Filed under: Cellphones, Digital Cameras

Liquid lenses have been kicking around as the Next Big Thing for a while, but outside of cameo appearances in a couple Samsung cellphones, they haven’t exactly made waves in the market. That may be in part due to the fact that they can be made smaller and cheaper than conventional optics, but haven’t been able to provide zoom or particularly high resolution. All that might be changing, however, as a Fraunhofer Institute team working in conjunction with French firm Varioptic has developed a system of 4 liquid lenses that can snap from 1 – 2.5x magnification at the touch of a button. The system isn’t quite ready for primetime yet — exposure times are still a little long, it can’t zoom continuously, and the assembly is a little big at 29mm — but the team is already considering solutions to those problems and is ready to go to the prototype stage. With all the interest from cellphone manufacturers, we’ll bet they solve those problems right quick.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Announcements

Incredibly, Engadget Mobile’s still celebrating its glorious relaunch — and why shouldn’t it? Celebrations mean giveaways, and today, “giveaway” means a shiny new Sanyo M1 for Sprint. Equipped with a full gig of onboard storage, the M1’s pretty much a music fan’s dream, so why not take a crack at winning it? Click on!

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

Good news for those of you in Taiwan (and America, too) who can’t wait to get acquainted with HTC’s Touch, as its creator has reportedly announced that it will be deployed shortly in its “home base,” with an American launch to go down before the dawn of 2008. Peter Chou, chief executive officer at HTC, has purportedly stated that it would “only be fitting if the first country in Asia to sell the Touch was Taiwan,” and also noted that Chunghwa Telecom would be its “exclusive partner in distributing and retailing the handset” in that country. On the home front, all we know is that the Touch should indeed be found on American shelves before the year’s end, but here’s to hoping it’s closer to today than December 31st.

Read – HTC launch in Taiwan
Read – HTC launch in USA

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

Ok, it’s time to coronate the Engadget mascot — we know how you’ve waited to find out whose character is going to appear on Engadget (and take home the Wii). We’re just as stoked as you. Whenever you’re ready, the winners are posted after the break.

Continue reading Winners of the Engadget Mascot contest!

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

While yesterday’s WWDC may have been relatively uneventful for those keeping an eye out for hardware refreshes, Steve made sure he showed off the desktop of Leopard in as much detail as possible. Interestingly, the newfangled dock he managed to brag about may have looked a tad familiar, and as a clever user over at Maxasia points out, it is. According to him, the dock revealed yesterday sports a “troubling resemblance” to Sun’s Project Looking Glass. Of course, Apple’s icons do look a bit less grainy, but especially when you consider the silver platter that the shortcuts seem to hover over in both iterations, you can certainly start to to see the similarity. But hey, it’s not like Apple hasn’t been down this road before, right?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!