While we imagine that the vast majority of you would be perfectly content with an all-electric MINI Cooper (or a Porsche, if nothing else), some debutantes and Chuck Bass wannabes just won't have anything but the best. For those out there who can actually consider putting a Rolls-Royce in the garage, you'll be thrilled to know that CEO Tom Purves is spending some serious time thinking about a battery-powered Phantom. Reportedly, the bigwig stated that "many of its customers do small mileages exclusively in the city," and for these customers, "an electric Rolls-Royce would be ideal." He wouldn't hand over any prospective time lines or anything, but we did get the impression that he reckoned the engineering wouldn't be too terribly taxing. And the best part? He suggested that most buyers would opt for an electric Rolls for "urban use" while sporting a gasoline-powered version for longer journeys. Yeah, that's something we can totally relate to.

[Via Autoblog]

Welcome to Incrudo country, gentlemen. Out here, we grow chest hair as bushy as the tumbleweed, and we like our phones built thick. We're not talkin' no ordinary thick, either, no sir -- give us 2 to 3mm of solid titanium casing here. We like our phones heavy, too; a half pound sounds about right. We didn't get these burly muscles wrasslin' cattle just to tote around a Samsung X820, if you know what we're saying. Make it look like a brick, because it's built like a brick. Just like us, because we're men. Incrudo men.

[Via Unwired View]

It's hard to tell if those awesome consoles up above are artists renditions or very real pieces of gaming technology that will shake the industry at its core. So hard to tell. We won't humor Piicron enough to actually describe their ideas (okay, just one: Ubercron, a $500 console that can play "any game ever released to any console" with its 3.2GHz quad-core processor) but we do recommend clicking on over to the website, where you can easily squander an afternoon reading through all this insanity. To be honest, we're almost a little disappointed none of this is grounded in reality, or even vaguely aware of reality: at least Phantom was trying.

At this point we're pretty certain Phantom's shady, vaporous history is warning enough to anyone thinking about giving cash to the company, but the risk-takers out there might want to take note: Phantom's oft-delayed Lapboard is now available for purchase. Of course, there's no ship date listed and -- true to Phantom form -- the site's SSL certificate is a little shady, but come on, you know you want to pony up your credit card number and let us know what happens.

[Thanks, Ray Z.]

Those terribly saddened by the recent drought of Phantom Entertainment news now have something to celebrate, as the current king of vaporware has seemingly inked an utterly worthless marketing agreement with ProGames Network to "place the Lapboard and Phantom Game Service content in [select] hotels." Reportedly, the two have agreed to place Phantom's not-yet-available wares into hotels found in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australasia (fancy, huh?), but to no one's surprise, neither firm mentions a target launch date.

There's just no way to celebrate the ushering in of a new CEO than to ink a loan agreement worth some $1.3 million, right? Just a day after Phantom Entertainment's, um, head honcho, stepped aside and gave the reigns of the vaporware wagon to Greg Koler, the outfit has now announced that it will be using the newfound fundage to "manufacture product lines this year with Alienware and IONE Technologies." We know, it's hard to stifle the chuckling, but apparently Phantom really believes that this time will be different, as it's busting out radical plans to "initiate marketing, sales, and distribution of the Phantom Lapboard." We'd feel sorry for the lenders, but they should have known better.

You can't keep a good snake oil salesman down -- well, until he jumps right the hell overboard from his company. Maybe possibly actually on the eve of -- gasp -- actually shipping something, vaporware stock scamming pump and dump frontrunner Phantom Entertainment (aka Infinium Labs, aka the dudes Gizmondo like sooo looked up to) announced today that its founder, Chairman, and Director Tim Roberts is peaceing out just in time to not screw up their non-sales during this week's E3 conference.

Lovely fluff ensues: "'We are grateful for Tim's vision and his service in helping to guide the Company since its inception' noted Greg Koler, CEO and President of Phantom Entertainment, Inc. 'We will miss Tim's counsel and insightful views on the direction of technology and we wish him well with his new endeavors.'" Vision? In producting what, bupkis? Service? In doing what, leaving the company in 2005 with a booty load of stock making the whole business look like a scam? Man, you can't even make this shlock up.

