Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
The Roomba, that robotic vacuum cleaner from iRobot, is getting a bump up in intelligence with two new smarter models: the Roomba Pro (pictured on the left), which can do spot cleaning and focus on cleaning just one specific area, and the Roomba Pro Elite (pictured on the right), which includes the extra capabilities of…
Some tips in this week’s Circuits section of the New York Times for adding surround sound to your home theater, mentioning some of the new systems coming out, like self-configuring setups from Pioneer and Yamaha and systems from Samsung and Niro that can simulate front and rear channel surround sound without actually needing to have…
We weren’t even aware that the current Global Positioning System is actually the second generation of the technology, but the US government is already working on GPS III, which should have better accuracy and higher reliability than the current system, and enable a whole host of new applications. The first GPS III satellites should start…
Handy little guide to all the different Flash memory card formats out there. Well not all of them, it misses the xD-Picture Card and miniSD formats. Read
Nifty, though perhaps unintended, feature of TiVo’s Home Media Option, which is available for Series 2 TiVos: besides being able to use it to stream MP3s and view digital photos stored on your computer, apparently you can also use it to stream MP3s and view digital photos stored on the computers of your friends who…
A new cellphone from Nokia aimed at the Asian, African, and Middle Eastern markets with an unusual, but oddly graceful keypad (whether it’s easy to use or not, we can’t say). The 2300 is a dual-band GSM phone is pretty light (just 92 grams) and has special software for filtering out text message spam. Read
Rumor that Dell’s new Axim X3 series of Pocket PCs is set to drop on October 15th. It’s thought that the X3 will be smaller and slimmer than the X5, have an SD expansion card slot, 64MB of RAM, and come in two versions, a 300MHz version and a 400MHz version with either 802.11b or…
Oh, and Casio has another upgraded Exilim coming out, this one a four megapixel version of its EX-Z3 camera, the one with the optical zoom lens. The EX-Z4 is almost exactly the same, except for the bump up in resolution from three to four megapixels. Read
Casio’s superslim Exilim digital camera just got a little bit smaller. Not by much, just 10%, but enough to make a difference. Plus, the new EX-S20 and EX-M20 (pictured from left to right) cameras still have the same two megapixel resolution as their predecessors, the EX-S2 and the EX-M2, and even improve on them with…
Brief piece over at HomeTheater.About.com on why your next television should be a widescreen. We recently took the plunge ourselves, picking up Sharp’s 22-inch widescreen Aquos LCD TV (pictured at right), and we’ll never go back — being able to watch movies in their proper letterboxed format without bars on the top and bottom of…
To deal with a housing shortage, Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, is offering students Acer TravelMate laptops and BlackBerrys if they’ll agree to live off-campus. Read
Infosync review of Nokia’s new musicphone, the 3300, which combines a dual-band GSM/GPRS handset with an MP3 player (with a slot for Multimedia Cards for storing MP3s), a stereo FM tuner, and, most attractively, the ability to record directly from the radio or via a line-in port. The US version of the 3300 comes with…
A new 100-hour TiVo for DirecTV from Samsung. The SIR-S4120R packs a 120GB hard drive, with a version for recording high-definition television broadcasts expected sometime next year. Read
These no-name personal video players keep coming out of the woodwork, with the latest model to crop up being the et970 from ATLMultimedia. Like most of the others out there, the et970 has a 20GB hard drive, a 3.5-inch LCD screen, plays back and records MPEG-4 video files, and can double as a digital video…
Another new digital camera from Fuji. The 3.2 megapixel FinePix S3000 (not to be confused with their other new camera, the 3.1 megapixel Finepix S5000) has a 6x optical zoom lens and uses the (relatively) new xD-Picture Card as its memory ard format. Read
Apparently the British government is thinking about requiring every automobile in the UK to have tracking microchips installed that will track whenever drivers break the speed limit, wander into a bus-only lane, or park somewhere they’re not supposed to. That information would then be communicated back to the government through a system of sensors that…
If pre-teens are going to start carrying cellphones, they may as well have PDAs as well. BusinessWeek has a roundup of some of the more “educational” handheld gadgets for kids out there, like Leapfrog’s iQuest (pictured at right) and Franklin’s Speaking Homework Wiz. Speaking of handhelds for kids, it’s not particularly educational, but whatever happened…
Well, it doesn’t have to be sunglasses. It could also be an eye patch. It’s a wireless sensor called the TempAlert that can gauge body and brain temperature, but to be accurate has to be placed on a specific patch of skin near the eyes and nose. Hence the sunglasses. Or the eyepatch. Read
New 2x DVD burner for laptops from Toshiba. The SD-R6112 supports the DVD-R/RW standard and should start showing up in laptops (not just Toshiba’s) soon. Read
Somehow this, which popped up on Hyperorg.com, seems incredibly unlikely to us: A friend in Belmont (MA) was among a group of neighbors whose laptops were stolen from their homes. It seems the thieves used RF detection equipment to scan the neighborhood, finding homes with wireless hubs. They targeted those homes & stole the laptops.…