Best Gadgets World

by Donald Melanson, posted Jun 30th 2008 at 1:41PM
While the original Rock Band is still going strong, Harmonix is already looking towards the next bit of kit that it hopes will be cluttering your place, with it now getting official with Rock Band 2 for the Xbox 360 and playstation 3. This time around, it seems the Xbox 360 will be getting a jump on things with a launch in September, with the PS3 version set to follow “later in the year.” Both of those will, naturally, be coming with all new instruments, including the tasty Fender Stratocaster pictured above, but you will be able to use your current gear if you want to spare the extra clutter and save a few bucks. What’s more, you’ll also be able to carry over all your current downloaded content and, as IGN reports, you’ll even be able to download and play new tracks on Rock Band 1 once Rock Band 2 is out. Of course, Harmonix is saving most of the details for E3 next month, but you can find a few more tidbits in IGN’s interview with Harmonix’s Dan Teasdale available at the read link below.

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The team behind Opera Mobile has announced that they will have Opera Mobile 9.5 available as a “first beta” on July 15. The beta edition will be available for public download and will be based on the same engine as the desktop version of 9.5. The new version of the browser will offer support for Opera widgets, Javascript, AJAX and Flash (Lite 3.0).

Although Opera Mobile is available for both Windows Mobile and Symbian-based phones, this release announcement only mentions a Windows Mobile release. You can also already find a version of Opera Mobile 9.5 on currently shipping phones such as the HTC Touch Diamond.

Read [Opera Mobile Blog] Via [MobileCrunch]

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Philips holds the distinction for being the first company in the world to light up its office with nothing but LED solutions. This office is owned by Generali and located at 100 Champs-Elysées Avenue, Paris, making it famous by being a milestone in lighting history. The entire LED effect also goes down well with scene and atmosphere effects that are also LED based. The whole idea can be attributed to architect Anthony Béchu who had been commissioned by Generali, in order for the former to come up with ‘an innovative window in the world of LEDs’. Research has shown that LED lighting solutions improve people’s well-being in addition to providing designers a greater amount of flexibility in the layout of open spaces and the ceiling design. This frees designers from the lighting orientation too often given by fluorescents tubular lamps. Thanks to the relatively long lifetime of LEDs, maintenance costs are reduced to a bare minimum - a good thing in today’s ever rising energy cost scenario.

Throughout the office spaces, the functional office lighting is realized through 422 luminaires integrated in a false ceiling with 600 x 600 grids. Each luminaire is powered by 16 or 12 high power LEDs of 2.6 W depending on their location in the office space. This provides an average of 300 lux everywhere and 500 lux on the working planes. Philips has given special care to the development of optics. In addition, recessed SpotLed 3 K2 luminaires each with 3 LUXEON high-power LEDs are applied in the corridors. The solution complies with lighting norms and standards on energy consumption, illumination levels and visual comfort.

The building would definitely be a sight to behold in its entirety, as when the glass façade of the top two floors are lit, anyone looking at it will get the sense that the building is more like a a beacon in the night to the outside world.

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It is good to know that just like sex, drinking is a universal value. How else do you explain the Star Trek Experience bar located at Hilton Las Vegas? Not to mention numerous drinking holes found in the Star Wars universe, but we’re here to concentrate on the former series today with a unique bottle opener.

As well as its supreme practicality, the Starship Enterprise Bottle Opener serves as a constant tribute to the most iconic pretend spacecraft in televisual history. Better still it’s embossed with the legendary NCC-1701 registration, so you can be sure you’re opening your bottle of wallop with a Shatner-era vessel. And that’s just as well because judging by his, erm, interesting cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Captain Kirk is the only member of Starfleet who likes a drink. Boldly going where no bottle opener has gone before. Make it so!

Well, only true blue Trekkies need to pick this up, as I don’t see the rest of the drinking crowd willing to fork out £12.95 for a ‘mere’ bottle opener when their teeth double up as one just fine.

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From tomorrow (1st July), Sky will be re-branding their Sky HD service to “Sky+ HD“, and reducing the price significantly. I believe the name change has been done to avoid confusion with people thinking that Sky HD does not include the recording and pausing features as offered by the Sky+ service.

Now for the interesting part, Sky has reduced the price of the Sky+ HD box by £100!, down to £149 from £249. I’m sure this price drop will make Sky’s HD service a whole lot more tempting! Sky+ HD really does offer the best HD service in the U.K, you can read my Sky+ HD review here, and join Sky at the best prices here.

There has never been a better time to join or upgrade to Sky HD.

