Nat-2 created these pair of shoes that unzips and transform into a pair of sandals.

The Lean and Clean Balancing Machine Bookshelf is not only a cool looking bookshelf but also serves many purposes. The most functional being that it is not fixed in one position. This bookshelf is always balancing on one round peg in the wall. It keeps the dust off since, it won’t rest on flat surface for a long time. Everytime you take a book off of one side, the whole shelf will tilt. Another useful feature is that the counterbalances are decorative frames. You can put tiny flowers like the ones in the picture or real pictures of you looking scared while going down a roller coaster last year at Six Flags.

First one is the product on the left. They call it the SteakHouse Grill. It’s pretty much a steak toaster. You put your steak into the middle and the electric grill heats it from the sides. The fat grease drip to the bottom which also reduces smoke. It’s $199, so why don’t you have it yet? Oh yeah, I can’t find a way to buy it.

Second (to the right), is a Tetris ice block manufacturer. It’s a concept design that they named “Tetrice.” It’s an ice tray with Tetris block shapes so you can play Tetris as long as ice doesn’t melt. So, this is great for when you’re outside in below freezing temperatures and you got nothing to do.

Designed by Andrea Cingoli, Paolo Emilio Bellisario, Cristian Cellini and Francesca Fontana. These pen caps can serve as a cutlery.

Turn your favourite office tool from your desk in a common cutlery…this is din-ink. A set of pen caps, including a fork-cap, a knife-cap and a spoon-cap, that replaces the normal pen cap during lunch time! All caps are made by annually renewable resources, like natural starch and fibres, to be 100% biodegradable and atoxic, warranting the best alimentary use. Dispensing each set in a compostable packaging the whole set is designed to respect the environment. Now give your office ballpoint pen a good excuse to be gnawed by your teeth: use them for din-ink.

Michael Harris designed this concept idea for a nail assist. It helps to strike the nail with a bigger metal area at the top. It also helps you strike the nail down straight. The third benefit is the protection to your fingers. If you still hit your fingers even with this device, you do not have the sense of touch and sight.

My initial thought about it is that it’s fun just navigating through the menu. I thought that when you play video, you can play it portrait or landscape mode. It seems to only play in landscape mode. Also, I’ve read before that the iPod Touch has inferior screens compared to the iPhone.

I noticed that right away when watching a dark video (not the kind of dark that includes capes, Big Ben and howling…I’m not sure what I’m referencing). I figured it was just a result of a poor LCD screen. My phone is like that when you’re not looking at it straight-on, the blacks look inverted and seems like it’s brighter than other colors. It seems like early iPod Touches have defective screens. Now Apple has officially announced that there is definitely a problem. Since the iPhone has been out for more than three months, I didn’t consider the Touch as a first-gen device. Well personally, the screen isn’t a big issue. I’ve had no problems with it when doing other things with it, especially web browsing.

Web Browsing With Safari

When I first saw the announcement of the iPod Touch, the first thing I thought of was browsing the web on Safari while laying down on the couch while watching a Mets game or IMing friends while on the water closet that Thomas Crapper made famous as Patrick Norton puts it.

Playing with Safari was pretty fun but when you get into it and try to browse like you would on a desktop or laptop, you realize it’s really slow. When you zoom in to read text, it looks like Google maps when you zoom in. It looks like it’s loading a jpeg everytime you zoom or scroll. It’s a good thing it doesn’t have flash or pages with flash would come to a halt. This is why I think that Apple didn’t include Flash support in the iPhone and iPod Touch. It would probably crash it. It already freezes when you goto a content-heavy site. It froze on my when I visited my iGoogle page. I have about a dozen widgets and it kept getting hung up. Same problem with Yahoo.

It’s not like that’s why I got this for. I got this for when I think of something, I can Google it without having to get my laptop, startup it, wait for windows to load, log in to my user account, wait for windows to load and then start firefox. So far, it’s been great for that. Although, I missed the Mets game.

Music

Music playback it pretty straightforward. Press the Music button on the home dock, select the way you want to browse your music, find your music, and play. Not much has changed. Coverflow is something that I never really liked. When I listen to music, I don’t listen to one album at a time anymore. I had to when I had CD’s. I don’t need to load each album, one at a time. It feels like going backwards. I just like to play my playlist and shuffle the albums.

I never get an urge to play a specific song. Sometimes when I’m at a party, I want to play a song for everyone, but usually they don’t have a stereo with an iPod dock or a RCA stereo to 1/8″ headphone cable laying around. They’ll have a computer but of course I can’t copy the songs from my iPod to their computer. I could try downloading and installing a program like Senuti but at this point, I’m sober which means I’m knocking over the ice luge and nobody wants that.

YouTube, Other Features

This is the first thing that came up when I clicked on the YouTube icon, “YouTube Not Available.” Why? I don’t know. I was able to click on the other buttons and they played fine. This is one of my favorite features, actually. The videos look way better than on youtube.com. the H.264 conversion look great. I thought that they converted the compressed videos on youtube but I guess that they converted the original, uploaded videos.

Another feature, I like is Contacts. I don’t use the iContact or whatever it’s called on OSX, but entering contacts was easy and fun on the Touch. I really could’ve used this feature last week. A potential client called me but I had nothing but my cell phone on me. I couldn’t take down the number. I told him my email address but I don’t think he got the right spelling.

So this is my new iPod of choice, the 3rd generation iPod Nano. It’s been called the Fat iPod, iPod Fatty or the iFatty. This was caused by early pictures which was taken with a straight-on angle. Steve Jobs even called it the fatty iPod when introducing it. It’s nothing like that when you actually hold it.

I liked my 1st gen Nano when I had it. The only issue was that I listen to a lot of podcasts and more and more video podcasts were coming out. This is why I went out and buy a 5.5 gen iPod with Video. I considered a Zune but the software for it wasn’t great for podcasts. I didn’t like the Sandisk Sansa’s buttons. The Creative Zen seemed old and bulky. I didn’t care about the other features that the iPod doesn’t have like a FM antenna or voice recording.

What I liked about the 1st gen Nano was not only its small form factor but how quickly it was about to browse through the menu to change songs since it has solid state based storage and its battery life. This new one promises 24 hours for music and 5 for video. Ars Technica reported that the UI (User Interface) was demanding and slowed down the new iPods, but I don’t really see what they were saying. Maybe they meant it for the hard-drive based iPod Classic or I read it wrong.

Tempo is a conceptual design of an external hard drive that also serves to protect users from accidentally deleting files. It lights up red when something has been deleted. This looks pretty cool but I don’t know how they’ll fit a 250 GB hard drive into that shape and size.

This looks like just a concept but a designer named Yong-Seong Kim designed this DAP that unfolds to play CDs and MP3 CDs. It looks cool but not very functional as you can’t just put it in your pocket or backpack when playing a CD. What it would be good for is if you go someplace to sit down and there’s CDs around like a library. Although it would be weird to just listen to a CD at the library without taking it home and ripping it to your computer.

I’m gonna build this in my house. Click on image for slightly more info.