Still haven’t found that case you’ve been looking for? At last, the promise land. Designer Tjeerd Veenhoven has crafted a partly nifty, partly hilarious new wind-powered iPhone charger / case, appropriately dubbed iFan. In theory, at least, this here case would wrap your iPhone up for protection and then catch wind gusts from wherever, in turn rejuvenating your phone as you talked and walked. There’s even a bicycle attachment mockup for those who’d rather place it on their handlebars and kick things up a notch. Unfortunately, there’s no word on whether the process can be reversed (i.e. if the blades can be turned into a battery-powered cooling machine when you’re at full capacity), nor a hard on-sale date. But hey, at least there’s no jailbreak requirement.

Fan of the original 1,500mAh Mophie Juice pack for the iPhone 4? Sure, we certainly were when we reviewed it a few months back. So let us introduce you to the new Mophie Juice Pack Plus featuring a bigger 2,000mAh battery that more than doubles the life of Apple’s non-removable iPhone 4 battery. Unfortunately, the extra oomph bumps the price from $79.95 to $99.95 and adds another 1mm of bulk to the pack — not that a minor size bump should matter too much when you’re already strapping your svelte phone to a battery sled. It’s available now in black with yellow, Engadget Mobile magenta, and classic Engadget cyan coming soon.

It took half a score to actually get real, but did you know that it takes but two minutes to construct a 2011 Chevrolet Volt? Okay, we lied — one minute, fifty-five seconds. Hit play below to enter what Kenny Loggins would describe as “The Danger Zone.”

Thinking of grabbing Looxcie’s remarkable Bluetooth-based Borg-cam as a $200 stocking stuffer this year? Hold on a twirl, and make sure you’re paying for the one that actually plays nice with your mark’s favorite smartphone. You see, the company had to make a hardware modification this week to the original Looxcie to make it compatible with iOS devices, and while that’s complete now, you’ll want to buy the new Looxcie LX1 if your giftee owns an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Otherwise, you’ll be buying a device that’s Android-exclusive for the very same price. Got an Android phone to begin with? We expect the seething anger of Looxcie early adopters will soon afford you some deep discounts on the now-inferior original. PR after the break.

Sharing is caring, and imaging devices that pack pico projectors sure do make it easy to care — assuming you’re in a dimly-lit room with a flat, color-free surface at your disposal. BenQ‘s DV S11 is the latest, a 1080p zoomless camcorder that exists in the Flip style and can also capture five megapixel stills. No specs are listed for the projector itself, except that it’s said to be able to push a 50-inch picture out its hole — presumably only if you’re at the bottom of a cave or in some similarly light-free environment. The combo is available now in Hong Kong priced at $2,399 HKD, which equates to about $300 American.

Speeding is easy to do, and like it or not having someone else in the car nagging you about it actually can help. What to do if your mother is unavailable? Check out Slow Down in the App Store. It’s a product of the Belgian organization OVK, Parents of Children Killed in Road Accidents, and it has a very simple idea: if you drive too fast it slows down your music, as demonstrated below. Cross the limit and your thumping beats get run through molasses, but get back to a legal speed and Joanna Newsom’s lilting highs stop sounding like a zombie’s baleful lamentations. We’re not entirely sure whether the app works outside of its native land at this point, and given how unreliable the indicated speed limits in navigation software tend to be we’re not sure we want it to. But, if you have a bad habit you can’t kick, this free app might just help.

So, we don’t mind a small home renovation project every now and then, and this is one we’re seriously considering. Instructables has posted a step-by-step guide on installing sliding doors which are powered by an air compressor, and which look super cool. As you’ll see in the video which is after the break, it’s a pretty simple idea, which requires a pretty fair amount of work, but the results are very impressive. The sliding doors are controlled by a panel switch and have a key which can lock them open or shut, and the door also boasts a vent above it for air ventilation after operation. Yes, we actually want one of these.

