Gadgets Base

The Asus M70 can be considered a powerful notebook, but its small brother Eee PC 900 is more into the budget laptop scene.

The original Asus Eee PC was first released in November last year, so this second version with a release date set to 1 of May 2008, is obviously improved in some aspects. The price for a Eee 900 depends on the specifications you chose, but it starts at 329.

As stated previously, there were a couple of improvements and the best one is the option to buy the laptop with the Microsoft OS - Windows XP - already installed. Other details like the screen display, RAM memory, and storage space are also better than before.

- 8.9-inches
- 1GB of RAM
- 20GB hard-drive
- 3.5 hours of battery life

I love to cook, but I’m messy and temperamental and hate to clean up. I throw things around like a little Asian, non-professional Gordon Ramsay. I tell people in my family that in exchange for cooking intricate meals, all they have to do is clean up, but in truth, I’m not sure they get the better deal. The thing that bothers me the most about my kitchen rampages is that when they’re over, I’ve almost inevitably killed any cookbook I’ve been using. My regularly used cookbooks are crunchy with olive oil, batter, and butter, and would probably taste pretty good by now if I baked them. Some pages have become hard to read and I’ve been searching for a solution to protect my precious cookbook collection.

Enter the “chef’s center” which supports your cookbook at a good reading angle, swivels all the way around, and most importantly has a crystal-clear, splatterguard which keeps your book open at the right page and safe from flying ingredients. The spring-loaded screen guard fits everything from the single xeroxed page to the thickest of cookbooks. There’s a pull-out measurement guide to help you adjust recipe servings while you cook. Then when you’re done, the chef’s center folds down flat for easy storage.

The chef’s center is $29.95 from Prepara.

I recently realized, when writing a letter, that I can now barely write. I’m so used to putting everything into a computer, or a PDA/phone that I can type with my thumbs much more quickly than I can write. I was ashamed and a little frightened and started imagining scenarios when there’s a big Cloverfield-like attack and power outage and I die while thumb-typing and screaming into a dead blackberry.

Another problem is that when I do scribble little notes and phone numbers, I forget what they’re about by the time I find them in my purse a few months later. And forget notes from lectures or conferences- I clearly have undiagnosed ADHD because generally all I can make out are bad drawings of big-eyed waifs and mean notes to the lecturer to please stop talking so I can go to the bathroom. Once in a while, though, I see a note that says something like “IMPORTANT, make sure to look this up!” and I don’t remember what it’s in reference to at all.

I may simply need Ritalin, but the Livescribe Pulse pen computer could also help me out a little. The Pulse is like a grown-up version of the Fly Fusion pentop for kids.

Mobile Burn reviews the LG CU720 Shine (AT&T) and writes, “The LG Shine sports a 2 megapixel camera, located on the back, with a flash and self-portrait mirror. There are plenty of options in the camera application, including the ability to record video. The camera viewer requires that you hold the Shine in landscape mode, which allows for comfortable picture taking. The handset is also able to stand on its side, making self-timer shots a breeze. I found the photo quality to be very good, and the flash did not completely wash out the subject. I would easily recommend the LG Shine’s camera as great for capturing moments to send via MMS, or even to use on a personal blog. However, the photographs would probably not look very good when printed.”

Read more about the LG Shine.

by Joshua Topolsky, posted Apr 15th 2008 at 10:19AM
Tesla Motors can’t seem to keep itself out of the press, can it? The newest flare-up concerns rival Fisker and claims that the automaker has stolen trade secrets and copied design concepts. In a lawsuit filed Monday by Tesla, the carmaker accuses Henrik Fisker — whom the company had hired to design its WhiteStar sedan — of accepting the work to “gain access to confidential design information and trade secrets.” The company alleges that Fisker then used that knowledge to launch a competing vehicle, and believes Fisker has implemented its range-extended vehicle (or REV) technology in the recently introduced Karma. “I think it’s ironic that Fisker chose to name his car the Karma, when what he’s done is very bad karma,” said the company’s lawyer. Fisker wouldn’t comment on the case, then drove silently away when pressed.

[Via CNET]

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Filed under: Transportation

IBM has announced a next-generation nonvolatile memory as “racetrack”, where Big Blue expects it to replace flash memory in the near future and eventually hard disk drives, although I must say that flash memory is also currently in the race to usurp hard disk drives with not much success since both platforms have their own camps of supporters which results in a happy co-existence. The main technology used in “racetrack” is spintronics - where the storage of bits generated by the magnetic spin of electrons rather than their charge was recently demonstrated by IBM. Storage and retrieval of information is achieved by “massless motion”.

