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You can always depend on iLuv to make snazzy new cases for the latest Appleproducts and now they have with their latest additions for the iPod Nano 5th generation.

The cases range from hard clear plastic to soft, but irregardless, they are all super stylish and the perfect new suit for your iPod Nano.

The designs are hip and trendy and will not only make your iPod Nano pop but protect it too. Some of the designs include the icc306 city series which has different cases for New York, London, Paris and Sydney.

Another series, the icc307, is covered in retro-style record players, headphones and speakers.  There is even the icc304 case designed as a camera to enhance the newest iPod Nano feature. The new iLuv cases for iPod Nano 5th gen retail anywhere from $19.99 to $24.99 respectively.

Television housings, cathode ray tubes, computers, monitors, and other imported electronic waste items not salable at the Alaba Market in Lagos, Nigeria, are dumped in this nearby swamp.

Credit: Basel Action Network
A policy analysis published Thursday in the journal Science calls our attention to something it's much easier to turn away from: what happens to outdated computer monitors, cell phones that aren't smart enough, cables that once powered discarded laptops, even old calculators.

Much of this waste, which is largely a product of the developed world, ends up in the developing world, and the hazardous materials it contains accumulate in the food chain and in poor children's blood. In Africa, China, and India, markets for secondhand electronics are having a terrible impact. Children in Guiyu, China have high levels of lead in their blood and swamps in Nigeria overflow with discarded electronics.

So what can we do about it? The United States, one of the largest producers of electronic waste, is one of 23 member countries that has not ratified the United Nations' Basel Convention, which would regulate the movement of hazardous electronic materials across international borders.

A bill in the Senate (S. 1397) would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to award grant money for recycling research and ask the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a database of green electronic materials. According to the authors of the Science article, the European Union and the state of California both have complex and inconsistent waste policies, but we can still learn from them:

For example, Californians are willing to pay extra for "green" electronics products (e.g., containing fewer toxic substances, capable of being economically recycled) and to drive up to 8 miles to drop-off products for environmentally sensitive recycling. In addition, political mandates and economic incentives are key tools for engaging manufacturers,who will need to assume greater responsibility for designing electronic products that contain safer materials and are easily managed after consumers no longer want them.

However, the long-term solution, the authors suggest, is to change the way electronics are made in the first place:

The MP5 Player Digital Camera NES Games FM Radio SD Slot – 8 GB is a device with an awful name but very familiar icons.

It has no real description so I’ll basically piecemeal this together…The 3.5″ MP5 player with digital camera and SD slot supports NES and Game Boy games, so it’s like having an emulator on the go.

It also features playback for various MP3 and movie formats for instance AVI, WMV, or WMA.

It comes in the colors Black / Yellow / Pink / Blue / Grey and supports many different languages. On top of all that, it sports icons that look very familiar to the iPhone.

MP5 Player Digital Camera NES Games FM Radio SD Slot – 8 GB retails for $75. However, getting the NES games on this device is for you to figure out.

Is Apple's iPhone-without-a-phone the McDonald's Happy Meal of mobile communications? 

Peter Farago of the mobile analytics firm Flurry uses data from its November report to make the case that Apple (AAPL) is quietly — and successfully — using the iPod touch to lock in a loyal base of under-age users who will eventually become the next generation of iPhone buyers.

"While it is clear that the iPhone has significant short-term revenue value for Apple," he writes in a report issued Sunday, "Flurry believes that the iPod Touch holds more long-term strategic value for Steve Jobs and team."

"In terms of Life Stage Marketing," Farago writes, "the practice of appealing to different age-based segments, Apple is using the iPod Touch to build loyalty with pre-teens and teens, even before they have their own phones (think: McDonalds' Happy Meal marketing strategy). When today's young iPod Touch users age by five years, they will already have iTunes accounts, saved personal contacts to their iPod Touch devices, purchased hundreds of apps and songs, and mastered the iPhone OS user interface." (link)

The evidence that Apple's strategy is working, Farago says, can be seen in a graph of end-user sessions recorded over the past six months.

