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Showing posts with label Gadgets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gadgets. Show all posts
Thursday, January 7, 2010
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Hi,it me again Iam so sorry cause never up date this blog for a long time. Actually I very busy with my works.For my fellow readers thanks for still visiting my blog.For bloggers who want link up with this blog I really sorry cause I not open link exchange anymore.But if you like my blog keep reading with feed burn,just put your e mail and you will get a new post from me.Even I not up date my blog,it still a good page rank,so it my responsibility to keep it with a good page rank.
Do you have a watches,how about this watches,I got a view this pic watches from my friend.Mr Jamal via e mail. Ok enjoy it guys...
Dell’s lithe, nifty beauty
Dell Laptop
SINGAPORE – Few laptops impress me with their looks, but Dell’s Adamo has earned a place in my books for its brilliant aesthetics.
Airtel, RIM launch new BlackBerry in India
NEW DELHI, INDIA: Bharti Airtel, India’s telecom major, Tuesday announced the launch of the Blackberry Curve 8520 smartphone on its prepaid and postpaid platforms in collaboration with Research in Motion (RIM), the Canada-based manufacturer of the device.
Following on the heels of the launch of Nokia’s E-series phones that have most of the standard Blackberry features, the Bharti’s smartphone will be available from Aug 7.
It’s a netbook that can morph into a picture frame. Boston-based startup company Litl has launched a laptop that can be used straight up or flipped around so it can stand upright like an easel.
Called Webbook, the device has a 12-inch screen and a hinge that can pivot to change how the netbook looks. Twist it around and the device takes on the form factor of a picture frame than a traditional laptop.
“With its screen exposed, the Webbook is ideal for passive or lean back web activity like enjoying photos, listening to music, or consuming news, weather and other web content,” says Litl in a statement.
Under the hood, the Webbook doesn’t have much to brag about. The device has a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 1 GB RAM, 2 GB flash memory, a camera, Wi-Fi connectivity, a USB port, two infrared ports and a HDMI port. Clearly it is intended as a clould computing device, one where you don’t store much locally on your hard disk but use it to access files or photos already on the internet.
The Webbook will also have proprietary “channels” or feeds from sites such as Flickr, Shutterfly, The Weather Channel and Facebook, says the company.
It’s a cute idea but rather expensive one. The device is available online for $700, with an optional remote control for $19. Without the hardware muscle to back it up, the Litl Webbook will be a hard sell for most users. The device doesn’t have enough storage to be a primary laptop and at its current price point, an all-in-desktop for the living room might be an attractive alternative.
More pictures of the Webbook
Apple’s App Store is now serving over 100,000 downloadable iPhone apps, the Cupertino, California company announced Wednesday. Overall, iPhone owners worldwide have downloaded over 2 billion apps to date, according to Apple.
“The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, in a press release. “The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating.”
Games appear to be the hottest items in the App Store. Of the 100,000 apps, only 16,000 titles are games, according to NPD Group. And yet, 65 percent of the 2 billion apps downloaded are games, according to Tal Kerret, co-founder of casual game solution provider Oberon Media.
Hitting six digits is an impressive milestone for Apple, especially when pitted against Google’s Android platform, which is serving about 11,000 apps. But as the App Store continues to expand, an inevitable question arises: How many apps do you really need? My colleague Philip Elmer-DeWitt raised this point recently in a piece in which he argued 11,000 apps may very well be sufficient to serve Android users.
The key, then, for Apple and its rivals — Motorola, Verizon, Palm and Microsoft — should be to focus on marketing high quality, killer apps that will lure consumers toward their respective handsets and app stores. We’re certain Apple’s “There’s an App for That” campaign is generating a lot more interest in the iPhone than press releases boasting the number of apps available for download.
Until now, the Apple Stores have used Windows CE-based handheld computers to check out your purchases. The convenience of not having to queue at a counter to pay meant that Steve Jobs has doubtless spent the last few years squirming that his company relied on a Microsoft product. Apple store employees weren’t happy either. According to Apple Insider, “the system has drawn complaints from employees about software crashes, sluggish operation and the need to frequently reboot.”
Now that the iPod Touch can run applications that interface with add-on hardware, everything has changed. The new payment system uses an iPod in a hard plastic case that can scan barcodes and swipe credit cards. This is married to an application called EasyPay Touch, which will process cards, issue returns and even let you buy and activate an iPhone on the plan of your choice. If the Apple employee hits the “cash” button, a register drawer will open somewhere in the store in which to deposit the filthy lucre (participating stores only).
