GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

E-books may be taking off for Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, but there’s one category of printed matter where digital hasn’t made a dent: Textbooks.

It’s not for lack of trying. Most textbooks are massive tomes that weigh several pounds, are printed on hundreds of pages of glossy paper, can cost upwards of $100, and are often out of date as soon as they’re printed. You’d think someone would have figured out how to make e-textbooks work — and plenty of companies have tried.

Yet print still rules, with over 99% of the textbook market. But with the rise of tablets and e-readers, software developers and textbook publishers are making yet another effort to take textbooks digital.

Matt McInnis is one of the new hopefuls. For eight years, he ran Apple’s education division. But last year, when the iPad was still just a rumor, McInnis started thinking about starting a digital textbooks venture. He left Apple to follow his dream, and the result is Inkling, which launched two months ago.

Inkling is an iPad app that turns textbooks into bite-sized, illustrated, interactive pieces of media. With Inkling, William Strunk’s Elements of Style is reinvented with humorous hints and cheeky cartoons, while a biology textbook has beautiful diagrams and color photos.

“With the iPad, there’s an obvious opportunity in education,” says McInnis.

Inkling allows readers to jump into any chapter. Users don’t have to buy the entire textbook: They can just buy a few chapters and later get the entire textbook.

Inkling is just one of the companies looking for a way to make digital textbooks work. Earlier this year, textbook publishers such as McGraw Hill and Kaplan struck a partnership with software company ScrollMotion to bring textbooks to the iPad.

Digital textbooks have been struggling to take off for nearly a decade. Publishers were slow to adapt print editions to PCs and professors don’t usually recommend digital textbooks to their students. And for all their texting and video games, some say, students are not as comfortable with the technology as you might think.

“There is the issue of trust,” says Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, which looks at use of IT in education. “Even though we think of this generation of students as being wired, they have dealt with print all their life for core education. They know how to master that but they are less certain of electronic material.”

Last year, digital textbooks generated an estimated $40 million in sales, according to Xplana, an educational software and consulting company. This year, it is expected to grow to $80 million — but that’s still just 1 percent of the total higher education textbook market. By 2015, Xplana estimates digital textbooks will be 20% of the total market.

But a lot has to change in the next four years before that prediction can become reality.

Why haven’t digital textbooks taken off?

Despite their promise, digital textbooks haven’t taken off for two big reasons: ease of use and price.

Publishers have long been offering some textbooks for PCs but these digital editions have never entirely replaced their paper cousins.

Digital textbooks haven’t become really popular because they aren’t easy to use on computers, says McInnis.

Story continues …

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Little Death Ray, from Lady Clankington's Cabinet of Carnal Curiosities

It’s hard to know exactly what devices women used to get off by themselves before the Industrial Revolution. But it’s only right that we commemorate the inauguration of the electric age by returning to the Victorian era and making over our joybuzzers to match. Hence Lady Clankington’s Cabinet of Carnal Curiosities, a new steampunk-themed set of sex toys, just in time for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s forthcoming comedy Hysteria, about the invention of the modern vibrator.

Nothing on Lady Clankington’s site breaks character for a moment. (Except, just maybe, the FAQs.) It’s an experiment in genre-fiction-as-retail:

Due to her voracious desire for endless…adventure, her husband (an industrialist of some note) expired from exhaustion long ago. In a fit of frustration, Lady Clankington employed the genius of one Dr. Visbaun to create a cadre of strapping automatons that would finally grant her the only company able to keep up with her unending desire…for adventure. … Each design has been well tested by the lady, herself.

You can actually purchase these curiosities from the site, each of which comes with a “certificate of authenticity.” Each design will be limited to a run of 100 numbered pieces, the site says.

The testimonials are also a must-read. This one is from “Baron Pudgy Mdphlappes”:

The Baroness always felt terribly insecure during my long voyages to study the courting rituals of aboriginal tribes in various far-off lands. I thought she might feel safer with a little protection, so I ordered one of Lady Clankington’s Little Death Rays! Now she feels so safe and secure, she quite often sends me telegrams saying I needn’t bother coming home at all! Thank you Lady Clankington for freeing me up to do my life’s work!

I do have to complain, though, on behalf of us gents. Buying the vibrator and then walking away is sooooo vanilla. (Even if it is sooooo Victorian.) With real steampunk, everyone gets to play together.

Story continues …

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

You remember the saying about being as dark as a black cat in a coal cellar? Well, it turns out Canon has made a sensor that can photograph it.