Taking an underwater self-portrait isn’t the easiest thing in the world — even if you’re fond of robot DIY — but this concept camera won a Red Dot award for capturing more than typically meets the eye. The UNDERABOVE floats like a buoy thanks to a pair of watertight ballast compartments, takes images with twin cameras above and below, then stitches the result into a turquoise vertical panorama viewable on the inbuilt LCD screen. If and when this device actually gets produced (and gains some serious image stabilization) the worlds of fish and man will never be the same.

Fring is working hard to seize on this (hopefully temporary) gap in the video chat firmament, where Google is lacking in a first party mobile video chat solution, Apple’s supposedly open FaceTime standard has yet to be opened, and Skype is dragging its feet on a mobile video call implementation. We’re not sure how long that will last, but until then we’re happy to have Fring sprucing up its own cross-platform solution. Fring just pushed out new Android and iPhone versions of its app that include “DVQ,” or “Dynamic Video Quality” for video calling. It’s pretty simple: the video quality automatically (and asynchronously) adjusts to use your available bandwidth, with an emphasis on keeping the audio stream pure and uninterrupted. It might sound like a no brainer, but it’s a nice touch — particularly for folks straying from WiFi and trying their luck with carrier data. Check out a video of DVQ in action after the break.

It’s said to be “The world’s simplest cellphone.” That’s a bold claim from anyone let alone a previously unknown (in gadget circles anyway) Dutch team of creatives over at John Doe Amsterdam who wanted to build a basic phone — the most basic phone ever — that wasn’t as dull and boring as other affordable phones on the market. So is it? Well, it certainly is basic. In the age of smartphones and cheap featurephones, John’s phone is more clearly defined by what it lacks than what it has: no fancy color touchscreen display; no camera; no 3G radio, WiFi, Bluetooth or even GPRS data; no FM radio; no user-accessible storage; and no music player or apps of any kind. It can’t even send a text message. It’s just a quad-band GSM phone with an ink pen and paper notepad tucked neatly into its capacious recesses. That’s right, pen and paper. So, it’s definitely basic, but is it simple to use? Read on to find out.

John’s Phone review

To be honest, the John’s Phone Business edition we reviewed looks and feels like a cheap child’s toy. An €80 child’s toy to be sure but a child’s toy nonetheless. And that’s ok, we guess, considering the unsophisticated audience it apparently targets including tweeners, the elderly, or twenty-somethings whose aim is to be conspicuously cynical when placing their cellphone on top of the bar. While John Doe claims that the phone is manufactured from high-quality plastic, it feels like the stuff you’d find liberally slathered around a Barbie Dream House. The rough seam that runs the circumference of the handset doesn’t exactly elicit a sense of quality either. Even the trio of shiny silver switches seem to be made of the same plastic “chrome” found adorning the bumpers and headlights of Revell model car kits. The phone’s also incredibly light at 3.35 ounces considering its plump 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.8 inch dimensions — making it almost exactly the size and weight of a standard deck of playing cards.

The most notable design flare on the John’s Phone is a clear plastic door on the back of the handset that hides a 32-page paper address book with a notepad and tongue-in-cheek “Games” page dedicated to tic-tac-toe. There’s even an integrated ink pen that could easily be mistaken for a stylus. The company jests that it can be used even when the phone is switched off. Ha.

The black on white display at the top of the John’s Phone is tall enough to present the user with two lines of recently dialed phone numbers (the volume slider controls the scrolling) or the signal strength, position of the precarious on / lock / off switch (more on that later), and the battery status. When the 1,200mAh battery is full, the display will show the word “JOHNS” along the right. The lower the battery the fewer the letters displayed. Cute. While the display location is certainly novel, it’s also impractical to view when tapping out phone numbers on the keypad. So far we’ve only fully charged the device once… about two weeks ago! The company promises “more than three weeks” standby from the non-removable battery and we believe it.

John’s Phone comes in a variety of adorable sounding colors like sweet (pink), tree (brown), business (black), snow (white), grass (green), and even a limited edition €100 “bar” (it’s gold, get it?) for those looking to make the ultimate ironical statement. You’ll also see variations in the begin and end call keys depending upon the model chosen. These vary between a pair of portly red (end call) or green (begin call) tots, “hello” and “bye” text, or a small dot and bomb with a lit fuse that would have made Mel Blanc proud once he overcame his confusion.

