Looking simply like set of everyday headphones, the device is fitted in with a set of infrared sensors. These are responsible of capturing the movements and passing on the signals for the performance of tasks. Named as “Mimi Switch” or “Ear Switch”, the device is connected to a micro computer capable of controlling electronic devices.

Kazuhiro Taniguchi explains that the device serves the purpose of a hand free device. It can start and stop music on an iPod with the wearer sticking his tongue out. Likewise by opening the eyes wide, iPod skips to the next music track.

The device captures expressions and refreshes mood too, like if a person is not smiling to his normal routine, the machine plays cheerful songs to bring a smile. This system can work in elderly and disabled people by mounting it on to a hearing aid. It can also tell how many times a person sneezes or if a person is not well it can send messages to relatives to warn.

One can easily use it as a remote control. It accumulates data on everyday movement basis and work accordingly. Things like turning on room lights can be easily managed through this little device intended to be launched with a wireless version in future.

According to a statement on Apple’s website, most of these products were previously sold by Apple, but they were returned to the company because of some quality issues. Now these products have gone through different quality tests and are being offered to the Chinese Apple lovers.

These second-hand products, which have been made available on the Chinese website of the company, are being offered in different prices ranging from 308yaun to 14,000yaun and include products like iPod shuffle and iMac computers.

Apple has already introduced this sort of deals in some other countries including the UK, US and Japan. Apple didn’t provide the details about the available quantity of these second-hand products.

Best Buy, the US retailer, has already the sale of iPhone 3G refurbished versions that have been priced nearly $40 less the new devices.

According to the committee, people who listen to personal music players for just six hours a week at high volume (over 89 decibels) more likely to become the victim of permanent hearing loss after five years.

The committee has also made some valuable calculations in this connection and believes that the problem might affect 2.5 to 10 million people and 5 to 10 percent among them would be European people.The problem is really serious and some measures must be taken to protect children and teenagers from the effects of hearing loss.

Meglena Kuneva, who is EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner, says in this connection: “The findings show that there is a clear risk and we have to take immediate action against it. The most important thing is that consumers must be aware of all such risks.”

“We must look again at the controls in place to make it certain that they are effective in a complete way and have accordance with new technology.” Meglena added.

IPhone and iPod Touch users who quite often reach to the Picasa Web site via the Apple gadgets’ Safari Web browser are now automatically switched to this new iPod dedicated interface .

Once the user has logged in, he can see their photo albums very comfortably and he can easily drill down to get a full composite view of all the pictures, claims Google. It further claims that the Picasa’s slideshow feature has also been specially optimized for the devices like iPod and iPhone.

New features of this innovative interface of Google also include the ability to search for photos in albums or through community photos. This new service has been launched only in English presently. This is the first step and Google will be introducing further multi language features rich applications with ability to switch between the languages in coming days. At present people from other countries and people who do not use English will have to change their language preference manually.

“Now with this innovative introduction people can also view friends’ albums through favorites: says Google’s representative.

Simultaneously, on Wednesday, Google also released an upgrade of the Google toolbar for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. This upgraded toolbar for Internet explorer has many improvements and additional features. Among the new features is the ability to save settings online, so people can access their bookmarks, custom buttons and information saved in the automatic form-filler from any of their computers at home or work, Google’s representative said.

Other new and collaborative features of this toolbar include the ability to add Google Gadgets, which are the company’s brand bearers for its Web widgets. Widgets are small applications that are used to access online services directly through a click. In the case of the toolbar, an example of a Gadget would be the one that can easily perform a product search immediately after a person highlights a name on a Web page.

Google has also built into the internet explorer toolbar its Notebook application that lets users store text and images from sites. Pre-existing features that have been retained in the upgrade include automatic form filling, pop-up blocking and spelling correction. The toolbar is available on Google’s site.

The company is trying to provide everyone an equal opportunity by limiting the amount of phone purchase for every person to about two only as compared to the previous limit of five units per person. The move might be too late though as there are about more than a million units already sold since its launch from June. Only time will tell how much has been accumulated by unscrupulous re-sellers.

Another issue for this new –must-have item for urbanized shoppers is the exclusive terms of iPhone to use AT&T network solely. Naturally, this would cause a lot of inconvenience for the rest of the public that are loyal to their current network providers.
A string of hackers that offer to unlock the devices for use to other networks were the natural consequences of this corporate decision on exclusivity.

The company naturally tried to prevent this from happening since it is damaging to their business. Unfortunately, their efforts of using updates that covers up the software’s weakness for hacker’s intrusion were met by the public with equally stolid reactions sparking a couple of lawsuits in the process.