It’s rare that Apple’s patents actually show the exact form factors of devices they have in development, but this “dual sided trackpad” patent for a phone seems to definitely show that they’ve got some flipphone version coming up. The patent itself outlines a phone that has two multitouch sensors, both on the “bottom” part of the phone. When it’s closed, the phone acts like your current model iPhone. When it’s open, only the bottom part of the phone is touch-sensitive, whereas the top part is just a display.

The top/bottom touchscreen difference has the interesting effect of bringing some new features such as actually drawing out a number on the touchpad, rotating and old school dial (?), simulating a T9 dialpad, or even having both sides of the touchscreen active at once for some crazy control.

What’s the point of this? Besides new features, apparently many people HATE the candybar form factor and won’t even consider a phone a real phone unless it’s a clamshell.

A French company has sent out a sample of a game called Crazy Kart 2 which boosting about 60 FPS framerate using a software-only engine. The game is still in production, but it seems rather ambitious, with multi-player support, downloadable vehicles, and the possibility of motion-tilt-steering (currently the game is touch screen only).

Before now, no one was really sure that kind of graphics we’d be seeing for the iPhone, so far everything looks better then I expected.

Recent news has come out about the new Nike+ running device called SportBand. The armband will still be wireless and still require you to shove a Nike+ kit into your shoe in order to track how fast/far you run, but you won’t have to carry an iPod Nano on you. Once you are done your workout, just take out the attached USB stick and visit the Nike website to view your running results.

Just when you thought you had seen every iPod concept out there, a new crazy design comes out of nowhere. This time it’s the coin sized iPod that weighs about half an ounce. There is small, and then there’s is really small…maybe even too small? This concept is a neat idea, although I don’t think we’ll ever see something this small from Apple.

Yesterday a photo of the the Endeavor was taken from the International Space Station only to find an iPod near the co-pilots window.

Surprisingly this isn’t the first time the iPod has been seen in space, however it is the first time It’s been seen in space from someone in a different space vehicle. Pretty cool picture, Here’s the image in high resolution.

Here’s a short video tutorial that shows you how to copy and paste text…

Read on to find out how to copy text into an email… Read the rest of this entry »