According to Parkin IBM, “We have now demonstrated a current-controlled, domain-wall, shift register which is the fundamental, underlying technology for racetrack memory. We use current pulses to move a series of domain walls along a nanowire, which is not possible to do with magnetic fields.” IBM’s main aim is to use the similar square micron that currently houses a single SRAM memory bit, or 10 flash bits, and drill down into the third dimension to store spin-polarized bits on a sunken racetrack-shaped magnetic nanowire. A silicon area of just 1 micron wide and 10 microns high is able to store up to 10 bits compared to one, doing away with flash memory. In the near future, IBM hopes to develop this even further to achieve storage of 100 bits in the same area, making it dense enough to replace hard disk drives.

IBM has also estimated that an iPod running on racetrack memory could potentially hold up to 100 times more information, and it also holds the advantage where components cannot wear out unlike solid state devices which makes it all the more compelling. 1.6TB of media on an ipod in the future? I’ll take one, thank you very much.

Source: Information Week

This was a deal we had to share with our readers. Until they run out, Tiger Direct is selling these HP w2207 22″ Widescreen Flat Panel Monitors for only $249. Dang.

Specs:

• 5ms response time
• 0.282mm pixel pitch
• 1680×1050 (WSXGA+)
• 1000:1 contrast ratio
• 300 cd/m² brightness
• DVI-D input
• VGA input
• USB Hub
• Speakers
• Rotates to a vertical (portrait) screen.

Don’t wait too long. These are going to sell out quickly!

Posted in Computers, Gizmo of the Day

by Darren Murph, posted Apr 14th 2008 at 11:54PM
RFID clothing is far from revolutionary, but American Apparel is about to get everyone’s attention by placing tags on a smorgasbord of garments. The firm is setting out to implement RFID at the item-level, meaning that tags will eventually hit each article of clothing it produces. For starters, the advanced inventory system will be rolled out across each of its 17 metro New York locations, while plans are already in place to deploy the solution to another 120 North American outlets. The idea is to track individual pieces as they’re “tagged at the company’s manufacturing facility in Los Angeles, received in its retail stores, stored in the stock rooms at the stores, and then placed onto the sales floor and ultimately sold at the point-of-sale.” Of course, we wouldn’t expect the tags to follow you home or anything — too bad we can’t say the same for the company’s skeezy CEO, Dov Charney.

[Image courtesy of The New York Times]

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Filed under: Wearables, Wireless

With people like us who stay online most of the time in mind, E-TEN Information Systems will be releasing two almost identical versions of a new Wi-Fi enabled and touchscreen-equipped Windows Mobile 6 Professional certified smartphone. Called the E-Ten Glofiish (not a typo) M810 and M750, these new smartphones are said to be targeted at bloggers, podcasters, video makers, and chatters, who need as much online time and connectivity options as they can get in order to keep their lives/ businesses running smoothly.

The Glofiish M810 has support for UTMS and HSDPA data connectivity, and will be equipped with a secondary camera that can be used freely in video calls. It will run on a Samsung S3C 2442 500MHz processor, has a quadband antenna, built-in Bluetooth and GPS, a microSD card slot and a miniUSB port. The Glofiish M750, meanwhile, has just about the same features minus the UTMS/HSDPA network support. Meaning, it will still have the same 2-megapixel camera with auto focus, 2.8-inch TFT screen, 256MB ROM, 64MB RAM, and the sliding form factor with a slide-out keyboard. Could these smartphones be a hit among netizens?

The Glofiish M810 and M750 are said to be the first E-TEN Pocket PCs to have built-in JAVA support, facilitating online downloads directly to the phone for most available downloadable content. Now I have to say the design is a bit conservative, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not striking in itself. Here’s another photo of the upcoming Glofiish M810. Expect it to be available in stores in two to three weeks time.

Via [SlashPhone]

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by Donald Melanson, posted Apr 14th 2008 at 5:54PM
It takes a special sort of someone to look at an old clunker of a Windows laptop and think, “I’ll turn that into a Mac,” but Phyro-Mane of the Case-Modder forums is apparently just that sort of person, and while his results certainly won’t be fooling any Mac faithful, they’re definitely admirable. Phyro even went so far as to add a sheet of plexiglass to simulate a glossy screen and, naturally, turned to a Mac OS X theme for Windows XP as a finishing touch. If you want to give it a shot yourself, you can find all the details (in German) plus plenty of pics of the entire transformation process by hitting up the read link below.

[Via Hack a Day]

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops