Category: Gadgetry

If you’re lucky enough to have justified the expense of buying a MacBook Pro you might be axin’ yourself what you can do with that ExpressCard slot gathering dust (okay, hopefully NOT gathering dust) on the left-hand side of your Book. Hey, I’ve got an idea, how about sucking down some of that sweet broadband? If you’re so inclined, and have the bucks to spend (hit up whomever you had to convince to buy the MB Pro), 5thirtyone has a mid-sized review of the Verizon Wireless Novatel V640 ExpressCard EVDO. It looks relatively brainless in set-up, honest-to-goodness plug n play. And speaking of looks, what a fugly mother. It looks like a power brick plugged into the side of your otherwise sleek Pro.

BTW: The piece has a link to Booster-Antenna, a site that offers the Verizon EVDO for $80 off, and links to two EVDO forums: EVDO Info and EVDOForums

You may have already seen this, but rumors have been flying along the Apple grapevine that the ol’ Wizard of Cupertino will soon pull a wireless, full/touch-screen iPod out of his hat. Can you imagine how freaked Microsoft will be if Apple manages to get such a next-gen Personal Media Player on holiday shelves alongside the Zune? And you thought MS was spooked when they heard the price of the current 30GB iPod.

I liked this book the first time, when it was called the Free iPod Book from iLounge and it was, well, free. The PC World iPod and iTunes Superguide is US$13. Like the iLounge book, this is a PDF-only e-book. I don’t know if it’s any good or not, but the iLounge book is surprisingly good. And did we mention that it’s free? Of course, the iLounge guide is six months, so it doesn’t cover the latest iPods and iTunes 7. Hopefully, they’ll release an update for the holiday season.

On Kevin Kelly’s highly-recommended Street Use site, he has a couple of nifty pics of vendors in India and China who run while-u-wait printer cart refill shops.

BTW: These pics come to KK by way of Jan Chipchase’s photo-intensive blog FuturePerfect which has a lot of really cool high-tech meets the streets images from around the world.

I’ve been sort of surprised by the extent to which the tech press has gotten all excited over the Microsoft Zune. Now granted, I’m no big fan of Mr. Bill and company, but part of me has been hoping the Zune will be a success and bring some pressure to bear on Apple (the consumer being the winner in a competitive market, and all that jazz). And this (MS enjoying a significant marketshare) is likely to be the case, regardless of the quality of their product. But it’s that quality (or apparent lack thereof) I’m sort of surprised by. What I’ve seen and heard about the Zune has not said “iPod Killer” to me. The price is one of the few things that’s struck me as threatening. The slightly larger screen is nice, too. Otherwise, well… I’ll let these snip-snips from recent articles critical of the Zune do the talkin’:

[from Wired News:] “…although the Zune looks good on paper, it’s not going to kill the iPod because of three things:

1. It’s not cool and never will be.
2. The Zune will be locked down tighter than the queen’s knickers.
3. Wi-Fi song sharing will not catch on in public.

Read the rest of the piece here.

[from Engadget, via Slashdot:] “You can search for and find other Zunes nearby. You can send songs / albums for the 3 x 3 trial. Songs past the three days / listens are deleted at next sync, but catalogued on your PC for record-keeping should you want to purchase them later. No word on whether Microsoft is going to keep track of which files are traded. You can send and receive image files for ‘unlimited viewing.’ (Oh, so copyrighted images aren’t worth DRMing?) You can’t: Connect to the internet, Download songs directly from the Zune store via WiFi, Sync to your computer via WiFi.”

Read the rest of the piece here.

Blogger Jake Ludington spent some quality alone time with the forthcoming MS Zune media player. He took pictures of it next to his new 80GB iPod. One thing I’m now certain of is that I HATE the way the Zune looks. Seriously fugly, IMHO (altho I’ve heard it looks a lot better in person).

AnandTech has a great indepth review of the MX Revolution, the new Logitech mouse we blogged about last month.

Conclusion? They like it. A lot. But it’s really expensive (at US$100) and the bleeding edge tech it uses is more an “exercise in what could be accomplished, not what should be.” They end with: [The MX Revolution] “is the world’s most advanced mouse, but is it the world’s best mouse? No. It is very close but not there yet.”

We’re trying to get a review unit to do our own testing of it.

Jalopnik has a piece on this amazing VW concept car, an outward repro of a 1963 VW Microbus, but inward it’s like all like 21st Century and stuff, with electric power, solar-paneled, with interactive all-digital instrumentation, video rearview, etc. Dude, I like, want one!

Those Birkenstocked wonders over at Treehugger have a piece about a mobile phone industry initiative to add audio alerts to phones telling you when your phone is done charging. Apparently huge amounts of energy is wasted when the phone remains plugged in. To wit: If only 10% of the world’s mobile phone users unplugged their phones after charging, it would save enough power to provide energy to 60,000 European households for one year.

You may have heard your geek buds talking up the Neuros OSD recently. It’s the Linux-powered open source PVR that’s, so far, being rolled out to a limited market of hackers/developers who might add functionality to it. They’re even offering cash awards to hackers that do.

Here, one of the happy few who got a first-wave unit, gets down and dirty with the contents inside the Think Geek shipping carton.

(The actual release date of the device is late October).

[Via Gizmodo]