Microsoft has developed a new sort of touchscreen that doesn’t involve touching. It uses IR (infra red) beams from the sides of the phone to track your gestures.

Does this mean if my cat waves its tail near it the phone will call my stock broker?

Research in Motion will open its own application store and on-device app centers for the BlackBerry next year. Developers can submit content for BlackBerry apps to RIM in December.

Back in December, David wrote a somewhat brutal review about the GE Halogen toaster over. The thing burned him, and he was determined to burn it right back. What’s interesting about this isn’t that the boss had a grudge against an oven. What’s interesting is the strange fascination this article seems inspire with readers the world over. We’ve gotten an almost never-ending stream of letters about this review and this oven. Since nothing beats a warm toasty bagel for breakfast (except orange danish), we thought we’d share with you a representative sampling of the letters (two more showed up today).

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

Pinnacle Systems, Inc. showed how its Pinnacle PCTV HD mini Stick and Pinnacle TV for Mac HD mini Stick can be used to resolve TV viewing conflicts. With these two ultra-compact HDTV tuners, people can watch, timeshift and automatically record their favorite HD and SD TV shows on their computer.

AccuWeather.com has a new VideoOn Demand (VOD) player, powered by BrightcoveT. The new player allows AccuWeather.com users to more easily locate and share weather videos.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 was downloaded 3 million times in its first week, with about 80 percent of the downloads by Windows users while only 221,000 downloads by Linux users were recorded. The successful introduction of the open source office suite came despite the group’s download servers being temporarily overwhelmed by demand for the new software last week.

October 31st is the last day to take advantage of the free upgrade to Windows Mobile 6. The upgrade link will be removed from HTC’s website at 12:00 pm (noon) GMT on October 31st

An alternative to a smartphone or mini-PC has been launched by IMOVIO. The iKIT is a Pocket Mobile Companion. At 95mm by 65mm and only 15.5mm high it’s as portable as a mobile phone. The WiFi and HSDPA enabled device comes with a full QWERTY/AZERTY keyboard, an 8GB SD card slot and a 2.8 inch QVGA display.

This book offers an introduction to Ardunio-the open-source electronics prototyping platform. “Getting Started with Arduino” gives you ideas for projects and helps you get started.

Fears of mobile-phone disasters wrought by malicious viruses have prompted development of handheld anti-virus software. The latest, from SoftReg, is Zebra Virus Cleaner for Palm and Windows Mobile phones.