iRobot Releases The World’s Smallest Floor Washing Robot

Robots are getting smaller, smarter and more efficient, but they’re still cleaning our floors. The next generation household robot from iRobot is the Scooba 230, the world’s most compact floor washing robot, built small enough to clean in tight spaces, under and around furniture and bathroom fixtures.

At 3.5 inches tall and 6.5 inches in diameter, the Scooba 230 features a three-stage cleaning system: first it washes, then it scrubs and then it squeegees floors, neutralizing up to 97% of common household bacteria. Scooba 230 holds enough cleaning solution to scrub up to 150 square feet of linoleum, tile or sealed hardwood floors and includes a water management system so it never cleans your floors with dirty water. When Scooba is done washing your floor it lets you know with a couple beep-beep-boops.

iRobot Scooba 230 and the latest iRobot Roomba 700 Series vacuum cleaner will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 6th. They will be available for consumers this spring 2011. Price TBA.

Check out this video of PCMag’s Editor-in-Chief Lance Ulanoff playing with the new bot.

Meet the LG Optimus Black, the “world’s thinnest smartphone”

As we write, LG’s press conference is in full swing, the company is detailing its success and unveiling its new home cinema products.

Smartphone announcements haven’t come just yet but that doesn’t stop its PR department getting a little trigger happy and sending over details of its new super-thin Android smartphone the LG Optimus Black.

The Optimus Black is being touted at the world’s thinnest smartphone, coming in at just 9.2mm, tapering down to 6mm. The handset features a 4-inch NOVA display which reduces power consumption by 50% when used indoors, and will ship with Android 2.2 (Froyo) with the view to an Android 2.3 Gingerbread upgrade.

Included will be a 2MP front-facing camera for video calling and will allow for the transfer of data between devices by way of its Wi-Fi Direct functionality, making it the first handset to feature the technology.

The LG Optimus Black will be released in the first half of 2011, we assume more details will become available after the conference.

Is your iPhone having issues with 4.2.1? Tell us!

This evening several tweets started to pop up, like this one from Scoble —

—reporting issues with iPhones hanging and crashing.

The problems seem to center around Mail with:

crashing

slowdowns

strangely formatted emails

emails without senders

For some people it was a single crash or two, others more. Some folks one reboot (hard reboot I’m going to guess) and it was fine, others (including Scoble) nope. If this is an intermittent bug with Mail, I’m guessing (pure speculation) maybe a connection glitch is causing Mail to flip out.

Regardless, Robert brought to our attention, with a tweet of course , that he was tracking reports in his favorited tweets . By my count there were 16 reports thus far. Now, that’s not a lot and honestly I havent had problems on my iPad (I had 4.2. GM2 for a week-ish before 4.2.1. came out) or iPhone (I went from 4.2 to 4.2.1 with no issues).

Okay, so putting my tech support hat on I’m wondering:

Several of the reports involve Mail, so is this an issue with IMAP or Gmail that’s trigging something?

If Mail isn’t the root cause, because of multitasking, is there another app people have in common that is running at the same time that could cause this?

Could an app that hasn’t been updated for 4.2.1 be at fault? Instapaper, for example, was updated last night, but that update would crash iPads still running iOS 3.2 (a fix has been submitted to Apple for that one).

Searching through the Apple forums, there doesn’t seem to be a hue and cry about this, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem, it could be that in the 36 hours since 4.2.1 has been out not enough people have started using it to have the problem surface.

There is the bug where your music disappears, but that appears to just require a re-sync to fix (via DownloadSquad ). We’ll investigate this more and update this post as we find out more details.

So, have you been having issues since the 4.2.1 update?