Gadgets Blog

by Nilay Patel, posted Jul 12th 2008 at 8:06PM

Hey you — you looking for a quarter of the ipod touch experience for a little less than a quarter of the price? Yeah? Well, how does dropping $73 on the depressingly derivative Teclast M26 grab you? Seriously, this thing looked like it had a glimmer of potential when it was first announced, so it’s kind of sad to see it getting priced like the throwaway crap it turned out to be — we should definitely know better by now.

[Via PMP Today]

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Gadgetell exclusive: last night I was contacted by a couple of developers, each shut out of the beta program.  Both, I might add, have fantastic application ideas but Apple hadn’t even looked at thier app until yesterday.  Or so it seemed.

Both developers got notification they were accepted into the program.  Word is a couple of weeks and wham, bam, boom - they are in the App Store.

As I’ve said before, I found the launch of the App Store a little underwhelming but do believe it will snowball into some amazing Apps for us to enjoy.  How about you, got an app you can’t live without now?

I also got to thinking this morning, Apple just created a way for them to add productivity to current applications while getting us to pay for them.  Things like a video camera, MMS, copy and paste.  Things that we all think should just be in there, Apple can now collect revenue for.  Nice.  Well, for them anyway.

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by Nilay Patel, posted Jul 12th 2008 at 6:33PM

We’re not certain why Kodak is trickling out these middle-of-the-road digicams instead of announcing them all at once, but here we are. Joining the M1093 IS are the new M1073 IS (pictured) and M1063, while the C813 get a new friend in the C913. As you’d expect, almost nothing about these is all that spectacular: the $179 M1063 and M1073 IS are both 10 megapixel units with ISO1000 sensitivity and face detection, while the $120 C913 is a 9.2 megapixel unit with a 2.4-inch display and digital image stabilization. Expect to see these all in October, and check out the C913 after the break.

Read - M1073 IS
Read - M1063
Read - C913

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Filed under: Digital Cameras

by Darren Murph, posted Jul 12th 2008 at 10:51AM

Sans Digital caught our eyes earlier this month with a simple, albeit remarkably nifty CF to SATA adapter, and now it’s doing so again with a 2-bay NAS enclosure. The AccuNAS AN2L is a RAID 0/1 chassis that supports file sharing in Windows, OS X and Linux, and it also enables playback of files via a PS3 / Xbox 360 or any other UPnP / DLNA-certified device. You’ll also find that this thing doubles triples as an iTunes music server and BitTorrent client, which makes it all the more tempting, does it not? No word on pricing at the moment, but if you’re strangely uncomfortable with loading in your own HDDs, the outfit will be selling these with 500GB to 2TB pre-installed for an undisclosed premium.

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Filed under: Storage

While the whole mobile phone industry is busy with the hype built up by the release of the iphone 3G, HP has quietly made available its new Windows Mobile smarthphone, the HP iPaQ 910. This smarthphone which has a striking resemblance to a Palm Treo is now available for $499.99 at HP’s website.

Like we said before, the iPaQ 910 is loaded with high-end features including a 2.4-inch touchscreen display, full QWERTY keyboard, HSDPA for connecting to the web at 7.2 Mbps, 3.0-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, built-in Google Maps and GPS, 128MB of RAM, and a 416 MHz Marvell PXA270 processor.

The iPaQ 910 runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional and is loaded with various Microsoft programs including Office Mobile, Office Outlook Mobile and Internet Explorer Mobile.

Product [HP] Via [IntoMobile]

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by Paul Miller, posted Jul 12th 2008 at 3:04PM

Well, that was quick. We mentioned Ion’s fancy drum kit yesterday, which will be released around when Rock Band 2 ships, but works with both Rock Band games, and now we’ve got a price and a press shot of the Drum Rocker. The $300 set has high-durability pads, which are supposed to play quiet and will register the velocity of your hits, but the real win is the re-configurability of the whole set — much like a for-realises electronic drum kit. We’re also really digging the metal-reinforced kick pedal, which seems a major improvement over the junky, difficult pedal packaged with the original game. Only $300? We’ll take two.