What about signing for your purchase? The grand irony is that the stylus-free handheld computer needs to use a stylus. And not just any stylus, but the Pogo stylus, which we called “The Most Useless iPhone Accessory. Ever” back in December 2007. Still, it’s one more weapon in the fight against Microsoft, and especially the new Microsoft stores. Apple Insider says that “The Microsoft solution is about four times larger than an iPod touch and weighs five times as much.”
We’re sure that Steve Jobs is very happy.
Exclusive look at Apple’s new iPod touch-based EasyPay checkout [Apple Insider]
The world’s biggest iPod speaker is best described in numbers. The Wall of Sound weighs 102 kilos (225 pounds), stands almost a meter tall (a yard) and 1.25 meters wide (a bit more than a yard) and can rock up to around 125 watts.
The wall is made up of 28 individual speakers, each housed in their own chamber, and the whole thing is hand-built. It even has its own tube amplifier hidden away inside and yes, that tiny protrusion on the side is an iPod dock.
The pitch reads thusly: “It looks frightening and it IS frightening!” This is backed up by the horrendous music which blasts from the website of the maker, Brothers of Stockholm, and of course the name, Wall of Sound, which reminds us of the scary Phil Spector.
The most frightening part, though, is the price: $4,500. Incredibly, the first batch has already sold out.
If you have a computer, it’s likely that it is a laptop. A handy, take-anywhere, do-anything computer that has one shortcoming: storage. You can of course stick in a bigger hard drive, but that doesn’t help if you have a ton of movies, and it certainly makes backing up trickier. This is where Lacie’s new Network Space comes in. The sleek block of black is designed to make hooking up easy, even without wires.
To show how convoluted laptop management can get, let’s look at my own (admittedly rather paranoid) setup. My MacBook has a 500GB hard drive inside. At the desk, I hook into a USB hub to which is connected a 500GB external drive and used by Time Machine. In addition, I have a bunch of movies and TV shows on another 500GB drive, and every few days I make a bootable backup to a smaller 320GB, bus-powered hard drive using the excellent Super Duper, from Shirt Pocket software. Finally, I use Backblaze for off-site backup ($5 per month, or the price of two bottles of beer in my local bar).
That’s a lot of cables and a lot of mental overhead trying to remember to do it all. And that’s why the Network Space looks so attractive. NAS (Network Attached Storage) isn’t new, but this Lacie gets a lot right. First, it’s $160 for a terabyte, almost $100 less than Apple’s Time Capsule. It has a sleep mode, can be woken over the network and the USB port means you can hook up another drive to it. There is even an option to control the glowing light, and it will work as an iTunes server, and serve files to Macs, Windows machines and games consoles.
Perfect, right? You can just throw this in a closet with a power supply and forget about it. Sadly, no. You need to run a cable to your router as the Network Space is Ethernet-only, with no Wi-Fi. So close, Lacie, so close. You almost made the perfect solution. Maybe I should buy that Time Capsule after all.
Hey you, bamboo, the fastest growing plant on earth: Pretty soon everything will be made of you. Brando's jumping on the bamboo bandwagon with this keyboard and mouse combo, with the tech inside mimicking their non-biodegradable plastic counterparts.
That optical mouse looks pretty clunky, but we could see ourselves getting used to the wooden keyboard, making us feel better about our ever-expanding carbon footprint while enjoying the unlikely pairing of high-tech and wood. Bambooya!
The keyboard's $39, the mouse is $19, or get them both together for $52.
Microsoft may be looking into expanding its multitouch support — as it's doing with Windows 7 — but the user needs a way to take advantage of that technology. I don't know about you, but the monitor I use wouldn't fit the bill, and I don't imagine people are running out to replace their own with expensive multitouch-capable screens. To that end, Microsoft is exploring another avenue to help proliferate multitouch: new computer mice.
The five designs you see in the video below aren't final products. They're concepts and show the direction Microsoft is going with the idea. The mice use everything from IR-sensitive cameras to capacitive-sensing electrodes, and look like anything from Microsoft's own Arc mouse (such as the multitouch FTIR concept you see pictured above), to ugly orbs.
Microsoft isn't alone in its pursuit, however. Word on the street is Apple is hard at work on the same. (Coincidence?)
We see a trend in the making. Finally, external drive makers have figured out how nice it is to see how much disk space is left without plugging in that drive. Following the lead of Verbatim and a few others, now Western Digital's My Book Elite and My Book Studio drives have labels on the outside, giving you that always-on info.