Flurry, according to Farago, tracks 15 million end-user sessions every day from its "analytics solution" code embedded in 3,000 applications on 4 platforms: Apple's iPhone OS ( both iPhone and iPod Touch), Research in Motion's (RIMM) Blackberry, JavaME and Google (GOOG) Android.

The graph above shows that the iPod touch's share of those user sessions has grown 4 points over the past six months — the same as Android despite starting from a much larger user base. While the iPhone continues to grow in user sessions, its share in Flurry's data has dropped from 57% to 50%.

Even more significant, according to Farago, is that kind of things the kids are doing with their iPod touches.

"Anecdotally," he writes, "we know the 'iPod Touch Generation' is made up of heavy MySpace, Facebook and SMS users, who voraciously share their lives with, and influence their ever-expanding social graph. Importantly, this also includes promoting products they like. Empirically, Flurry compared how iPod Touch session usage has changed over the last six months across key application categories important to this demographic; namely, Social Networking and Games."

Farago's empirical evidence is displayed in the two charts below, which show the iPod Touch growing faster than both the iPhone and the Android devices in Flurry's Social Networking and Games categories.

Scientists infused donor lungs with an anti-inflammatory gene, a treatment that might increase the number of organs available for transplant. [Image courtesy of Science/AAAS].

A new gene therapy treatment designed to reduce inflammation can prevent damage in donor lungs, potentially making more organs available for transplant.

According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, about 1,800 people in the United States are currently waiting for a lung transplant.

Researchers from the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Toronto had previously developed a novel system to improve the health of donor lungs, which mimics normal physiological conditions by continuously pumping oxygen, proteins and nutrients into the injured organs. In the new study, published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers infused the lungs with the gene for a molecule called Il-10, which reduces inflammation.

Both pig and human lungs given the treatment functioned better than untreated organs, with better blood flow and less swelling, an affect that lasted up to 30 days. And the treated lungs functioned better when transplanted into pigs.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times,

They then took human lungs that were considered too damaged for transplantation and subjected them to the same procedure. The treatment significantly improved blood flow through the lungs and improved their ability to take in fresh oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. The higher levels of IL-10 persisted in the lungs for 30 days, suggesting that the procedure could also reduce rejection of the organs. The lungs were not implanted in humans.

The procedure "not only may result in improved preservation of lungs [before transplantation] but also may repair lungs otherwise not suitable for transplantation," Dr. David S. Wilkes of the Indiana University School of Medicine wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.

But several questions remain, he said. Implanting lungs from a human donor might present more problems. And the use of adenoviruses has caused complications in some gene-therapy experiments when the virus inserted the added gene at an inappropriate location.

Keshavjee said the team hopes to begin human trials in a year or so.

When it comes to music-playing mirrors, they have been very few and far between. As a matter of fact, it has been quite a while since we wrote about one. Fortunately this new MP3 Shower Mirror, isn’t just practical, it’s also wireless and fog free.
 
The Sharper Image MP3 Wireless Speaker Fog Free Shower Mirror makes sure that you stay safe while listening to your Mp3 player’s tunes in the shower.

The way it works is that your Mp3 player docks itself in a transmitter which in turn transmits your music wirelessly to the fog free shower mirror up to 100 feet away.

The shower mirror comes with suction cups to attach to the bathroom wall and it also works as a digital clock. The system also comes with four built-in 2 watt speakers and operates on 4 AAA batteries. You can pick it up now from The Sharper Image for $69.99. Yes, the Sharper Image is back, believe it or not.

The world of iPhone/iPod gloves is starting to get more and more crowded.

A few weeks ago we posted about Dots Gloves, and before that we talked about TouchTec gloves, the premium brand of all touchscreen enabled gloves.

However, for those of you looking for another affordable option, check out Echo Touch gloves.