The new, super-sensitive CMOS sensor is fresh from Canon’s labs, and measures 202 x 205mm. A 35mm film-frame (and its corresponding sensor) is 2436mm. This makes the new C-MOnSter 40-times bigger than Canon’s biggest sensor, the 21.1 MP model in the EOS-1Ds Mark III and EOS 5D Mark II. You can see both side-by-side in the above photograph.

To visualize this, imagine a foot-wide circle. This is the wafer from which the chip is cut. This new behemoth is just about the largest square that can be chopped from that wafer.

The chip is suitable for both stills and video, and needs just 1/100th the light of an equivalent stills camera sensor to make the same image. It is, in short, as sensitive to light as Marty McFly is sensitive to being called “chicken”. If you could lift it, a camera with this lens would turn night to day and allow you to take high-speed action shots at night, by moonlight, even if it were cloudy.

It is of course unlikely that you or I will ever use a camera this big. The sensor is much more likely to find it’s way into astronomy-related cameras or even super-hi-def commercial movie cameras. What it does mean for us is that the camera manufacturers are seriously investigating low-light, and that in turn means the end of crappy flash-photos taken on drunken nights out. Hooray for that.

Canon succeeds in developing world’s largest CMOS image sensor, with ultra-high sensitivity [Canon]

Ironically tiny product photo: Canon

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Olympus has revealed two new lenses today, both for the Micro Four Thirds format. One is a 40-150mm 4.0-5.6 which will sell for just 330 when it is launched in October. This has a silent AF-motor for movie-shooting but is otherwise rather pedestrian thanks to those mediocre maximum apertures.

The other lens is way more interesting. It too has rather poor light-gathering abilities when wide-open (4.8-6.7), but that is excusable as it runs from 75-300mm. In 35mm terms, that’s a 150-600mm monster. Still not impressed? The lens weighs just 430-grams (15-ounces) and is only 116mm (4.6-inches) long.

For comparison, look at some SLR lenses. Nikon’s longest reaching zoom is the 200-400mm 4, which weighs 3360-grams or a wrist-breaking 7.4-pounds and measures 365mm or 14.4-inches. That, though, is still short of the Olympus’ 600mm far-end. To get to that number, you need to choose a prime lens from Nikon.

The Nikkor 600mm 4 weighs five kilos (11-pounds) and is a John Holmesian 166mm (17.5-inches) in length. To put that in perspective, the diameter of the Nikon is almost four times the length of the Olympus. Also, the Nikon will cost you $10,300.

This astonishing difference is due only to the lack of a mirror in the Micro Four Thirds cameras, and the smaller sensor (half the size of a 35mm-frame and around two-thirds the size of a typical DSLR). These lenses would have been possible on Leica rangefinders, too, but were impractical as there was no way to see through the lens and frame your shot. Digital live-view has changed that.

The 75-300mm Olympus will cost just 900 ($1,140, but certainly less when sold in the US) and will be in stores in December.

Olympus releases M.Zuiko Digital ED 75-300mm lens [DP Review]

Olympus introduces M.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150mm lens [DP Review]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Mojowijo is a teledildonic accessory for the Nintendo Wiimote, which is somewhat ironic given the console’s family-friendly reputation. The device, currently in private beta, is very simple: You hook the hardware components to two Wiimotes. Wiggling and thrusting on the first remote are detected and sent via Bluetooth to a nearby PC (you don’t need the actual Wii itself).

From there, your movements are sent over the internet and reproduced by a vibrator on the other Wiimote, allowing a remote partner to enjoy your stimulations. Amusingly, the product page touts these teledildonics as just one possibility: the others are sharing the game with someone in the same room, or using the device on yourself. This last seems absurd, a little like riding a bike and steering it using a couple of sticks. It would obviate the need for sitting on your arm until you can’t feel your hand, though.

You can sign up for the beta now, and you’ll get a prototype device to test. The signup page asks for an awful lot of personal details, though, so it might pay to be wary before jumping in, especially as the product shots are just computer-renderings.

If this does take off though, we can see all manner of possibilities, including the inevitable professional services like those seen in FaceTime porn.

Introducing Mojowijo – Share the mojo with anyone in the world [Mojowijo via SF Weekly]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If you have kids, you’re going to love the Squishy Circuits Project: it involves cooking and electronics, although not at the same time.

Squishy Circuits is a great sets of recipes from Samuel Johnson and Dr. AnnMarie Thomas at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Essentially you will make two batches of Play-Doh, one conductive and one non-conductive, and preferably different colors. The dough can then be formed into any kind of circuit and, with the addition of some wires poking into the dough and some batteries, motors and light-bulbs, you can have yourself some sticky, squishy, educational fun.

