My brush with the good life: Wearing a $77,000 watch

In the literature of watch geekdom we often bump up against watches that cost well into the six figures, some even in the seven. I take a populist stance on the purchase of watches and encourage the intelligent watch collector to purchase what they can afford or, better yet, save up for a nice watch they can wear forever. I also, for the most part, scoff at any watch over, potentially, $20,000. A few weeks ago I went to the JCK show in Las Vegas, a strange ...
Engadget Podcast 203 – 07.02.2010

Robots, death, Epic Fascination, and tropicalia: genre-surfing tokenism dominates the Engadget Podcast this week.
Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel, Paul Miller
Guest: Chris Ziegler
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Castor - Rude Boy
Hear the podcast
00:02:58 - Motorola Droid X review
00:04:40 - Introducing review scorecards!
00:18:48 - Droid X ad pokes fun at iPhone ...
What if you could commute in a spider robot?
You know, you'd think that ridable spider robots would be one-of-a-kind, yet here we are with our second ridable spider robot in just one month. Sure, the first one might look a bit more tough and intimidating than today's, but that's not what its all about.
Parrot AR.Drone hits the US this September for $299

Parrot promised to reveal the launch details for its AR.Drone at E3 this week, and it's now delivered -- the remote-controlled quadricopter will be available in the U.S. this September for $299. Of course, this is hardly your ordinary remote-controlled quadricopter, as it's not only controlled via WiFi, but via an iPhone, iPad or iPad touch -- something we got well acquainted with both at CES and on the ...
Giant robo-babies crawl out of your nightmares and into reality (video)

We like robots that play soccer, safe wildlife, and clean our stuff. We're not, however, particularly fond of robots who look like extras in horror movies. Such are M3-Kindy and Noby, a pair of bots recently shown at the JST Erato Asada Project symposium in Japan, both designed to study human development by basically pretending to be babies. Noby, pictured above, is a sort of abbreviation for "none-month old baby," and that's ...
MIT student turns his lamp into a living, robotic assistant

This is MIT student Natan Linder's LuminAR robotic lamp, and it makes for a pretty awesome office companion. That's because it's able to beam information around your office from a pico projector and even recognize how you interact with the image, allowing you perform actions such as tapping and typing.
Using gestures, Linder can also command the lamp to perform simple tasks. Is the projection in the way? With a swipe of his hand, the lamp moves to ...
8 technological failures behind the oil cleanup, in images

It's the largest oil spill in American history, and BP's shame has been bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico for over 40 days now. What's being done? Well, in a word, a lot. Swarms of underwater robots, a fleet of ships and a whole army made up of volunteers, the Coast Guard, engineers and workers are considering everything imaginable to stop up the well, which lies 5,000 feet underwater.
Click through the gallery below to see the powerful ...
Robot Wars: The 6 scariest unmanned aerial vehicles

Look out, everybody, because here come the unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as UAVs or drones. They've been flourishing in the Iraq War, starting with just a few unarmed drones when the conflict began in 2003, and now growing in numbers to more than 7,000. Many are packing serious missiles and bombs, and some soon could be autonomous. This is undoubtedly the dawn of an entirely new era of military might: robot wars.
Flying over battlefields in a ...