Dave Zatz has an invite to a CES Slingbox event. Neato: New video streaming gear including a touchscreen device.

You'll experience an up close view of Sling's new placeshifting products including WiFi television, ultra-slim Slingboxes, and a next-generation touch screen device.

I just hope it's not mostly echostar-only stuff, since they were acquired. [Zatz]

Every little boy wants to race in the F1 at some point, but does he want to spend $191,500 on a simulator? Cruden's Hexatech simulator can be fully customized for the real F1, NASCAR or WRC experience.

All of the features, including the chassis, wheelbase and track, tire and suspension, engine, gearbox, differentials, aero loading, aero draft, steering, brakes and ABS can be adapted for your personal use, with each simulator coming with three 42-inch TV screens for the racing to be projected onto.

Cruden is claiming it'll last 10 - 15 years, which works out to around $19,150 a year—surely you can spare that from your annual salary? [Cruden via Autoblog]

Think those plastic glasses are filled with Daisy's fresh milk? Wrong! The battery-powered white LEDs light up the opaque plastic, fooling everyone into thinking you're drinking nature's own juice. Instead of gin. [Amazon via OhGizmo]

The importance and relevance of the National Geographic magazine can never be argued against, particularly with their nod to the dawn of a new decade in the form of a HDD pre-loaded with every issue ever published.

The 160GB external hard drive has 100GB spare for storing your own travel photos, videos of volcanoes and the like, or perhaps downloading new digital copies of the magazine too, if it goes for another 100 years.

All of the articles, pictures, even adverts are included on the digital copies, and a DVD is also bundled, providing tips, behind-the-scenes videos and interviews. $199.95 may seem like a lot for a HDD, but if you weigh up the cost of what every magazine would've cost you from the past 121 years, you're actually making a saving [National Geographic via Download Squad via Crunchgear]

UPDATE: Or, you could buy each and every issue on a CD, for under $50

Garmin's 450T GPS is their highest end without an integrated camera, and so, the best discreet outdoor GPS they make. It has a barometer, altimeter, waterproofness, tilt-compensated compass and a receiver sensitive enough for quick fixes in canyons and forests.

The 450 has a 3-inch, 240 x 400 pixel screen, 850MB of internal memory and a MicroSD slot. It works off AAs but with lithium or NiMH cells you can get 16 hours of life. There's a $400 450 model (lacking the t, which is $500) that misses the full payload of North American topographical maps, covering "major trails, urban and rural roads, interstates, highways, coastlines, rivers and lakes as well as national, state and local parks, forests and wilderness areas".

I'm all about cheap, internet enabled smartphone GPS apps for walking and turn by turn, but for the serious outdoorsman who doesn't want to risk ruining or running down batteries in their phone, and wants a full payload of maps for when the internet goes down over the north side of that big mountain, this $500 outdoor GPS seems like the one to have. But man, think about how much smartphone and GPS app $500 buys you these days. You'd have to be really, really serious about the outdoors these days to get a device like this. I'm personally on the fence.

[Business Wire, Garmin Blog, Garmin]

Garmin® Grows in Outdoor Recreation, Adding New Oregon® Handhelds, Garmin Connect™ Compatibility and Free Custom Maps Utility

OLATHE, Kan.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. (NASDAQ: GRMN), the global leader in satellite navigation, today announced the Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 touchscreen GPS devices, the newest of Garmin's next-generation outdoor handhelds now compatible with the online community at Garmin Connect as well as Garmin's free Custom Maps utility for transferring paper or digital maps onto your compatible handheld.

"More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them"

"More than ever, Garmin offers intuitive touchscreen options for anyone exploring and enjoying the world around them," said Dan Bartel, Garmin's vice president of worldwide sales. "Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 provide a bridge between the slimmed-down Dakota™ family and the top-of-line Oregon 550t, all of which work seamlessly with Garmin Custom Maps in planning your adventure and Garmin Connect for reliving the experience and sharing the memories."

Responsive to the touch of a finger, yet resistant to the rigors of nature, Oregon 450t and Oregon 450 simplify navigation through a glove-friendly touchscreen interface. This bright 3" color display is easier than ever to read and use in all conditions. Other key upgrades include user-selectable dashboards, enhanced track navigation, high-speed USB for faster map transfers with your computer, photo navigation and the 3-axis tilt-compensated electronic compass, which shows your heading even when you're standing still, without the need to hold it level. The new dashboards give users the ability to customize the appearance of various pages on your Oregon, including the geocaching, compass, stopwatch and elevation functions. For hikers, cyclists and trail runners, the enhanced track navigation will prove especially useful. When navigating to a destination on an active track, users will see the changes in elevation ahead of them as well as where they've been. Also, waypoints and other key locations along the active route – such as start, end and high and low elevation points – now appear on the map and active route pages. The new Oregon units also include a barometric altimeter, paperless geocaching and wireless exchange of tracks, waypoints, routes and geocaches with compatible Oregon, Dakota, Colorado® and Foretrex® devices.

