular company is. Just try carrying one of these around with you on your next visit to Wal-Mart and see how long it takes to get kicked out.
Read [Via Gothamist]

A new adapter for adding a Bluetooth headset to cellphones. The HBA-001 from Hit Incorporated works on most handsets with a 2.5mm jack (except Samsung's), and can clip right on to your belt, a feature that absolutely, positively won't make you look geeky.
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With Sony's new wireless Clie PDAs getting more similar in terms of their specs and capabilities to Sony Ericsson's smartphones, Ross Rubin wonders whether the two companies are headed for something of a collision. He speculates that Palm's purchase of Handspring (and by extension, it's new Treo 600) is going to put even more pressure on Sony to develop it's own Clie-phones, something that would put them in the awkward position of selling a gadget that very directly competes against its joint-venture with Ericsson. Doing so might be the final nail in the coffin, or give Sony extra incentive to buy out Ericsson's share of the joint-venture. It's an open secret that Ericsson wouldn't mind getting get out of this money-losing partnership anyway.

Either way, given the scope of its business it certainly makes sense for Sony to have its own in-house line of cellphones. But if Sony wants to take the plunge and start competing full-on in the smartphone market, what they really need to do is to start developing some competition for Microsoft's new Smartphone operating system (confusing, isn't it?). And the quickest way to do that would be to buy PalmSource to get control of the Palm operating system (this isn't crazy, Sony Chairman Nobuyuki Idei has already hinted at doing this before; just going with Symbian wouldn't give Sony the control it likes to have). But not just to build a Clie-phone -- they should position the Palm OS as a counterweight to Microsoft's cellphone OS, and then license it out to other cellphone manufacturers. If Sony does this it almost won't matter what happens to Sony Ericsson, but you can bet that if the joint-venture is still in business (or wholly-owned by Sony) they'd be the first in line to license Sony's Palmphone OS.
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There's a new robotic vacuum cleaner coming from Hanool Robotics that the company claims will be smarter and better at cleaning rooms than the Roomba and the other robovacs that are out now. Instead of moving around a room randomly, or in ever-expanding concentric circles (like the Roomba), the OTTORO uses cameras and sensors to plot out the most efficient route for vacuuming a room. Also improving on the Roomba, the OTTORO can clean corners using a special section port and automatically return to its base station for charging.
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New line of external hard drives from LaCie designed by F.A. Porsche, the same firm behind Best Buy's stylish line of vpr Matrix PCs. The drives will have capacities ranging from 40 to 250GB, and look a lot like the vpr Matrix computers too, i.e. very angular, with lots of black and silver.
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Tom's Hardware Guide asks a pretty good question about Philips' new boom box, the AZ2555 Sound Machine: why in the heck is it "USB enabled?" You'd think WiFi would be a better means of accomplishing this, but the USB cable port on the Sound Machine is for streaming audio from a PC, basically turning it into a pair of glorified computer speakers.
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BargainPDA reports that Hewlett-Packard is working on a line of high-end Pocket PCs with built-in QWERTY keyboards, Bluetooth, WiFi, and optional GPRS, but there's no word on when the first of these h4000 series handhelds might be released.
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A new media-centric version of Toshiba's massive seventeen-inch widescreen laptop, the Satellite P25. The Satellite P25-S607 adds Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center edition software (for recording and playing back TV shows like a TiVo), a remote control, and a DVD recorder to the mix. Rest of the specs are the same as the P25-S507: a 2.8GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 64MB video card, built-in 802.11a and 802.11b, and a 60GB hard drive.
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A new wireless surveillance camera from Panasonic that can be viewed from anywhere over a web browser. The BB-NCW150 connects to a home network over 802.11b and also has remote-controllable pan and tilt to help you "keep tabs" on things.
Read [Translated from Japanese using Babelfish. Via I4U.com]