The recipes are almost exactly the same, both based on flour, water and oil. The insulating dough has added sugar and granulated alum in the mix to keep the electrons from flowing through, and its water must be distilled. Otherwise, you already have everything you need in the pantry.

I wonder just how complex the circuits can be? My first experiment, after testing the properties of the two batches of dough, would be a swiss-roll capacitor. Imagine how useful that would be: if your phone runs out of energy, you could recharge it. If you run out of energy, you could just eat it. Yummy. I’d better just check on the toxicity of that alum first, though. I remember something about that from crystal-growing back when I was a kid…

OK, I checked, and we’re good to go: Alum is only toxic to humans in doses of around an ounce. This recipe uses a teaspoon, or just 0.167 fluid-ounces. Now we just need some non-conductive cocoa-powder for some really tasty science.

Squishy Circuits Project Page [University of St. Thomas via OhGizmo]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Oh man, the iFixit crew just hopped up another step on the Stairway to Awesome. They have opened up and explored a Magnavox Odyssey 100, successor to the world’s first home games-console.

Kyle Wiens and his nerdy team are better known for flying around the globe to buy brand-new Apple products in order to tear them apart, photographing and detailing the internals for our voyeuristic techno-pleasure. The Magnavox teardown marks a week of more retro autopsies, and reveals surprising circuit designs and even some analog controls inside the 1975 console.

The case is held together with a single flathead screw, easily removed, Once inside you see not only a circuit-board but also a mess of wires and components. This, according to the know-alls at iFixit, was because Magnavox wanted to ship the console fast, and wasn’t sure that Texas Instruments would have the chips ready on time. There are also pots (potentiometers) which can be twisted by the user to adjust the positions of the on-screen goals and walls of the two built-in games, tennis and hockey.

We’re looking forward to seeing what other historical devices iFixit will be ripping open this week in celebration of its new line of game console repair manuals. I have my fingers crossed for a Vectrex, if only to see just how they managed to cram such a big wad of amazing inside.

Magnavox Odyssey 100 Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The Swimsense from Finis is like a bike computer for swimmers, only instead of counting wheel-revolutions, it counts strokes. The new wrist-mounted computer is waterproof (of course) and contains a motion detector which detects “stroke types, records the number of laps swum, total distance, calories burned, lap time, pace and stroke count.” Phew.

The smart part is that motion-sensor, which uses accelerometers to detect what kind of stroke you are swimming based on your arm movements, differentiating between the stately breaststroke, the blind backstroke, the all-conquering freestyle and the flailing, rescue-me-please-I’m-drowning butterfly. Combining this info with settings for the pool-length and your weight, age and gender, the Swimsense then presents a breakdown of what you have done in an online workout viewer. All you do is upload the data via USB.

My swimming is pretty much limited to splashing from the li-lo to the pool-bar, but the more sporting mermaids and mermen out there can add this to their Christmas list: the Swimsense will be $200 when it launches for the 2010 holiday season.

New Product: Swimsense [Finis Blog. Thanks, Jennifer!]

Swimsense product page [Finis]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The clickety-clack of manual typewriters have long been replaced by PC keyboards and even that is now disappearing with touchscreens. But for those nostalgic about old-school manual typewriters, a hack lets you update and make them compatible with PCs.

Jack Zylkin worked for nine months to create the design and schematics for a USB-based typewriter that can replace the keyboard on your PC.

“Typewriters are alasting marvel of classicengineering and design,which are now a casualty of our disposable whiz-bang techno-culture,” says Zylkin who created this project at Hive 76, a hackerspace in Philadelphia. “I wanted to do something to make these beautiful machines relevant and useful again. I have seen machines that are 100 years old and still functional as the day they were made, why should I let them go to waste?”

Zylkin estimates it can take five to 10 hours to mod a manual typewriter, if users follow his instructions. But it seems pretty easy to do.

“Its a weekend project for when you are snowed in with no TV,” he says.

Zylkin posted the step-by-step guide to creating the USB typewriter on Instructables.com and his post is now featured as part of the site’s ongoing back to school contest.

Others have attempted the USB-typewriter hack before, says Zylkin, but those projects “involved endless jumbles of wires, a disemboweled keyboard circuit and a phalanx of momentary switches.”

The USB-typewriter hack isn’t an expensive project.

“On eBay, you can get a quality machine for anywhere between $30 and $60,” says Zylkin. “Sadly,the people who trade typewriters on ebay only want to saw the keys off and make jewelry out of them! What a waste! ”

So Zylkin suggests asking friends and family to get an old typewriter from the attic. He is offering $50 DIY conversion kits that include the printed circuit boards for the project.

