Light-up Showers

People have talked about showers that light up many times, but this shower is different. You see, it's powered by the water coming through the head and changes color in response to the water temperature. No wires to run, no batteries to change—just sweet LED light bathing you while you bathe. It's about $105 in Japan, and there it shall ever stay.

Thanko Mp3 player/Recorder watches

Thanko Japan, which has been making MP3 watches for a while now, has developed two watches that can now record sound as well. One has 512MB of flash memory, and the other can store 256MB. They both can record audio in the MP3 format, but unfortunately they connect with the mother ship via turtle-slow USB 1.1. Able to play back MP3s and WMA files continuously for nine hours, the 512MB watch is $160 while the 256MB variant is $120.

LG's TV-cellphone V9000

LG showed off its V9000 this week at the 3GSM conference. With this phone, LG looks poised to battle Samsung’s SGH-P900 for high-end cellphone supremacy. Its biggest draw is that it receives wireless TV signals (using the DMB-T transmission system) on its 256K color display. Additionally, the V9000 sports a 1.3 Megapixel camera with 30 MB of onboard memory. Battery life looks to be impressive, too, lasting three hours while playing TV. Though LG did not release information regarding price, it is expected to launch the V9000 in Italy and Germany sometime in the first half of 2006.

Serene cellphone from Samsung

Leave it to Bang & Olufsen to create Serene, a cellphone that turns the worlds of fashion and design upside down. This time the stylish B&O designers teamed up with Samsung to produce a cellphone that has the keypad on the top and the screen on the bottom. If you don't like it that way, though, you can flip the screen the other way for a more-conventional approach.

In the middle of that retro-looking keyboard there's a dial that lets you navigate through the menus. It also has a spring-loaded hinge that flips it open slowly, as if it were trying not to scare you. In the market full of me-too phones, Serene is a truly original design.

Sony VAIO VGN-AX570G multimedia laptop

The good: Excellent display; solid productivity and multimedia performance; integrated TV tuner; built-in 0.3-megapixel camera; large drive capacity.

The bad: Tiny touch pad and mouse buttons; only three USB 2.0 ports; memory-card readers support only two formats; can't have TV tuner and DVD burner onboard simultaneously; loud fan.

The bottom line: With a superb 17-inch display and an integrated TV tuner, the Sony VAIO VGN-AX570G is among the most self-contained multimedia laptops and undercuts many of them by several hundred dollars.