By Evan Ackerman

Have you ever tried to taste electricity? You can, you know… Go find a 9v battery and stick the contacts on your tongue.* Not pleasant, right? Sony has this problem (and it’s a serious, serious problem) totally licked with an RC car that runs on juice. The tasty kind of juice. You know, from fruits and stuff.

The Tomy Ene pocket RC car has, inside of it, a “bio battery” that can generate electricity from sugar in things like juice or soda. As of two years ago, each cell could output 50 mW of power. For this little car, its speed and endurance depend entirely on what you decide to feed it, and while Sony is promoting Coke products, grape juice apparently works the best.

From what I can tell, Sony’s liquid battery technology uses enzymes to digest glucose, which may mean that they last far longer (and are rechargeable more times) than those incredibly strange Nopopo urine powered batteries, which use magnesium and carbon and only last for about 4 charges. However, when you consider which kind of fluid you’d rather donate to your batteries, Nopopo might come out ahead.

Tomy’s car, with Sony’s battery inside it, is currently in the functional (yay!) prototype stage, you can see a video of it motoring around here.

[ Gigazine ] VIA [ Inhabitots ]

*OhGizmo takes no responsibility for whatever you crazy people might actually do at our suggestion. Try this one at your own risk.

MSI has sold millions of their Wind series of netbooks. Let’s all give them a round of applause shall we? But what does this mean for you guys? Good things, as luck would have it. Instead of some useless, commemorative award, they roll out the U135 model. And unlike most “Yay us!” products, this one actually has some worthwhile upgrades under the hood.

The Wind U135 is the first to contain Intel’s new Pine Trail Platform for the Atom processor. The keys are also supposedly 20% larger, always nice for small-form factor products. On a whole, the device operates on only 7 watts of power, and when combined with the optional 6-cell battery, gives you a decent amount of up-time. The rest is pretty standard. You get Windows 7 and 1 GB of DDR2 memory stock, and you can choose between a 160GB or 250 GB hard drive. It also integrates a 1.3M webcam, 3 USB 2.0 ports and a 4×1 card reader.

These units will run you between 309.99 – 329.99 USD at your favorite electronics retailers.

Yay! for Brando and yay! for convergence!

Of course you need this really small MP3 player that doubles as a microSDHC card reader. Why? Hell, I don’t know, but it’s so small that it won’t take up any space at all in your gadget junk drawer and then that one time when you actually need a microSDHC card reader that doubles as an MP3 player, you’ll thank good ol’ Matt Burns and CrunchGear. Oh, and it’s only $18 and available in five fantastic colors.

The “WiFi Body Scale” from French company Withings records your weight and BMI and automatically uploads it to a secure website, which would be a lot easier to make fun of if it weren’t for Wii Fit, which does that stuff but doesn’t upload it anywhere.

People made fun of Wii Fit at first and then it went on to become the most popular Wii game in the history of the universe, so it stands to reason that this scale may become the most popular scale in the history of scales. Or it may not. You never can tell.

And it wouldn’t be a serious product if there wasn’t also an iPhone app for keeping track of your progress as well, right? Well, there is. And get this: up to eight different people can keep track of their weight on the same scale. The scale even knows who’s who right when they step on the scale. Maybe it knows each person by the amount of meat in their feet. Science!

The scale costs $159 and is available at Withings.com (and apparently Amazon, although it’s not in stock there at the moment). Yes, that’s a lot for a scale but even at $159 it offers far more value than the $55 Yay! Scale from earlier this week.

WiFi Body Scale [Withings.com]

A document on Sega America’s official FTP server suggests that Sony will launch it motion control thingamajig this Spring. The document summarizes a meeting between Sega and Sony, which took place last month.

Of course, I wouldn’t put it past a Sega employee “plant” such a document in the first place, just to get the Internet talking.

Other highlights from the document:

•Sony killed PS2 backwards compatibility because it wants to sell those games on the PSN

• Dreamcast games may find their way to the PSN (yay!)

That’s pretty much it. Expect Sony to address this, maybe, at the Tokyo Game Show on Thursday.

Helpful, pre-circled pic via OMGENGADGET

Okay, this is definitely a new one. The “BeerPaQ CarboPouch for Draft Beers” is pretty much exactly like it sounds, although you could drop “BeerPaQ” and “Carbo” to achieve the same effect: it’s beer, but in a pouch. But why?

Here’s why. It’s expensive and time-consuming for smaller “craft draft beer brewers” — people who brew their own beer that’s delicious enough to sell to other people — to bottle all those beers for sale. These beer pouches make it easier and less expensive to do so, especially at on-site events like beer festivals and whatnot where they may sell beers one at a time.

The pouches are made from a special “organoleptic film structure” that apparently don’t change the taste of the beer, so it’s just like drinking out of a bottle assuming you can get past the mental aspect of drinking a tube of beer.

Here’s more:

“The patented film structure is designed to handle the pouch “stretch” after filling and carbonation expansion. The automatic filling process is such that there is no headspace after filling. The three-side seal pouch has a smooth side comfort grip feature. The combination of these factors makes the CarboPouch™ a true economical innovation for distribution of craft draft beers to the consumer’s home. Sports functions now have a package!”

The pouches come in three sizes: 8 ounces (boo!), 16 ounces (yay!), and a whopping 1.8 liter-sized pouch (hooray!). I’ve never personally heard of or seen anything like this but maybe they’ll slowly creep their way into local beer-stravaganzas everywhere.

CARBOPOUCH [Beverage Pouch Group via DVICE]