But if all that’s too much work for you, Zylkin has some USB typewriters available on Etsy priced at $350 to $500.

See the short clip showing the USB typewriter at work:

Photo: Jack Zylkin

[via Hack a day]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Afghanistan’s vibrant cellphone ecosystem is one of the country’s economic bright spots. There are about 12.5 million cellular subscriptions in the country of 27 million people.

Jan Chipchase, executive creative director at Frog Design spent some time in Afghanistan recently for a research study on mobile banking.

In Afghanistan most cell phone users have pre-paid mobile accounts but not ATM cards (only 3% of the country has bank accounts) so mobile banking willtake the form of SIM cards that are pre-loaded with credit and distributed to resellers. But that presents some major challenges. In most other countries, transporting the SIM cards and securing them would be a simple matter. That’s not the case in an war-torn environment not known for its safety, says Chipchase.

For some challenges though, there are unique local solutions. Since many users have mobile phones but no access to electricity, battery charging stalls (shown in the photo below) have popped up in cities like Mazar-e-Sharif. One hours battery charging costs 10 Afghanis or 0.2 cents. A stall carries a variety of chargers to suit different phones. To charge the phone, a user is given a number tag and the same number is attached to the battery and the phone. It’s a system similar to how valets keep track of the keys of a parked car.

CD players and boom boxes are sold by the roadside in cities but music is clearly moving towards mobile, says Chipchase. There are a number of “corner-shop app stores,” he says, that offer to side-load ringtones, applications and movies on mobile phones.

A mobile charging stall in Mazar-e-Sharif carries a number of battery chargers.

A twenty year old Sony calculator wrapped by a carpenter-made casing and still in use by its one owner a Mazar e Sharif cloth trader.

All photos courtesy: Jan Chipchase/Frog Design

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

"Happy Christmas Everybody!" by allerleirau/flickr. Used gratefully via a Creative Commons license

New e-readers, new tablets, and new game console accessories are all wonderful, but even in a down economy, just keeping up with demand will be a serious challenge for many gadget retailers — especially as we get closer to the holidays.

Over at Teleread, Chris Meadows looks at order-to-ship times for two hot gadgets, the Kindle 3 and the iPad. The new Kindle is being staggered out to customers according to when they were ordered (dates from Amazon’s Kindle Community Forum via KindleWorld):

• Orders placed before 8 p.m. Pacific Time on August 1st will still ship by the August 27th release date.
• Orders placed before 10 p.m. Pacific Time on August 5th will ship on or before September 4th.
• Orders placed before 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 8th.
• Orders placed after 12 p.m. Pacific Time on August 12th will ship on or before September 12th.

Apparently it’s the new “Pearl” E Ink screens that are the problem; PVI can’t make enough of them for Amazon to ship its Kindles out the door, especially since other companies are clamoring for the screens too.

The iPad, however, which had crazy wait times for months after launch, is finally meeting demand. “Apple basically ran out of product the first weekend and didn’t catch up for months,” Fortune reports: “The iPad 3G launch had to be pushed back, the international roll-out postponed by a month, and shipping delays at Apple’s online store reached as much as three weeks (15 business days).”

But now Apple can ship iPads within 24 hours. iPhone 4? Not so much. Will they be able to keep it up through December? Can Amazon catch up? If demand remains high, it’s not a bad problem to have.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Samsung’s bet on Android seems to have paid off big for the company. Samsung has shipped more than one million Galaxy S phones in the U.S. since the devices were launched in mid-July.

The news makes the Galaxy S devices one of the hottest Android phones available today, though the smartphones haven’t reached iPhone-like popularity yet. Apple sold 1.7 million iPhone 4 devices in just the first three days of sales in June.

So far, Samsung has two models of the Galaxy S phones, Samsung Vibrant and SamsungCapitvate, available on T-Mobile and AT&T respectively. But two more Galaxy S devices are expected to debut soon–Samsung Epic 4G on Sprint and Samsung Fascinate on Verizon Wireless.

Common to all these devices are features such as AMOLED display, a 1GHz processor called ‘Hummingbird’ and entertainment apps. Samsung says all Galaxy S devices will be upgraded to Android 2.2 Froyo operating system.

It will be interesting to see if the Galaxy S phones can topple Motorola Droid and the HTC Evo as the best-selling Android phones.Motorola recently launched Droid 2 on Verizon Wireless and the Evo has reigned on Sprint as the first 4G phone.

Samsung’s Epic 4G, which is scheduled to be available on Sprint starting August 31, could finally give the Evo some real competition.

