Gadgets Base

In a move that can only be described as shocking, Microsoft has announced price cuts on Windows Vista. The price cuts affect the higher versions and will lower price for the full version of Vista Ultimate from $399 to $319, with the upgrade price dropping from $259 to $219. Vista Home Premium will drop from $159 down to $129. In addition to those lower prices, Microsoft will also remove the difference between the full and upgrade version on Home Basic and Home Premium, which will put the full version at the previous upgrade prices.

The real question here is whether or not this will convince more people to upgrade to Vista. While some of the versions were a little pricey to begin with, it seems a lot of the complaints about Vista were due to usability and not pricing.

Read [Reuters]

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Posted Mar 1st 2008 5:41AM by Ryan Block
Filed under: Networking
So IBM is apparently working like crazy on some next-gen communications technology that — ready to have your mind blown? — “uses light instead of wires to send information.” We know, this is some crazy future crap up in here, but check it out. Apparently this so-called light-based communications system is supposed to be ten times more power efficient than others in its class, and can transfer data at speeds far greater than our current 4Mbps token-ring networks and even the next-gen 10BASE2 Ethernet (as if!); if optical data communications are actually real, well, it’s just in time because we’ve been seriously maxing out our Tandy 1000 playing MUDs. Touting such other gibberish as “high definition content,” and “ex-aflop supercomputing,” IBM’s Optocards (which feature integrated “Optochips”) can apparently move data at up to 8Tbps / 1TBps per second, which isn’t quite up to snuff to compete with Alcatel-Lucent’s latest, but is still, like, way more than necessary for accessing the Engadget BBS.

Posted Mar 1st 2008 8:10AM by Ryan Block
Filed under: Wireless, Storage
You kind of miss the point if you open your Time Capsule after just a day or two, but at least we now know that future generations can, in fact, expect an active drive cooling system (by way of a blower fan).

Yes, we know, it’s a highly unusual device. But the Breast Massage Robot really has its purpose! Well, at least according to its manufacturers.

Engineers from the Beijing BUBBY Robot Technologies Co. led by Wang Wei are the ones responsible for this eyebrow-raising device. According to them, the Breast Massage Robot is good for:

*Adolescent girls who want to improve the growth of their breasts.
*breast surgery patients who want a fast recovery
*breast-feeding moms
*relieving breast pains during menstruation
*women who want to improve their sex lives
*women who just want to relax

If this is the kind of thing you’d want to put your money on, Wei and Co. seem to be currently looking for investors. If the projected figures are correct, you’ll be riding on the gravy train. According to the report filed by Wei and Co., expected sales figures are 360,000 sets in mainland China, 180,000 sets for the whole Southeast Asian region, and 360,000 sets for Europe and America. I didn’t realize there’s a market for breast massagers. Too bad. Check out all the document here.

Watch a video of the Breast Massage Robot in action courtesy of botjunkie.com

via

One of the proudly showcased iRiver PMP’s at CES, the E100 is set to start shipping today in Europe. So far, it seems to be a basic PMP, nothing too fancy, but still a nice one overall.

Basically, it comes with a 2.4-inch QVGA screen and it supports many audio and video formats. These formats include FLAC, MP3, ASF, OGG, WMA, WMV9, and XVID. Additionally, it comes with a nice integrated FM tuner and stereo speakers. So far, there are only 2 versions the 2GB and the 8GB. This isn’t a lot of internal storage, but more memory can be added on via microSD expansion. You can get your very own iRiver E100 with the 2GB starting at $119 and the 8GB selling for $194.

Via [PMP Today]

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Posted Mar 1st 2008 2:36AM by Ryan Block
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Apparently TiVo sent around an email notifying its loyal overpaying customers that it’s shutting down the TiVo Rewards program on May 28th of this year. This won’t matter to the vast majority of TIVo customers, no no, this decision only screws the company’s staunchest word-of-mouth advocates. You know the kind, the alpha geeks obsessed enough with the company’s products to others spend their time zealously recommending it to friends and family in the hopes of spreading the premium DVR experience (and earning some points while they’re at it). Shutting down the program is one thing, but expecting the most loyal segment of TiVo’s cutomer-base to turn in their points before the next series of hardware comes out is beyond lame and decidedly un-TiVo.

Pocket-lint reviews the Nokia N82 and writes, “Like the Nokia N95, one of the main reasons to get the N82 is the 5 megapixel camera. Exactly the same as the N95 the only difference here is the inclusion of a Xenon flash, the same as the Samsung G800, and picture quality was good…The camera is more responsive than the first N95, comes with autofocus with a dedicated autofocus assist lamp, fast reloading between shots and DVD-like quality video capture however it doesn’t have an optical zoom as found in the G800.”

