Shiny Awards. The name may not sound like much to you, but it's the Oscars of the techie gadget world. Hosted by none other than Shiny Media, the most recent award ceremonies was held at London, the night of February 21, 2007.

LG, with their Chocolate mobile phone, Roberto Cavalli LG phone and the BH100, bagged two wins, a runner up spot, and the lovely and equally stunning Colleen over there.

Of the most notable, and laughable, highlights during the night was the wicked ASBO Gadget of the Year award. ASBO, short for Anti-Social Behavior Order, describes the gadget that could be best used to annoy people around you. But wait, who needs a gadget to annoy people?

Samsung - those poor chaps - won that award fair and square with their K5 MP3 player. It won not because of its small profile and even smaller speakers, but because the "itsy bitsy" speakers are actually very powerful - almost too powerful.

We also noted that Apple's iPod Nano and (*gasp!* lo and behold!) Nintendo's Wii, bagged their own prizes from this prestigious event. And look, even Bethesda Softwork's The Elder Scrolls Legends IV: Oblivion and Nintendo's Wii Sports gets to bring home something for Mommy.

Click on Full Article below to view the complete list of winners under each award category.

We are pretty sure you're having a grand time tinkering with your Mii avatars over the past few weeks. And we here, are having a blast as well listening to these stories. Remember the Miimii-fied Marcus Fenix from Gears of War? And how about the Rainbow Six: Vegas Mii invasion? Heck, even just looking at them weird faces is so fun!

After a while anyway, you might begin to want some features not provided in the creator. After all, the idea behind avatars is to represent its creator physically or reflect on what's inside. What if I have a tattoo that I want to show off? Or maybe slogan shirts just so I can speak my mind? Uh, how about "Chuck Norris loves Wii" or "Wiicked" for starters?

Anyway, the point is that Mii is fun already. But there are various areas wherein it can still be improved on. We found a list of Mii suggestions and we thought we'd share it with you. Also, please feel free to add your own:

• More hats: Like a top hat, a jester hat, one of those big Russian ones with the furry ears…
• Proper warts: The mole option isn’t enough. At least, not enough for my Lemmy Mii.
• Boobs: Because the Wii world needs Dolly, Jordan and Anna-Nicole in their FULL glory.
• Man-boobs: Because you can’t be sexist about these things. And lots of men do have man-boobs nowadays.
• Bling: Pimp coats. Diamond earrings. Those gold teeth that rappers have. It’s a no-brainer.
• Silly walks: Imagine if Miis could flounce, limp and disco-walk their way through games…
  Peg-legs: Mainly for pirates, and Heather Mills.
• Parrots: Mainly for pirates. I don’t think Heather owns a parrot.

See the full list after the jump!

And the Apple phone rumors just keep on coming. After posting the speculated design of the Macphone, here is yet another update about this much-awaited product.

According to sources of ThinkSecret, it is in their belief that Apple will not be able to release a phone this year due to some "significant technological hurdles" in its attempts to reinvent the cellphone with an innovative ground-up design. Instead, it is expected to be announced at the upcoming Macworld Expo in January 2007. Another big expectation coming from Apple is that it will enjoy the same US market reception that LG's Chocolate and Motorola's RAZR did.

It is also rumored that Apple will integrate several high-end features into its phone, such as a  3-megapixel camera, a 2.2-inch display, and complete iTunes/iPod features and integration. As for the number of music and photos that can be packed into the phone, it will be dependent on the phone's storage capacity, although there is still no confirmation as to that particular piece of information.

Well, if that is to be believed, then we just might be finally hearing some real facts about the so-called MacPhone in a few months' time. For now, let's all just be patient and be smart enough to suspend both judgment and disbelief on rumors regarding this hyped product.

So its been a busy few weeks for Nokia, they've released news of new forthcoming handsets, while at the same time had to deal with the release of some of its N-series handsets. In the past week, we in Europe have seen the N91 release, and after our post of the review for it, I decided to buy one myself.

Anyway, Nokia's recent press releases have included two basic handsets, one of which seems to take its inspiration from the LG Chocolate, or even Nokia's subsidiary, Vertu.

The basic model, the 1110i, is a simple 80g phone that boasts 5 hours talk time, and standby of up to 15 days. It will cost €45/£31/$57 + Tax. Like its predecessors, it has a mono-chrome display, and is dual band equipped. Remember this phone isn't meant to astound you with features, just provide something for those infrequent users.

What seems to be its older brother, appears to have been taken to town on its looks. It has an unusually black and gold appearance, something that makes many feel it got its looks off the LG Chocolate or its much fancier relative, the Vertu range. Its called the 6080 and is triband equipped. It handles 65'536 colours on a 128 X 160 display. It'll weigh 91g and is mainly aimed at sales in Asia. Smaller details include a blinking light to indicate missed calls and messages. Battery life lasts 3.5 hours for talking, and up to 12 days in standby. Music wise it has a MP3 player and built in radio. Its price will be around the €180/£123/$228 mark, and is expected to ship in Q4.