Meanwhile, Samsung is gearing up to launch a 7-inch tablet in September called the ‘Galaxy Tab’. The tablet will run Android 2.2 Froyo OS, include video-calling capability and full web browsingwhich likely means support for Flash, according to a teaser video that Samsung posted last week.

Photo: Samsung Vibrant (Stefan Armijo/Wired.com)

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If you want to know just how fast you can go on your vintage fixed-gear conversion, but can’t bear to put an ugly plastic computer onto your beautifully curated bike, this concept bicycle speedometer could be right up your bike-lane. It comes from Estonian designers Redfish Creative and, despite some flaws, looks pretty gorgeous.

The computer works just like any other wireless bike-computer, with a fork-mounted sensor that detects a spoke-mounted magnet as it thrum-thrums past and beams the info up to the head-unit on the bars. The difference is in the interface which looks more Gran Turismo* than Tour de France, all analog dials and twisting knobs.

The speed is shown with a needle on a dial and the mileage (or, in this case, kilometer-age) reads out on a retro-style odometer that can be switched from trip-distance to total distance at the slide of a switch. The wheel-size, which needs to be input for this kind of rotation-counting setup, is dialed in via a knob on the magnet-sensor unit.

And now the flaw, although not really a big one. The Bicycle Speedometer has a built-in electronic “bell”, triggered by pulling back on that side lever. The sound would be both a drain on batteries and less loud than a proper metal ding-a-ling model, and the holes to let out the sound would also let in the water.

Ditch the bell and I’m sold. The device is mounted with a leather-covered clip. Classy.

Bicycle Speedometer [Redfish via Core77]

*not the video-game.

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Combined with a party-keg, Griffin’s recently-outed Party Dock for the iPad should make some great, well, parties. As long as you like quiz games, that is.

Thanks to an FCC filing, the iPad accessory was leaked last week and Griffin quickly took control of the situation. Now you can read preliminary details and sign up for future updates at the site. So just what is the Party Dock? It’s a dock for the iPad which has four wireless controllers (hence the FCC filing) letting up to four people play games at once. Because four heads squeezed around one ten-inch screen is a little crowded, the dock also hooks into a big-screen via composite and component video connections.

Games will have to be custom-designed for the dock, and developers can sign up with Griffin already. The controllers are simple, with four directional buttons, a central buttons and one more back button. In terms of layout, the controllers are identical to Apple’s IR remote. This design clearly lends itself more to trivia games than four-way shoot-em’ups.

The dock also supports regular video, so you can watch movies and YouTube on your big-screen TV, as well as photo slideshows and music. There is no launch date or price available yet, as the leak came a lot earlier than Griffin expected. That early-outing will have one advantage at least: now the developers know about it, there may even be a good game lineup at launch.

Griffin Party Dock [Griffin]

<< Previous
|
Next >>

<< Previous
|
Next >>

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If I popped open a Christmas Cracker and this tiny little camera-kit dropped out instead of the usual crappy plastic novelty, I’d be a very happy boy. As the Mini Model Camera actually costs $28, more than a whole box of the traditional exploding British tubes, this is unlikely. That hasn’t stopped me from writing to Santa about it, though.

The teeny SLR is made to 1/6th scale and the body measures just one inch by one half inch. Yes, the body: this miniature camera actually comes with three interchangeable lenses, complete with lens-hoods and, on the telephoto, a little tripod mounting-ring in case things get a little to heavy.

The knobs and dials don’t actually move, but they are all represented in Oompa-Loompa-sized detail (only with less orange). The brand isn’t specified but the models are clearly based on Canon gear, with the monster-sized telephoto lens in Canon’s signature beige colorway.

Yes, it’s just a trinket and no, it won’t actually shoot pictures, but it is cute as hell, and could also double as a marker in that other Christmas family-favorite, the game of Monopoly. It would certainly be better than that stupid old boot, or worse, the clothes-iron that I always seem to end up with.

$28, available now in time for my Christmas gift.

Mini Model Camera [Photojojo]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

This rather familiar-looking tablet is in fact one of the first Android tablets in the wild. The Identity TAB comes from South Korea’s KT and will cost 300,000 Won, or around $250, and is almost identical to the upcoming Galaxy Tab from Samsung.

The TAB runs Android 2.2 Froyo, and the TFT LCD (multitouch) screen measures seven-inches, which seems to be a sweet spot for Android tablets. It runs on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, is packed with 8GB storage and a gyroscope, plus some great additions not found in Apple’s iPad: a 3MP camera (rear-facing), an SD-card slot and a DMB TV Tuner (sweet!).

