Best Gadgets World

by Donald Melanson, posted Jun 19th 2008 at 5:57PMSony Europe president David Reeves has never been one to shy away from making bold statements in the past, and he’s now come out and weighed in on another touchy subject, with him flatly telling attendees at the DevStation conference in London that “there is a piracy problem on the PSP.” What’s more, Reeves went so far as to admit that it “sometimes fuels the growth of hardware sales, but that “on balance”, Sony is “not happy about it.” To that end, Reeves says that Sony will soon be unveiling new ways to combat piracy on the handheld, although he unsurprisingly isn’t getting a whole lot more specific than that at the moment.

[Via PSP Fanboy]

• Read
• Permalink
• Email this
• 30 Comments

Filed under: Gaming

by Darren Murph, posted Jun 19th 2008 at 4:10PM
Thanks for keeping your promise, Yamaha. The almost unicorn-like Tenori-on music maker has at long last gone on sale here in America, offering USers willing to part with $1,200 the chance to get lost inside a cacophonic wilderness. Good luck finding one in stock.

[Via CNET]

• Read
• Permalink
• Email this
• 24 Comments

Filed under: Misc. gadgets

by Darren Murph, posted Jun 19th 2008 at 6:30PM
Whoa, wait a minute — Mad Catz signed on to produce Rock Band instruments? Sure enough, the deal was announced shortly before CES 2008 consumed our lives, and now we’re hearing whispers that the first products from said agreement could hit stores as early as next week. We’re talking a Fender bass ($69.99), Telecaster ($79.99), microphone ($59.99), portable drum kit ($49.99) and a premium drum set ($149.99). From what we can glean, everything listed above will be tethered, but we aren’t writing off wireless versions just yet. Oh, and be sure you consult with the SO before you up and purchase a second kit for the den — you can’t afford for that first one to get defenestrated.

• Read
• Permalink
• Email this
• 7 Comments

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Plants are more versatile than we give them credit for, you can make clothes with them, build with them, use them as ornaments and if your really radical you can eat them. However up until know you would have even thought of making phones with them, and its all thanks to Samsung who have unveiled their new “initiative to be more nature friendly” which means they will making some of their new handsets (the W510 is the first) out of corn.

Admittedly it is not just corn as that would be incredibly impractical, rather it is a corn based plastic that makes the casing. This technology is not new, it has been used in things like plastic bags on-and-off since the mid 1990s, but it is not till now that it has been used in such a high profile and relatively high cost product. This is due to the fact that is has been strengthened, so in the future we could see things like corn PCs and Laptops, and this could spell the end for some of the heavy metals such as lead or mercury which have not been needed in this handset.
This, coupled with their attempts to irradiate BFRs and PVC from charges and other accessories, will make Samsung a lot greener in the future.

Via [InfoWorld]

Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed →

by Thomas Ricker, posted Jun 19th 2008 at 6:40AM
We know he’s just thinking about the children but damn, if Walter Bender’s latest move doesn’t smack of retribution for Negroponte’s XP-lust. Having successfully spun himself out from under NickNeg’s OLPC, Bender’s UI now owned by his non-profit Sugar Labs might just end up on Intel’s Classmate PC. Right, the same competing platform the OLPC camp had lambasted, repeatedly, for its “shameless” and “half-hearted” behavior in the educational marketplace. Nevertheless, Bender is quoted in an interview saying, “A community volunteer is working with Intel on Sugar for the Classmate PC. Sugar Labs helped to expedite the relationship.” We assume Bender’s loftier goals act as a lithium-salve to what must be a palpable internal turmoil.

P.S. That’s our mockup, Intel declined to comment on the usage of Sugar.

• Read
• Permalink
• Email this
• 4 Comments

Filed under: Laptops

3D animation is so under utilized. For such a popular spectacle, you’d figure that companies would be jumping out of their seats to create 3D content. Is it a cost issue? Most likely. But man, when it’s done right 3D animation is so awesome. Not to mention you have an excuse to wear those awesome blue and red glasses.

As impossibly cool as it might sound, there is a gadget that actually allows us to create our own 3D artwork. The 3D Drawing Pad comes equipped with 50 specially gridded sheets of awesome 3D paper. They even provide you with a black pencil to make you doodles really pop off of the paper. It’s everything you need to create your own 3D drawings.

Usually, to create 3D animation, you need a set of blue and red pencils to outline your artwork. The 3D Drawing Pad’s special grid background makes the multi-writing utensil non-existent. One black pencil and a pair of 3D specs is enough to produce some 3D drawings to show-off to anyone bored enough to look.

But wait, there’s more! All of this for the low, low price of $2.95? What’s the catch?! Ok, enough with the infomercial shenanigans. But for real, the 3D Drawing Pad is pretty cool for the avid doodler, and a whole hell of a lot cheaper than producing professional quality 3D work. So why not give it a try for three bucks?

