Gadgets Blog News

Gamertell’s Pulkit Chandna is reporting that Alienware has again pushed the envelope, producing one of the most powerful notebooks known to us Homo sapiens. The Area 51 m17x notebook is Alienware’s newest addition to its lineup and it surely will make its owner the subject of very pleasant geeky envy. At its heart is an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor with a 4 MB L2 cache. Combine this with the 800 MHz front side bus and 4GB ofDDR2 RAM and one can already sense a winner. Read [Gamertell] Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! (Read the full post about ‘Alienware launches Area 51 m17x gaming notebook’…)

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As expected, AT&T has officially begun offering the new pro-rated Early Termination Fee (ETF) schedule. In news that was announced back in early April, these new fees went into effect as of May 25 and allow for a little lower price should you decide to skip out of you contract earlier than they would like. In the past customers would have had to shell out a flat fee of $175, but now you will save $5 per month. This means that with a small amount of time left on your contract you will be able to get out fairly cheaply, assuming you have 6-months remaining you will be charged just $85, where in the past it would have been the full $175. (Read the full post about ‘AT&T officially offering pro-rated Early Termination Fees’…)

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So much storage media, so little time. And so it goes. We’ve got USB drivces, hard drives, and SD drives galore. And each one of these storage units have their data accessed in different ways. Such an unproductive mess. It’s easy for a card to get lost in the shuffle. And then there was the Brando Multi-Functional Dock Station, the ultimate in storage consolidation. This gadget from Brando allows you to dock USB + eSATA + 2 hubs + 4 cards, all consolidated into one super duper storage interface. The Multi-Functional Dock Station offers full support for SDHC and mini SDHC formats, along with a long list of other standard flash card formats. (Read the full post about ‘One Dock To House Them All’…)

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Laptops aren’t generally known for having the largest hard drives out there. If you pick up a cheap one, you might not have more than 80GB of space, which some people can easily fill up. If you’re looking for an easy way to add more space without cracking the case or carrying around an external drive, you might look into one of these new ExpressCard drives from A-Data. Many newer laptops feature ExpressCard slots, which aren’t always used, so why not fill yours with 16GB or 32GB of storage? What’s really cool is that if you want to access the files from another computer, you can simply plug in a USB cord and treat it just like an external drive. (Read the full post about ‘Add 32GB of storage to your laptop without cracking the case’…)

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Here’s something to make us envy our mobile phone savvy friends in Japan yet again. The Sharp Willcom 03 smartphone was announced in Japan, and boasts an innovative interface heralded by a split touchscreen feature, wherein the lower part can switch between a key and a media button layout. This is in addition to the standard slide out QWERTY keyboard. Like we said, the Sharp Willcom 03 is powered by Windows Mobile 6.1 and as such, although not explicitly mentioned by Sharp and Willcom, it might come with pre-installed mobile office applications. In addition, this phone offers a 3-inch touch screen display, powered by Marvell PXA270 processor at 520 MHz, USB, IrSS, Bluetooth and microSD card slot for storage expansion. (Read the full post about ‘Japan gets the Sharp Willcom 03 Windows-powered smarthphone’…)

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Brighthand reviews the Palm Centro and writes, “…on the rear of the Centro sits a 1.3 megapixel camera. Compared to the Treo 680, the camera’s shutter speed was greatly improved. However, picture quality did decrease. Photos from the AT&T Centro had a blue/purple cast in most lighting settings. Nevertheless, you could snap as many pictures as the 68 MB of internal memory, or up to 6 GB microSD card could handle. The camera features a neat 2x zoom that doesn’t do a bad job, but then again, except for the very high end, cameras in mobiles are just OK.” Read more about the Palm Centro. (Read the full post about ‘Palm Centro Review - Brighthand’…)

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by Darren Murph, posted May 27th 2008 at 5:24AMJust in case you felt there wasn’t quite enough screen real estate on the ultra-sleek V8, RAmos is giving the display even more attention on the Blue Magic T8. The player features a 4.3-inch display, 10-millimeter thick enclosure, built-in FM radio tuner and the potential to play nice with a not-yet-developed dock that would enable video output. (Read the full post about ‘RAmos reveals Blue Magic T8 PMP’…)

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by Paul Miller, posted May 27th 2008 at 7:14AM VIA’s trying its hand once again at the “mini-note” form factor, with a new OpenBook reference design. Its first go round, the NanoBook, was generally panned in light of the ultra-successful Eee PC, but certainly wasn’t ignored. The new design is right in line with the new wave of subnotebooks, with an 8.9-inch 1024 x 600 screen, connection options including WiMAX, HSDPA and EV-DA, three USB 2.0 ports, VGA out, a 4-in-1 card reader and front and back 2 megapixel webcams. There’s also room for 2GB of RAM and a 2.5-inch HDD, and you can run Vista, XP or your Linux flavor of choice. (Read the full post about ‘VIA unveils OpenBook subnotebook reference design’…)

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by Paul Miller, posted May 27th 2008 at 7:42AM We got to spend a little bit of time with a prototype of VIA’s new OpenBook reference design, and while it’s not going to revolutionize anything, VIA does seem to have a pretty good grasp on the balance of value, size and power necessary to compete in the subnotebook game. They were showing it off with Vista (though it will be available in XP and Linux versions as well), with an interface that was plenty responsive, and while the video we saw wasn’t an incredible display of multimedia showmanship, it was neat to see on the C7-M all the same. (Read the full post about ‘VIA OpenBook hands-on’…)

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by Thomas Ricker, posted May 27th 2008 at 7:29AM $399? Ha. Amazon just cut the price of its Kindle e-book reader to $359 and zero cents with free 2-day shipping. Now giddy up, son, there’s no cake for you here.[Thanks, Chris G.]Read PermalinkEmail this6 CommentsFiled under: Misc. gadgets, HandheldsTags: laptops, speaker, Hi-fi, dvr (Read the full post about ‘Amazon’s Kindle now 10% less’…)

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