We’ve had the Wicked Laser Green 95mw laser for a couple of weeks now. It’s falls outside the sort of things we’d normally test, but I’m glad we made an exception, because this thing is bonkers.
I suspect that if you’ve never worked professionally with lasers, the only thing that you will have seen that’s brighter than this laser is the Sun. This – 95mW CLASS IIIb portable laser, to give it it’s full name – is a little more convenient than the Sun though, as it’s the size of a pen (15cm, 6inch) and you can switch it on and off.
It arrived well packaged in a rather natty box and we couldn’t wait to get it on. An unexpected lack of the required 2 x AAA batteries at our end lead us to initial disappointment but this instantly evaporated when it was powered and switched on for the first time.
What you can do with it
Once you get over the brightness, you’re left with what to do with amazing product of human engineering.
Man-magnet I showed the Wicked Laser to a room full of lads (aged 25-35). The effect was remarkable. I have never seen some of these people move so fast, as a collective WOW went up around the room and they literally dashed towards it. Their attention was completely captivated.
If you’ve got any reason to want to grab the attention of a large group of boys, you could do little better than to get yourself one of these.
So how far does it go?
Naturally our curiosity was peaked – how far does the beam go? What size is the light point when it gets there? Wicked Lasers tells us that the beam will reach 30-40 miles, yes MILES, and if you were to be there looking at it, the point of the beam will be about the size of a house!
Safety
To re-itterate a warning – this laser is seriously bright. Forget every laser pointer you might have seen before. This is like nothing you’ve ever seen. James Bond look out.
I’d definitely recommend wearing protective goggles with it, if you’re going to be using indoors. This baby has so much power that it reflects a serious amount of light when you point/shine in to surfaces. In our findings, the longest you want to use it indoors without protective glasses is about 15 mins. After that you start to get a strange ache in the back of your eyes. This fades off over around 10 mins.
Conclusion
This thing is seriously powerful and certainly not to be messed with. You _will_ impress the pants off people who see it – especially men. Take care with it though, it could be dangerous It’s certainly not cheap, but you’re paying for its extreme power.
We don’t really know how or what to compare it with as it’s outside out normal remit. All we can rate it by is how much it impressed us – and everyone we showed it to, without exception.
Score: 93%
Wicked Laser 95mW CLASS IIIb portable laser- $369.99 (E307, £214)
Extra photos and videos
When you get to the end of burning things and scaring ocean liners, you start to explore the potential. Here’s one of the videos that we shot with using the laser. Link.
Creating lighting havoc from the sofa.
Commanding the street.
Oh look, it’s the corner of the room.
Freaking out the camera with a direct hit.
Rolling off Sony Ericsson’s well-furrowed product slipway this morning is the W700i Walkman Phone, the company’s eighth addition to their Walkman range. 
Like the W800, the W700 comes with a full complement of onboard gizmos, including a two megapixel camera, 1.8 inch 262k 176×220 colour TFT display, dedicated music buttons and Bluetooth and Tri-band connectivity. 
Details of a snazzy new range of Sony flash memory MP3 player/FM radios with a colour display have appeared on Sony’s Chinese site. 
Sporting attractively bijou dimensions of 75.5mm x 45.5mm, the CE-P is smaller than a credit card (but not as thin, natch) and is designed for carrying around your neck, gangsta-stylee. 
The CE-P series will come in three flavours, offering storage capacity from 256MB to a 1GB. 
Leica has released details of their new Leica C-Lux 1 camera, an ultra compact number which claims to be the world’s smallest camera with a 28mm lens. 
The f2.8 – f5.6 zoom lens offers a normal focusing range of 50 cm to infinity, with the macro setting getting close up and personal at 5 cm at the wide position and 30 cm for telephoto. 
Early reports have commended the camera on its sharp, high resolution output, but as with the 
Supplied with a high-capacity rechargeable lithium-ion battery plus a posh leather case with micro-velour lining, users can expect to pay a hefty premium for the privilege of flashing a Leica-branded camera about. 
Toshiba has today released the first HD-DVD player. 
Where the Toshiba-lead HD-DVD will win with the public is in the simple extension of the DVD name, incorporating HD which everyone either does know about, or will do after the advertising frenzy around this years World Cup. 
The highly rated Palm Treo 650 smart phone has won the support of another major mobile phone operator in the UK. 
With Orange the sole Treo supporter up until now, rivals Vodafone, T-Mobile and O2 have preferred to offer a selection of Windows Mobile-based devices made by HTC – including the 
Palm – who are currently celebrating the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Palm Pilot – is reported to have shifted 564,000 Treos in the last quarter (and we’re soon to join the throng after giving up on the fiddly complexities of our Windows Mobile handset). 
Aimed at aspiring superstar DJs, bedroom mixers and club jockeys, Numark’s entry level CD Mix 1 combo is a convenient package offering dual CD transports and a basic mixer. 
A large pair of LCD screens above each of the CD’s controls offers useful information on the modes selected and time remaining/elapsed for the playing track. 
Although it has to be said that the beatmatching facilities on the CD Mix-1 are unlikely to thrill ‘ardcore drum’n’bass heads looking to mash it up bigstyle, it’s certainly a good place to start on. 
Our verdict
Hook it up to your home system, your hi-fi or zillion watt soundsystem and you’re off! 
Sanyo have just launched what it’s claiming is the world’s smallest, thinnest and lightest solid state digital camcorder, the Xacti C6. 
Saving space by recording straight to a SD card instead of using conventional tape, recordable DVD or hard disk, the Sanyo can grab an hour of VGA resolution (640?480 pixels) video at 30 frames-per-second on a 1 GB card using the “TV-HQ” mode (MPEG-4 bit rate: 2 Mbps). 
There’s also a 5x optical zoom, 12x digital zoom and a Digital Image Stabiliser for correcting any wobbles, with the CCD sensor using 9-pixel mixing technology to record brighter and clearer video in low-light situations. 
More rugged than Chuck Norris in a suit of armour, Panasonic’s latest addition to their Toughbook notebook series is set to be introduced at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2006 event next week. 
In line with its rugged ambitions, the lappie is packaged in a full magnesium case with carrying handle and sports a water/spill resistant keyboard and a shock-mounted 80 GB hard drive. 
AUDIO
Most built-in MP3/FM/headphone combos are so bulky it looks like the user has got two halves of a tennis ball stuck on their heads, but a new headset from Japanese manufacturers Thanko looks to change all that. 
Clearly getting carried away with claims about the unit’s diminutive size, the (ahem) ‘ButterFly’ FMP3 comes in two flavours offering 512MB and 1GB flash memory capacities, with the built in MP3 player supporting MP3 and WMA at 32 – 192Kbps data rates. 
Powered by a non-removable 3.7V lithium ion battery, charged over the USB connection, the hazy web translation suggests that the makers are claiming up to 700 minutes for radio play and 350 – 400 minutes of continuous MP3 playback.