Product Page via Nerd Approved

• Email to a friend
• Leave a comment

by Ross Rubin, posted Jun 19th 2008 at 11:46AMEach week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment

The first iPhone arrived at a time that suggested Apple needed to protect its iPod franchise — but Apple delivered something that was much more than an mp3 player that could make phone calls. You probably won’t be editing any iMovies on it for some time, but in the iPhone Apple has essentially delivered Macintosh 2.0. It’s portable. It’s affordable. It’s connected. And it runs OS X, complete with its own breakthrough pointing device, your finger. Whereas the first Mac came with productivity applications MacWrite and MacPaint, the iPhone came with applications for Web surfing, e-mail, and consuming media, the evolution of what much personal computing has become.

Furthermore, Apple has shown that it has learned from mistakes it made with the first Mac. Whereas early monochrome Macs were a tough sell for game developers, Apple has highlighted games as some of the most impressive early third-party applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. And whereas Apple was notorious for keeping Mac prices high for many years, the next-generation iPhone takes advantage of carrier subsidies for an out-of-pocket price of $200 in the US (and even less or free in some countries). Despite the many changes that have transformed the software industry since 1984, the iPhone, along with its SDK, development tools and app store, have the potential to bring the work of OS X developers to millions of people who don’t own Macs — that is, if Apple lets them.

As the sole distributor of iPhone applications, Apple has absolute authority on what programs are made available to customers, and can refuse distribution of any application at will. It is the iFunnel, imposing more control than is exerted over most smartphones — or even many feature phones that can access Java applications — that are marketed off of the carriers’ deck. Apple has already outlined some kinds of applications that it will disallow: programs that feature pornography, compromise privacy, hog bandwidth or device resources, or are illegal or malicious. However, there seem to be many applications that don’t fall into these categories, applications that vendors say are ready to go, but which Apple has not yet approved, such as Adobe’s Flash or TomTom’s navigation software.

As one product manager at a large, longtime cross-platform developer that has created an innovative and free iPhone application recently put it, anyone can create anything using the iPhone emulator. The trick is getting it onto the device. The manager said that his company had the scale and historic relationship with Apple to instill confidence that it could get its app approved. He noted Apple has been overwhelmed with submissions, though, and wants to maintain a good user experience at launch, even if that means featuring a small portion of applications that are ready to go.

Operating on a cellular network certainly complicates software development in a way that the gung-ho evangelists of the Mac’s early days didn’t need to consider. And by scrutinizing applications for quality and polish, Apple can keep the iPhone user experience more stable and consistent than that of early Macs. But, as Steve Jobs admitted after Apple first locked out all alll third-party native iphone applications, Apple is a platform company and ultimately its value in being in the cell phone market ties back to that heritage.

Being too restrictive on which applications are allowed for the iPhone won’t right another wrong of the first Mac’s development. It will stifle a platform that Apple has clearly committed to with an SDK. For the benefit of iPhone and ipod touch users, OS X developers, and ultimately Apple itself, the iFunnel should let quality programs flow freely.

Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research and analysis firm The NPD Group. Views expressed in Switched On are his own.

• Permalink
• Email this
• 0 Comments

Filed under: cellphones, Wireless

by Donald Melanson, posted Jun 19th 2008 at 8:25AM It looks like those curious to see just how Nanosolar turns out their solar panels for less than a dollar per watt need wonder no more, as the company has just posted a video that shows the thin film solar cells rolling off the presses at speedy 100 feet-per-minute. That’s apparently possible thanks to what the company claims is the industry’s first 1GW production tool, and its use of its own long-in-development nanoparticle ink, which eliminates the need for expensive high-vacuum chambers (though the printer still costs a hefty $1,65 million). What’s more, the company says their technique would even work “in principle” at speeds up to 2,000 feet-per-minute, although they aren’t making any promises about attempting an upgrade anytime soon. Head on past the break to check it out in action.

[Via Earth2Tech, thanks William]

• Read
• Permalink
• Email this
• 43 Comments

Filed under: Misc. gadgets

by Joshua Fruhlinger, posted Jun 19th 2008 at 5:46AM
var When you’re Comcast and you have some serious cash to throw at an installation in your new Philadelphia-based Comcast Center, you go all out on a $22 million high-definition video wall, of course. The giant display measures 27 by 87-feet and mashes 10 million pixels across modules linked by a central system that contains 27,000 GB of info, six DX700 LED digitizers, seven Encore video processors, and three Matrixpro routers. So what does it do? It’s kind of a giant screensaver that may get old over time, if you ask us. It displays the time, shows figures pushing the panels open, and plays with the space in surreal, 3D-esque animations that are, admitedly, fun to watch. Check the video after the break.

• Read
• Permalink
• Email this
• 50 Comments

Filed under: Displays

by Joshua Fruhlinger, posted Jun 19th 2008 at 10:12AM
You didn’t think NVIDIA would sit back and let AMD get all big-headed about their 4800 series cards, did you? Of course not. NVIDIA’s new GeForce 9800 GTX+, hot on the heels of the GeForce 9800 GTX, bumps some specs with the help of its new, more efficient 55nm tech. The results include a 738 MHz core, 1836 MHz shader clock, 512MB GDDR3 memory (1000MHz), and 2- and 3-way SLI support. If we have to compare those specs to the stock card’s, well, you’re just not a GPU freak like some of us. Look for it in July for $229 retail.

• Read
• Permalink
• Email this
• 35 Comments

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming