Hey, I was away on a little vacation before our September busy season starts.

I was in Hawaii and it was terrific. I swam with a whale shark, took my first surf lessons, hung out with Lisa's family and ate a lot of great food. I did work a few days at the start, and checked a lot of email on the iPhone, which got terrific 3G across both Oahu and Maui, much better than I get in SF. I also got some quality time in with a new waterproof camera and I did not lose it scrambling away from killer waves or imaginary sharks (for once). I also got some quality time in with the Kindle and thanks to its unique properties, finished about 1000 pages of book at blog reading speeds. More on those later. For now, I'll just say its nice to be home.

The lilliputian IdeaPads from Lenovo are coming, as we know, and now they're a little closer, having passed through the FCC's certification process. This is the final regulatory hurdle the IdeaPad S9 and S10 faced before going on sale in the US and comes just in time, as the duo of subnotebooks are expected to hit shelves next month. [Engadget via SlashGear]

Apple's tacking on an addition 60 days to the 30 days it already doled out to MobileMe subscribers, which means you've got an entire three months extra to wait out the issues you've been having. Apple sent out these emails today to MobileMe subscribers, but if you're one of the ones with MobileMe mail snags, you might not have gotten it. Well you've seen it now! Apple has some qualifications, so click on to see if you're eligible. [Apple]

Curbed's got a complaint report from the residents and visitors near the SoHo Apple store in NY, all of whom are really angry at what the store's been doing lately in terms of bugging its neighbors. The latest offense—the anvil thrown off a ten story office building onto an already arthritic camel—was the Jonas Brothers event held August 12. According to the complaint, "thousands of young teenage girls...screamed incessantly on the street for hours for their idols, blocking traffic, injuring one resident in the rush, and inconveniencing scores of other people and businesses." Speaking as a guy who has little kids screaming their faces off outside his window when he's trying to work, I can sympathize. [Curbed - Thanks BrooklynBum!]

Some medical students have come up with a handy replacement for the EpiPen called the EpiCard. It's roughly the size of a credit card and has built-in audio instructions on its use to help the patient self-administer the treatment if needed. Those of us with hardcore life threatening allergies have to keep a treatment like the EpiPen around, but they can be cumbersome. Having something like this that you can take anywhere is just what we need. [EpiCard via MedGadget]

I think NBC's web-only Sci Fi series The Gemini Division is about an alien, or a robot, or an alien robot that somehow got Rosario Dawson to be its girlfriend. I like that. I also like the Rosario somehow got her deliciously moisturized hands on what looks like a "Windows Mobile" phone, which Screen Junkies was kind enough to point out. That phone ain't Windows Mobile. If that phone is Windows Mobile, I'm Diane Keaton. And let me tell you, Diane Keaton is a lot manlier than I can ever claim to be (and looks nicer in a suit). Maybe buff alien robot guy brought it from wherever he came from and gave it to her as a present?

"Here honey, this is the new iPhone!"
"Why does it say Windows Mobile on it?"
*CHOKES HER*

Apologies for the spoilers. [Gemini Division via Screen Junkies]

Earlier today Google released the Android 0.9 SDK r1 Beta, boasting of a pile of API updates and a visual refresh that moves it one solid step closer to actually, you know, showing up on a phone. A long changelog and a few screenshots are great, but we've fired up the SDK's emulator for a guided tour of Android's salient features.

0:02: Main menu is contained in a drawer that slides from the bottom of the screen
0:08: Multiple home screens can be flipped with touch gestures, a la the iPhone
0:20: Icons can be dragged from the main menu to build customized home screens. Dragging to the menu drawer trashes the home screen shortcut
0:38: Dialer screen, followed by the call behavior. Calls can continue in the background, and all functions that don't require data transfer can work concurrently (This is currently a software regulation, as 3g networks should theoretically allow for simultaneous voice and data usage).
0:53: Ongoing calls and other notifications can be accessed by dragging the taskbar down.
1:20: Browser displays Gizmodo. Rendering is quite good, page navigation is a fairly intuitive rehash of current touch-control schemes. It's not terrible good at guessing column widths during double-tap zooming, but seems very usable. Preview magnification feature is useful for smaller screens or text-heavy pages.
2:22: "Tabbed" browsing feature lays out a grid of pages, with previews
2:45: Google Maps app. As you can see, this is among the more polished apps, and will feel familiar to anyone who has used Google Maps on the desktop or mobile devices.
3:30: Google Maps Street View.
4:00: Home screen include widgets (Google Search, a clock and a picture frame are the only ones for now) that can be dragged around the home screen(s).
4:23: The music apps relies on a panel of icons (a recurring theme in Android)
4:30: Message composition is unremarkable, but there is no sign of an on-screen keyboard at the moment. This could be a customization catered the the first round of Android phones, at least one of which will have a slide-out keyboard.
5:12: The camera naturally doesn't work in the emulator, but there are currently very few options in its menus.
5:50: Wallpaper switching. This is one of the few areas where Android excels aesthetically. Wallpaper scrolls as home screens are switched, but at a slower rate that the icons. This creates a convincing illusion of depth.
6:11: The home screen can also be modified via the system menu, where you can choose to add applications, widgets and shortcuts, as well as change the wallpaper.

