One of the complaints with the iPhone, other than the fact that AT&T is the carrier, is the fact that it isn’t able to multitask.  I can personally live with the one-at-a-time style of the iPhone… but maybe I don’t know what I am missing. 

The rumor of the day states that a new iPhone is coming this summer and will be more powerful and have the ability to handle multitasking.  Will have to wait and see.

[Via]

I will make this one quick because it isn’t technically gadget related… but Carlos Slim Helu, Forbes richest man, could sure afford to buy a lot of cool gadgets.

“Bolstered by a surge in the share price of his America Movil empire, Slim’s wealth edged ahead of the $53bn fortune amassed by the Microsoft boss Bill Gates, making the portly cigar-smoking 70-year-old the first non-American to hold the top spot since 1994.”

For some reason (a good thing I suppose) terrorists are too damn stupid to light a bomb… they have failed at multiple attempts, the latest being the underwear bomber.  Well what would have happened if the underwear bomber was smart enough to blow himself up with his underwear bomb?

Not to be a spoiler for the video… the title already did that… but the plane would have fared pretty well… hard to say how the passengers would have done.

Iron Man 2 is expected to hit theaters on May 7th, 2010.  Looks like Sam Rockwell will have to deal with Whiplash, fast cars and fast women.  Lots of cool gadgets.

The nerdy dudes at Hack n Mod have figured out how to restore a scratched up iPhone, and de-brand it in the process.  Takes a bit of work but the finished product is stunning.  Read on for the “how to”  restore your iPhone.

Steps to Resurrection:

• Buy a scratched iPhone on eBay
• Gently dry sand external scratches
• Add some water and wet sand
• Polish with a 3M Headlight Lens Restoration Kit (~$15)

[Via]

If you are reading this, chances are you shop on the Internets, and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the Internets is a series of tubes infested with ebil hackers who wants to jack your stuffs.  Enter the SmartSwipe, a tiny black plastic Personal Credit Card Reader and Secure Online Shopping Assistant complete with excessively bright blue LED lights.  But enough conjecture…

Immediately upon opening the box I found one extremely comforting thing – a single CD-sized piece of paper with a three step installation process.  Seriously, it’s Barney friendly – Step 1, go to their website and download the install software – reboot.  Step 2. Plug the USB cable into a USB port (duh!).  Step 3. Start shopping online and follow onscreen prompts – swipe card, etc… That’s it!

So what does this little plastic dongle really do for you that makes you safer from the ebil internet haxx0rs?  Well for starters since you never actually enter your credit card info, even if you’ve got some evil keystroke capturing cootie on your system, the ebil haxx0r behind it will never see your credit card info.  In addition to that, your data is encrypted and that’s pretty cool.

The first time you open the Internet Explorer, after installing the SmartSwipe software and hardware, you are greeted with a their popup that reminds of the three simple steps of using SmartSwipe:

1. Shop – shop online at all of your favorite websites.
2. Click – when a website asks for your credit card number click the SmartSwipe button on your toolbar (this is important).
3. Swipe your credit card and follow the on-screen prompts.

There is a “Don’t show this again” check box, and a couple of help links to help you ease into the process.  The whole process of having to enter your credit card info becomes less painful, you do it once and allow the SmartSwipe to remember it and it will fill in the credit card info for you – I tried it on Buy.com, Amazon.com, and Pricegrabber.com and it worked flawlessly.  Also, some of the information normally exposed on the screen, gets removed by SmartSwipe replaced with blanks and little lock pictures.

On a somewhat negative side, SmartSwipe only works with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, a browser which I use for about five percent of my web browsing – Mozilla support would have made this a much more functional device for me.  On the whole, SmartSwipe still makes a good gift for that naggy relative or friend who constantly gets cooties “somehow” and still shops online.

http://www.smartswipe.ca/

This is a rant about my Chase Business card, the credit card I use to buy most of my gadgets, so while it is not strictly a gadget, it is most certainly a “gadget enabling device”. The short of it is my Chase Business credit card, specifically the Southwest Rapid Rewards card sucks, it sucks hard and with gusto!  At this point some of you may ask “Gee, just how much does Chase Bank suck?  Can we get a visual metaphor?”  Let’s just say that it could probably suck a golf ball through a length of garden hose running from Boston to San Francisco.  Read on for the full details.

