Gadgets Base

With a still undecided format war, many of us are unwilling to commit to either of the next generation formats. So until we can get a winner declared the best options seem to be a combo drive. Thanks to Plextor you now have two more options, they have just released the PX-B920SA and PX-B300SA. According to Plextor both drives will be available in late-February but no pricing information has been announced.

Both drives offer SATA Blu-ray/HD DVD playback. The PX-B920SA offers BD-R writing at 4x, DVD’s at 16x and CD-R’s at 40x and can also read HD DVD. The lowered spec’d PX-B300SA will also write to DVD’s at 16x and CD-R’s at 40x, but cannot write to BD-R’s.

Via [EngadgetHD]

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Posted Feb 8th 2008 7:53AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Gaming, Laptops
The forum jockeys riding NotebookReview have whipped themselves into a rightful tizzy over their new Area-51 m15x laptops. It seems that the first round of recipients received their swank gaming machines with that programmable edge lighting intact. The rest lost it completely without even a hint from Alienware and certainly without the consent from its paying customers. The situation then turned ugly when at least some owners complained only to be told by Alienware’s support that the power button was the 6th promised light zone, not the LCD edge. Now the good news. The light tubes are in there, but for whatever reason, a software patch must be applied to activate them. Crazy, right? The patch is available just beyond that read link.

The U.S. podcasting audience reached 18.5 million in 2007, according to eMarketer and was projected to top 65 million by 2012 with 25 million listeners downloading one or more podcasts a week.

Ad spending on podcasts in the U.S. is also expected to creep up, from $165 million in 2007 to $435 million in 2012.

Major podcasting networks like Revision3 are growing with the medium’s success by revamping their websites and adding new programming.

If you’re not already a podcast consumer, then check out the podcast section in iTunes. There’s a lot of great stuff from tech shows to yoga workouts. And they are all free. I usually watch 5-10 podcasts a day on either my iPod Touch or Apple TV. Makes the bus ride to work much more enjoyable.

Here are a few favorites:

• Diggnation - weekly rundown of the front page stories on Digg.com
• Tiki Bar TV - drinking games
• Unboxing Live - take a new gadget, and open it up while the camera is rolling
• Midwest Teen Sex Show - explores topics concerning teen sexuality from gym class to syphilis
• The Totally Rad Show - movie, comic books and game reviews
• Make Podcast - how to tweak, hack, and bend technology any way you want
• Play Value - the history of video games.
• NBC Nightly News - the full TV broadcast sans commercials

methodshop

Posted Feb 8th 2008 9:01AM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Wearables
Some researchers at the University of Michigan are clearly misdirected in their goals to harvest energy from a knee brace. The device generates electricity in a method similar to regenerative breaking in a hybrid car, so the attempt is to harvest wasted kinetic energy in your knee from when your leg hits the ground and at other points in your stride. Hopes are to reclaim this energy for use to power gadgetry on your person, or perhaps a prosthetic limb, and the researchers claim it only takes an extra watt of metabolic power for each watt of electricity generated — compared to 6.4 watts of metabolic for a hand-crank, for instance — but we’d say that’s still one watt too many: if we were meant to use our own calories to power devices, why did God make batteries and solar panels?

Posted Feb 8th 2008 3:10AM by Ryan Block
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
So this new AbleComm spinoff RedHotPhones is selling tons and tons of phones — all red — including replicas “inspired by Batman”. Definitely not the amazing new Christopher Nolan retelling, we’re talking original campy-ass 60s Batman. We’re not sure what kind of person would spend $112 on a novelty landline-phone with no way to dial out (probably the same people that bought the $300 Shakespeare bust back in the day), but buy it fast, we heard the mayor of Quahog, Rhode Island is filing suit.

Posted Feb 8th 2008 5:03AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Cellphones
Samsung just announced their new flagship “Soul” cellphone in the spirit of its Ultra Editions. Get it? Spirit Of ULtra, soul? Yeah. Anyway, as Sammy’s go-to phone for 2008, we’re looking at a quad-band GSM phone with 7.2Mbps HSDPA; 2.2-inch QVGA display; 5 megapixel, image stabilized camera with Power LED flash and face detection; FM radio; microSD; Bluetooth, and more in a 12.9-mm thin slider. Sweetening the deal is a Magical Touch interface which adapts to your usage (music, camera, etc) a la LG’s Venus. They’ve even added a jumbled-up Google icon for search and gMail access. Look for it to hit European retail in April. On display next week at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress where you can bet your last money, it’s gonna be stone gas, honey.

Gallery: Samsung’s Soul slider is coming through

Posted Feb 8th 2008 2:05AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Peripherals
Evergreen’s testing the limits of convergence this morning with their new ¥3,499 ($33) Genius Navigator 365 mouse. It’s a 1600/800dpi laser mouse and you guessed it, a gamepad all wrapped up in a single package. Neither of which we suspect works as well as a pair of dedicated devices. Look, we may not approve of your choice for this mouse, but we’ll fight to the death for your right to choose it. Ok, maybe not this time.

Posted Feb 8th 2008 3:51AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Fancy yourself a do-it-yourselfer? Have a taste for the acoustic warmth our audiophile friends swear can only be delivered by vacuum tubes? Good, we’ve got the amp for you. Elekit of Japan just introduced their flagship TU-873KEII tube amplifier with a price set at ¥83,790 (about $780). The amp has a rated output of 8W x 2ch (8ohm), 10Hz - 50kHz frequency response, 106dB S/N ratio, and pretty blue ring up front to compliment your glowing tubes. You can even swap out the tubes until the sound is just right. With a March production run of just 300 units you might even have it assembled in time for Summer.

[Via Impress]

Posted Feb 8th 2008 4:00AM by Chris Ziegler
Filed under: Cellphones, WirelessWhat if Toshiba were to produce a Blu-ray player? If there’s one surefire sign that a company is recognizing the mortality of its own standards, it’s throwing some support behind the competition’s — and that’s exactly what Qualcomm has done in announcing new roadmaps for its mobile and cellular base station chipsets that include LTE. LTE, one of several 4G standards competing for the hearts and minds of carriers across the world, has a huge leg up on Qualcomm’s own UMB and WiMAX (which is technically a pre-4G standard, anyway) by having the blessing of the GSM Association, the global juggernaut of mobile industry organizations. Anyway, Qualcomm’s new plans call for future chipsets to support various flavors of UMTS, HSPA, and EV-DO, theoretically making it easier for carriers of all creeds to migrate to LTE while still supporting legacy cells and devices. The new silicon is expected to be available next year, and without a single major carrier having signed up for UMB, we’d say that’s not a moment too soon.

Posted Feb 7th 2008 7:37PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
You might remember how excited we were to send Veronica Belmont over to eCoupled’s booth at CES for a demo of the company’s wireless Foreman grill, only to be bitterly disappointed when the reps claimed to have “power problems” and didn’t really demo anything at all. Well, as it turns out, there was an eCoupled engineer on our flight home from Vegas, and after showing us his wirelessly-charging laptop, he promised us a video of the Foreman in action. And… it’s a video of a dude cooking a burger. Sure, the grill is wireless — but come on, where’s the showmanship? Let’s at least put a hula hoop around it, people. That said, we can see a lot of potential for the tech if it gets ubiquitous — let’s just hope the sales team has a little more of the ol’ vaudeville spirit in ‘em, eh? Check the video after the break.