[Via Joystiq]

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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

by Joshua Topolsky, posted Jul 12th 2008 at 12:28PM

Do you have $8000 to blow? Have you been dying to open a laser tattoo parlor? Well guess what? It’s your lucky day. The folks at Epilog would like you to meet the Zing, a $7,995 laser etcher / printer that can not only scar you for life, but can also leave a personalized stamp of your choosing on anything that you can fit into it. If you’ve seen engraved iPods, Zunes, or MacBooks, you get the idea of what this device can do. The Zing is made to tackle almost any material, be it wood, plastic, leather, glass, or various metals (of course), though we’re fairly certain the company doesn’t condone or recommend taking this baby to your precious, supple skin. Check out a video of it doing what it does best on an iphone after the break.

[Via Gearlog]

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Filed under: Peripherals

We have recently seen the Creative ZEN X-Fi get announced, however that initial launch was just in Singapore, but it did not take long to begin showing up online for US sales as well.

Buy.com has just listed the 8, 16 and 32GB models of the ZEN X-Fi and the pricing is similar to what we saw for the overseas market. The 8GB model is $149.99, the 16GB model is $199.99 and the larger 32GB model is $279.99.

Although the 8GB model was originally announced for the Singapore market as to not include the same wireless capability as the larger models, it looks like all three will have Wi-Fi capability when it hits the US. According to the Buy.com listing the 8GB has “X-Fi technology and wireless LAN.”

All three models are listed and available for purchase, however an actual shipping date was not mentioned.

Product [Buy.com]

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There’s a new kid on the Webmail block - GMX.com. GMX Internet Services, Inc. claims to have over 10 million Internet mail accounts, and has attracted 100,000 users in the beta testing of their new webmail service. Built with a lot of AJAX features, the GMX interface resembles Outlook and Hotmail more than Gmail or even Yahoo Mail, and sports 5GB of storage.

Here are my initial thoughts where I compare GMX mainly to Gmail as that’s my primary webmail client.

GMX’s interface isn’t as responsive as Gmail, not that it’s slow, but being a technical user who sometimes can click and type faster than some slow computers can respond, that’s a negative. However, if you’ve ever used any kind of e-mail client before, you’ll find it relatively easy to get up to speed on this one.

There are no ads visible, although that could change if this service really takes off. Obviously Gmail is funded by ads, but they rarely bother me, and I even sometimes find them useful.

GMX’s #1 feature that they tout is their 7 layers of spam and virus checking. Now they are not clear on what those 7 layers involve, and there’s very little that you can do to change the settings except to have blacklists and whitelists of e-mail addresses and to turn off the spam protection. I don’t understand why that’s an option.

GMX allows you to pull in your e-mail from other e-mail accounts and an additional plus here is that that mail gets scanned by their virus and spam filters as well.

5GB is great, but so far it’s not growing like Gmail or close to the 7GB I currently have. I also hate the fact that so many operations open up new windows.

Now is a great time to get in as you’ll probably get the username(@gmx.com) that you want. Overall, GMX appears to be a pretty solid webmail service, although I can’t vouch for their reliability as of yet. However, having become a power Gmail user, what with my Greasemonkey extensions and all, I’m not even in the least bit tempted to switch.

Posted in Computers, Networking & Internet

Another series of leaked images of another upcoming handset from Sony Ericsson. The images come courtesy of the Arabic SE4M forums, and not only give a pretty good look at the handset, but they also include a few details about what we can expect.

As typical with leaked images, the pricing and release date have not been mentioned. But we do have enough details to make this something to look forward to. Based on the images we can tell that it will have a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash. It is also a Walkman phone, however the images are not showing any headphone jack, and based on previous models, lets just hope that it comes as a standard 3.5mm jack and not an special size.

Keep reading to check out a few of the images…

Via [myse1]

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