What's so great about that? Even when not plugged in, they'll show you a 12 character label, and a second line showing how much space is left on the disc, both in gigabytes and with a graph. Neat. Look for the USB 2TB My Book Elite for $280, and the 2TB My Book Studio with FireWire 800 and USB connectivity for $300.
Western Digital also spruced up its Passport Elite line, slimming it down and making it more streamlined. There's no alphanumeric display on the outside, but there is a small LED indicator showing disk space left. And hey, look at that, there's a dock to plug in those suckers, all looking good in red, blue and black and priced at $170 for the biggest one, a 640GB USB drive.
Via Gizmodo
What, is it external drive day in the tech world? First we hear from Western Digital, and now LaCie brings style to the mix with a couple of aluminum external hard drives designed by Philippe Starck. Both the rounded LaCie Starck Mobile and the squared-off desktop model have a shiny, asymmetrical chrome front LaCie is calling "sculptured magma."
Whatever; we think it looks attractive. Who cares if they're fingerprint magnets? Just look at that LED that projects Starck's + logo on the table below. It's classic Philippe Starck, the designer who cranks out product after product that makes us weak in the knees. Besides their superficial design, if these drives are like other LaCie units, they're dependable and reasonably fast.
Pricing is not too bad for all that style: You'll drop $130 for a 1TB desktop drive, $250 for the 2TB model. The 320GB mobile drive is 100 bucks, with its 500GB sibling running $140.
Via Electronista
So, here's a USB-powered massager. That's nice, right? I mean, you pay $15 for it, plug it into your machine and then — bam! — you get a gentle massage. Apparently, I got it all wrong.
The folks behind the Happy U, the little unit is not only a "professional massager," but its "as powerful as two real massage experts" who never tire. What's more, it's somehow perfect for if "you want to relax, relieve discomfort or lose weight."
And here all I wanted was $15 worth of shoulder pain relief. But, hey, I'll take a life-changing USB device, too.
Buffalo is now selling the first external hard drive that supports USB 3.0, meaning if you have the fancy new ports on your computer (which you probably don't), you'll be able to get insanely fast transfer speeds.
The drives, which come in 1TB and 1.5TB varieties for $225 and $284, aren't outrageously priced for being a fresh technology, so if you feel like popping a USB 3.0 into your computer, this should be a cool way to get all the juice out of it.
Gawd, please don't use this on me, beloved comrades. If you slipped this $32 USB Computer Prankster into a USB port in the back of my PC, I probably wouldn't be fooled when it started turning caps lock on and off, typing random text, and taking my cursor on random trips to cloud cuckoo land.
This diabolical dongle could wreak havoc on the uninitiated, especially if you install it and then set its time delay so you can sneak away undetected. Really, be careful where you apply this annoyance; someone might notify Homeland Security.
Thumbs Up, via Geek Alerts
Two weeks ago at Gadgetoff, a day-long conference devoted to life-changing and sometimes totally useless ideas and inventions, technology investor Gary Lauder presented an idea that captured my imagination. He spoke briefly about the history of foot binding, the practice of systematically constricting and deforming women's feet so that they would fit societal ideals. Foot binding is one of the most most extreme examples of "suffering for fashion."
Lauder then suggested that our future might include a different sort of binding: thumb binding. Right now, our opposable thumbs are just the wrong shape and size for the tiny keys on smartphones, including BlackBerries, iPhones, Palm Pres, Sidekicks and the like. But if we applied changed bandages daily the old-fashioned way, our fingers could end up in just the right shape!
This idea was obviously tongue-in-cheek — gadgets should conform to the user's hands, not the other way around. Right? Well, you wouldn't guess it from the current array of non-hand and arm-friendly keyboards I use at work and around town every day. It begs the question: Why don't we demand more ergonomic gadgets?
Are Hot Gadgets the New High Heels?
I associate the phrase "suffer for fashion" (great song, btw) with women — we don't bind our feet anymore, but we do wear high heels, even though they've been shown again and again to cause injury in the present and pain as you age. Men, it is argued, would never make such compromises just to look attractive. Their shoes are almost universally comfy.
The same cannot be said of their cellphones, PDAs, netbooks, keyboards and mice. When it comes to these gadgets, both sexes suffer the consequences for being trendy, in the form of repetitive stress injuries (RSIs), strained necks and shoulders, BlackBerry thumb and even cellphone elbow.
Fashion vs. Convenience
One might argue that we don't rely on PDAs' tiny keys because they're super cool, but because they're convenient, and that gadget makers are doing the best they can with the technology available. Tiny keyboards certainly are handy to carry around. But there are alternatives that could be just as portable and easy to use (more on this in a bit). I believe that a lot of what keeps us from adopting more comfortable, less injurious technologies is not simply convenience, but the fact that the current alternatives to tiny keys just aren't fashionabe.