Solar lights on occasion have a bit of a tendency to be dull.  The stakes you put in the ground to line your garden with are usually featured in every other yard around.  However, there are the ones that stand out from the rest, like these cute little lamps.  The silk-like waterproof nylon will stand up to storms a bit better than the pretty lanterns that are a similar style but made for indoors.

The lights are pretty straight forward like all solar lamps they charge with the sun, but they don’t come on automatically, they have a switch to turn them on and off.  They come with a AAA rechargeable battery, which I didn’t know was allowed.  I figured it was a rule that manufacturers were banned from including batteries.  The lamp comes in bronze and slate, to buy one it will cost you $36 and for a pack of three $99.  Each lamp is 18” tall, so it’s not like you’re getting three very small lanterns for almost $100.  The unfortunate side is that you can only buy a pack of three in bronze or slate, you can’t get one that has both colors.  So if you want to mix and match you’ll have to pay the individual price.

Source: thegreenhead

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The Asus Eee PC has certainly set an unpredecented, er, precedent, moving thousands of units and proving to the world that there is a market for a tiny notebook which does the most basic of tasks minus the bloated bells and whistles of much more expensive devices. 3K Computers has taken up this challenge, and they recently announced their second generation of RazorBook 400 mini-notebook computer in the form of the 3K RazorBook 400 Mini Notebook Ultra Mobile PC which is powered by Windows CE. It tips the scales at just under a kilogram (now that’s worth lugging around in press conferences and events such as CES), boasting a highly affordable price tag of $299. At that price, what can you expect? Head on after the jump for more details.

The RazorBook 400 is perfect as a low-cost portable internet appliance for mobile professionals, students, internet browsing on the go, playing Flash games, secure online shopping, instant messaging, and playing music and movies while on the road. With a boot-up time of less than 8 second, the RazorBook 400 was designed to be turned on and off instantly just like any other appliance in your home. The energy-saving RISC architecture processor is fan-less and offers completely quiet computing with very low energy consumption. Without a spinning hard disk drive, the RazorBook 400 is shock-resistant and touts 4GB of solid-state storage for your documents or media files.

It really sounds like a direct competitor the the first generation Asus Eee PC, although it does run on a Windows platform instead of Linux, making it more user friendly to people who are just starting out. This second generation UMPC is tipped for a July or August release, which is by no coincidence the middle of the “back-to-school” season.

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You don’t have to be Chinese to decorate your home with lanterns, and with this set of half dozen Solar Lanterns, you don’t have to worry about spending more on your monthly power bill since they prefer to harness the power of our sun instead.

This beautiful collection of six Solar Party Lanterns provides a soft, warm glow that will spread through your party, so even though the sun has gone down, you don’t have to. Your stunning set of solar lantern are enchanting garden decorations, as well as practical, energy efficient party lights, and have been beautifully crafted to imitate delicate Chinese outdoor lanterns. Adorn your garden or camping pitch with three red lanterns and three hypnotic color-changing lanterns. All are solar-powered, so no batteries are ever needed, and light up automatically at dusk when switched to ‘on’ mode. Order yours now and enjoy the balmy summer evenings long into the night.

Each set of Solar Lanterns will retail for £29.95.

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Nokia has just put up a flash demo of the latest in its N-series phones, the N96 which is slated for release sometime this quarter. Like we already know, the N96 sports a dual-slide design, a 2.8-inch screen and supports high-quality videos in various formats. In addition the N96 also features a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, flash, video light, video recording at 30 fps, A-GPS for geotagging of photos and 16MB of internal memory.

As this seemed to be not an official announcement, expect Nokia to delete the flash demo once this news spreads out. If you don’t get to watch it, don’t worry because like what happened with other Nokia mobile phone models, once a flash demo leaks out, and Nokia deletes it, for sure Nokia will issue an official announcement in no time at all. Also, rumor has it that the N96 will retail in the ballpark of $870.

Via [SlashPhone]

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Nokia has just put up a flash demo of the latest in its N-series phones, the N96 which is slated for release sometime this quarter. Like we already know, the N96 sports a dual-slide design, a 2.8-inch screen and supports high-quality videos in various formats. In addition the N96 also features a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, flash, video light, video recording at 30 fps, A-GPS for geotagging of photos and 16MB of internal memory.

As this seemed to be not an official announcement, expect Nokia to delete the flash demo once this news spreads out. If you don’t get to watch it, don’t worry because like what happened with other Nokia mobile phone models, once a flash demo leaks out, and Nokia deletes it, for sure Nokia will issue an official announcement in no time at all. Also, rumor has it that the N96 will retail in the ballpark of $870.

Via [SlashPhone]

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