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The Skinny: Garmin takes a giant leap forward over the Forerunner 50 with their new 405 sports watch. Unlike its predecessor, this baby includes GPS and the ability for users to wirelessly sync with a PC using ANT+Sport technology. https://gizmodo.com/garmin-forerunner-50-slim-sports-watch-records-mileage-287397 Athletic types can record data regarding speed, distance, heart rate and location as well as…
What’s What: Updates all along the nuvi line. The top-of-the-line 880’s big gun is new speech recognition with a steering wheel-mounted push-to-walk remote, and burnt coffee lovers can bark out commands like “find nearest Starbucks.” The Catch:Voice controlled GPS means you gotta turn the radio down to command, no? The 260w adds almost another inch…
The Skinny: Garmin’s Mobile PC, a software suite that provides Garmin’s GPS capabilities on your laptop with any GPS receiver. It’s available by itself for $59, but if you want a more integrated approach, you can buy it with the Garmin GPS 20x sensor (USB dongle) for $99. Both will be available in April. Both…
The SkinnyThe nuvi 5000 is a truck-sized navigator, for well, trucks and SUVs on the higher end of the nuvi line. It has a 5.2-inch touchscreen, stores 10 routes, has a digital elevation map and an MSN Direct option for traffic, gas and weather. Media-wise it’ll display analog video from a backup cam or something,…
Would you like your D-Link router to look like this? Or perhaps a more flaming/square/butterfly motif fits your style? Head to D-Link and customize away. [D-Link]
The Scratch: Motorola is launching a new line of MPEG-4 set-tops designed for HD video and surround sound—DCX. They all rock 1GHz tuners (good for bandwidth-binging HD and VOD) and support whole home networking, which is useful for sharing DVR goodness. The DCX3400 (picture) is a dual-tuner HD DVR, while the DCX3200 is a single-tuner…
Although this Powramid looks quite similar to the flying saucer surge protector we saw last month, this looks a bit more refined in terms of not looking like some guy made it in his garage. The Powramid has the same six outlets that the flying saucer had, but has their outlets facing right side up,…
The world’s tallest elevator testing tower has just opened in Inazawa City, Japan, and is named Solae. Why would you build a tower just to test elevators? Because the world’s tallest buildings (including Taipei 101, which I rode in last year) have a need to install elevators that take you from floor 1 to floor…
Apple’s Mac OS X had a good year last year, according to Net Applications. Market share for OS X climbed to 7.31% for the month of December, 2007, up from 6.38% in February, a 14.57% increase. How about the Windows OSes? Why, they’re at a paltry 91.79 % of the market. [Net Applications]
• An Apple Patent that refers to wobbling icons is strikingly similar to the same feature found in the leaked iPhone 1.1.3 firmware, confirmation? [Mobile Mag] • Apple stores that still have “cashwrap” counters, aka cash register counters, will soon be moving to those portable credit card-transaction computers. But don’t worry you cash lovers, the…
We’ve been using an 8GB to tote around our critical data (Futurama episodes), but Corsair’s 32GB USB flash drives can carry four times as much Fry and Bender on the go. The two drives, Voyager and Survivor, will be retailing for $229 and $249 each—not a bad price for this much storage. The Voyager is…
We seldom have the need to share what we’re listening to on our iPods with more than one other person, but if you’re having some sort of “party” that “people” are “attending,” this Belkin RockStar might be good. It’s just $20 and offers six ports—one input and five outputs—so you can split one signal to…
The Deal: BlueAnt, who we’ve seen some Bluetoothiness from before, is introing “the first ever Bluetooth headset with a true voice user interface,” the BlueAnt V1. The VUI is powered by BlueGenie, which is the first time it’s been used on a headset. Other than the big ant-stamped button, it should be pretty hands-free, with…
It seems that American political campaigns start earlier and earlier with each political cycle. However, if you thought the 2008 presidential race started early, check out this article from the April 16, 1908 Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA) titled, “‘Count’ Opens Campaign for Presidency in Year 2008.” An excerpt along with the piece…
Designed for those annoying bastards who always say “I want a phone that just calls,” the Freedom Phone does indeed bring freedom—freedom for the rest of us who are tired of you saying that every time you see a phone with fancy features. It’s a pay-as-you-go phone that you buy with minutes already on board.…
The Skinny: The DH01 has a 4.3-inch screen (but how thin is it?), a five-minute memory buffer for pausing live mobile TV, DVR playback from SD or MultiMediaCard cards and four hours of playback time. The Catch: It’s dedicated—who’s gonna carry around a separate player if they can probably get the same live TV on…
Laptops usually come adorned with either a trackpad or a IBM-style nub for cursor navigation, but what’s a guy that loves trackballs to do? Unless they want to bring a full-sized 1995 trackball mouse with him like Travis witnessed last year at CEDIA, their only option is this Traveler 350 USB trackball. It clips onto…
The OhMiBod iPod Vibrator, which we got hands-on of above, is set to get an iPhone compatibility upgrade next week at the Adult Entertainment Expo (AVN) in Vegas. Our own videograhers loved it when they saw it last year, which allows you turn on the music and start “jamming away.” Here’s what the founder has…
According to analyst Shaw Wu, Apple has plans to start selling computers with Blu-ray drives built-in. It’ll announce this at Macworld, and immediately thereafter the HD DVD camp will gulp audibly. That is, if it’s merely a Blu-ray drive: [There’s] a smaller chance Apple may use a combo Blu-ray/HD DVD drive to ensure full compatibility…
Few things set geek hearts aflutter like a juicy hardware rivalry. Who among us hasn’t thoroughly enjoyed taking sides in such legendary throwdowns as Mac versus PC, PlayStation versus Xbox, or (for the truest of old-timers) Atari versus Intellivision? It’s thus in our nature to pay excessive attention to the raging Blu-ray versus HD DVD…