Gadgetory

hi I'm Brian Cooley in from Hollywood welcome to the buzz report first our gadget of the week it's the brand new palm folio sort of a thin client laptop companion to go with your smartphone initially just trio's what it gives you as a big screen and a full-size keyboard for email attachments web access it has its own Wi-Fi access or it can borrow a connection off your 3g trio it has instant on and off that's nice it's thin and sexy and most importantly it scratches that it's that every smartphone user has felt when their screen is too small and the keyboard is too small so what does this thing give me more trepidation than a blonde James Bond playing poker well here's a few reasons the battery life is just five hours that seems rather little for a low-power device that has no hard drive it doesn't run office or anything like that you have to press a button to sync the email from your treo to your folio but what really gets me is that it seems to ask us to start carrying another device at least part of the time if I'm going to start carrying anything more when I'm running around and traveling it's going to be a bottle of bourbon the way I fear the palm engineers have been doing now the news Microsoft's Windows Media Center hasn't exactly sparked a revolution in the living room has it so now they focus on just one piece of furniture the table this is called surface a coffee table computer that's been all the buzz this week using a fisher-price looking version of Windows driven by a giant touchscreen with cameras under the glass it can read barcodes and respond to multiple touches at once you'll see it at t-mobile stores where you'll use that instead of talking to a human to buy a phone that could be a good thing and it's Starwood Hotels properties where it might be a place you'd sit down and order a cocktail in some food right there on the screen kind of the digital version of one of those really unappetizing laminated menus this all sounds very advanced but I wonder this will the surface have the correct touchscreen drivers and dll's to recognize real world inputs like teenage Punk's carving they're moronic tags into it stop check out this buzz-worthy tech developed by a former doctor who before that was a real estate agent and a pizza chef and came up with the technology while roaming around Mardi Gras in 1972 sound like an IPO to you it's called chroma phones a color alphabet that replaces each letter of the 26 with a unique color like this animated poem we're watching L is read you as light yellow v is electric blue which spells love just not correctly it is said that this technology would allow us to embed textual messages into any graphical image so while looking at a Warhol print you could also be reading your phone bill plus things that are colorful already might take on unintentional new meanings like this hot dog on a stick uniform let's decode it ooh not taking the kids there anymore are we and finally a new wrinkle in Google Maps got a lot of buzz this week what they call a street-level view as if you're a pedestrian on the sidewalk it's only enabled for a few major metro areas so far and it's both really cool and really invasive here's cnet's front lobby for example you can see we're able to walk up and down the street turn around 360 zoom in on the plaza recognize faces see who's goofing off and smoking and it gets really interesting when you search a residential address zoom in see the house number what car they own maybe even read the license plate you can basically reverse-engineer the kind of license plate address lookup that most states require a court order to do now this isn't the first tool that lets you do this but coming from google it'll be the first one that gets all kinds of visibility and freaks people out i'm brian cooley this has been the buzz report thanks for watching you