Best Gadgets World

The voice to text service company, Jott, has brought its voice recognition technology to BlackBerry devices. Using Jott’s technology BlackBerry users can now reply to email using their voices. The Jott voice recognition technology works with the BlackBerry 8800, 8300 and 8100. By using Jott for BlackBerry, you will be able to reply (at least according to Jott) 3-5 times faster than typing the message out, you will be able to send more personal replies and possibly most important be able to keep your eyes on the road while replying to email, of course in order to reply you would have had to read the message first.
Jott for blackberry also works with Bluetooth headsets. If you are interested, simply download and install, Jott will then automatically add a “reply with Jott” option to all emails that you receive from then on.

Product [Jott for BlackBerry] Via [Boy Genius Report]

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Posted Apr 8th 2008 4:17PM by Paul Miller
Filed under: Misc. gadgets
If you have a hankering for making pretty pretty pictures with your music, Yamaha’s finally going to fill that urge with a US launch of its Tenori-on music maker. The handheld device is sort of a Lite Brite for music, with 256 push-button LEDs for sequencing music and adjusting tones. The concept was first unveiled way back in 2005, but we’re glad to see it come full circle and land in America. Yamaha will be hosting launch events in New York and San Francisco on April 16th and 18th, respectively.

I’m not quite in the market for a tiny portable PC just yet, however, once I am ready there will be plenty of options to choose from. While the Eee PC from Asus really sparked things last year, Intel’s Atom chip is likely going to revolutionize the industry. At least that’s what Intel is hoping to do.

The above picture is just one of the prototype devices utilizing the new Atom chip which will be launched in June. The chip is one of the cheapest you’ll find, and doesn’t take up much space at all. It is around the size of a penny and runs at speeds from 800MHz to 1.8GHz. This is exactly what the UMPC market has been waiting for.

Source: Crave

If defence is needed around your garden then a paintball turret should sort out any problems. This particular Paintball turret has a video relay allowing you to remote control it and see through the eyes of the camera. Each turret is custom built to your specifications. Upgrades are also possible too which will see the gun being able to rotate through 360 degrees of infinite motion, 1000+ round hoppers, upgrades and more. Built from machined polyurethane/delrin assembly, it also features hardened stainless steel shafts with metal gears.

Those specs alone would make anybody avoid even walking past your garden.

Features

The Paintball Turret costs $1400.

Source - Gadgettastic

Guest Post by Matthew of Gadget Venue.

With any product or service, there’s always going to be room for growth (and complaints).  Below are a few Gmail features I think would make my life, and possibly some others lives easier.

Ability to Mark ONE Email in a Conversation as Unread

You’re scanning through your email, and get to one that you want to come back to later.  What do you do?  Mark it “Unread”, of course.  One of my biggest pet peeves in Gmail is how they won’t let you mark ONE email as Unread—you have to mark the whole conversation as unread.  Then, when you go back to that email later, you have to scroll through all of the old threads in the conversation to get to the only email you wanted to see.  The backbone for such a feature is already there, since when a new email comes in, only that one new email is unread in the conversation.  So why don’t they make the quick change an enable this feature?  Does this bother anyone else?

Colored Stars

Colored labels are great, but what happens if you need to categorize your important items?  Yes, you could use the labels to identify what each item belongs to, but what if you want to star items different colors based on importance… or work versus personal… etc.?  Which brings me to my next point…

Set Email Importance

Now wouldn’t it be great if we could sort our emails based on importance?  Outlook allows you to do this - granted it’s not as well as it could be done, but at least the feature is there!  Say you have a few emails that are not so important, and then some others that are very pressing issues.  You get around 100 emails a day (like many of us tech bloggers do) and your important items get lost in the mix.  Gmail… can you help me out with that?

Ability to Add Items to a To-Do List

And yet another task management need.  Many times we get emails and forget we had something to do.  Yes I could easily label things “To-Do” and then remove it from that label once I’m done with it, but doesn’t this seem like an attractive feature to have built in?  Wouldn’t it be neat to be able to highlight text in the email, and then click a button in the sidebar that says “Create To-Do Item from this Text”?

Alright, that’s enough ranting.  Now you tell me what you want to see in Gmail’s future…

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Samsung has joined the growing market for HSUPA compatible phones with the release of the Samsung SCH-M470. Aside from the good looking Korean gadget girls that Samsung used for the promo of its first HSUPA phone, the SCH-M470 also sports an equally stunning look. That’s aside from the fact that the SCH-M470 boasts of 2mbps upload speed through HSUPA technology.