These gloves are available of both men and women, and they cost just $30.00a pair. But what makes them especially unique is that they come in a big selection of color choices.

Verizon Wireless and Motorola officially launched the Droid phone this morning at an event in New York. The announcement confirmed the device specifications that leaked last week--and made official the phone's rumored $199.99 price.

Verizon's "Droid Does" ad campaign has already positioned the smartphone as a direct competitor to Apple's iPhone. The Droid's combination of features and price--which essentially match those of the iPhone 3GS--also put Verizon and Motorola in a strong position to challenge the prestige and smart phone market share that AT&T and Apple have enjoyed for the past two years.

The Droid is the first device to run the second generation of Google's Android operating system, which the company released to developers yesterday. Android 2.0 adds support for the ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange e-mail server and makes it easier for users to access contacts and multiple e-mail accounts. Android 2.0 also supports HTML5, the next major revision of the core markup language of the Web; eventually, the W3C hopes that HTML5 will replace the need for proprietary "rich-content" plugins such as Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

A few of the Droid's features--such as a physical keyboard, built-in voice recognition for many applications, and multitasking--could give it a slight edge over the iPhone. The biggest potential advantage, however, is Verizon's 3G network, which is much larger than AT&T's. iPhone owners tend to use much more bandwidth than other AT&T customers, which has slowed Web browsing, e-mail syncing, and overall application performance, as well as increasing the number of dropped calls that users experience.

Currently, many users and analysts assume that Verizon will be better able to support the network traffic that such a device generates--but just how well remains to be seen.

The Droid is the first Verizon smartphone that will support outside applications. Indeed, the number of applications available is one area where Apple is likely to maintain a significant edge over Google, at least for a while. Apple has already approved more than 100,000 applications for download from its iPhone App Store; Google is its next closest competitor, with just over 10,000 applications available in its Android Marketplace.

Analysts are skeptical that Apple will hold the lead, however, as the Droid is just the first of a wave of Android phones expected from major carriers such as Verizon Wireless. On Tuesday, research and consulting firm Gartner predicted that Google's Android platform will be more popular than the iPhone OS by 2012.

The iPhone has radically changed the smart phone game in just over two years; I can't wait to see what some solid competition does for the field.

Apple and AT&T have adopted a close variant of AT&T's standard smartphone data plan, starting with 450 minutes, 200 SMS text messages, 5000 night/weekend minutes, rollover minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile for $59.99/mo.. Family plans start at $80/mo., raising minutes to 700 with unlimited night/weekend minutes.
Current AT&T customers can add iPhone service to their existing plan for $20/month; new customers essentially pay standard AT&T rates plus $20/month per iPhone.
Enthusiastic texters users can blow through iPhone's 200 SMS message quota in a hurry. AT&T offers more expensive plans for these users; upgrading to 1500 texts adds another $10, and unlimited texting is available for $20. (We speculate that iPhone's lack of internet chat is an intentional omissions designed to let AT&T sell service upgrades.)
Apple and AT&T state that all iPhone plans require a two-year service commitment. However, iPhone buyers have discovered two workarounds.
With a sufficiently poor credit record, an AT&T store can provide you with a special code to enter in iTunes activation that enables you to obtain a contract-free, month-to-month service plan at a higher price about $86/month.
If you buy from Apple, which does not perform an in-store credit check, you can enter an invalid social security number during iTunes activation to force a credit check failure. iTunes will then let you buy a pay-as-you-go "GoPhone" plan. We recommend against using a random number — if it turns out to be in use, you've committed identity theft. 999-99-9999 seems to be a truly invalid number, but we have not tested this.
Both of these methods have a higher monthly cost than the standard plans, though, so the benefit is marginal.
Customers who are currently under contract with other carriers may have to pay cancellation fees to the other carrier to terminate service early. AT&T does not offer a fee reimbursement option.

iPhone is synced from one Mac or PC — sort of. We're used to floating our Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones among Macs and using iSync (along with .Mac sync) to keep all the Macs and phone in sync. A change made in any one location updates all the others. At first this did not seem to be possible with iPhone — we thought we would have to pick a master Mac and stick with it. But we've since discovered that we can set iTunes on another computer to merge Calendars and Contacts with those already on iPhone.