Consider the lowest-hanging fruit: cellphone elbow, the pain of which I've experienced myself on occasion. Using a headset can easily prevent cellphone elbow. But headsets aren't cool. Bluetooth headsets have caught on somewhat in the suit-wearing crowd, but most of my friends wouldn't be caught dead using one even if they're comfortable (or built into your phone).
Typing is a more difficult issue. I've written most of this essay using my right hand only, because my left wrist and hand are having a painful flare-up after too much typing on crummy keyboards over too many weeks. Some QWERTY keyboards are more comfortable than others, but computers today still come standard with keyboards and mice that are terrible for our hands.
There's nothing groundbreaking or complex about ergonomic keyboard technology: It wouldn't cost companies more to make the baseline templates for both more ergonomic. Think of how much money Apple spent to design its Mighty Mouse. It's beautiful, of course, but it doesn't come close to conforming to the shape of an average human hand. In the same vein, this attractive little mouse from Microsoft may impress your friends with its looks, but your wrst may not be quite so enthusiastic. If we were begging for more and better ergonomic keyboards, companies would provide them, but as with cellphone earpieces, one major problem is that what's comfortable isn't usually what's attractive.
Another alternative to uncomfortable keyboards is to eschew typing entirely in favor of talking. Voice-recognition software is pretty great already, and it just keeps getting better — why do we use keyboards at all anymore, at least in private? Dictating to secretaries used to be expensive and inconvenient, so we've become accustomed to thinking with our fingers, but it's something we could re-learn with minimal effort. Dictating e-mails onto an iPhone in public may sound ridiculous in theory, but is it really any worse than talking on the phone to a friend? Better in-gadget dictation software would alleviate some of the damage we do to our hands while Twittering and texting.
For times when speaking out loud just isn't an option, tiny keys still aren't the only solution. laser-projection keyboards, though imperfect, are highly portable and connect to most PDAs so you can type emails on any surface. And what about good old-fashioned Palm-style writing with a stylus? It's not super fast, but then again, neither is hunting and pecking on the Palm Pre. In these days of swiping fingers and capacitive touchscreens, handwriting may be the most retro, least-trendy writing methd of all. But it does show that if companies were really driven by their customers to come up with alternatives to typing, they could.
A Shiny Future, or a Healthy One?
Gadgets are inherently kind of dorky, but it turns out there are levels of dorkiness. There's going out and getting the iPhone as soon as it hits stores (acceptably nerdy) and then there's walking around with a headset so you can dictate e-mails (unacceptably nerdy). I think we should embrace tech methods that are healthier. As we do, companies will have better incentives to develop cooler toys that don't ruin your hands. If we don't, we could well end up in an age where we distort our bodies to fit gadget fashion trends by, say, binding our thumbs to make them pointy.
If you've seen the recent instant horror classic Trick 'r Treat, you know that scary things can be fun. In that same spirit of Halloween fun you might want to pick up the Samurai Warrior USB Joypad.
Designed to look like a samurai warrior, the controller has tiny mask that reveals a frightening skeleton face (with eyes that light up!) when the mask is removed. Compatible with the PlayStation PS3, PS2 and Windows operating system, and featuring vibration feedback you can pick up your Japanese gaming-meets-horror curio for just $25 here.
Via Technabob
I've always hated Apple's mice. It took them way too long to integrate secondary buttons and scroll wheels, and when they finally came out with a mouse with those features (the ironically named Mighty Mouse) it was an overdesigned, unwieldy product that was difficult to clean.
So now that Apple has unveiled Mighty Mouse's successor, the Magic Mouse, I approach it with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. The Magic Mouse is definitely something different, bringing the iPhone'smulti-touch capability to the mouse. Now you simply slide your finger along the mouse to perform various actions — vertically to scroll (it can supposedly read the momentum of your finger for faster or slower scrolling) or horizontally to, say, browse through tabs in Safari or pictures in iPhoto. That's pretty cool, and it eliminates one of the big problems in the Mighty Mouse: the scrollwheel, which would invariably get gunked up quickly.
The flatter design appears more finger-friendly, too, looking a little more like gaming mice from brands like Razer. It pairs to your Mac (Leopard or later) via Bluetooth and is powered by a pair of AA batteries. It's on sale today for $69 — a decent price that may even bring skeptics like me back. What do you think?
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