We'll freely admit how smitten we are with Dell's concept, the Inspiron Duo. While it's supposedly coming to retail by the end of the year, it's so special that every time we spy new photos or video footage of it, we watch joyfully. Of course, Intel doesn't need to watch from afar, as demonstrated in a new video -- they simply asked Dell's Inspiron Product Marketer, Dave Zavelson to show it off on film. The Duo, in case you've been hiding under a rock since before IDF, is a 10-inch netbook with a swivel screen which enables you to use it as a sort of tablet... you know, those things that everybody's cranking out these days. It also boasts a dual-core Atom N550 CPU and Windows 7 Home Premium. Regardless, we still haven't heard any pricing or definite availability info yet.

Someone named Shelby got a totally awesome Macbook birthday cake. I wonder if a real one popped up out of the middle, like one of those bachelor party strippers. Oh no, they messed up the QWERTY keyboard lettering.

I bet there is a brand new Macbook hiding inside of there. Tell them to cut that cake carefully, Shelby!

Crestron is a name synonymous with two things in the world home automation: cost and quality. So it's always good to the see the company shed its proprietary nature and embrace an off-the-shelf consumer product. Take its new iPanel for example. Instead of dropping a few thousand dollars on a Crestron touch-panel that does just one thing, you can purchase this $500ish snap-on case with thirteen dedicated buttons for home, lights, guide, and info functions. In other words, for the half the price of a typical touchscreen Crestron touchscreen controller you also get a WiFi-connected iPad. Sounds like a winning combination to us. Look for the iPanel to get official at CEDIA next week.

It ain't the first, but it's Kingston's first, regardless. The DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 is the company's first foray into the wild and blossoming world of high(er)-speed thumb drives (following the likes of A-DATA with its own N005), with this guy in particular pulling down read speeds of up to 80MB/sec and write speeds of 60MB/sec. It's available in a trio of sizes (16GB, 32GB and 64GB), with a five-year warranty affixed to each. Regrettably, such speed and capaciousness won't run ya cheap, as these fellows are priced at $89, $138 and $270 in order of mention. Nothing the corporate card can't handle, though.

The problem with YouTube is that you can only share stuff you happened to be recording. The Looxcie, a $200 video camera that you wear on your ear, proposes a simple solution: record everything, all the time.

Here's the idea: You wear the Looxcie on your ear and it records everything you see, roughly as you see it. The camera can hold up to four hours of video (in crummy 480×320 at 15fps); when it runs out of space, it starts dumping the oldest footage—it's not made for collecting clips, it's for capturing them in the moment.

When that shareable moment arrives—your cat gets stuck in a vase!—you press a button that instantly makes a clip out of the last 30 seconds and it gets beamed via Bluetooth to an app on your Android phone (other OSes coming by the end of the year). There, you can edit the clip and share it through all the usual services. The app also lets you access all the other footage stored on your Looxcie, allowing you to create longer clips and tweak settings.

Desperate to charge your iPad quickly and willing to shell out $100 for it? Then the Morphie Juice Pack might be for you. It's an external battery that's compatible with most gadgets, but advertised particularly for the iPad.

Microsoft will officially launch Internet Explorer 9 later today, and it looks to be the most significant update the browser has seen since the jump from IE6 to IE7. Users will immediately notice the cosmetic changes that takes the trendy "less is more" design ethos to almost fundamentalist extremes. IE9 trims even more fat from the interface than its quite spartan competitor Google Chrome. The OneBox (Microsoft's combination search box and address bar), the tab bar and the navigation buttons have all been condensed to a single row, and the status bar is long gone, making IE as unobtrusive as possible, which leaves plenty of space to display the contents of a website.

Users can also drag favicons from the OneBox to the taskbar in order to create pinned site shortcuts. These glorified bookmarks display the page icon in your taskbar (instead of the standard IE icon), and some sites even offer app-style pages that can support Windows 7 jumplists. Treating sites more like apps is an integral part of IE's modernization strategy, but, unlike Chrome (which can also create single-site shortcuts), IE doesn't further strip away interface elements in "app" mode. The eBay "app" will still display in the admittedly minimal, standard IE9 interface, whereas creating an "app" in Chrome removes all trace of the browser except the title bar.

Internet Explorer 9

Most importantly, though, is the improved speed, support for technologies like HTML5 and the more standards-compliant rendering engine. What was the slowest beast in the browser market is now a serious competitor in terms of raw speed. In fact, at least by some measures, it's faster than the current king Chrome. The addition of hardware-accelerated rendering will also lead to improved video playback, and will enable rich 3-D graphics in the browser.

Once it launches, we'll be giving IE9 a serious hands-on, and come back with a final judgement, but, for the first time since the days of Netscape vs. IE, we're actually kind of excited by what Microsoft is bringing to the browser market.

Update: Internet Explorer 9 is up and out for download! Get it here.