As with any tablet facing up to the iPad, it will win or lose based on the smoothness and integration of the operating system and hardware (things much more important when you are interacting with on-screen controls directly) and of course an app ecosystem. The Identity TAB does have one other great advantage: It’s in Korea, which means crazy-good internet. The $250 price is for the unit alone. Sign up for a contract and it is free if you pick a $22 per month WiMax contract from SK Telecom, offering an impossible-to-exhaust 50GB of data. One caveat: from the (translated) wording of various descriptions, it is unclear whether WiMax (called WiBro in Korea) is built-in or requires an external unit or dongle.

Despite the embarrassingly derivative design, the TAB certainly looks like a tablet to watch.

KT nation’s first Tablet PC released Android [Today Korea via Akihabara News and Engadget]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Here’s a neat twist on the glut of beautiful-but-impossible-to-read watches filling online stores these days. The Zub Zirc No. 20 from Nooka is not only gorgeously futuristic, with a brand-new way of depicting the passing of time, it is also – almost heretically – easy to read.

Designers can be a little precious, and watch designers are no exception, as our newest Gadget Lab writer Tim Carmody pointed out last week with this quote from Denis Guidone: “I dont like to design watches, what I really like is to design time.” Whatever, dude. You should be making stuff like the Zub Zirc, a watch so cool it’s even hard to stop saying its name, over and over. The polyurethane-sheathed watch comes in a polychrome of garish hues and reports the time via a circle of 12 dots (hours) and a horizontal LCD strip which runs from empty to full as each hour progresses.

The Zub Zirc No. 20 will cost you a not-bad $130, and there are even color-matched sunglasses available.

Zub Zirc No. 20 [Nooka via Uncrate]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Five hundred eighty-three calculators, 128 brands and one man who has painstakingly cataloged them all.

Emil Dudek, a technology enthusiast who lives in South Wales, U.K., has spent the last eight years acquiring calculators made in the 1970s, taking them apart, photographing them, analyzing the technology and posting it all to his website along with specs and comments on each machine.

It’s one man’s digital ode to electronic calculators. For Dudek, who got his first electronic calculator at the age of 15,in 1976, the devices represent a snapshot in time — a moment at the cusp of a digital computing revolution.

“Calculators were what we drooled after as kids with our nose stuck to the shop window,” says Dudek who runs the Vintage Technology site. “The calculators gave us the freedom and power to do complex calculations.”

Dudek’s online catalog of calculators is an impressive archive of calculators from one decade. Each of the 583 calculators on the site have size, power, case, display information, year manufactured and name of manufacturer listed. The models also include comments explaining the components used, construction and the logic used.

Ultimately, Dudek hopes to catalog the 3,000 to 5,000 calculators he estimates were made in the 1970s.

“What I thought really interesting is that it not just has calculator information but also chip numbers from some of the old ICs used in the device,” says Matt Stack, a calculator enthusiast who recently created a graphing calculator built on open source hardware. ” I like to consider myself an expert in calculators and I learned something.”

Story continues …

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

ATI, the Canadian graphics-chip company born back in 1985, is dead. After being acquired by AMD in 2006, and spending the intervening four years locked in the Californian chip-maker’s cellar, forced to try on dresses that “make it look purty”, the deed has finally been done: the ATI name has been erased from all products.

The acquisition brought one of the Big Two GPU-makers (the other is NVIDIA) into the AMD’s CPU business, but ATI managed to keep its name on its inventions until today. From now on, there will still be Radeon and FirePro cards, but they’ll be called AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro.

Why? AMD is moving firmly into combined CPU-GPU systems, which put everything together for energy and space savings. Think of the Intel GMA 950 which was used in MacBooks and Mac Minis, along with PC hardware. These “integrated graphics” systems share the main RAM with the CPU, further saving money but also offering lesser performance. AMD decided that these combined systems would be too confusing with all the different branding, and dropped ATI like the hot girl drops the dork with a car after they arrive together at the school prom.

Best of all, AMD has redesigned the stickers for its chips, and there are actually two sets. One drops all mention of even the AMD name, replacing it with the word “graphics” so when its discrete graphics cards ship in Intel boxes, the names won’t clash. So goes the complex corporate maze that lies behind those ugly stickers found on all PCs.

AMD jettisons ATI brand name, makes Radeon its own [The Tech Report]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Limor Fried’s MintyBoost project is a great example of DIY and commercial tech working together. Take an Altoids tin, a couple of AA batteries, and some very smart hackery, and you’ve got a lightweight USB charger that you can use to charge/run your handheld iWhatever, or almost any other phone, camera, or small device that can take a charge off USB power.

