Why Are US Army Soldiers' Pants Breaking? [Military]

Our soldiers just got one more enemy in Afghanistan: their own pants. It seems their pants—which are completely new and supposed to be more durable than previous models—can't survive the rigors of the desert. They're ripping apart seemingly at random.

The new pants seemed perfectly fine. They use tightly stitched flame-resistant Defender M fabrics and Christian at Kit Up! says their "crotch design" is fine! But they can't survive up to the daily life of Army soldiers, and they get ripped right, left and center. The problem is so bad that the Army had to get back to select a new fabric, 40% stronger than the current material. They are currently making 100,000 new uniforms in Union City, Georgia.

Hopefully they will finish and ship those 100,000 new uniforms soon. I hate the idea of soldiers fighting on the battlefield and getting a big rip on their pants just at the wrong time and place.

Are you a soldier stationed in Afghanistan? Are your pants breaking? Tell us in the comments. [KitUp!]

Photo by Michael Yon

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Our Favorite Laptops, Cloud Storage, 4G, Gadgets, and More [Bestmodo]

It all seems a bit for naught, with the earth in obvious upheaval, spawning one natural disaster after another and careening toward a horrible, fiery, and certain end next year. But until that happens, there are some pretty cool gadgets to play with! Here's the best of bunch from August.

Best Windows Ultraportable
The Vaio Z is proof that Sony can still do some things very right. The screen is beautiful. Borderline jaw-dropping, and makes watching HD content a joy. It's light, nicely designed, and blazing fast—pretty much everything you'd want in an ultraportable. Its one downside is a seriously tiny and lacking trackpad. But still, it's an astonishingly fast and fluid machine otherwise.

Best Cloud Storage Service
It's SugarSync—with a few caveats. SugarSync was the best confluence of price, ease of use, and features, but if you're looking for pure, sheer simplicity for sharing your sharables with the lovable luddites in your life, Dropbox might still be the better option. And if you're a total cheapass, maybe take a look at Google, or Microsoft's SkyDrive. Best 4G Network
You already knew this, but here it is in writing: Verizon's LTE network is the country's fastest 4G service. LTE is just better. AT&T's in the process of field testing its own LTE service, though, so we'll have a fight on our hands. Best iPod Dock
So yeah, $600 is a lot to spend on an iPod dock. But the Bowers and Wilkins Zeppelin positively drips with engineering. It has 5 brand new drivers-2 mids, 2 tweeters, a sub-each powered by its own class-d amp, and 150 total watts of oomph. Best Mobile Bluetooth Keyboard
The Targus Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard for Tablets came out on top of our mobile bluetooth keyboard deathmatch. It doesn't fold or roll up like some of the other ones, but after using the it for a few minutes you forget it's undersized. The individual keys have some separation between them, making keyboard errors less frequent, and it's attractively priced. Best Affordable Amplifier
The Topping TP-30 is the best audiophile-worthy amplifier to be had for under $500.

Best Windows Ultraportable: Like last month's MacBook Air, this is more a passing of the torch, with the elder Vaio Z giving way to the new model.

*Note, this is not a complete list—just the change log. Our full list of The Greatest Gadgets is right here.

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How HP Tried to Sue Itself Over TouchPad Refunds [Hp]

The latest bit in the increasingly amusing Laurel and Hardy routine that is the HP TouchPad: HP just tried to sue itself for offering HP TouchPad refunds. No, seriously. This is a thing that happened.

The company got wind recently of a fraudulent "HP Refund Program" in Europe, targeting German TouchPad buyers looking to be refunded when that insano fire sale kicked off. The questionable site was asking for bank account information, which seemed shady! So HP mobilized its legal team, refusing to let such an affront stand. Except!

Except that the site in question was legit. Contracted by HP to handle the refund process. Totally benign. Oops?

Presumably HP has called off the hounds from... itself. Seriously, though, guys. I know things are weird over there these days; no need to make it worse by punching yourself in the face. [PreCentral]

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Samsung's Swiveling MV800 Is a Gift to People Who Love Their Own Faces [Video]

Sammy's got a triple blast of cameras today, and the kookiest release is the MV800, with an AMOLED screen that flips around for perfected self-portraiture. No more MySpace arm extension!

The 16 MP MV800's not particularly thrilling beyond its shape-shifting frame—although touch controls are the capacitive screen are nice. Really, unless you want to take a lot of photos of yourself and your friends, and don't feel like tossing your camera up into the air, there's not much reason to pay a premium for the swivel action. It's a pumped-up point and shoot for the vain. Check for it at the end of the month.

Samsung's next fresh camera, the 20 MP NX200, is a nice hunk of meat. It's a mirrorless interchangeable-lens unit—the successor to the NX100—with a bevy of lens options coming out along with it, an ISO range up to 12,800, and 1080p video at 30 FPS. A particularly neat touch is the lens-mounted switch, allowing you to control shutter speed, aperture, exposure, white balance, and ISO, by twisting the lens ring. It's nice to see controls move off oft-overly crowded back of the camera, and to somewhere more natural.

