Gadgets Base

Even Mac users have their chance to receive perks that Windows users aren’t as lucky to receive. Other than receiving a much more stable operating system all around, Mac users also get to reap the benefits of products made by young and inspired Mac fans.

If you’re a OS X owner who happens to be a power user of Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools, After Effects, or Logic Pro, then Photojojo has these excellent Keyboard Shortcut Skins which are made for both Macbook, MacBook Pro and Air keyboards, as well as the thin Apple desktop keyboards and the classic Apple keyboard.

The skins divide the keyboard into a grid of pretty colors, each key displaying its shortcut feature for the app of your choice, while still displaying the correct letter of the key, just in case you have trouble typing without looking at the keyboard.

Photojojo claims that the skins are easy to remove and reapply as you please (just in case your use more than one of the listed applications, we suppose,) and are custom designed to fit your Mac keyboard. The skins help you memorize the shortcut functions for your favorite programs, if you have trouble doing so without a visual aide.

Product Page via Uncrate

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All coasters are just the same, right? I love those that feature my favorite lager, but this Solar Powered Drinks Coaster will probably usurp that preference .

Placing your drinks glass or bottle onto the solar drinks coasters sets off a mesmerizing sequence of hypnotic colors, which illuminate your glass and drinks bottle and will look fantastic in your garden this summer. Eye-catching colors include red, orange, blue, green, yellow and purple, making these solar color-changing coasters a guaranteed talking point! An integral solar panel that charges up during the day is used to power your solar coasters and an energy efficient color-changing LED produces the vibrant multi-colored effects for up to 6 hours.

It isn’t too cheap though at £14.95 each, which means equipping your whole bar will cost you a small fortune.

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Instant messaging programs have launched the creation of a whole new language. Yes, IM speak. Where every word is abbreviated and every emotion can be expressed with three symbols. Our new language really speeds things up.

Though with as much emoting has been done via IM over the last decade, relatively little has been done to aid our emoticon habit. Sure, most IM applications now come stock with a click menu for the commonly used smiley faces, but most of us still like to use our hands for speed purposes. The look@me keyboard is made especially for emoticons.

Featuring all of the commonly used (and even the not so commonly used) symbols which compose our online emotions, the look@me keyboard reminds us of the old accounting number pads. No calculations here. This is about pure and simple emoting fun.

If you already have your heart set at picking up one of these look@me keyboards, you might be out of luck. It seems for now that it is no more than a pipe dream in the designers mind. We’re not quite sure how an emoticon keyboard would sell anyway, since everyone is already so use to the older way of doing things.

Designboom

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Wired reviews the Paml Centro and writes, “The Palm Centro is like the friend you call when you need to be bailed out of jail: Reliable, smart and capable of getting the job done. But its dependable nature also means it’s not exactly the handset you want to party with…No WiFi or integrated GPS (a Bluetooth GPS receiver is optional). Short three-hour battery life. The 1.3-megapixel camera captured crap-quality photos. Plastic housing feels like it could be busted by a strong wind.”

Read more about the Palm Centro.

I refuse to use the “iphone killer” moniker to describe phones with large touchscreens, finger-friendly user interfaces, and slim form factors with touch controls, but Samsung sure makes the term tough to avoid with its series of Instinct vs. iPhone commercials. The 4.4-ounce iPhone-rivaling Instinct features built-in GPS, EVDO Rev A mobile broadband connectivity, microSD card expansion slot, video and still-photo recording, live TV, and on-the-go music downloads (without wi-fi) and will be available from Sprint on June 20th.

Pricing hasn’t been formally announced yet, but it’s expected to be priced at under $300.

Via MobileBurn.

With summer coming around, it makes perfect sense to kick it off with a party, or even parties if your budget permits it. Apart from good food and drinks, it is essential to get everyone into the party mood, and this USB DJ Plasma Tube will definitely come in handy! Using the latest plasma technology, the light emitted will groove along with the rhythm, so picking up just one won’t be enough for your resident DJ. Available in blue, green and red colors, each $15 purchase comes with a sonic switch as well as an adjustable tube lamp lighting strength level that can be adjusted via a knob. From afar, people will probably think it is some sort of Jedi party.