Reverse engineering Apple’s secret charging methods from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Clive Thompson profiled Fried and her company Adafruit Industries as part of a 2008 feature in Wired on “open source hardware.” The idea is that hackers like Fried can use what they find out about consumer devices to make and sell their own products, but also to produce DIY kits and share information with others who then build their own projects.

As a case study in the value of sharing this information, consider Rob Scott. Before he took his son on a week-long bike trip, he used Fried’s schematic to hack together what turns out to be a really striking-looking solar charger for his son’s iPod.

It’s always nice to see what the maker community is doing to accessorize their retail gadgets; the results aren’t always super-polished, but they generally solve real problems in important use cases that don’t get addressed by manufacturers, either because they’re too unusual or they can’t be easily solved by more plugs, more peripherals, more complex devices that cost a lot of money. And in turn, we all find out a little bit more about how these magical devices get put together and how they work.

See Also:

• DIY Graphing Calculator Is Built From Open Source Hardware
• Why Arduino Is a Hit With Hardware Hackers
• Beautifully Hypnotic Video Details Canon Macro Lens Hack
• Hacker Stuffs MiFi Inside iPad, Ruins it in the Process

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Electronic waste can sometimes find a surprising second lease on life, as designer Tina Sparkles has proved by making a dress using recycled wires.

“I read how e-waste is being shipped to developing countries and how people are melting it at homes there,” says Sparkles. “And I was inspired to create something that could recycle some of the materials.”

The dress called ‘Systems Supernova’ was shown earlier this month at the Austin Fashion Week.

Sparkles used a curtain from a thrift store as the base of the dress and then stitched the wires on it. She got the wires from an electronic recycle store in Austin, Texas.

Overall, the piece weighs 30 lbs. But it looks pretty stylish and will make for a stunning entrance at any event.

See more photos of the dress:

The base material for the dress is a curtain from a thrift store. Photo: Cameron Russell

Tina Sparkles is enveloped by the wires she used to create the dress.

Photo: Andrew Sterling

[via Make]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The Gadget Lab crew kicks off this week’s podcast with a look at Dylan Tweney’s ugly new kicks, a pair of surf shoes made of recycled soda bottles. They cost $70. Seriously.

runMobileCompatibilityScript(‘myExperience597207539001′, ‘anId’);brightcove.createExperiences();

Moving on from cheesy hippy apparel, Brian X. Chen shares the news of an upcoming Apple press conference, where we can expect new iPods, a major iTunes upgrade (streaming!) and maybe a do-over of the Apple TV.

Apple’s competitors haven’t been so quiet, either. A “leaked” video emerged this week demonstrating Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, a 7-inch, Android-powered touchscreen tablet that looks to be a worthy rival to Apple’s iPad.

Speaking of the iPad Tweney shares a hack for his iPad to gain 3G service at no additional cost with the help of his iPhone. If you jailbreak your iPhone at the site JailbreakMe.com, you can download an app called MyWi to turn the iPhone into a wireless hot spot. Select the hot spot on your iPad et voila 3G-surfing privileges on the tablet without any monthly bills. That’s sweet.

Still, it’s too bad 3G coverage in general is spotty at best (especially here in San Francisco). Dissatisfied customers are in luck: We’ve heard Sprint may give you a free femtocell to boost your service if it’s proving unreliable. Also, an unhappy AT&T customer on Wired.com staff complained loudly enough to score a free femtocell to fix the crappy reception on his iPhone. Who said whining doesn’t pay off?

Like the show? You can also get theGadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you dont want to be distracted by our smiling faces, check out theGadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Labvideo oraudio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #86

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If you love Nokia hardware but wish for a better operating system, consider what some enthusiastic developers have done.

As part of a project called NITDroid, the developers have created a compatible version of Android operating system for Nokia’s internet tablets. The result is a device that has the body of Nokia and the brains of Android.

“Nokia’s hardware is fantastic but their software is sub optimal, slow buggy and not always the best user experience,” says Terrence Eden, a U.K.-based mobile consultant who installed Android 1.6 ‘Donut’ on his Nokia N810. “Android is a much better software environment for Nokia hardware than what Nokia provides.”

Eden’s Nokia-Android hybrid works well except for access to Google Market and apps, he says.

Meanwhile developers have created a stable version of Android 2.2 Froyo for the Nokia N900, which ships with Nokia’s Maemo operating system. They have been able to get calls, data and Google apps going on the hacked device. The only missing feature is camera support.

This is not the first time a phone has been hacked to run an entirely different kind of operating system. Eager to experience Android’s features, some intrepid smartphone users hacked their Windows Mobile phones to run Android.

With Android for Nokia phones, the NITdroid project has had varying degrees of success. So far, they have attempted to port Android for Nokia’s tablet range of devices–which means the Nokia N770, N800, N810, and N900.