Both units boast a worldwide shaded relief basemap, and Oregon 450t adds preloaded 100K topographic maps for the entire United States and state-of-the-art 3D elevation perspective. Coverage on the 450t includes major trails, urban and rural roads, interstates, highways, coastlines, rivers and lakes as well as national, state and local parks, forests and wilderness areas. In addition, you can search for points of interest by name or proximity to your location and view descriptive details for terrain contours, topo elevations, summits and geographical points.

Customizing maps for your Garmin outdoor handheld – and downloading your activity afterward - were never easier. Through a few simple steps, Garmin's Custom Maps can bring the details, labels and landmarks of your existing paper or electronic map to a compatible Garmin Oregon, Dakota or Colorado. Compatible with both PC and Mac, this free utility complements the myriad of mapping products already offered for Garmin devices, including City Navigator®, NT for turn-by-turn directions on city streets, Blue Chart® g2, for marine charting, and TOPO U.S. 24K and 100K map software for incredible terrain detail (each sold separately). The power of Custom Maps is exemplified through paper and digital maps labeled for specific events and purposes, such as a college graduation invitation that lists campus buildings; a roadmap of a parade, marathon, 5K or bike race; a park pamphlet showing trailheads; land-management maps of wildlife and game areas; or a historic illustration of an area as it once stood. To walk through the steps, to find and share maps and to join discussions about Garmin Custom Maps, visit http://www.garmin.com/CustomMaps.

Experiences will live on long after the activity has ended, thanks to Garmin Connect's newly announced compatibility with Garmin outdoor handhelds, adding an expansive new product line to the free-to-join online community of more than 17 million activities – with more than 38,000 new activities per day – for sharing, storing, analyzing and enjoying. Outdoor and fitness enthusiasts alike can share activities on Facebook and Twitter, export to Google Earth or relive the activity in table view, calendar view or on a variety of maps including our new embedded Google Earth view.

I'm surprised it's taken this long, to be honest. Microsoft's posted a job offer, seeking a Principle Program Manager, who can "bring Xbox LIVE enabled games to Windows Mobile."

Based at their Redmond HQ, the right person for the job will "focus specifically on what makes gaming experiences "LIVE Enabled" through aspects such as avatar integration, social interactions, and multi-screen experiences."

I imagine to do all that, they'll be needing some top-notch Windows Mobile handsets, and really the Snapdragon-powered HTC HD2 is the only device on the market so far capable of doing it. Not that it at all resembles a device targeted at Xbox gamers. Give me a Zune phone any day of the week. [Microsoft via Engadget and Kotaku]

Image Credit: T3

Joining it's brethren the compass, tape measure and calculator-ruler watch is this flashlight watch. Is it an official Stanley gadget? I dunno. But I still find it inspired: all watches should have built-in LED flashlights.

[Brando]

At what point does a supposed ereader become a tablet? When it has a color screen for viewing photos and YouTube videos? Built-in MP3 player? Someone needs to have a quick word with Paradigm Shift's marketing department.

The company will be announcing two ereaders next week at CES, the 5-inch EER-051 and 7-inch EER-071WF. The first will have all the basic functions with 1GB of flash memory and an SD card slot, and the 7-inch model run on Windows CE, will be fully touchscreen, and Wi-Fi enabled. If you want to watch YouTube videos, chat to friends using E-Buddy and read Microsoft Word, Excel and PDF documents, this is the model for you. Internal memory is 2GB, but a microSD card slot will expand it further.

The 5-inch model will read ANSI, Unicode TXT, DOC, PDF, HTML, FB2, PDB and EPUB ebook formats, with the more capable 7-inch model a few more DRM-addled ebook formats.

Paradigm Shift is obviously keen to keep prices down on these two models, with the 5-inch EER-051 costing $150 (and coming in white, blue, periwinkle, pink, black and silver) and the 7-inch EER-071WF in just black and white for $200, on sale end of February. [Electronista]

Motorola hasn't exactly been shy with telling people how many Android phones they'll be releasing in 2010, so it's no surprise to hear that they'll be showing off "a pair of new phones" at next week's CES.

