Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Gadgets
Star Trek Plate Covers Won’t Make Your Lights Turn On Any Faster
11:45PM Jesus Diaz | You can’t wait for the movie. You have the t-shirts, the tricorder replica, the klingon doctorate, your room looks like the Enterprise’s bridge, your face has morphed already into a sexy Vulcanian, and you have been writing your first Star Trek novel for years now. But do you have these plates for your electrical wall thingies? Yeah. That’s what I thought. Go get the three of them for only $US18. My favourite by far is the power plug plate: More »
Computers
UMID’s Mini Netbook Makes Eees Look Massive
11:30PM Kit Eaton | Yes, the netbook market is tired and pretty jam-packed, but check out this shiny beast: it’s a mini-netbook from Korean manufacturer UMID. And it’s tiny. There’s no official size info, but it looks smaller than a paperback book, and comparable to the old Psion PDAs, if you remember ‘em, but far more capable. galleryPost('umid', 3, ''); More »
Phones
Blackberries Fail Twice as Often as iPhones, But Less Than Treos
11:15PM Mark Wilson | Research group SquareTrade recently released the results of a massive mobile phone study. They tracked 15,000 individual handsets over their first year of use, and they found some large discrepancies in reliability. The iPhone malfunction rate sat at a comfortable 5.6%. The Blackberry (in its various incarnations) jumped to 11.9%. But it’s all better than the Palm Treo, which malfunctioned 16.2% of the time within the first year. More »
Phones
Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 To Drop Black Friday For $US800
11:05PM John Mahoney | Sony’s Win-Mo 6.1 Xperia X1 finally has a firm U.S. release date set: November 28, better known as Black Friday. Although unlike most things on sale on that fateful day of darkness, the Xperia will not be a particularly awesome deal at $US800 for an unsubsidised, unlocked X1. It’ll work on AT&T’s 3G network here in the States, though, if you are so inclined. Pre-orders begin tomorrow, and general availability will be at Sony Style stores and authorised retailers. Full release after the jump. More »
Phones
Pharos Unveils Traveler 117 and 127 Unlocked WinMo GPS Smartphones
11:00PM Sean Fallon | Rumours have been floating around for a few weeks now, but today Pharos has officially unveiled two new additions to their Windows Mobile GPS smartphone lineup—the Traveller 117 and 127. Generally, another GPS-enabled phone is nothing to get all that excited about, but tri-band 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 2-megapixel cam / front VGA cam and a VGA touchscreen (on the 117 / QWERTY on 127) isn’t half bad for an unlocked Windows Mobile 6.1 phone priced at $US530. As for the GPS itself, Pharos Smart Navigator throws in traffic updates, dynamic POI and FollowMe services and can be purchased separately for $US100 (it’s free on the 117 and 127). Both phones and the software will be available starting on December 1st. More »
Hardware
Hard Drive Failure Soundboard Guarantees Debilitating Flashbacks
10:30PM John Herrman | Data recovery service Datacent has put together an extensive collection of recordings of popular hard drives failing. This might sound pretty boring, but it isn’t just bunch of typical of click-click-bzzzzz heartbreakers — a lot of these sounds are downright bizarre. Who knew that Maxtor drives play a song when their spindles fail? Or that failing Hitachi Deskstars wrote every Autechre track, ever? Or that Toshiba laptop drives are actually screeching Helldemons with an acute sense of pain? [Datacent via Slashdot] More »
Entertainment
New Watchmen Character Posters Give Gadgets Sneak Peek
10:15PM Jesus Diaz | Behold, the amazing new character banners for Watchmen, a perfect mix of reality and illustration styling. One of the things that I loved about Watchmen back in the 80s–yes, I bought the original when it first came out–was the technology, omnipresent across the whole series. Dave Gibbons made every gadget and architectural structure perfectly futuristic and credible, yet absolutely retro. From Archie–Nite Owl’s flamethrowing, screeching, smog-producing, almost invisible and completely submergible ship–to Rorschach’s hook launcher, which you can see in these posters alongside the Comedian’s flamethrower, a glimpse of Ozymandias’ Karnak, and–ahem–the Silk’s hot garter belt. More »
Peripherals
Eye-Fi Anniversary Edition, 4GB Card for $US100
10:00PM Mark Wilson | There’s really nothing wrong with the semi-perfect Eye-Fi, other than maybe that we could use more than a piddly 2GB of SD storage when we’re away from our Wi-Fi network. To celebrate keeping the doors open for a year, Eye-Fi has announced the Eye-Fi Anniversary Edition card. It’s a limited edition version of their classic Eye-Fi, doubled in size (features like geotagging can be purchased at an additional cost). You can pick up the Anniversary Edition at Costco for $US100 or on their site for $US130. We’ll let you decide if that Costco card is worth it or not. [Eye-Fi] More »
Peripherals
Super-Speed USB 3.0 Formal Unveiling Next Week, Windows 7 Won’t Support Natively
9:02PM Kit Eaton | We’ve learned about some of its specifications, and had a first look, but it looks like USB 3.0 is going to get a proper unveiling next monday with an announcement of its final protocol specifications at the first SuperSpeed USB Developer Conference. But at WinHEC last week there also emerged a rumour that Windows 7 won’t support version 3.0 natively, due to the time constraints involved…unless the OS suffers delays perhaps. The logo got a reveal there too—something we should all get used to. We’ll all get comfy with the speeds of the new connection: at 4.8Gbps it’ll shift a 25GB HD movie file in 70 seconds. USB 2.0 takes 13 minutes and USB 1.0 over 9 hours. [Who, in the name of all that is holy, good, and properly kerned, who the heck designed this logo? Jimmy Carter's campaign graphic designer? --jd] [EverythingUSB] More »
Software