It's hard to pass judgement on Android in the condition it's in. What's there is impressive, but there are so many glaring omissions, at least from a consumer standpoint. There is a fantastic system for managing ongoing calls and system messages (via the pull-down taskbar) but no apps to take advantage of it. Email and IM would suit such a configuration beautifully, but neither is included in this release. And seriously, where is the calendar? The organizer? A video app? Youtube support?

Sure, these things could be left to the developer community, but Google already has messaging, email, video and calendar services, so it's reasonable to expect that they be included by default in Android. Before a public release, Android should at least posses a feature set comparable to your average candy bar phone, courtesy of Google, so that the eager open-source development community can devote their effort to creating new, innovative apps and modifications for the OS.

Objections aside, the progress is promising. In terms of usability, Android is much easier to navigate and customize than virtually all other mobile solutions. With a few more apps, Android will be a clear choice over Windows Mobile, skinned or not. You can download the SDK and play with the emulator yourself, if you want. Just a word of warning, though — explaining to your family or significant other that you're testing an emulated prerelease of an upcoming mobile OS is about as hard as it sounds. [Google Android, Android on Giz]

My guess is that most of the guys out there would love their own R/C hovercraft, but the bottom line is that not everyone can afford a fancy commercial version. Well, if you have some junk lying around the house, some time on your hands, and you don't mind a hovercraft that is butt friggin' ugly, you can build your own R/C model for under $50 (depending on what kind of junk you have lying around) and the instructions from Project Hovercraft.

[Hacked Gadgets via Make via DVICE]

A few years ago, AMD was the king of performance per watt with its K8 architecture, while Intel kept pushing the Pentium 4 faster and hotter, until it basically had to chunk its NetBurst architecture. So this is something of a nostalgia trip for AMD fanboys: In Tom's Hardware's tests, a 1GHz Athlon 64 2000+ using the years-old K8 architecture "beats the Intel Atom 230 in energy consumption and processing power" and "outperforms [it] in several benchmark tests" even though the Atom chip is running at 1.6GHz chip. How?

In part, because the K8 architecture is just damn good, but also because AMD's 780G desktop platform is more modern—so it has more features too—while the Intel 945GC chipset is old and busted. The AMD system is quieter too, because it doesn't even need a cooling fan. So while the 8-watt Athlon 64 2000+ processor technically uses more power, the AMD system on the whole consumes less than the Intel setup, idling or under a full load. AMD winning at something—between this minor victory and ATI's latest on top of the world, it's almost like the good ol' cutthroat days again. Almost. [Tom's Hardware]

Boy that Michael Phelps is fast. No one can argue it, he can dominate in almost any style of swim and possesses one of the best dolphin kicks in the world. That is, one of the best kicks aside from some random guy using the Lunocet monofin. Because while Phelps is able to swim at an inhuman 5 miles per hour, the average swimmer using the carbon fiber Lunocet will routinely hit about 8mph. Is it too late for us to book our tickets to Beijing?

The Lunocet weighs about 2.5lbs out of the water, but in the water it's positively buoyant. Constructed from silicon wrapped in carbon fiber with a titanium footplate, the system gives you the same power on a downstroke as an upstroke. Coupled with a pair of strong legs the monofin could theoretically generate enough power to drive a human completely out of the water—yes, real life dolphin acrobatics at last.

So is the Lunocet worth its $1250 to $1800 pricetag? We don't know, but it sure sounds a whole lot better than actually training. And we doubt that we'll be getting access to DARPA's swimming tech anytime soon. [Lunocet]