With much fanfare as expected, Apple introduced the latest family of iPods. Most notably the new iPod Touch gains Facetime capability with dual cameras and the high resolution Retina display from the iPhone 4. The new iPod nano ($149-$179) also gets updated with a completely new form factor that significantly shrinks down the device with a touch-enabled enabled screen. Lastly, the Shuffle gets even smaller (as if it wasn’t small enough) with a diminutive form factor and an amazing price ($49). Link

Email is great, except when there’s too much of it. Gmail is rolling out a new feature today, called Priority Inbox. It automatically identifies your important email and separates it out from everything else, so you can focus on what really matters.

Google just announced a new feature: Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates.

Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name. If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID.

For more information, visit gmail.com/call.

I’ve been watching BBC’s The Genius of Design and it has totally re-educated my perspective of the Industrial Design profession. The genius of design is in offering solutions to a problem in such a way that they don’t compromise on our routine habits. The other aspect of designing that I understood was that it’s not wrong for designers to try and improvise an existing solution, with their own perceptions. Usually I disregard a design submission that is very similar to a published post, but this time around I want to bring out the two and spark a debate on the design challenge.

Problem:

The clothes iron is a fantastic invention and the technique dates back to the ancient Chinese people using pans filled with hot coals to iron out clothes. With electricity and modernization we moved on to regular and steam irons. However one situation remained constant with the advent of new technologies – burning clothes due to carelessness.

Solution:

One solution that we recently saw was the Roly Poly Iron designed by Wonkook Lee. It worked on the rocking principle where weights in the handle pulled back the iron into a standing position, when not in use. A simple enough idea that was worth exploring!

Designers: Sangyong Park, Jungmin Park & Sunwoo Hwang

Japanese designer Ryohei Yoshiyuki creates “a small window on one’s arm”,  man’s original clock, ‘Time of the Sky’. To create this innovative time piece, Ryohei collaberated with media artist Tomoya Kahimada and programmed the watch so that it displays different colors of the sky every few seconds, therefore referring to changes in the real sky. Our favorite function is the button when pushed, the sun or moon’s colors appear in the sky display from that time indicating hour clock direction.

‘We are always looking at some kind of window, on the computer, mobile phone and so on. and now a small window on one’s arm.” – Ryohei Yoshiyuki

Check out this impressive HTML5-based painting tool by DeviantART.

Patrick Sung has designed Universal Packaging System (UPACKS), a conceptual packaging system that forms to whatever it is that you’re shipping. Although it bends around your package, it is designed to be sturdy and strong. The idea is that no one box fits all. Often times, packaging is wasted to fill and pad empty space in boxes.

The In Out Bottle for sugar dispensing has a very clever twist to it, the silica gel mouth kinda in-turns to form a funnel, so that you don’t spill the sugar while refilling it. Reminds me of the funnel refill bottle for soaps we did recently. So I guess the consensus is that funnels incorporated into the lid cuts around two steps in the refilling process, hence better! What do you think?

In Out Bottle For Sugar is an IDEA Design 2010 winner.

Designers: Yan-Ting Chen & Hsin Yeh

I finally had a moment to download, install and test drive Flipboard on my iPad. I am speechless. It’s another one of these “woah-I-am-touching-the-future-moments”. Here’s a video explaining what Flipboard does:

A big giant yay to the team over at Flipboard. Design and Usability is topnotch. Realizing that this is the first version of the app, I can only *imagine* what the future versions are going to look like. What an impressive first start.

Tread 1 by Devon Works is inspired by motorcycles and industrial conveyor belts as you can see.