Read - press release
Read - CNN says dude's a crook (2006)
Bonus: check out dude's LinkedIn profile. He really seems to believe he's a "Proven Leader in Sales." Sales of what, exactly?

Apparently these guys just don't know when to quit, and rather than ditching the Lapboard in the same way the gaming service was dismissed, the seemingly bogus company is making waves (and probably little more) yet again. Although Alienware has reportedly handed over an order for the firm's yet-to-be-seen wireless gaming keyboards, we still maintain little faith in the notoriously unreliable company to actually come through, and today its, um, brave CEO announced another unsurprising delay. This time, the delay is actually being attributed to an overwhelming "demand," as Phantom claims that "major manufacturers of media center PCs and distributors" are throwing down so many orders that the company won't be able to "begin air shipments to the US" until February 2007. While you can place your order now through its online webstore (not recommended), only orders received through October 31st are "promised" in that first wave of shipments. But for those who are rightfully gun shy about handing over your credit card info to a company with such an incredibly undependable track record, you can surely count on just picking one up from "major retail locations" in Q1 of next year.

Yeah, yeah, we know that Phantom's Lapboard is supposed to be totally legit and whatnot, but it's hard not to doubt the legitimacy of any sort of product from a company that has produced vaporware with the incredible hype and consistency of the unabashed Phantom. Now that Alienware has ordered up themselves a bunch of these $130 Phantom Wireless Lapboards and Wireless Laser Mouse setups for sale with their Media Center PC and PC lineup, we suppose we'll have to admit that Phantom just might hit their projected November launch date after all. Of course, they could always pull a Sony and blame increased demand for some unforeseen delays -- we suppose we'll find out soon enough.

In a resurrection of not-so-epic proportions, Phantom has seemingly not thrown in the towel just yet, as its latest announcement has shown (delayed) signs of life. Just when Infinium Entertainment shed its old skin and dubbed itself Phantom, we all had such high hopes that it might actually deliver on some promises (like giving back their shareholders some money, for one), but we suppose this latest delay isn't such a letdown considering the company is probably recovering from whatever caused it to vanish last month. Although Phantom's ever-elusive Lapboard is still on track for a November release (ahem), it has announced that its gaming service won't see any action until March 2007 "as part of a licensing and recoding effort" -- apparently its CEO is hoping the setback will give Phantom time to license its goods vaporware to "well-established PC and HTPC manufacturers." Whatever the case, we're just overrun with elation (ha) to hear that Phantom is alive and kicking, and be sure stay tuned for more late-breaking delays that are practically guaranteed to hit sometime before next March, or your money back.

Having been burned oh so many times by the notorious Phantom from Infinium Labs -- perhaps the most infamous piece of vaporware this side of Duke Nukem Forever -- we're more than a little skeptical of any company that comes out of nowhere to offer a "media entertainment console" targeted at gamers. And we're even more skeptical when that company -- in this case, Alabama-based Envizions Inc. -- claims to have been showing off their console at a major trade show that we attended -- in this case, E3 -- but somehow managed to keep it under our radar. We're still going to give the so-called EVO: Phase One the benefit of the doubt, though, as Envizions has just announced October 20th as a solid North American release date for what seems to be little more than a souped-up media center PC out of the box -- although the unit comes with one wireless controller, it will only "have console-like features upon future upgrade applications and hardware assistance." Not a good sign. For $680 you're supposedly getting a machine with an unspecified processor and RAM configuration (also a bad sign) along with a 500MHz Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro graphics card sporting 128MB of 800MHz DDR3 RAM, a liquid cooling system, and oddly enough, a built-in fingerprint scanner (to protect all of your valuable saved game-states, perhaps?). Again, we'll wait until October to pass final judgment here, but lets just say that we're not going to be the ones throwing down $25 to place a pre-order. Keep reading to check out some of the company's over-the-top marketing, direct from CEO Derrick Samuels' MySpace page...

[Via IGN]