The Samsung SCH-M470 slider phone is not all HSUPA and good looks though. It also has some nifty features such as a 2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, push email and Google search. The Samsung SCH-M470 retails in Korea for around $600 through SK Telecoms. No word yet on a possible U.S. release.

Via [Akihabara News] Product Samsung Korea

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IOGEAR has announced its new ultra-slim portable media player that allows users to tote their multimedia content just about anywhere they like, thanks to a slim form factor that is appealing to the eye. It also makes for a handy portable hard drive since you will be able to use it to carry your important files wherever you go. Folks who thrive on digital video, songs and pictures can now transfer it from a PC to a laptop through USB 2.0, watching it on a big screen HDTV or an entertainment system later regardless of location.

One interesting aspect of this portable media player is there isn’t any display on it - unlike other PMPs which we have seen in the past. I guess that will help with the cost in the end, but the drawback would be you won’t be able to watch your movies wherever you are since there isn’t any way to hook it up to a TV while you’re sitting on a plane. Still, it does boast some impressive features such as improving standard definition video playback by automatically upscaling it to 720p resolution whenever it is hooked up to a HDTV. All you need is to plug it into the said TV using RCA or component and you’re good to go - would be nice to see an HDMI connector, but I guess there is always room for improvement with future iterations.

According to Miranda Su, executive vice president of IOGEAR, “IOGEAR recognizes that today’s tech-savvy consumers are creating and collecting large amounts of digital media, such as movies and photos, and need simple solutions to transport and access them from any location. Our Portable Media Player makes it easy for people to transfer, organize and take their entertainment with them while on-the-go, and enhances the viewing experience by upscaling standard content to HDTV resolutions.”

The IOGEAR Portable Media Player (GMD2025U120) will be available immediately, retailing for $349.95.

Press Release

Wal-mart has announced that it is now offering refunds for hd dvd players purchased on or after November 1 2007. Consumers have until April 30 2008 to return the players with or without the original packaging. Consumers just need to present their proof of purchase to get a refund.

If you are one of those who bought HD DVD players, only to find out later on that movie companies will no longer support it and instead put their videos on Blu-ray discs, now is the chance to get your money back or add a few more bucks to purchase a Blu-ray player instead. Similarly, other big box retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit City and Future Shop all have similar return policies for HD DVD players.

Via [Engadget HD] Read [Wall Street Journal]

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Posted Apr 8th 2008 12:27AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: cellphones
It appears that Nokia is readying its official response to the iPhone, a project grossly codenamed “Tube” that will feature a touch interface. The new handset — which is said to closely resemble Apple’s device (see above, we assume) — was shown during a slideshow at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Redwood City, California. The slide demonstrated the phone’s UI, including a promotional shot featuring Shrek The Third. Tom Libretto, vice president of Forum Nokia, believes that the company can compete for the iphone’s marketshare, though the phone-maker hasn’t set a street date for the device. Apple has sold more than 4 million units since the iPhone’s launch, but Libretto smugly noted that, “We’ve done that [volume] since we’ve had dinner on Friday,” (though he failed to mention that it was 4 million low-end candybar handsets). He then put on a monocle, puffed on a Cuban cigar, and knocked back a tall glass of Cristal while chortling, “Oh, I do say!”

[Thanks, Alex]

Posted Apr 8th 2008 3:32AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: GPS, Handhelds
Although officially unveiled at Intel’s IDF forum last week, the UI of Lenovo’s Ideapad U8 MID has remained a bit of a mystery. Oh sure, we saw the teaser video. However, that vid was all flash based animation. Now we’ve got the real goods thanks to the folks at PCHome.net. That ain’t Windows kids, the U8 features a sexy Lenovo-grown UI which has us asking when we can get our hands on it outside of China… and for how much? Unfortunately, you’ll notice some serious lag between finger touch and application launch in the video posted after the break. We’ll attribute that to what we presume is a prototype device — certainly it can’t be the fault of Intel’s highly touted new Atom processor could it?

P.S. Anyone speak the native tongue found in the video? We distinctly heard “SSD,” “WiMax,” and “SIM card” mentioned, all of which would be new details.

Update: Helpful readers Riceman and rdy0329 provided us with the following snap translations: definitely a prototype, will not include WiMax but will support China’s 3G TD-SCDMA standard for voice and data, will ship in 4, 6, and 10GB SSD options.

[Thanks, Engadget Fan]