“On the N810., everything is pretty much functional. It isn’t a phone so there’s no call functionality to deal with,” says Eden.

But with the N900, users have found themselves unable to use the Android-powered device to make calls on a 3G network or change the screen brightness.

Tweaking the Nokia phones to change its operating system to Android isn’t for everyone, says Eden.

“It’s not something anyone off the street can do,” he says. “It’s a bit like installing Linux on the PC that you bought off Best Buy.”

But for those who are willing to take the risk, Eden has written a step-by-step guide on his blog for getting Android on the N810. The NITDroid wiki also has an installation guide for other Nokia phones.

Photo: Terence Eden

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The kids may be ditching wristwatches for time-telling smartphones, but manufacturers and designers still have some tricks just-barely-up-their-long-sleeves. The trick seems to be making watches more like smartphones by packing in extra functions or forgoing utility altogether for pure aesthetics or prestige.

Now, I can’t really read the spiral watch in the video above, but I appreciate the beauty and concept of the thing. The designer, Denis Guidone, says I dont like to design watches, what I really like is to design time. This really puts us on another plane. If Marcel Duchamp were alive today, I’m sure he’d be making timepieces. (Dali, definitely.)

The “architecture you can wear” web magazine/design store Yanko Design has been highlighting clever takes on the wristwatch like this all summer, including design firm odm’s digital watch that puts the screen on the sides and the buttons in the middle, and a really gorgeous and surprisingly affordable piece by Daniel Will-Harris that lights up the numbers showing hours and minutes in color:

Image from Yanko Design

Let’s suppose, though, that you want your watch to DO stuff. Computerworld reports on watch manufacturers who are stoked about using the new Bluetooth spec, which makes it easier to hold connections on low-power devices, to pair your wristwatch with a computer the same way you would a mouse, keyboard, or phone:

That means a watch or other device with a standard coin-cell or “button” battery that is worn on a wrist, kept in a pocket or worn on a necklace could communicate with a person’s smartphone or laptop. Using the wireless connection, the watch could display data received from the larger device, Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) Executive Director Michael Foley said Wednesday…

“The specification opens up new categories of Bluetooth devices,” he said. “You could replicate your phone on your watch for caller ID information or [to activate] a music player.”

These watches are probably still over a year away, though, as nobody’s made an announcement just yet. The ones with virus-templated nanobatteries that last forever are a LONG ways off.

Finally, there’s the classic non-timekeeping function of a wristwatch — showing neither utility nor idiosyncratic taste but socially recognized status and power. Luckily for high-end watchmakers, the psychosocial cachet of their products doesn’t seem to be trailing off.

In “Why Do We Care About Luxury Brands?” Jonah Lehrer writes about what our continued desire for genuine Rolex watches, Hermes Bags, and real (not sure ’nuff) iPhones has in common with our childhood objects of affection:

Although we outgrow stuffed animals, we never get beyond the irrational logic of authenticity and essentialism. There are certain things whose value depends largely on their legitimacy. While I might listen to bootleg music on my iPhone, I want the phone to be genuine. I want that Apple logo to be real. Why? Because the brand has effectively woven itself into my emotional brain.* Because when I see that logo, I dont see a functional object. Instead, Ive learned to respond to everything that isnt functional, all those subtle connotations conveyed in the glossy ads. There are many blankets in the world. But there is only one blankie. The best brands are blankies.

Sometimes it’s nice to look at your watch, not even to check the time, but just to remind yourself that it’s there.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Gary Fong, the company behind those plastic-cup-like attachments you see atop many a photojournalist’s flashguns, has come up with an iPhone 4 tripod mount. The plastic adapter looks like it was given roughly a minute’s thought before a back-of-the-napkin sketch was put into production.

Thanks to the squared-off shape of the iPhone 4, almost no custom-shaping is needed to make a snug-fitting holder. Thus, Fong’s adapter is little more than a C-shaped plastic strip with a metal tripod-bush in the base. That is it, and it’s just the kind of thing that you’d make were you scratching around the junk-drawer for a home-made solution.

But despite its basic design and almost complete lack of fancifying, it could be the most practical iPhone tripod mount we’ve seen. There is no need for suction cups, permanently-attached stick-on adapters or even damage-inviting dock-connectors. You simply slip the iPhone in when you need to take a steady picture. Easy. The adapter should be live on the Fong site on Friday September 3rd for $20.

One final thing: The product pictures raise one really big question. Just where on Earth did Gary Fong get ahold of a white iPhone 4?

Fong website [Gary Fong. Thanks, Zach!]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews