Tuesday 5 March 2013

Latest Star Trek gadety bits

StarTrek.com have announced a new range of Star Trek mobile device accessories, which are appearing in the UK now. There are cases for your iphone 4 or 5, complete with stylus:


There are also bags for your ipads (or tablet computer of your choosing). If you look closely at the styluses that come with these you might notice they've snuck a QUOGs character on each:


And there's also a new Starfleet delta USB, thing:


On the subject of USB, things, I neglected to report on the Mimobot Star Trek range which launched a little while ago. So if you've not seen them yet, have a look: There are Mimobots characters from all sorts of other franchises, the first Star Trek ones are Kirk, Spock, Picard, and Data, with more due out later this year:


More than a mere USB, thing, they come preloaded with all sorts of Star Trek stuff, as this video explains (alongside a funny little animation):



Perhaps the coolest thing about these is the incredible tale of where they got the Data sound clips, which Mimoco's Scott Seraydarian told StarTrek.com about:
All the content was coming together well… except we were having trouble tracking down decent Data sounds. There was a rumor that there might be a rare, out-of-circulation sound collection that Brent Spiner custom-recorded for a sound software in the mid-90’s. My mantra in general is: “Patience Pays”… and in this case it paid dividends. The CBS team finally found the old set of the 3.5” floppy disks. We had a feeling that they were good and worth the trouble, but had the pressing challenge of finding a mid-90’s Mac with a working floppy disc-drive. A few weeks passed and finally a few old machines were found in a CBS storeroom. But the euphoria was short-lived once we realized we could access the discs but had no way of getting the sounds off the machines. You have to keep in mind these beautiful relics were pre-wifi, even pre-USB ports! As John said “Nothing like working with brand new, state-of-the-art, sealed in package 1993 technology!”

Our deadline was quickly approaching and we were preparing to throw in the towel when the CBS team came through with an external zip drive… the sounds needed to be cleaned up, but they were fabulous better then I was even hoping for!
You can here some of those sound clips, here. And see more images of the Star Trek Mimobots after the jump:


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