There's no reason whatsoever to recommend this "Morphy Richards 2 Perfection Toaster"—it's upwards of $60, for one—but the space-age bread insertion mechanism, as seen in the video, is quite futuristic. Pretend you're loading the photon torpedo tubes.

Catalog Page [ElectricShopping.com via Serious Eats via Oh Gizmo]

The description on this clip calls it an "actual leaked phone conversation" to Dell. It's just lame enough to be believable, but who knows? [via Digg]

Laptop mag got their hands on a Everex CloudBook sub-notebook this morning, the $400 Asus Eee fighter that has a built-in 30GB hard drive instead of the Eee's all-solid-state rig up. I have (had?) high hopes for the CloudBook, but the first impressions don't sound that good:

The pointing device: The touchpad is a tiny stretch of plastic in the most awkward place you can possibly imagine, on the right above the keyboard. The left and right mouse buttons are on the left side above the keyboard, forcing you to use two hands to navigate and click.

That's a really, really bizarre decision. I don't know why I hadn't noticed that from the press images before. Also, Laptop is having issues even getting the thing setup, software-wise.

CloudBook Unboxing and Very First Impressions [Blog.LaptopMag.com]

From a Business Week cover story about the X300's development:

Hill's other idea was to make the PC very small, less than 10 inches across and less than one inch thick. Yet he wanted it to have a full-size keyboard, so he dusted off a design from the mid-1990s: a keyboard that folded up when the laptop was closed and opened out to full size when the machine was opened. The "butterfly" keyboard had caused a sensation when it was first introduced on a ThinkPad in 1995. ... During a meeting at Sapper's modernistic, V-shaped home on Italy's Lake Como, the 75-year-old design legend urged Hill to make the fold-out keyboard deploy automatically, rather than requiring the owner to snap it into place. By midsummer, Hill handed his ideas over to the Yamato engineers to see what would really work.

A 10-inch sub-notebook with an automatically expanding fold-out keyboard? I don't know if it would have seen better sales, but it sounds awfully neat. Perhaps a bit too anachronistic.

Building the Perfect Laptop [BusinessWeek]

Trends in Japan says that rice cooker manufacturer Zojirushi's latest model, the "Rizo," was designed with "the western kitchen in mind." I'm not quite sure what that means—many rice cookers, including some from Zojirushi, have been available here for a while. I don't think it's the design that's holding them back from mass market penetration, but simply that rice isn't the everyday staple for most Americans as it is for many Asian cultures. I am curious about the special "risotto mode," however; how would it do all that stirring?

Another model from Zojirushi, called the "i-pot," will send a text message to your phone if it hasn't been used in a while, the better to keep track of the elderly's behavior. I know that when my parents die I want the first person to tell me to be the rice cooker.

Zojirushi Rizo rice cooker plans western invasion [Trends in Japan]