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There’s been talk of this for a few months now, but the Inquirer confirms that Motorola is “not far” from releasing several cellphones with built-in WiFi that will be able to seamlessly roam from one wireless hot spot to the next. Whether they’ll be able to make Voice over WiFi calls is unclear. Read
New widescreen laptop from Hewlett-Packard. The Compaq Presario X1000 is just 1.3 inches thick and has a 15.4-inch wide aspect ratio LCD screen, 64MB of video RAM, up to 2GB of RAM, integrated 802.11b, optional Bluetooth, up to a 1.6GHz processor, up to an 80GB hard drive, and a CD-RW/DVD+RW combination drive. Read
If you need an industrial strength hard drive, you’re in luck. Western Digital plans to start selling its high-speed WD Raptor hard drives, which were originally designed to be used in servers, for the desktop PC market. The 36GB Raptor drive isn’t for everyone. It offers less storage capacity than Western Digital’s Caviar line of…
New widescreen Vaio laptop from Sony. Besides having nice design, the PCG-TR1 comes with a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive; a built-in rotating digital camera for video conferencing; simulated 5.1 channel Dolby surround sound for headphones; integrated 802.11a, 802.11b, and Bluetooth; and best of all, a 1280×768 pixel, 10.6-inch widescreen LCD. Only available in Japan, of course. Read…
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A bunch of geeks with too much time on their hands wanted to know if it were possible to put WiFi into a light fixture, and ended up building a wireless access point attached to a light bulb that screws into a light socket and connects to the Internet using PowerLine networking (which uses a…
It’s not quite a laptop, and too big to be a PDA, but ZDNet asks, “Should you buy a tweener?” Overlooking the fact that the term “tweener” is stupid and shouldn’t be used, it’s a good question. Their appeal is seductive, since getting significant amounts of real work done on a PDA can be next…
Nokia and Mastercard are testing using cellphones as credit cards: The phones are equipped with MasterCard’s new “PayPass” payment technology that lets consumers wave by or tap MasterCard credit card-connected devices on a reader to charge their accounts, rather than swiping cards through the retailer’s magnetic stripe reader. Read
It’s truly pathetic that we’ve even dedicated this much time to covering this, but the iLoo is not a hoax. First we report a couple of weeks ago that MSN UK was planning to take the WiFi-enabled portable toilet around to summer music festivals as a marketing gimmick. Then Microsoft insists earlier this week that…
Digital Photography Review takes a look at Pentax’s new five megapixel digital camera, the Optio 550. The 550 is the only compact five megapixel camera with a 5x optical zoom lens, and it can also record video clips of up to ten minutes in length. Read
Remember instant cameras? They may seem a little archaic in the age of digital, but Polaroid has a new instant camera out. The Polaroid One is slimmed down version of the Polaroid One Step, adding a few new features like a self-timer, a digital film counter, and red-eye reduction. If Polaroid were really smart, they’d…
Worried about losing the satellite link to their transmitter during a thunderstorm, WFMU put connected an emergency iPod to the transmitter that can be switched on in case of emergency: The Apple device is set on continuous random play from a playlist containing the extensive collection of “Live at WFMU” CDs (live music recorded at…
We don’t cover many gaming-related gadgets here on the site, but Sony has a new portable version of the PlayStation coming out. The PSP will have a 480 x 272 pixel LCD screen, a USB 2.0 port for hooking up to other devices, a slot for Memory Stick storage cards, and play special 1.8GB “Universal…
The fetish aspect of new gadgets leave me cold. I much prefer to hear about stuff that people have lived with and worn down, but still find love for. The web tends to offer sanctuary to the former, and not the latter. In my constant search for a decent web site that tracks and review…
CNET roundup of a few of the non-iPod hard drive MP3 players out there, like the 20GB eDigital Odyssey 1000 (pictured at right) and the new 60GB Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen. Read
Another new Bluetooth gadget today: a Bluetooth GPS receiver from PalmTop. The TomTom Navigator Bluetooth GPS is designed for use with Pocket PCs, but will also work with laptops and a few Bluetooth-enabled cellphones like Sony Ericsson’s P800 and Nokia’s 7650 and 3650. These Bluetooth GPS receivers are great because you don’t have to actually…
Over at DesignTechnica, Doug MacLean wonders whether all the emphasis on expensive home theater systems with digital surround sound and high-resolution displays is leading to worse and worse films being made: So many movies are produced more like extended music videos than films or merit. The booming audio and bright video are part of the…
For the past couple of weeks we’ve been playing around with the new NetDrive Wireless from Martian, which the company advertises as a totally silent hard drive that connects to a home wireless network over 802.11b. With the number of home WiFi networks growing rapidly, a wireless network drive is such a perfectly obvious idea…
For whatever reason, Microsoft is now claiming that the iLoo, that WiFi-enabled portable toilet MSN UK was supposedly testing at music festivals this summer, is an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke. Just a month after April 1st. Very, very clever. Read
Samsung and Ucentric are working on a multi-tv digital video recording system for Comcast cable subscribers that will create a single library of stored programming that can be watched on any television in the house. You can even pause a show in one room and finish watching it in another. Read