Gadgets Blog News

This is the mother of all scales — the brand-new Tanita KD400 at Competitive Edge which features a stain-resistant steel plate and an add and weigh feature. Best of all, it completely folds up for easy storage. Mine is discreetly standing up with my cookbooks.

The eye-pleasing compact digital lithium scale is only $60 at fine cooking stores and Competitive Edge. Backed by Tanita’s three year warranty, the KD-400 is designed to live up to abuse from the toughest cooks, or, in my case, munchkins who are just learning to measure. (A frog weighs just over 3 ounces, just so you know.)

Tags: design, cable, equipment, ipod

Share This

by Nilay Patel, posted May 7th 2008 at 7:58PM Microsoft’s recently refurbished Zune store features a lot of NBC content like Heroes and The Office, but it looks like it may have come at what could be a steep price: NBC recently told the New York Times that it’s working with Microsoft to develop “copyright filters” for the Zune that would “remove pirated movies and videos.” (We’ll pause for a moment so you can gape appropriately.) Granted, it’s not clear whether NBC wants to actually delete non-DRM’d media or simply block playback, but apparently the network thinks it’s an issue on par with variable pricing, and it’s not in the iTunes Store because Apple refuses to cooperate. (Read the full post about ‘Microsoft and NBC working on copyright filters for Zune?’…)

Share This

A message to Popgadget Drop email subscribers: The giveaway drawing for the pink Panasonic Lumix camera closes on May 15, 2008, not May 1, 2008. Thanks, J, for pointing out this error. To sign up for our emails, go to this page. Tags: ipod, video games, hdtv, cameras (Read the full post about ‘Popgadget Drop email - correction’…)

Share This

Walk up to any right-minded business owner and you’re sure to be told one thing - it’s supposed to be about the green stuff. And I don’t mean the Benjamins. To get an idea of what I’m talking about, ask yourself what it would take to give your mobile device enough juice without doing Mother Nature any harm. The answer to that question might not yet be known for sure, but that question is what Devotec Industries is trying to address with its new Solar Charger. While it doesn’t have the best thought of name in the business, this little number should be able to “keep your phone juiced up twice over before needing a recharge.” It contains a built-in 1800mAh battery under a charging solar panel, and aside from that it also charges via USB cable or AC adaptor. (Read the full post about ‘Devotec’s Solar Charger offers cheap alternative to extra battery packs’…)

Share This

If you’re going to be catching a Continental Airlines flight out of Boston anytime soon, you’ll have a chance to test their new electronic boarding pass system. Any passenger with an Internet enabled cell phone or PDA will now be able to receive their boarding pass via an email with a link to a special web page that will display an encrypted bar code. The code reveals their name and flight info when scanned at the TSA check point and boarding gate. The agents doing the scanning are forbidden to actually touch passenger’s devices, fearing liability issues if they are damaged or broken. “We don’t want to drop it,” said Kevin Anzalone, a TSA supervisor at Logan. (Read the full post about ‘Continental extends electronic boarding pass testing, now at Logan Airport’…)

Share This

Kenko’s new digital photo frame might seem like your regular digital photo frame at first, but the KDF-07 holds a secret that could change the way you look at gadgets of its kind…forever. Or not, but still the Kenko KDF-07 offers a cool little trick hidden (quite literally) up its sleeve. Actually, it holds a control pad on a secret panel that can be found behind its silver frame, black matte, and wood grain finishes. It will instantly blow up your photos to 7-inches wide and play them in a slideshow - with your permission, of course. I’d like to say that its current price, $160, is a bit too much, but then I remember, $500 digital photo frames. At which point I’ll say, “Yikes! (Read the full post about ‘Kenko’s digital photo frame makes remote even harder to find’…)

Share This

The release had been confirmed for May 9, however Verizon must have been feeling a little generous since they have added the blackberry Curve 8330 a few days ahead of schedule. The Curve is retailing for $219.99, which comes after a $100 online discount, along with a two-year agreement. The Curve was also scheduled to arrive on retail locations as of May 12, no confirmation yet on if Verizon released it in stores early also. Now lets just hope Sprint will finally launch their Curve. Product [Verizon] Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! (Read the full post about ‘Verizon’s BlackBerry Curve 8330 now available’…)

Share This

The Yahoo-Microsoft deal that wasn’t: a victory for emotion and memory. You saw it in Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang’s “OK, so now what?” post on his Yodel Anecdotal blog. And you really saw it in the comments to that post. Yang is now being spanked throughout the blogosphere for having the temerity to say no to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Allegations of Yahoo execs high-fiving each other after the deal fell through will no doubt end up in the inevitable shareholder lawsuits. True, the shareholders are the ones losing a lot of money as they watch the stock price sink. (Read the full post about ‘Yahoo: Anybody-But-Microsoft Club’s last hurrah’…)

Share This

Dang! Take-two has sold approximately 6 million copies of the latest installment in its Grand Theft Auto series of video games. I won’t comment on the style of the video game, but I will comment on the financial windfall that this is for Take-Two. They’ve got some debt, but nothing that the $500 mil couldn’t take care of.

But think about this: the last release of GTA (Vice City Stories) was in Oct 2006, so they’ve been working on this latest release for at least 1.5 years. Let’s say it was 2 years. Let’s say they had 100 guys working on it averaging $100k each. That’s $20M over 2 years. Let’s double it to account for overhead expenses.

(Read the full post about ‘GTA IV rakes in $500M in its 1st week’…)

Share This

If you’re not that much of a techie, and just aim for variety in most of your so-called “gadgets,” you might be enticed in considering Sotec, Japan’s newest wonder, an Athlon 64 X2 powered little lappie called the WinBook WV. You did want a laptop now, didn’t you? Reading my write-up about its specs would be the modern-day equivalent of watching caveman paintings dry, but if you must really know, it will have a 1.90GHz Athlon 64 X2 TK-57 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 15.4-inch LCD (1280×800 screen resolution) and 2.9 hours of manufacturer-rated battery life. Wi-Fi b/g will be built-in as standard, and it also comes provided with 120GB of storage in a hard disk drive that I’m sure you’ll love to destroy at a later time. (Read the full post about ‘Sotec to launch AMD-powered WinBook WV laptops in Japan’…)

Share This