But the process of merging calendars and contacts can be very slow, especially if you have thousands of calendar entries or contacts. And, iPhone forgets its sync settings at your previous Mac or PC, so you have to repeat the merge process every time you move from machine to machine. So while you can sync it among multiple machines, in practice it's something of a hassle.

Music, Podcasts and Video likewise sync only from one Mac, but there is no merge feature — each type of is completely replaced. But like other iPods, you can at least transfer purchased music and videos from iPhone to your other iTunes-authorized machines.

The upshot is that you can sync your contacts and/or calendars at one Mac or PC (perhaps a work location), and music at another (such as home), but there is not a true multi-device sync. This is an odd omission, since Apple's iSync tool supports multi-device sync with other mobile phones.

Good news for all those users with a Nokia N97 out there is that the Firmware v20 for Nokia N97 has started to roll out and is now being made available for users to download to their devices.
The update, which is region specific for now, brings along a lot of new features, a lot of bug fixes and a new interface design that everyone will love.
Following are the new most noticeable features of the Firmware v20 for the Nokia N97.

• Improved touch screen scrolling.
• Ovi Maps 3.1 with 3-D Maps.
• Nokia e-mail, Ovi Contacts and Ovi Store.
• VoIP support.
• Improved battery and memory performance
• Improved image and video stability

Here is how to update to Firmware v20 using your device. Set your device to alert you when new software updates are available.

1. Select Applications > Software Update in your device's menu.
2. Choose the applications you'd like to update.
3. Follow the instructions on the device display.

You may also be able to update individual applications even if there is no software update available for your device.
For instructions on how to update through PC, follow this page.

iPhone provides basic email services. Like every other part of iPhone, it's surprisingly easy to use; iPhone provides implicit guidance every step of the way. Composing, filing and deleting email is simple. The message list includes a two-line preview of each message's content. (This can be changed from zero to five lines.)
iPhone's "intelligent keyboard" is outstanding. It uses predictive techniques both to improve keystroke accuracy and to correct typos. Predictive text has gotten a bad rap in the past, but iPhone's implementation is excellent. Our iPhone correctly interpreted words so badly mistyped that we doubt a human could have correctly guessed the intended word. It even learns new words you enter, and automatically adds your contact names to its dictionary.
There are a few omissions — no BCC option, and you can't create mail folders, even if you're using IMAP mail. Nor can you delete multiple messages in one swoop. But it does support SSL and encrypted authentication, helping to ensure security.

Opera is no doubt one of the most sophisticated web-browsers for mobiles and smartphones, and it just got a whole lot better for Nokia phones.

The new Opera 10 Mobile beta for Nokia and symbian smartphones brings a whole new generation of mobile browsing to life, all with some new features and a totally new interface.
The crisp, new look introduces the Speed Dial, tabbed browsing and the always convenient password manager to Opera Mobile. Opera Mobile 10 beta is optimized for both touchscreen and keypad-style navigation. Here is what the new Opera 10 Mobile beta looks on the Nokia N97.



The major focus was put on performance and that's what makes this release twice as faster than its predecessor. Opera Turbo is also integrated, saving end users both time and money with its server-side compression technology.

For those not having a smartphone, they can still download Opera Mini 5 Beta to play around with almost the same features.

iPhone is every bit as impressive as Apple makes it out to be, and then some. It didn't take long to become enthusiastic; iPhone really is a breakthrough device. Yet, with the possible exception of voicemail, there is no single thing that iPhone does that's really new among the smartphones it aims to usurp. Like iPod, iPhone simply does it all better far, far better than any other device.