Best New Technology

Posted Mar 5th 2008 1:26PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: Storage

If you’ll recall, Microsoft announced that it was teaming up with SanDisk last May to conjure up a suitable U3 replacement. Not quite a year later, we’re starting to hear the first whispers of what that replacement may be. Purportedly dubbed StartKey, the so-called Windows companion would essentially allow users to “carry their Windows and Windows Live settings with them” on any sort of flash memory device — be it a USB drive, SD card, etc. Interestingly, it’s also being reported that Redmond would like to “build an end-to-end StartKey environment,” but aside from the tidbit that it should be out in at least beta form by the year’s end, pretty much everything else remains murky.

[Via ArsTechnica, image courtesy of Tom’s Hardware]

My clock radio wakes me up every morning just around the time the guy from NPR delivers the weather forecast. Invariably, though, I smack the snooze button and never hear if it’s going to be rain or shine. But I don’t have that problem anymore now that Brookstone’s WeatherCast Alarm Clock is perched by my bed. It streams weather information from accuweather.com wirelessly and without a subscription fee. I can push the snooze alarm all I want but the customizable time and weather is always displayed on the 3 X 4.5 inch LCD. With the touch of a button I can switched between the five day forecast or today’s current weather with temperature and weather forecasts for the next 24-hour period broken out in four 6-hour chunks. Forecasts included expected temperatures (your choice of Fahrenheit or Celsius) and weather conditions noted by brain-dead simple icons. Out of the box setup is completely automated. The device picks up the satellite signal and your location in the U.S. within 30 minutes of inserting four AA batteries. My area, for example, is Northern California and WeatherCast uploaded the correct time and the weather 411 for five major cities: San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento and Reno, Nevada. I wanted Santa Rosa, CA  (a city not listed) but by registering my unit at myambient.com and listing my zip code, i was able to add this city instantly. And with updates transparently transmitted every 15 minutes or so, it looks like I never need to turn on the clock radio again.  —Michael S. Lasky

WIRED Persistent, free, wireless current and five-day weather forecasts for major U.S. cities are satellite-pinpointed to up to six cities in your region. Snooze alarm button toggles bright backlight. Weather icons and large numbers make it easy to read.

TIRED Fee-based premium service is specific cities not among the five included in the broad regional area the satellite identifies. Kick stand is not adjustable.

$100, brookstone.com

Intel announced that their gross profit margin for the current quarter is dropping from 56% of sales down to 54%. It’s not a big dip but when you are talking billions, people will notice.

Standard NAND flash memory has been growing steadily in capacity at the same time as prices are dropping. Due to the performance of the memory, it won’t work great as a hard drive yet, but as people start to understand the limitations and prices drop more, it becomes more attractive due to its low power usage, low heat, and fast seek times. However, price and capacity are still a challenge as are reading of large files.

To be able to get a 32GB flash memory stick relatively cheap is pretty exciting. You can store 6000 5MB MP3s on that memory stick and for many people, that now represents well over their entire music library. The idea of the jukebox that you can fit into your pocket is starting to come true.

Posted Mar 5th 2008 8:24AM by Darren Murph
Filed under: cellphones

If there’s one person at CeBIT you don’t want to not recognize, it’s German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, we can only assume that Vodafone booth workers were left with their tails stuck between their legs after said figure gave its recently announced picture-based search engine a go. Upon Otella returning nothing after a picture was presumably snapped of Merkel, she quickly asserted: “I am not in the database.” Better still, she continued by proclaiming: “That’s a major gap.” Heck, maybe she should be happy — after all, Vodafone’s set to trial the service with Europe’s “best selling tabloid,” and not being in there would most certainly be a good thing.

Posted Mar 5th 2008 4:25AM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Misc. gadgets

Printed solar cell tech keeps getting closer and closer to reality, with a Massuchssetts company called Konarka Technologies today announcing that it’s now able to manufacture solar cells using inkjet printing. There’s not a ton of information available about the process, but Konarka’s already demonstrated it and published details in a trade journal called Advanced Materials — which sounds like scintillating reading, if you ask us. Konarka says the process makes fabbing solar panels extremely easy, since it doesn’t require a clean room, and the resulting cost reductions could lead to an increased number of applications for solar power. Of course, the economics of inkjet printing have lured more than one company to the dark side — we wonder if Konarka is eventually going to start selling solar ink cartridges for more than the printers themselves?

[Via The Raw Feed]

Remember when every gadget was “Credit Card Sized”? Now, when the size requirement for a modern gizmo is that it fit into a manilla envelope, the Digital Voice Recorder goes old-school, although at 6.5mm (0.26″) thick, it’s more like a stack of 12 credit cards.

Inside the slim body you’ll find a pull-out USB plug, a gig of memory (for a claimed 69 hours of WAV) recording, a lithium ion battery and a set of buttons which also control an MP3 player. Which makes us wonder why you’d want one. Almost every mp3 player (ipod excepted) has a voice recording function. At $70, this looks a little pricey in comparison, and for a 1GB player, the battery life is awful: just four and a half hours of playback. Especially when you compare it to a whole PC crammed onto a debt-maker.

Product page [ThinkGeek]

IQ Test Gift Pack
Have you ever wondered how clever you really are? Now you can put that to rights and establish your genius once and for all with the help of this authentic, honest-to-goodness IQ Test in a sleek metal box.

See price

To paraphrase the product blurb, Art + Moleskine + Laser = Awesome. Joe Mansfield offers to take your black and white artwork and laser-engrave it onto the cover of the iconic notebook. You send in a pdf and, for just $5 (plus the cost of the Moleskine) you’ll get back a personalized cahier. The etching comes out in a sepia tone, and grayscales are converted to a dot halftone.

I will, if I may, compare the Moleskine to Apple products: They’re simple, perceived as expensive and have an almost fanatical fanbase. They’re also a pleasure to use. And, also like Apple gear, when we post on them, we get a firestorm of anti-fanboy hatred in the comments. Go!

Product page [Engrave Your Notebook via Make]

The Alessi Pop-Up Bottle Opener is one gadget that you can consider having in your home if you happen to host lots of parties. Constructed from stainless steel, all you need to do to open a bottle is to press down this ovoid-shaped object and voila! The cap will be removed, held by a magnet located inside the opener itself while preventing it from flying all over the place. Of course, there are much more affordable bottle openers around, but after forking out $47 for this, I believe you’re going to open a whole lot of bottles in the future just to show it off to friends and family alike.

Posted Mar 4th 2008 4:10PM by Darren Murph
Filed under: cellphones, Wireless

It seems as if Tata Communications is out to one-up BSNL — or at least claim its share of the limelight, anyway. More specifically, the outfit has teamed up with Telsima in order to roll out the “world’s largest commercial WiMAX network” in India. Over 5,000 enterprise / retail customers are already connected in ten cities, and there are plans in place to secure nearly a quarter million customers in retail alone during fiscal year 2009. Furthermore, we’re hearing that the services should be stretched to 110 cities for enterprise users and 15 cities for the retail segment by the year’s end, but users in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Cochin, Chandigarh, and Kolkata are the only ones celebrating at the moment. Not a bad way to grab a bit more market share from Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, eh?