Best New Technology

Posted Feb 7th 2008 2:42PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

The Archos 405 got a little heftier this afternoon, with a capacity bump to 30GB. Archos went old-school in getting to that size, using a hard drive instead of flash — but the upside is that drives are cheap, which means the 30GB 405 is just €199 ($293). European customers can apparently score this at the end of the month, but there’s no word on a North American release yet.

[Via ArchosLounge]

February 7th is the official European launch date for the Palm Centro, the company’s entry-level smartphone powered by Palm OS. It is one of Palm’s bright spot in a very competitive market – the device has been met with enthusiasm by critics because it is cheap (with a service contract), although other smartphones like the Blackjack II are becoming really cheap as well.

We have a sneaking feeling that law enforcement officers might not have the same understanding of technology as you, Gadget Lab reader. This hilarious case from blogger Rottin’ in Denmark tells a story of the astounding ineptitude of Danish police when confronted by 1. The internet, 2. An iMac and 3. WiFi. This wouldn’t be so bad, but the cops had come a-knockin’ to investigate computer crime.

According to the blog post, the Police made a dawn house call to investigate a suspicious credit card transaction made over the writer’s open WiFi network.

Police [Doughface]: We traced the transaction back to the wireless network in this apartment.

Rottin in Denmark [Me]: But we have an open wireless connection. Its unsecured.

Doughface: The internet doesn’t work that way.

It gets worse.

Doughface: What were you doing the night of November 15?

Me: Fine, lemme check my e-mails. I was probably at a concert or something.
I sat down, opened my e-mail account and scrolled through to November, looking for invitations, confirmation e-mails, whatever.

Doughface: [audible gasp] If that computers only two weeks old, how are you checking your e-mails from November?! [Makes gotcha face.]

Me: Wait. What?! These are on the internet. They aren’t on my computer.

Doughface: You just said it was two weeks old, but those e-mails say November! [Gotcha Face intensifies to David Caruso Face]

Me: Internet!

Doughface: If its only two weeks old…

Me: Internet.

The last, and most embarrassing part, is when the police demand the computer part of an old first generation iMac, thinking that the colored bubble on the desk is just the monitor. Go to the site to read the full transcript. It’s too full of expletives to post here. It’s also the funniest thing I have read this week.

How the team at ‘CSI: Denmark’ stole my computer [Rottin’ in Denmark via Mac Observer]

Feh on red meat and booze — who can’t live without those for a day or two. Hardcore Jesus types are suggesting that those who want to make a meaningful sacrifice for Lent need to look at their Blackberries, iPod and MySpace habits.

”My friends are talking about giving up their cell phone or not using Facebook or MySpace because they compulsively check their profiles,” one Pennsylvania college student said in a survey of pre-Easter sacrifice plans.

A reminder lest you take this thing too far, however: God likes blogs, newsreaders and Digg.

Lent in the wired age: No iPod, no MySpace [The Morning Call]

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of iPod docks on the market. From looking at all of these, one would almost assume that everyone in the world owned an iPod. We all know that’s not the case, and those that don’t have a desire for Apple’s music player sometimes feel a bit left out. Well those of you without iPods can thank intempo for giving you the option to use any iPod speaker dock with a variety of other mobile devices.

If your phone or MP3 player happens to have stereo Bluetooth, you can buy this little BTA-01 adapter and plug it into any iPod dock. The adapter makes your dock believe that an iPod is sitting there, and goes about pumping out your music, none the wiser.

This will mostly affect music phones, which I’ve never really gotten into. I’m on my phone a lot, so I really don’t need anything else taxing my battery life. However, for those that love to rock out with your phone out, you can pick this adapter for $80.

Source: CrunchGear

If you, like us, have been wondering whether all the fuss about the Solid State Drive in the MacBook Air was, well, just a fuss, wonder no more. Ars Technica has run benchmark tests on the new machine and found that, with the exception of random disk reading and writing, there isn’t much difference between the SSD and a regular hard drive, and in fact the SSD air did poorly on sequential writing and reading.

This is to be expected. The advantage of a solid state drive is that there are no moving parts. Whereas a mechanical drive has to keep the read/write head moving to access data, the SSD doesn’t. This should also translate into longer battery life (no moving parts, remember?) It doesn’t. Ars got the same two and a half hours from both models.

Visit the site for the full and very in depth review. There are also the results for CPU and memory tests, but as the SSD equipped Air has a faster processor, these are slightly skewed.

What does $1,300 extra really get you? [Ars]

Posted Feb 7th 2008 10:06AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

For those of you who simply can’t wait one more second to get your hands on one of the more hyped updates in recent memory, Vista SP1, you’re in luck. According to a report (and our BitTorrent client, chugging along in the background), the new service pack has been leaked, then promptly made available for your forbidden downloading pleasure. Apparently, the full install doesn’t provide you with an upgrade option, so make sure you backup necessary files (like those pictures of Mom, apple pie, etc.). PC World offers a highly detailed report on how many seeders and / or leechers were available at the time its article was written, but we’ll spare you. Suffice to say, it’s there for the taking.

The whole situation still makes me a little nervous about just how nice the shopping experience will be, but there is a slight bit of good news for CompUSA fans. Those 16 retail store locations that we mentioned the other day, they are going to be retaining the CompUSA name. Systemax, the parent company of Tiger Direct is also planning on re-branding the existing 11 Tiger Direct retail locations with the CompUSA name and use Tiger Direct only for their online sales. The deal is said to cost $30 million and is an all cash deal.

Read [Trading Markets] Via [SlashGear]

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Posted Feb 7th 2008 6:27AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Laptops

In the most mangled product launch in recent memory, the Everex Cloudbook has managed to sell out. This according to Zareason who claim to have sold their ‘initial allotment” — however many that might be. Of course, to the best of our knowledge the CloudBook has never actually been on sale with Everex’s own site once again showing a Feb 15th launch. So if these in fact shipped then we ask you dear readers, where are the unboxing pics, reviews, and head-to-head comparisons with the Eee for us to fawn over? Bueller?

[Thanks, Jamerican]

While we can all appreciate someone (Toshiba) trying to break the norm, there are some things that just don’t make any sense.  The phone in question is the Toshiba G450 due to arrive in the UK next month for a whopping $300.  Even a four year old could tell you dialing on this thing is going to be dicey.

Two round number pads to get all 10 numbers seems a bit far fetched.  The tiny screen, though it is sweet OLED, is only 96×39.  Those small features add up to only 57 grams.

The phone, to its credit, can be used as an USB modem, storage device (160MB), Mp3 player and if you can figure out the number pad system: a phone.  Genius!

Maybe in the UK, a modem that is also a phone is appealing?  Any UK readers care to help out a yankee to make some sense of this?  Or perhaps, this is more fall out from Toshiba downward spiral (see: HD-DVD)

Press release: [Toshiba] via [OhGizmo!]

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