Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
New tri-mode, dual-band wireless card coming from Netgear that’ll work with 802.11a, b, and g, so you’ll be able to connect to pretty much any kind of WiFi access point. Read
Speaking of Sony, the Economist has a piece on the company and how it’s banking its future on the convergence of PCs and home entertainment. Since Sony is both an electronics company and a media company, this is turning out to be a little more difficult than they had anticipated. One telling passage: That Apple…
It wasn’t clear whether or not the NW-MS70D, that new Network Walkman portable digital audio player from Sony could play MP3s or not, but reader Shuichi Akito writes in that it’s not; it only plays ATRAC3 and ATRAC3Plus. Oddly enough, the same isn’t true for all Network Walkman players, says reader Chuck Herrick. His Network…
Just a few moments ago Gizmodo passed one million page views! Traffic has been growing by leaps and bounds since our launch last August, and we’d like to express our gratitude to everyone who has visited the site, written about us, linked to us, told their friends about us, or otherwise supported the site. Thanks!
Review of a new wireless portable keyboard for Pocket PCs called the Pocketop. Frustratingly, the Pocketop only uses IR, not Bluetooth, so you actually have to either have the keyboard line up with your Pocket PC’s IR port, or use a strategically placed mirror. Seriously. Wait for a Bluetooth version. Read
Elizabeth Spiers of Gawker, our sibling blog, tipped us off to this: Pat O’Brien, the host of Access Hollywood, is apparently writing a piece for Gotham magazine about “the gadgets one needs on the red carpet.” Included is some very insidery Hollywood gossip, like that people love their Blackberry email pagers so much they even…
Reader Mark Friesen just sent in these pictures of that new Matrix phone from Samsung. Note the screensaver on the phone on the right.
We’ve heard this before, but Steve Kovsky over at ZDNet thinks that videophonmes are finally going to catch on. Whether or not you agree with him, there is one very interesting tidbit of information to be gleaned from his column: The “#” key on your telephone is actually a holdover from AT&T’s ill-fated videophone plans.…
Slashdot thread on the fifth year anniversary of Apple’s decision to kill the Newton, its sole foray into the world of PDAs. Remarkably (or perhaps not given the loyalty/fanaticism of some Apple users), there is still a somewhat large community of Newton users who are working to create new applications for it and have even…
Now there are just tons of these USB-powered gadgets coming out of the woodwork, the latest (and we’ll try to make this the last one, we promise) is a USB personal fan for helping you keep cool. Could it be that all these USB-powered gadgets have been around for years and we’ve just never really…
A bunch of European wireless carriers – Spain’s Telefonica Moviles SA, Germany’s T-Mobile AG and Britain’s Orange SA and Vodafone Group PLC – have a new plan for letting people pay for things with a cellphone instead of using cash or a credit card. Read
Great new undercover spy gadget: a pen with a built-in videocamera that can wirelessly transmit the images it’s capturing up to 100 meters away. You just click the top of the pen to start. The PenCam can record sound as well, but that function is disabled when the pen is sold in the US. Read
New portable digital audio player from Sony called the Network Walkman NW-MS70D that comes with 256MB of internal memory and a slot for Sony MagicGate Memory Stick Duo memory cards. It’s not clear whether the NW-MS70D will play MP3s, or just songs in Sony’s proprietary ATRAC3 format. Read
PocketPCThoughts has the second installment of its three part series about how to get the best GPS system for your Pocket PC. The first part gave an overview of GPS, how it works, the difference between a car’s GPS system and a Pocket PC’s, and error rates, while this next part looks at the dizzying…
New York Times article on how to use cellphones to keep an eye on things back home: Maybe the “killer app” for video on phones isn’t seeing the person you’re calling. Instead, the exciting development may be the ability to use your cellphone’s color screen to view remote scenes, both of public places and of…
We’ve gotten ourselves a few mentions in the press lately, with Gizmodo appearing in a column about nanopublishing by Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News, in a piece in The Guardian about weblogs as businesses, and most recently, in an article in Reuters about weblogs stealing the Web publishing limelight. Read – San…
Some rumors have surfaced about HP’s new iPAQ 2200 Pocket PC, which is due out this summer. Supposedly it’ll run the new version of the Pocket PC operating system which comes out later this year, have 128MB of RAM, a 400MHz processor, slots for both Compact Flash and Secure Digital memory cards, a 16-bit color…
The USB-powered gadgets keep coming! To add to the USB toothbrush and USB hot cup, there’s now a USB heating pad (to keep you warm at night) and a USB mini hot-plate that keeps your drink warm while you’re working hard! Actually, given how cold it’s been here in New York lately, that heating pad…
Speaking of long-awaited cellphones, Nokia’s new Bluetooth-enabled cameraphone, the 3650, has finally begun shipping. The 3650, which won a design award at CES this year, comes with a large 176×208 pixel color screen and a weird circular keypad. Read
Responding to our plea the other day for information about Sony Ericsson’s P800 cellphone, and what price T-Mobile might offer it for sale in the US, a reader writes that the word on the street is that it’ll be sometime next month for $500 with new service activation. Read