Due to a mild masochistic streak, I have used this horrible Chase credit card since 2005, and experienced random declines of totally routine charges.  Mind you, it was never a balance or limit issue, more of the hey lets screw with this guys life for $hit$ and giggles. The “best” part was always the complete and utter lack of communication – nothing like a call or an email notifying me of potential fraud concerns.

Most recent example, a totally routine repeat purchase from a company that I purchase from twice a month for an unremarkable dollar range got declined.  Upon calling Chase at their 800-346-5538 I got greeted by a smug customer service representative who dished out pearls like “our fraud system determined that this charge was suspicious” and the ambiguously clever “the fraud system found the dollar amount of the transaction to be suspicious” – not high not low but “suspicious” (for the record it was not a prime number).  When I asked what they meant more specifically, they could not give me an answer referring back to the unquantifiably magical “fraud system”.  I reminded them that this is a business card, and  that I was trying to use it for standard business transactions (from a company that I have a purchasing history with) and like a four year old child they told me they were sorry.  I asked them if there was something I could do differently so my future charges would not keep getting declined and they suggested that I call them every time before using the credit card, at this point I wasn’t sure if they were done “helping me” and were simply screwing with me.  The helper, hypothetically let’s call her Christine Harwood (since that’s the name she used), finally told me that they “fixed” the problem and to try charging the card again.  Much to my chagrin the card got declined again.  I called back Chase and got the same representative who said, “didn’t I talk to you earlier” and I said “yes” and after that warm bonding experience she proceeded to grill me with additional security questions. She asked for my date of birth, and to completely blow my mind she followed that up by asking my age just in case a potential criminal could not do the math.

To make a short story long, I got them to finally resolve the issue, and I am now in the process of moving my business away from Chase Business Southwest Rapid Rewards Visa Credit Card because their fraud practices suck (see the complete suck references in the initial paragraph)!  To compensate for the wasted time I am considering going into a side business of selling T-Shirts with the following slogans:

· Chase business credit card sucks

· Chase credit cards are the worst

· Chase bank sucks

· Southwest Rapid Rewards credit card sucks

· Southwest business credit card sucks

· Chase customer service is poor

· Chase customer service sucks

· Avoid Chase bank and credit cards

The folks at style-your-garage have come up with some pretty cool garage door skins for garaged doors of all most sizes.  Pick from many options like; an Italian landscape, an alligator, a jet airplane, etc…

Your garage billboard comes complete with a separate, self-adhesive Velcro fastener and can be attached immediately!
The billboard is fitted in the same sort of way as a fly screen at the window.
It doesn’t matter what material (metal, wood, plastic, etc.) the up-and-over garage door is made from. The standard size of the garage billboard is: Height 2.10 m x width 2.45 m.
To install your garage billboard, you will need:
Around 15 – 30 minutes
Possibly someone to help you
A measuring tape or ruler
A felt pen
Scissors / cutters / Stanley knife
Cleaning agent, e.g. spirits
Dry cleaning cloth
Possibly a spirit level

Cool pictures of the garage door art work after the break.

Smart folks at the University of Kobe Gakuin (in Japan) have built an actual hover-chair.  It does about what you would expect a hoverchair to do… it floats around on a cushion of air.  They best part… it can carry Americans as it has a payload of 330-pounds.  Video of it in action after the break.

Let’s hope that cool computers like this become a reality in the near future.

“The device of the flexible display allows a new concept in notebook design growing out of the traditional bookformed laptop into unfurling and convolving portable computer.
By virtue of the OLED-Display technology and a multi touch screen the utility of a laptop computer with its weight of a mini-notebook and screen size of 13 inch easily transforms into the graphics tablet, which with its 17-inch flat screen can be also used as a primary monitor.
On top of everything else all computer utilities from power supply through the holding belt to an interactive pen are integrated in Rolltop. This is really an all-in-one gadget.”