The last of the trio, the WB750, is a fancy little point and shoot: 12.5 MP, a generous 18x optical zoom, 1080p video cap, and still capture while recording video. Other than that, it's just a point and shoot. But that zoom!

No availability on those latter two.

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Sony Tablet P First Impressions: Is the Taco Tablet Tasty? [Android]

I really love Sony for trying something different. Between this foldable Tablet P and the company's indescribably-shaped (but very palmable) Tablet S they are genuinely trying to leave the hardware pack mentality behind. But enough congratulations. How good is it?

I only had a very short time to play with the Sony Tablet P, and I was warned that it was a prototype and that the software was very much unfinished. Fair enough. The basics: it's a small tablet, with two 5.5-inch clamshell screens, that folds in half to get even smaller. Like, fits-in-your-pocket small. It'll be launching later this year as an AT&T exclusive, running Android 3.2 and and packing Wi-Fi and 4G connectivity. There's no Wi-Fi only model planned as of now.

The best thing about the Sony Tablet P? Portability. If you hate carrying a bag around (like me), being able to slip the tablet in your jacket pocket is a big plus. The hinge that splits the clamshell is sturdy. I mean it feels like it could stop a bullet, which is great. It weighs only 13 ounces, which is featherweight for a tablet.

Sony has pre-loaded a fair amount of exclusive apps to utilize the dual-screen design. Some of these implementations are very good (and just, you know, logical) like text messaging with the keyboard taking up the bottom screen and the text on top. The PlayStation app* takes advantage of the dual-screens, too, putting controls on the lower screen while the upper screen becomes your "TV". The email app and a few others are good, too.

Unfortunately, most of my praise ends there. Opening the tablet up you're met with a strange, square-shaped screen with a very thick, black line in the middle (the bezel where the hinge is). It's not something you can ignore. The size and shape really isn't optimal for anything. Holding the Tablet P vertically should feel a bit like reading a book, but the ebook app makes the text just a hair too small when you have a page on each screen. In other apps, things simply get lost in the chasm between the screens. The worst implementation of all was the app for watching movies, where it put the movie on the top screen and the player controls on the bottom. Seriously? Do you really think I need the entire bottom screen for Play/Fast Forward/Rewind? I do not. But I'm relegated to watching a tiny movie nonetheless. Which, on the other hand, might still be preferable to watching The Thin Red Line with a thick black line bifurcating the action.

What stings even more is that the apps that will actually leverage this dual-screen setup are going to be extremely limited. There are the ones Sony made in-house and... well, right now that's about it. Sony plans to release APIs to the world, but traditionally endeavors like that have failed miserably. It's been hard enough to get developers to adapt their apps for Honeycomb because they just aren't seeing the demand yet. Does Sony really think that this odd, niche tablet within the Honeycomb ecosystem is going to somehow incentivize developers more than Honeycomb as a whole? Does not compute. It also uses the same cheap, soft glass as the the Sony Tablet S, which, as we mentioned in that review is waaaay not good enough.

Anyway, like I said, my time with this thing was limited and the software wasn't finished (nor will it be until later this year), so don't let this be a final judgement. I really wanted to like this device, and as I say, I salute Sony for thinking out of the box. That said, I think they need to go back to the drawing board. This form-factor, ultimately, doesn't have much more of a prayer than the ill-fated Kyocera Echo or Toshiba Libretto did. The giant gap in the middle needs to go away, and it needs to be a more landscape form-factor (4:3 at the very least). Let this one incubate a bit longer, Sony. You're close, but you're not nearly close enough.

*This tablet and the Sony Tablet P are the first two tablets to be PlayStation Certified.

Specs
Two 5.5 inch screens
1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor
1GB RAM
5MP rear-facing camera, 0.3MP front-facing
4GB internal memory
Full-size SD Card slot (for media exchange only)
Wi-Fi + 4G
AT&T Exclusive
Weight: 13 ounces
Open - 6.22l x 7.08w x 0.53h (inches)
Closed - 3.11l x 7.08w x 1.02h (inches
Price/Release Date: Unknown
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How-to-Pronounce-Difficult-Words Videos Will Make You Cry From Laughter [Video]

Ever wondered how to exactly pronounce difficult words, names and posh brands like Cthulhu, Givenchy, Glenfiddich, Aeropostale, Porsche or Jake Gyllenhaal? Then don't watch these videos. But if you want to piss your pants from laughter, watch them.

The videos are produced by YouTube user PronunciationManual. They are a parody of the PronunciationBook series.

Their pronunciation of Glenfiddich is exactly the one I use, though. [YouTube via Ed Zitron via John Herrman]

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Sony's SA-NS 500 AirPlay Speaker: Room-Filling Sound from a Lampshade [Speakers]

Sony's new AirPlay-ready, lampshade-looking SA-NS 500 portable speaker looks like it's going to be pretty good. The SA-NS 500 has a four speaker array, a mid-range subwoofer, and gets 5-6 hours of battery life.

It also supports party streaming, which lets you play the same audio on multiple devices across multiple rooms—similar to a Sonos system—and can be controlled by Android and iPhone apps (no WP7 for now). It'll be available for $400—the same price as the Sonos Play:5—in October. [ThisIsMyNext]

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