Read more about the Nokia N82.

Posted Feb 29th 2008 11:36PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Wearables
Oh sure, we’ve seen gadgets used as motivational tools before, but Sega Toys is apparently banking on you not being a hothead. Otherwise, you just might fling its Body Trainer headset from your dome as soon as you hear “please exercise a little bit harder” over your incessant panting. Nevertheless, those with oodles of self-control may actually benefit from having a personal trainer (of sorts) in their ear while working out, and by monitoring the wearer’s heartbeat via a sensor, it can blurt out messages at the appropriate time to help users through their session(s). Reportedly, this nifty exercise buddy is set to launch in Japan this April for ¥5,775 ($54), and while we’ve no idea if this thing is destined for US soil, we can definitely see it being used more so for its musical abilities and less for its steadfast encouragement.

[Via CNET]

For centuries, people were able to picture only a two-dimensional image when taking photo. Even today, the most expensive and powerful cameras still give us a clear and beautiful, but flat image. We can’t feel the depth in them, can’t say how far the objects are from the camera. People tried to bring the stereo effect to photography in many ways, from a stereo slides to 3D glasses, but it always required image to be taken with two lenses. However, something that thought to be impossible before, now is one step closer from being real - Stanford University engineers have made a lens system capable of capturing the distance of subjects within a snapshot!

The whole system works differently from usual sensors work. Instead of having one lens for a whole sensor, it captures image in parts. Each part is a 16 x 16 pixel sensor with its own lens to view the world - thanks to that this system is called multi-aperture. Every lens gives to this mini-sensor a different picture than to others, which makes a final image composed of many small images which overlap slightly with that of the neighboring ones. Special hardware is capable of calculating the “depth map” according to the data captured by this sensor. This distance data is a result of work of special image-processing software, which analyzes slight differences between the positions of the same elements on neighbor sub arrays.

All this improvements not only can show a distance for each pixel, this technology can be used for making stereo images in future. It also reduces digital noise at the photos, makes the sensor more adaptive to shooting conditions and raises the overall quality of the final image. Researchers say that they see the future usage of this type of sensors even in the portable gadgets like cell phones, PDAs and other camera-enabled devices, because with this technology the sensors with small sizes, used in portable devices, will suffer less quality loss than they are suffering now.

Right now, the researchers have no specific file format for this data, but they say that this depth information can be written in the JPEG metadata. Unfortunately, this revolutionary idea has its flaws. First, it consumes ten times more power than usual sensor does, which is a very serious problem for portable devices. Second, necessity of using a small lens system for each sub array means that these sensors are more expensive to produce. And third, depth field calculation is possible only with subjects that have some texture and other small details. If you picture a smooth white wall, this information cannot be analyzed and calculated. However, this technology is developing fast, and if all this flaws will be corrected, it can be a new word in the world of digital photography.

Posted Feb 29th 2008 5:54PM by Ryan Block
Filed under: Gaming
When you were a kid did your parents ever do anything mean to you for their own amusement? Whatever it was, something tells us it wasn’t as evil as what Jonathan’s (above) family did on Christmas morning, having him unwrap an empty Xbox box with some shirts inside — while on video, mind you — and then everyone laughing at him when he got upset and cried over being hoodwinked. For the love of all that is holy in the gadget-loving world, that is so wrong. Despite the fact his family told Jonathan multiple times in the video, “C’mon, you know we can’t afford an Xbox!”, the kid’s shining example of an older brother (who uploaded the video) claims that they actually did get him the console, and that he’d eventually upload the video of the “real” unwrapping. He never did. Right.

Jonathan, you out there? Screw those people, they clearly don’t understand what it is to be a kid and to want an awesome gadget so badly you can taste it. We’ve been there our whole lives. Since, as a publication, we can’t just adopt you and raise you as our own, I will personally send you an Xbox 360 and some games — but only on the condition that you swear to you’ll never let your douchebag family play with it. Hit me up at engadget at gmail dotcom, make sure you can identify yourself so I know I’ve got the right person.

Update: We’ve been flooded with email from well-meaning geeks and even Microsoft; just about everyone wants to help us hook up Jonathan. We think we’ve gotten in touch with his family (who let us know he never got an Xbox, and the whole thing really was a prank on the poor kid); once we know for sure we have the right people we’ll post again.