Gadget Rumors

Gadget watchers have come across a handful of unconfirmed and confirmed rumors about the latest gadgets and gear. Check out the hottest of rumors on gadgets...

BlackBerry Bold Available October 2nd

The wait is over. Just as the lines are beginning to clear at the AT&T store for the Apple iPhone, the traffic should increase again on October 2nd when rumor has it you’ll be able to pick up the highly praised BlackBerry Bold. According to the same sources you’ll be able to pre-order one as of September 24th.

Analysis: The BlackBerry Bold is a very real alternative to the iPhone especially for use in the Enterprise

New Kindle Won’t Be Home for Xmas

An Amazon spokesperson squashed speculation on an imminent next-gen Kindle.

Analysis: A new Kindle would make a great holiday gift but a Kindle gift certificate might be wiser this holiday season. The new Kindle now due in 2009 will supposedly correct some UI problems and offer an improved screen.

From Apple; Goggles not Googles

Imagine watching a movie, working on a large spreadsheet, or maneuvering around a virtual world without using a big screen display. Rumor has it that Apple and Sony are hard at work on a pair of goggles that will do just that. There is also a patent on file describing a laser-based display that you see right through like a pair of glasses when no image is being displayed.

Analysis: We predict that immersive head gear displays like this will eventually become commonplace.

Confirmed Rumor on Asus Eee PC 904

Apparently Asus listened to users’ complaints about the small keyboard on the Eee PC 901 and responded with the Eee PC 904 which puts a larger keyboard on an 8.9 inch display laptop. It’s available in the UK for about $460 U.S.

Analysis: Some user comments have criticized Asus for deviating from the 7 inch form factor and also note that you can get a pretty powerful laptop for about the same cost, but we can’t wait to get our hands on one of these little beauties.

iPhone Gamepad

Rumors are still getting play about Belkin’s involvement in an Apple “sanctioned” game pad as first reported by toucharcade.com(along with this photo). Reports have been circulating that this 8 button gamepad with audio output would be supported by the Apple SDK. So far it appears to be speculation.

Analysis: As long as it supplies some extra juice to extend battery life, we say an iPhone gamepad is a great idea.

New and Cool Gadgets of the Week

The coolest gadgets this week are some new cameras, console games, and an update on the much anticipated laser-based rear projection TV from Mitsubishi. There’s lot’s more coming up on gadgets; check out what’s new for this week.

Ultra Mobile Laptop from Fujitsu

Fujitsu announced a UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) called the Lifebook U2010. It runs on an Intel Atom Z530 (1.6 GHz) processor, has a 5.6 inch 1024 x 768 screen, and claims an 8 hour battery life. It comes in many colors and includes a built-in webcam. The reported price of $1300 is quite a bit more expensive than the comparable $500 Asus Eee PC 901.

Two Cool New Nikons

The Nikon Coolpix S560 is expected to go on sale at the end of August and will sell for around $250. It’s a 10 MP compact camera with 5X optical zoom, ISO up to 3200, advanced face detection features and optical image stabilization. It will record 640 x 480 video at 30 fps.

The Nikon Coolpix P6000 is even cooler than the S560 (and twice as expensive at $500). It’s a 13.5 MP compact camera with 4X optical zoom and optical image stabilization. One feature you’re paying extra for is a built-in GPS that “geo-tags” your pictures. This camera could be the closest thing to an SLR that fits in your pocket.

Another Game for NVIDIA’s PhysX Engine

NVIDIA announced that CAPCOM’s upcoming Bionic Commando video game will use GPU-accelerated NVIDIA PhysX technology to enhance the game’s debris, smoke, dust, and weapon effects. Bionic Commando, which will be released by GRIN in early 2009 should offer super realistic images generated by the CUDA general-purpose parallel computing processor.

Batman Game Coming in 2009

A new videogame from Eidos Interactive called Batman: Arkham Asylum will be made available for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Games for Windows in 2009. The game is being developed by Rocksteady Studios and puts players in the role of Batman as he delivers the Joker to Arkham Asylum.

New Thinkpad for Digital Artists

The Lenovo ThinkPad W700 has a big bright 17-inch screen but only weighs just 8.4 pounds. The Quad-core Extreme chip should provide lots of horsepower. The W700 is the first laptop with an integrated color-calibration system using a set of built-in color sensors along with an onboard Wacom graphics tablet. This laptop won’t be cheap, costing $3,000 before adding the extras and may go for as much as $7500 fully loaded. It’s due to go on sale in September.

