Category: Gadgetry

The goodly gadget geeks over at Akihabara News have put together some unpacking porn and a mini-review on the new Samsung Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC).

Need a teeny-weeny 2GB thumbnail of a USB drive to go with your credit card-size computer? Sony’s got ya covered, at least if you live in Korea. They’ve just released their new Micro Vault Tiny Drives there, from 256MB to 2GB, in four mouth watering fruit *colors* (we lied about the flavor part — a geek can dream, can’t he?). No word about them coming to our shores.

And you thought the Mac Mini and Mini-ITX computers were small. Here’s a full-featured PC no bigger than a credit card. It boasts an XScale chip running Windows CE or Linux, 500MB of Flash storage, 128MB of RAM, an AC’97 sound chip, a Philips 802.11b wireless interface, a PCI bus, 4 USB host ports, and wired networking. All this on a board that’s only a little fatter than a mini-PCI card. And, this little wonder only costs US$49, IF you buy at least 10,000. Wanna go in on a group purchase?

[Via OhGizmo!]

Dick Tracy, eat your heart out. Or at least Tracy wannabes. MobileWhack is showing off these walkie talkie watches. They have built in PMRs (Personal Mobile Radios) that are voice activated and have a range of about 1.9 miles (3km). They can also be used with a PTT (push to talk) headset. The watches offer 40 hours of stand-by power, and six hours (theoretically) of continous talk time, on a charge. They sell for US$97 each. You’ll need two if you don’t wanna look like a complete whack-job (although I guess you could always just pretend there was somebody on the other end).

Lifehacker, with their new widescreen design, shows off the real estate with a tour of Windows Vista Beta. It’s real purdy, we’ll give it that. And are those Widge… oh, they’re “Gadgets.” Gina also runs afoul of numerous annoying nag dialogs — in Windows? Can’t imagine. Still too early to tell too much. It certainly *looks* better than the last time we saw it, and looking very OS X-ey, if you ask us.

Dave Zatz, of Zatz Not Funny and Engadget, conducted a short interview with Jim Denney, TiVo’s VP of Product Marketing, about the latest version of the TiVo Desktop. Denney defends TiVo’s decision to charge a premium for MPEG-4 and H.264 transcoding, citing the licensing fees they had to pay, and implying the US$25 fee doesn’t even cover TiVo’s “real costs.” The frustrating news in this exchange is that TiVoToGo for OS X is STILL not ready to be talked about (which likely means we won’t see it anytime soon). And questions about the much-anticipated TiVo Series 3 were also sidestepped.

Read the full piece here.

TiVo has finally released version 2.3 of their TiVo Desktop software for the PC. Additons to the software include the ability to perform auto-transfers of recorded shows from your TiVo to your PC and the ability to auto-convert programs to various mobile playback formats. While some formats are free, such as Windows Media, MPEG-4 and H.264 conversion (e.g. for iPod and PSP) require that you pay a US$25 (one-time) fee to unlock this capability. TiVo is allegedly charging this ’cause they had to pay a licensing fee. (Of course, you could always continue to use free conversion utils, such as AutoPilot, Videora or VEMode.)

[Via Zatz Not Funny]

We’ve really been enjoying the tips, tricks and solutions to every day computing problems that On Zen and Computing have been putting up on their site. The latest item covers using Disk Inventory X, a free OS X disk usage utility, to help you identify and heave out all of the space hogs and unused crap you don’t need any more. It’s never too late to do a little virtual spring cleaning.

HDBeat, a voice we respect in all things high-def and next-gen TV, discusses and links to a list of top ten reasons you NEED to be an early adopter of an HD movie format. The argument basically boils down to: you need to “vote” on one format (HD DVD or Blu-ray) with your checkbook and “take one for the team” in terms of early adoption problems and pricing, ’cause if you don’t, one format will never shake out and prices won’t come down (and movie libraries will stay small). Personally, I’m with this guy (from the HD Beat item’s Comments):

“?#$% the studios and the manufacturers. If they lose money because they were too narrow minded and greedy to make a smart decision, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. The studios should have forced a single format in the first place. Now everyone has to muddle through years of competing formats and partial library releases on different formats. I love HD and gadgets as much as the next guy but I’m not going to spend a dime until something big happens.”

Is it just me, or do you think this wee device belongs tossed in your pocket if you have to leave your desk, not tethered to this thing? And, given how easy it is to defeat a laptop lock, I’m not going to put a lot of faith in one of these.