So, how did it work? Well, to make and receive calls it worked fine. The ringer was suitably loud and the vibration was strong enough to get noticed in a pocket. The audio quality during calls was also decent — not spectacular but not awful either. There’s no built in address book but you can easily assign speed dial numbers to each key on the dial pad making the phone dead simple to operate once configured. There’s no speakerphone but this ultra-low-end handset surprisingly ships with an earphone / mic that plugs into the micro-USB jack for hands-free calling.

Now for the bad stuff. Along the left-hand side you’ll find three switches. At the top is a volume switch for adjusting the earpiece sound and for navigating your recent calls list. It’s not so much a switch as it is a spring-loaded dial that rotates about 90-degrees up and 90-degrees down by grabbing a small (very small) nub on the top of the arc. In practice adjusting the in-call volume or navigating through the call log is a needlessly difficult operation since the dial works best by grabbing the nub with a fingernail. That’s ok (but far from ideal) when pulling the switch down as you can hook a fingernail over the nub. Moving it up one-handed, however, requires a frustrating push on the very smooth plastic dial with the pad of your finger or thumb. More often than not, the dial slips beneath the finger necessitating a repeat action. Ugh.

Moving down from the volume rocker you’ll find a three-way switch to control the ringer (loud / normal / silent — vibrate is always on) and a second matching three-way below that for on / lock / off. Both these switches deserve a special place in Gadget Hell for the very worst in industrial design. Not only do they require a fingernail to operate, they also don’t work most of the time.

Wrap up

So is the John’s Phone “The world’s simplest cellphone.” No. The fact that all three of the device’s switches are so frustrating to use is simply unforgivable on such a basic cellphone that’s supposedly rooted in “great design.” We wish that the company had spent as much time on the phone’s industrial design as it did on its slick promotional materials and cutesy graphics. Even then, you’d better be sure that the simplicity is worth the €70 – €100 price tag (depending upon model) — for that you could take home a fully-loaded 3G featurephone from Nokia. A nod, perhaps, as to why the John’s Phone exists.

After a New York Times magazine article exposed his bizarre business tactic of courting the worst customer feedback possible so that infuriated buyers would leave negative commentary online, boosting his Google search results, DecorMyEyes.com eyeglass proprietor Vitaly Borker has been arrested on charges of cyberstalking, making interstate threats, mail fraud, and wire fraud.

The original story about DecorMyEyes, published on November 26, detailed the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Borker’s tactics of harassing, cheating, and bullying customers, sometimes under pseudonyms and often with threats of obscenity and violence, to the point that several of them contacted the police. He engaged in these tactics, as well as selling counterfeit and defective eyeglasses, specifically to take advantage of a loophole in Google’s search algorithm that didn’t differentiate between positive and negative mentions of a company in ranking sites in search results. As a results, DecorMyEyes’ Google rankings were stellar.

A Twitter account claiming to belong to DecorMyEyes tweeted a link to the Times story the day after it was published and added “Have a look at this publicity stunt! WOW we are famous.”

Google responded several days later on its official blog to say that it’s made modifications. “In the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience,” the blog post explained. “The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.”

Borker was arrested and due in federal court in New York on Monday, and according to CNBC agents found weapons and ammunition in his home at the time of arrest. The charges of making interstate threats and cyberstalking each have a maximum penalty of five years jail time, whereas if Borker is convicted of either mail fraud or wire fraud he could face 20 years in prison for each.