If you're a big fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, or even Battlestar Galactica, chances are you've spent quite a fortune just to get those cool action figures, vehicles, and other movie merchandise. It's the ultimate in geek status symbol.

But what if you could build a spaceship, say a Millennium Falcon, out of Aspirin bottles and toilet items? If you have zero skills in scratchbuilding, you'd probably end up with a crap spaceship. But with help from Ivanjs, you just might be able to pull off with just a simple itsy-bitsy spacecraft. This scratchbuilding genius was able to build a 40-inch exploration vessel out of Aspirin bottles, toilet items, chocolate drink caps, and other scrap materials.

   

Since January, he's been posting scratchbuilding tutorials over at lyzrdstomp.com. The fourth and latest installment of the tutorial discusses how to make surface texture from styrene strip. He talks about balance, composition, design, plus the use of ancient Chinese graphic design for inspiration.

Now, how's this for inspiration:

Here's an excerpt from the Ivanjs' tutorial:

This time, we're going to talk about surface detail and some techniques to help you come up with details that don't look like you just threw parts onto a model.

I'm a texture freak. In my paintings, I use different techniques to achieve different textures...Whenever I work on a spaceship model, I view the hull of the ship as sort of a blank canvas–it's the foundation for all the detail I'm going to put on it. The way I develop details for that ship is to look at the hull and break it down into sections and subsections...although I tend to concentrate on different sections of the model at any given time, I'm always conscious of the fact that the entire model must look like 1 unit, not a collection of detail assemblies. All those sections need to be "tied" together somehow.

You "unify" or connect all the different sections of your model with additional detail that overlaps each section. This could be a ship's intercoolers, pipes or whatever. In some cases, I just use a long piece of styrene strip with a few additional smaller pieces of strip on top of it. Sometimes, I'll create a detail that rises above all the other surface detail, like some kind of access boom or fuel conduit or something...

Read the rest of the tutorial after the jump.

The 4th Annual Mobile Game Conference which will take place in Seattle on July 13 and 14 has been announced to have speakers from big companies which include Digital Chocolate's Trip Hawkins and Square Enix's Kosei Ito.

Game Initiative has announced other speakers for the said conference, most from leading developers, publishers and operators all over the world. Game Initiative is a producer of conferences for professionals in the computer and video game industry. The confirmed list of conference speakers are

• Alex Bloom, Vice President, Content and Developer Services, Motricity
• Andrew Stein, Sr. Product Manager, Cingular
• Andre Vahsen, COO, Machineworks NW LLC
• Are Traasdahl, Founder and CEO, Thumbplay
• Chris Early, Studio Manager, Microsoft Casual Games Group
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
• Jason A. Ford, Vice President, Strategy & Planning, Namco Networks America Inc.
• Jason Spero , SVP Marketing , Digital Chocolate
• Jill Braff, GM North America & SVP Worldwide Marketing, Glu Mobile
• John Cahill, General Manager, Mobile Games, Yahoo
• John Szeder, CEO, Mofactor
• Julian Corbett, Vice President of Business Development and Brand Partnerships, In-Fusio
• Kanishka Agarwal, Vice President of New Products, Telephia
• Kris Davis, Games Product Marketing Manger, Sprint
• Kyu Lee, President, GAMEVIL USA, Inc.
• Neil Halder, Vice President Content Programming & Strategy, SkyZone
• Mark Pierce, CEO, Super Happy Fun Fun, Inc.
• Matthew Bellows, General Manager, Floodgate Entertainment
• Mike Yuen, Senior Director, Gaming Group, QUALCOMM
• Misha Lyalin, CEO, Reaxion
• Paul Foster, President/CEO, Pick Up and Play
• Paul Nakayama, Sr. Director, Content Programming, Amp'd Mobile
• Ron Czerny, Founder & CEO, Play Phone
• Randy Shepherd, founder & director of business development, werd interactive inc.
• Scott Edison, Director-Mobile, Oberon
• Seamus McAteer, Chief Product Architect & Senior Analyst, M:Metrics
• Steve Hoffman, North American Studio Head, Infospace, Inc.

The 4th Annual Mobile Game Conference where the latest innovations in the mobile games industry will be showcased will focus on the themes Design, Construction and Potential.

 

With recent arrival of LG's Chocolate KG800, it seems their new sense of style is catching on within other departments. The most recent evidence of this is the coming together of a new media player. The FM35 is a chocolate styled large screened media unit that can play a host of file types including MP3, WMA, OGG, AVI and ASF. However the most innovative thing about this is its ability to tune into the DMB (Portable Digital TV broadcasts). This DMB is infamous with phones at the moment, where it is due for launch in Germany in the following week. However if you think you want to get this player from Korea and use it in another country, you would be taking a wrong move. The DMB service in Germany and forthcoming UK, has a digital signature allowing it only to work on subscribed handsets.

More details about this player are that it has a 16:9 2.4" display, and allows 4 hours of DMB or 55 hours of music before each charge. As with most players the FM35 can also store pictures and text files. All this seems like a good feature packed hit, all contained within something that measures 92x52x14mm. So far no other details are released, and no price has been confirmed.