South Korea has overhauled its public transport network with recharging roads , where the vehicles use power from buried electric strips in the road. It was invented at the University of California, before South Korea adopted it for an amusement park. More

Seen sporting a Cyon badge (LG’s Korean phone brand), the LG Maxx LG9400 is powered by Snapdragon and the dashed dreams of anyone hoping it’d be an Android handset instead of another disappointing S-Class phone. That Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm is actually the QSD8650 model, a little faster than the QSD8250 one that’s used in most of the Snapdragon phones on the market today. The display is a 3.5-inch WVGA job, with an optical trackpad, GPS, Wi-Fi, 5.0-megapixel camera (capable of shooting HD video), DivX and T-DMB mobile TV support. There’s no word on whether it’ll launch in other parts of the globe, but I bet LG won’t confine it to just South Korea. [ Telecoms Korea via Unwired View ]

Yo Carl Sagan, we found the fourth dimension! It was hiding in a South Korean movie theater all this time, and you can go try it out for the eminently affordable $15.80 a pop. CJ-CGV, an enterprising Korean cinema operator, has been offering its 4D experience for a year now, but Avatar ’s sellout success has led it to open three more “4D plexes.” The way the company finally cornered that elusive fourth dimension is by engaging all five senses: moving seats, wind, water sprinkling, lasers, and synthetic smells are all used in time with the movie. Sure, it’s a gimmick and takes a loose interpretation of what the word dimension means , but at least it’s unlikely you’ll fall asleep during the movie, as some of us may or may not have done while watching the 3D screening. Avatar available to watch in 4D, but only in Korea originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink

The miracle of the English language is that sometimes you get to use the same old words and make a sentence never seen before. This is one of those times. And supposedly, it’s true. Koreans + Sausage + iPhone. I don’t know how legit this is, and why the person in the video is playing a Taiko Drum game on the iPhone that isn’t available in the US. But our dear Rosa just confirmed, through first hand wiener testing, that unwrapped hot dogs work

Another day, another Snapdragon handset. It’s kind of fun to consider a phone with a thousand megahertz processor common these days, isn’t it? We already knew LG’s Arena Max would have built-in WiFi , but now we can put a face to the name as well as a few other select specs. Wireless connectivity will be augmented with Bluetooth and GPS modules, which will be cozying up to a 5 megapixel camera unit at the back and a 3.5-inch touchscreen up front. The Cyon branding tells us Korea will be the inevitable first destination, though the rest of the world is expected to follow swiftly

In the cut-throat world of high tech manufacturing, “going rogue” is an ever-present temptation — and no one, from AMD to LG , is immune from scandal. For the latest bit of corporate shenanigans, look no further than Applied Materials, who installs and maintains Samsung’s chip manufacturing equipment — prosecutors in South Korea have accused the company of stealing the latter’s semiconductor technology and leaking it to Hynix Semiconductor (who ranks third in the world in the manufacture of NAND flash, behind Samsung and Toshiba). According to the AP, eighteen people have been indicted in the case so far, including the vice president of Applied Materials Korea. We just hope they didn’t get the idea from us! That is definitely not the message we’re trying to impart with this site. Samsung, Hynix, Applied Materials in corporate espionage shocker! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds

Who cares about FM radio right? But what if the FM radio came in a wooden box that’s really, really tiny? The Motz is all that and an MP3 speaker as well. Still nothing? Well, maybe you can tape it to your hamster so it looks like he’s carrying around an ’80s style boombox. Of course, it will have to be Korean hamsters only until this thing gets imported to the US

I haven’t had breakfast yet, so these breakfast robots from Korea are looking all the more attractive. KIST has developed two ‘bots which can operate a microwave, serving tea with toast and carrying it to the hungry person. In the video below, Mahru-Z (the boy robot with two legs, who took two years to create) carries a cup of something hot from the microwave, which he opens, picks the toast up from the toaster, and places them both in a basket. That’s when his ladyfriend Mahru-M comes in, who’s equipped with a nice round wheely bottom.

The list of devices with native Matroska support is growing rapidly fueled by the preponderance of ripped HD videos living large on the torrents. iriver’s hoping to capitalize on this phenomenon by adding .MKV to the list of supported formats (including AVI, WMV, MP4, TP, MPG, ASF) inside its new 3.5-inch (480×320 pixel) K1 Smart HD personal media player offering 18 hours audio / 6 hours video playback. In addition to detailed specs we’ve also got the official pricing: ₩229,000 (about $204) for the basic 8GB model, ₩279,000 ($248) to add a DMB mobile television tuner, ₩299,000 ($266) to bump things up to 16GB, and ₩349,000 ($310) if you want the full package with WiFi, DMB, and 16GB of storage. Korea-only for now. Gallery: iriver’s K1 Smart HD packs MKV video support into 3.5-inch player iriver’s K1 Smart HD packs MKV video support into 3.5-inch player originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:32:00 EST

Remember that leaked Motorola , with the right-side tumor? It’s just got official as the MOTOROI (great fun if you say it aloud), and while it’s destined for Korea only, it has an extra trick up its sleeve: handwriting recognition. In actual fact, the MOTOROI has five ways to get those words across, with a 3×4 keypad, full QWERTY, half-QWERTY, handwriting and writing pad listed. The specs sound great, certainly improving upon the CLIQ and Droid’s internals. Running on Android 2.0, it’s got native apps multitouch on that 3.7-inch WVGA screen, takes photos with an 8-megapixel camera, records video in 720p, and has an HDMI out and a T-DMB TV tuner for watching 24 of South Korea’s channels. 8GB of storage and a microSD card slot are pretty decent for storage options, and just like with its older brother the Droid, it comes with a docking station.