Technewsbuzz.com

It’s far and away one of the most genius concepts we’ve seen in the past year, and we couldn’t possibly be happier for one Min-Kyu Choi. Said designer, who recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, was recently showered with laud after the above-pictured Folding Plug nabbed the gold in the Brit Insurance Design contest. Unfortunately, we’re still no closer to understanding when some moneyed manufacturer will pick this up and start producing it, but hopefully this prize will reinforce its awesomeness and catch someone’s eye. In related news, we’re also seeing for the first time a Folding Plug version with USB ports on the exterior…

Now that the tablet PC revolution is upon us (for the second time in as many decades , if you’ll recall ), there’s bound to be a few that really stick out, and a few that get left in the dust. ExoPC is doing its darnedest to be grouped in the former, and it’s choosing to hold off on rushing things out in hopes of delivering a superior product to the world this summer. If you’ll recall, we heard that the 8.9-inch slate would originally be out and about this month, but the company’s own Jean-Baptiste Martinoli has informed us directly why the ship date is being pushed back a few months. For starters…

Well, it looks like it’s not just iPad pre-orders that are possibly be beating a few expectations — according to NPD , sales of Macs and iPods were also up over some estimates in January and February. More specifically, NPD’s Gene Munster says that sales of Macs were up 39% year over year for the two months (ahead of estimates of 22%), which should translate to sales of between 2.8 to 2.9 million Macs for the full quarter, while iPod sales were up 7% during the same period, suggesting total iPod sales of between nine and ten million for the first quarter. That latter number may actually be the more impressive of the two, as it marks the first time iPod sales have rebounded into positive territory in a…

Now, these may have been around for ages, we can’t really be sure because, truth be told, it’s pretty rare for us to troll the aisles of Kohl’s makeup section looking for KIRF s. Regardless, a helpful, hawk-eyed reader snapped this shot of an eyeshadow palette — called eyemobile — that’s got the distinct iPhone aura going on, though we’re 100 percent certain this is an unauthorized use case. It’s hard to say from the photo, but it also looks like there’s a lip gloss palette in the background (which we assume is called lipmobile), and that, friends, we would pay money for. Lots of money. [Thanks, Bill] Keepin’ it real fake: iPhone hits discount retailers as an eyeshadow palette originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:07:00 EST. …

Beaming data with light is hardly a new thing , but lately we’ve seen a number of attempts at making it rather more usable and, more interesting, rather more speedy. We’re starting to get the feeling that those maybe/maybe not dangerous microwave-based systems have had their days numbered. The latest to beam bits with blinkenlights is a team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications in Germany, which will be showing its stuff at the always happenin’ Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition in two weeks. The team was able to use a commercial LED and get an impressive 230Mb/s transfer rate, which doesn’t compare to the gigabit Penn State managed or 500mb/s Siemens pulled off , but those were done using rather …

It almost too much to take in all at once. Sure, the $1,999 Cintiq 21UX pen display is priced out of reach for most of us mere mortals who “don’t draw good,” but the pure lustworthiness of this unit sure makes us try to forget that inconvenient fact. The expanded movability of Wacom’s latest is commendable, the pen input is naturally great, the screen is beautiful, and even those new rear-mounted touchpads seem helpful. It would take someone much more familiar with professional draw-ist-ing to really speak to the more specific merits of the 21UX, but from a mere standpoint of inspiring irrational desire in our hearts, Wacom seems to have done a pretty good job this time out. …

Even though Microsoft’s big MIX event is still days away, the Windows Phone 7 Series development platform is already pretty well defined. It’s also clear that Microsoft wants to keep things tidy for developers by requiring all WP7 phones to meet a certain base-level spec . Now, thanks to a post from Microsoft’s Shawn Hargreaves, we know the display resolution for the first batch of Microsoft’s next generation phones: 480 x 800 (WVGA) pixels at launch, with a future update that will introduce a 320 x 480 (HVGA) native resolution. Dedicated hardware will ensure image scaling across all those pixels without taxing the GPU. That allows game developers, for example, to write to…

The Polaroid saga is a long and strange one. And the last couple years have been especially strange. Bankrupt , reanimated , relaunched , sold out , bought up … I wouldn’t be surprised if Polaroid showed up on Dancing With The Stars. They keep saying they’re coming back, but I’ll believe it when I see it. In the mean time, your options for instant film are depressingly limited, and it’ll cost you a bundle — but it’s not like it disappeared completely. The main rival for Polaroid was Fujifilm , which also makes digital cameras and lots of other films and media. Among their many products is Instax film, which is still manufactured and comes in cartridges…

Say it ain’t so! OCZ Technology — a mainstay in the storage realm but an outfit that tends to serve the performance (read: affluent) market first and foremost — has just dove headfirst into the value-priced SSD segment. Debuting today, the Onyx SATA II 2.5-inch SSD is the company’s most affordable MLC-based solid state storage solution to date; it packs 64MB of onboard cache, up to 125MB/sec read speeds, write rates of 70MB/sec and an MSRP of under $100 for a 32GB version. You know that hasty boot drive you’ve been looking for? Look up. OCZ breaks into bargain market with ’sub-$100′ 32GB Onyx SSD originally …

Who says you have to pick between a netbook and the coming onslaught of standalone tablet devices? Okay maybe some (eh hem Apple), but Lenovo’s trying to have it both ways with the IdeaPad U1 and the S10-3t . In clamshell mode the S10-3t looks like any old 10-inch netbook, but swivel around its capacitive mulitouch display and it turns into that slate device you’ve been dreaming of. That’s not all: the S10-3t is one of the first netbooks (or netveritbles) that has the new Intel 1.83GHz Atom N470 processor. But can the S10-3t straddle both worlds and do it well? And perhaps …