News on the Much Anticipated Laser RPTV

The hype is for a projection TV with an extensive range of colors and the best depth of field of any display technology. Add to that a claimed 75% reduction in power over an LCD TV along with a 50,000-hour life span. Sound impressive? A handful of reporters were given a sneak peak at this TV at the 2008 CES and they were impressed by what they saw. Mitsubishi says they will offer a 65” Laser DLP set called LaserVue in September. The price could be less than $2,000.

Options to Consider when Buying a Smartphone

Contenders for the Best Smartphone Crown are Few and Far Between
No question about it, the iPhone is a wonderful gadget. In fact, it’s really more like a computer that fits in your pocket and just so happens to make phone calls and the number of fun iPhone apps is growing by the day. However, as good as it is, it’s not perfect and there are a couple of competitors to consider when shopping for a smartphone.

There are many cell phones with similar features like touch screens and accelerometers but none has come close to the iPhone. There are, however, two brand new phones that we consider to be serious contenders; the new Blackberry Bold should be the darling of the enterprise crowd while the Nokia E71 offers a lot of features missing in the iPhone.

Blackberry Bold
The Blackberry Bold also known as the Blackberry Bold 9000 is just now, starting to appear in markets outside North America and early reviews indicate this smartphone is going to be a winner.

The BlackBerry Bold has a big 480 x 320, dense pixel per inch, color display which some say looks better than the iPhone. In addition to having all the latest bells and whistles like 3G, WiFi, A-GPS (Blackberry Maps included), stereo Bluetooth, QWERTY keyboard, and microSDHC expansion slot, this phone gets high marks for style and design (some say it even resembles an iPhone). The BlackBerry Bold also features an improved Web browser that renders pages fast. It has a 2 MP camera like the iPhone but also, like the iPhone, no forward-facing camera. It also comes with BlackBerry Desktop Manager including Roxio PhotoSuite 9 LE and the new BlackBerry Media Sync application which lets users sync their BlackBerry with their iTunes music collection.

The Nokia E71
One reviewer called the Nokia E71, “the best phone Nokia has made to date.” The Nokia E71, at 10 mm is thinner than the iPhone by a millimeter. Nokia says it’s the thinnest QWERTY smartphone.
Besides all the latest features like 3G and GSM radios, the Nokia E71 includes Assisted GPS (A-GPS), WiFi, a 3.2 MP camera with LED flash, a forward facing camera, A2DP stereo Bluetooth, a microSD slot and an FM radio. It lacks an accelerometer and a TV-out port. The 2.4 inch QVGA (320 x 240) screen doesn’t get as high marks as the Blackberry Bold and is smaller then iPhone's 3.5 inch screen and reviewers say the QWERTY keyboard is a bit on the small size.

Windows Mobile Phones to Watch For
To round out the group of contenders we felt we needed to include a Windows Mobile-based phone or two but we also wonder if they are going to have what it takes to take on the iPhone. Hey, at least you can run Flash applications.

Samsung BlackJack III
The BlackJack III just started selling in Korea for around $600. It supposedly runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, has a 3 MP camera. 528 MHz processor, GPS and WiFi. Some say the BlackJack III will be a Samsung i788 running Windows Mobile.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 is an impressive looking phone using an "arc slider design" where the screen slides up to expose a curved QWERTY keyboard. It has a large 3 inch WVGA (800 x 480) touchscreen display, a 3.2 MP camera, A2DP stereo Bluetooth, A-GPS, WiFi, and a microSD slot.

Conclusion
We have to admit, it’s a tough call. Blackberry has a large number of loyal users who, we’re sure, have been considering making the switch to iPhone but the Blackberry Bold might be enough make keep them in the Blackberry camp. The Nokia E71 seems to have it all, reviewers love it, and there are a ton of Symbian apps to run on it but it’s a close call between it and the iPhone.

Five Gadgets No Student Should Ever Need at School

With the cost of a higher education growing every year, you wouldn't want to see a minute of school time wasted on frivolous activities. There will be plenty of time for TV watching and game playing during school breaks. In that spirit, unrealistic as it may be, we suggest some gadgets that might be counter productive at academia.

