Gadgets Blog News

A friend of mine was very excited about the announcement today at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco that Logitech unveiled the official wheel of Gran Turismo, the Logitech Driving Force GT racing wheel. She’s a huge NASCAR fan and plays every driving game made, and you have to have a wheel or there’s “just no point!” I’ve played with her and it’s amazing how it simulates a real racing experience, though my racing is limited to go-karts and speeding on the freeway when I can. With features such as powerful force feedback and an innovative 24-position realtime adjustment dial for on-the-fly control of brake bias,traction and damper settings, this wheel will really spoil her. (Read the full post about ‘Logitech GT Driving Force Racing Wheel’…)

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Posted Feb 21st 2008 11:49AM by Paul MillerFiled under: Gaming It’s been a long time coming, but it looks like the GPU industry finally figured out the fact that most consumers don’t want to blow a couple grand on an SLI setup, they just want to play Crysis debt-free. The new GeForce 9600 GT from NVIDIA is an answer to those prayers, offering solid performance ratings nearly in line with last-gen’s 8800 GT, at a completely lovable $199-and-under pricepoint. For now the top of the performance charts is still the 8800 Ultra — as NVIDIA will readily admit — but the 9600 GT is just the first of NVIDIA’s GeForce 9 series, and while it’s sure to be followed by bigger, badder and more expensive versions, it’s refreshing to see the 9600 hitting the market first. (Read the full post about ‘NVIDIA’s GeForce 9600 GT card is officially the new budget hotness’…)

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In today’s fast moving era, one and all demand some kind of diversion in their work. With this perception, Coby Electronics Corporation, the pioneer in consumer electronics products, brought forward 3” high resolution Coby MP-835 MP3 and video player. This seamless new contraption comes in elite black with instinctive touch screen controls. The Coby MP-835 MP3 and Video Player shares wide screen TFT color display along with the resolution power of 480×272 pixels. Its incorporated FM radio along with other features like text, music, video and photos makes it more sophisticated. It is embedded with memory capacity of 2GB - 4GB. (Read the full post about ‘Coby MP-835 MP3 and Video Player’…)

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I really don’t know what it is with Japanese companies that makes them want to make the strangest combo gadgets in the world. I almost picture them having a wall with various gadgets listed on it. All they do is pick either keyboard or mouse, then throw a dart and see what crazy device they should combine. It looks like this time they picked mouse and vacuum cleaner. I don’t know about you, but I keep my mousing area fairly clean. While my desk may be cluttered most of the time, I try to make sure it is a crumb-free zone, for obvious reasons. However, if you’re one that loves nothing more than to hover over your desk and eat potato chips all day, you might find a mouse with a built-in vacuum cleaner to be quite handy. (Read the full post about ‘USB Vacuum Mouse cleans up after you’…)

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Who doesn’t love steak? “Vegetarians,” you might say - but for the purposes of this review, everyone loves steak! Now I genuinely love a nice steak, cooked to medium to medium rare on a grill with some sauteed mushrooms and onions on the side, steamed vegetables and a nice baked potato. I’m drooling just thinking about it. But what if it’s too cold to grill outside? What do you do then? Some visionary looked at a steak and thought “wow…I could totally toast that sucker!”. Thus the Steak Toaster (a.k.a. the SteakHouse Grill) was born. From the product’s website: New electric grill that takes true grilling to the table. (Read the full post about ‘Steak Toaster = Greatest Thing EVER’…)

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Posted Feb 21st 2008 8:02AM by Thomas RickerFiled under: HDTV var In an attempt to clear their shelves of dead hd dvd weight, retailers are taking the obvious step of slashing prices. Others, like play.com are renaming the players. Thanks to the magic of Google cache, we see that Toshiba’s “HD-EP30 HD DVD Player” (as it was known on February 15th) is now listed as the “HD-EP30 HDMI Upscaling Player with HD DVD High Definition Playback.” Caveat emptor, as they say. (Read the full post about ‘HD DVD players become DVD upscalers in format war fallout’…)

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Ironing can be quite the pain, especially when you’re already in a rush trying to get ready for office only to discover that your shirt is all creased since you failed to maintain an iron (pun intended) discipline where house chores are concerned. This is the professional-grade digital steam press with a pressing surface that is more than seven times larger than most handheld irons, reducing ironing time by up to 50%. Pressing is controlled with an automatic digital monitoring system to ensure consistent results based on the kind of fabric (nylon, silk, rayon, wool, cotton, or linen) you select on the instrument panel. A simple lowering of the handle produces more than 100 lbs. (Read the full post about ‘Tailors Steam Press’…)

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Intel has just rolled out a dual-socket motherboard for PC manufacturers who want nothing but the very best for their customers, resulting in a high-powered machine that runs on a couple of quad-core processors as well as multiple graphics cards simultaneously. Known in consumer electronics circles as Skulltrail previously, you get the Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform that features a Desktop Board D5400XS and a couple of high-powered Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors as well as the ability to support both Crossfire from ATI or SLI graphics cards from Nvidia. This way, no matter which graphical camp you prefer to set your base on, you will be able to start fragging almost immediately despite playing in the highest resolution possible while turning all other shaders and anti-aliasing options on. (Read the full post about ‘Intel on a rampage’…)

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Posted Feb 21st 2008 2:02AM by Joshua TopolskyFiled under: cellphones Just when you think you’ve seen the iPhone perform its last magic trick (making you eggs benedict, solving the inverse Galois problem, a brief appearance on Dancing With the Stars) something like this comes along to make your jaw drop just a little bit more. Touchpad for the iphone is built on top of VNsea, but instead of allowing you to navigate your desktop on the device, it becomes what is essentially a wireless, remote trackpad, which gives you direct access to your system as if you were using a mouse or touch device for input. It sounds interesting in description, but looks amazing in execution — check the video after the break to see what it does, then go get the app loaded up and try it yourself. (Read the full post about ‘Touchpad turns your iPhone into a remote trackpad’…)

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The Boston Globe picked a fight with TomTom.  Really, picking on TomTom isn’t fair, most GPS units figure out street numbers the same way.  Most units take a street with say 100 numbers and spread them out evenly.  It gets you pretty close most or some of the time. Boston is a city whose streets would do better to revert back to the horse paths they were.  So the Boston Globe set out to “stump” their TomTom and seems they had an easy time doing so.  They worked the POIs (point of interest) offered by the unit and alarmingly found TomTom wasn’t sure where they were, despite being the one to offer them. (Read the full post about ‘TomTom vs Boston; fair fight?’…)

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