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Sony has a new range of USB flash drives that will definitely appeal to those who love colors and absolutely adore the idea of merging both form and functionality in whatever device they use. Dubbed the new MicroVault Click, this spanking new range will come in a wide range of colors that will put a rainbow to shame, featuring storage space of up to 16GB along with a maximum read transfer speed of 31MB/s which ought to be more than enough for casual, everyday use at the office. Performance buffs can move aside, since there are always other speedier solutions which you can rely on such as a high end portable hard drive if you happen to want to store and carry your important information wherever you go.

Not only does the new MicroVault Click range feature advanced performance and increased storage capacity for today’s memory hungry world, you also get high speed data transfer rates as well as Windows ReadyBoost compatibility that supposedly improves PC memory performance on Windows Vista without the need to install additional RAM. Take my word for it - nothing works better than throwing in an extra stick (or two) of RAM into your PC/notebook if you want a quick performance boost, especially for folks who tend to indulge themselves with large files while at work.

You must be wondering where the ‘Click’ part of the naming convention comes in - well, according to Sony both the MicroVault Click and Click Excellence ranges feature a neat ‘click’ design that uncover and retract the USB connector for convenient use, doing away with the risk of accidentally losing your USB flash drive cover simultaneously. You get write speeds of up to 11MB/s, making data transfer a snap via USB 2.0 connectivity. This new range is blessed with a 5-year European warranty, Whatever happens to those of us living across the pond?

Source: BIOS

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by Thomas Ricker, posted May 27th 2008 at 7:29AM
$399? Ha. Amazon just cut the price of its Kindle e-book reader to $359 and zero cents with free 2-day shipping. Now giddy up, son, there’s no cake for you here.

[Thanks, Chris G.]

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Filed under: Misc. gadgets, Handhelds

by Thomas Ricker, posted May 27th 2008 at 4:39AM
We’ll get into more detail later, but we thought it was appropriate to share the moment when the Japanese showed the world just how pathetic your 3G iphone fantasies really are. Announced today are 19 new handsets from NTT DoCoMo’s 906i and 706i series. All 8 of the 906i feature 3G / GSM international roaming, GPS, HSDPA, 1-seg mobile TV, full browser with Flash 8 support, DCMX mobile credit card and iD mobile credit payment tech, VGA LCD screens, and voice to text translation of Chinese, English, and Japanese. Some even support direct transfer of Blu-ray video. The 11-strong 706i series features a variety of handsets including a waterproof 1-Seg phone, world’s slimmest 1-Seg phone, and a wellness phone to monitor your health and diet. All eleven 706i phones rounded up and pictured after the break.

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Filed under: cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video

by Paul Miller, posted May 27th 2008 at 7:14AM
VIA’s trying its hand once again at the “mini-note” form factor, with a new OpenBook reference design. Its first go round, the NanoBook, was generally panned in light of the ultra-successful Eee PC, but certainly wasn’t ignored. The new design is right in line with the new wave of subnotebooks, with an 8.9-inch 1024 x 600 screen, connection options including WiMAX, HSDPA and EV-DA, three USB 2.0 ports, VGA out, a 4-in-1 card reader and front and back 2 megapixel webcams. There’s also room for 2GB of RAM and a 2.5-inch HDD, and you can run Vista, XP or your Linux flavor of choice. It’s all based around a new VIA VX800 chipset running that trusty ol’ C7-M ULV processor, with some video acceleration tweaks to make multimedia possible. You’ll be able to get about 3 hours of juice out of a 4-cell battery. The entire design is being distributed as a CAD file under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license, which means OEMs can take these designs and run with them — and also means that we’ll be seeing plenty of versions without all the trimmings mentioned here. The real test of this new unit might come down to price, and since that’s up to manufacturers VIA isn’t saying where it’ll land just yet, but it’ll probably be closer to $600 than the $300-ish price points of the last gen.

Gallery: VIA unveils OpenBook subnotebook reference design

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Filed under: Laptops