We try to not put much weight on analysts' speculations, but Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry is confident that Motorola "may announce" two new Android phones, one on AT&T, the second on Verizon. Both will have, according to him, OLED screens and a slide-out QWERTY for the AT&T model, with the same handset shunning MOTOBLUR in favour of the Google Experiences interface.

Could that AT&T model be the Backflip/Enzo we've seen leaked pics of? Though the screen doesn't sound like it's OLED, admittedly. Or perhaps the Sholes or Opus One will make a cameo next week? Stay tuned for our CES coverage, in any case. [Barron's]

Image Credit: Phandroid

We've seen several HD radios with iTunes tagging before, but this is the first time we've seen it pre-installed in a car, ready to drive off the show room floor.

Joining the in-car Wi-Fi available via Ford's Sync system, the iTunes tagging will allow car-owners to buy songs they've just heard on the radio on iTunes. Sync is expected to be rolled out sometime in 2010. [TechRadar]

MacRumors has uncovered a 2007 trademark application from a secret Apple off-shoot, which may point at being related to the iSlate, either as an alternative product name or service. [MacRumors]

The curvaceous, sexy tablet from Notion Ink has some serious gender issues, as the company has named it "Adam." It'll still be the first tablet to use a Pixel Qi screen, Notion Ink's hoping, despite its June release date.

The specs haven't changed much since we first saw it a few weeks ago, with the long battery life being touted by Notion Ink's founder Rohan Shravan:

"We are the only ones to use Pixel Qi screens for Tablet technology. It consumes one-tenth of the battery compared with conventional LCDs"

A price point of $325 sounds very attractive, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's pushed north of that sum, considering the amount of spec crammed within that Android-powered body. [Electronista, pics via Slashgear]

Almost makes you like the Storm more, right? I'm guessing the (presumably resistive) touchscreen was so shoddy that the trackball was actually a required addition. Thank goodness this prototype didn't leave the R&D department. [PocketBerry via CrackBerry]

It's on my list of Things To Do Before I Die, but like most inclusions I fear watching a time lapse video is the closest I'll ever get. What a marvelous view. [TWAN via Boing Boing]

Yes, your eyes are deceiving you, LG's not licensed the StarTAC design. Phew. That telescopic antenna doesn't just harp back to ye olden days though, it also receives a digital TV signal, one of the first US DTV devices.

Joining the Lotus clamshell is the DP570MH portable DVD player, which will play DVDs and over 800 channels of live digital TV thanks to the LG2160A ATSC-M/H chip, which LG's offered to Dell for use in its laptops, and manufacturers of in-car receivers such as Kenwood. The DVD player has a four hour battery life when playing TV, which is only two hours less than the iPod Touch.

I'm all for DTV devices, but surely LG could've picked a better handset to introduce to the US market, considering the Lotus has been floating around since the end of 2008? [LGE via Engadget]

It may not offer the toehold-challenge of traditional rock climbing, but then, traditional rock climbing doesn't usually come with a paycheck. These climbers have been employed to scale huge wind turbines for maintenance, which is green in so many ways.

Instead of using huge, expensive and environmentally-unsound cranes to get repairs done, owners of wind turbines have started hiring rock climbers to do what they do best—get way high up. It's cost-effective, environmentally-friendly on a couple levels, and most importantly (for our purposes), looks really freaking cool. [Treehugger]

This Tomy i-Sobot's owner has seen fit to arm the little red eyed robot with an unbelievable assortment of mini replicas weapons. [Engadget China via Engadget]

Lady Justice weeps today. Samsung's ex Chairman, Lee Kun-hee, was found guilty of breach-of-trust and tax evasion in August to fines of $88.7m. Today? He's walking free because the president needed his help to plan the 2018 Olympic games bid.

It's his second pardon! The first time, he was convicted of bribing a previous president of Korea and then pardoned by another president all together. [WSJ]

Uh, I don't have a clue what's going on here. All I know is, it's Star-Trek-related, and it's very, very NSFW. [Dinner in the Darkroom]

Click through to the gallery below for the NSFW (and totally baffling) pic.

The world's most exclusive Subway is also cooler than you'd ever thought Subway could be: Fully-functioning, inside a shipping container, delivering sandwiches up and down the full height of the Ground Zero construction—soon to top 100 stories.

As crews work to rebuild the World Trade Center, this Subway is fitted to a giant crane that will grow as the buildings do. It's pretty great for the workers; normally they'd have to spend half their lunch break just getting getting up and down the building—now they can get their hoagies and Sun Chips on right where they work. It's badass enough to make you wish you liked Subway. [Core77, image from AP]