It’s hardly a surprise that there’s a cadre of individuals who aren’t too fond of Google’s seemingly omnipresent Street View fleet, but the ending of this dispute is downright absurd. Back in 2008, Aaron and Christine Boring were looking for a little excitement, and decided to find it in a courtroom; the duo sued Google for trespassing on their property while collecting photographs for Street View. According to them, Google’s Street View car ignored the “No Trespassing” sign planted out front, and while they noted that that would’ve accepted a simple apology letter, they had no qualms pushing for damages when that wish fell upon deaf ears. The payout? A single dollar. Let’s repeat that: 100 pennies. A buck. Barely enough to buy a Whopper Jr. in Portland, and definitely not enough to do so across the way in Vancouver. We suspect both parties are eager to put the whole mess behind ’em, but if you’ve been looking for a story to prove that America actually isn’t as aimlessly litigious as the world thinks they are… well, this one ain’t it.

Researchers from the CSIRO say it’s possible to deliver broadband via the humble TV aerial. Picture: Lucy Swinstead Source: News Limited

Researchers from CSIRO have developed new technology which could achieve connection speeds to compete with the best: through the tangled piece of metal already attached to most roofs.

“The basic premise is if you get good high quality analogue television you should be able to get reliable high-speed communications,” project leader Ian Oppermann said.

Australia’s sheer size makes universal internet access a huge challenge, with many millions of square kilometres stretching through deserts and mountains from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific and from tropics to snow.

In some places the population is so sparse, Dr Oppermann says they calculate the “nanopeople” per square kilometre.

The Government is rolling out the national broadband network (NBN) which aims to connect 93 per cent of the country to high speed internet via a fibre optic network.

But that still leaves 7 per cent without what is becoming, increasingly, a basic human right.

The NBN promises speeds of at least 100 megabits per second, but the new project team reckon they can match that and connect remote Australia through the spectrum once used for their TV sets.

Most people have access to a television signal and more remote communities have relatively little interference — perfect conditions for low-frequency internet transmission on the VHF/UHF bands.

Australia’s “big bold” internet experiment is being watched by a number of other countries mulling similar plans, many of whom Dr Oppermann said had either completed the shift from analogue TV or were in the process of doing so.

“There are lots of parts of Australia which look a little bit like big parts of Canada, Russia, China, parts of the US, most of Africa from the perspective of where the population is distributed and the sort of conditions that people live in, purely from a communications perspective,” Dr Opperman said.

“I think Australia really stands a chance of being of global test case. If we get it right there is really an opportunity that other countries will follow what Australia is leading with.”

The Government began switching off its analogue TV signals in June and the transition to digital-only transmission is expected to be complete by the end of 2013, five years before the rollout finishes for the NBN.

The spectrum is then expected to be auctioned off for communications purposes and this low-frequency analogue television spectrum could be the perfect solution.

“To give you an analogy, this is beachfront property,” Dr Oppermann said.

“The reason that it’s expensive is that it’s relatively low frequency and low frequencies travel very well. If you’re after reach it’s a very good piece of spectrum to have.”

Unlike current GSM or 3G networks which lose download speed exponential to increasing users, Dr Oppermann said an analogue signal would provide a consistent speed no matter how many users there were.

This high-speed communication could revolutionise life for people living in Australia’s isolated Outback, allowing for virtual appointments with a doctor or government officials.

Six farms on the southern island state of Tasmania will test the technology, which will only work in towns of less than 1000 homes because too many buildings will obstruct the signal, next month ahead of a wider field study.

“It’s not just an idea anymore,” Dr Oppermann said.

“We can demonstrate that it’s actually something useful.”

In what will no doubt be held up as an shining example of irony in the months and years to come, it seems the RIAA has succeeded in shutting down LimeWire… but only the legal part. The LimeWire Store, which legitimately sold online music, will reportedly close on December 31st, and the site itself states that it won’t be taking new customers from now on. Where, oh where will folks get their digital tunes instead? Some might go right back to filching them using LimeWire’s peer-to-peer application, which hasn’t actually been squashed by the injunction. Yes, a rogue group released LimeWire Pirate Edition last month, a version of the original Gnutella P2P client with all the bloat stripped out and premium functionality turned on, which is apparently receiving so welcome a reception in the file-sharing community that the Lime Group felt the need to issue a cease-and-desist to those distributing the software. Yo ho, yo ho…