1. High End Laptop
A high end laptop like the MacBook Air or Voodoo Envy gaming laptop is almost guaranteed to be lost, stolen, dropped, damaged, or have beer spilled on it. Game machine just means easier to play games on instead of studying, why even introduce the temptation?

2. Desktop Gaming Machine
It might make more sense to leave the over-clocked, tweaked out, game machine at home and send your student off to school with a less expensive laptop. There won’t be the temptation to game the nights away instead of hitting the books and you won’t have to worry about the machine getting stolen.

3. TIVO
Sure, someone might be able to add a few minutes to their day by fast forwarding through the commercials but we say the less TV, the more studying. Don’t get us wrong Tivos are great products we just don’t think they belong in dorm rooms.

4. Game Console
Maybe they got through high school dividing time between studying and game playing but college is serious and we say leave the PS3 or Xbox at home, at least for the first semester. The only exception might be Nintendo’s Wii since you can get exercise with it and even socialize while using it.

5. Segway
Okay, so it’s long shot that you could even afford one of these but we just wanted to put a plug in for some human-powered form of transportation, namely, a bicycle.

Essential Back to School Gadgets

Five Gadgets Every Student Needs to Avoid a Computing Disaster
It's only the beginning of August but already time to start shopping for the high tech necessities every student is going to need to succeed at school. Whether you're buying someone's first laptop computer, upgrading the old one, or looking for advice on essential gadgets for today's student, Here are some suggestions for what to buy along with some tips on good deals.

A Reliable Computer, seriously
Computers don't last forever. If your student is using the old hand-me-down computer with 512 MB of RAM running Windows 98 it's probably time to upgrade. First, you’ll need to decide between a desktop and laptop, or you could buy one of each. You’ll also have to decide between Windows and the Mac OS. Mac’s can run Windows applications easily but not the other way around. A desktop can deliver a lot more performance than a similarly priced laptop. With a desktop you'll get more storage, a real keyboard, better graphics processor, bigger monitor, and more expansion options but laptops are what every student wants so what are you going to do?

eMachines recently announced some new desktops including the T3656 which comes with 1GB RAM, a 160GB hard drive and sells for around $299.99. The T5274 has 2GB RAM, a 320GB hard drive and retails for $399.99.

Hot Back to School Deal from Apple
Apple launched a Back to School promotion campaign that offers a free iPod when you buy a qualifying Mac. You need to purchase both products and then submit a rebate to get up to $299 back on the iPod.

A good anti-everything application
It's too easy for anyone, especially students to click on the wrong link and find their computers loaded up with malicious software like virus' or spyware. There are many commercial applications to choose from like McAfee and Symantec. These companies maintain expensive labs to identify and combat malware. Unfortunately, you end up paying an annual fee for these programs which can add up when you're maintaining multiple computers in a household. Fortunately there are some very good applications like ones from Avast who offer "home" versions for free. PCPitstop.com offers some free tests for anything that could adversely affect your computer.

Extra Ink
You can often find third party ink cartridges for sale on ebay and other places. The ink may not be the very highest quality but we’ve found them to be quite adequate for most tasks and we’ve saved a lot of money too. Just in case the ink is out of stock or too expensive you should consider upgrading the old printer to a new model.

A fast, high resolution, inkjet printer can be amazingly inexpensive. Maybe it’s because manufacturers know they’ll make up for giving the printer away when you buy lots of expensive ink cartridges. The HP Photosmart D7460 is a wireless printer and it’s a fast color inkjet that gets good reviews. A mutifunction printer might make a lot of sense for a student. They can copy and scan documents and many of these devices produce high quality photo prints. The Canon Pixma MX850 that gets high marks from users .

External Backup Disk
It would be a terrible shame to spend a lot of money on computer gear only to lose that important term paper(not to mention that photo and MP3 collection) from a hard disk malfunction.. External hard drives that hook up to the computer through a high speed USB connection and very often include back up software can be relatively inexpensive.

Removable Storage
Two forms of storage we highly recommend are flash drives and optical discs. You can get 2 GB flash drives for under $20 which will store 4 years worth of term papers. Blank DVDs not cost around $.30 each and hold over 4 GB of data. You can back up all your docs to a few of these in spread them around for safe keeping.

2008 Summer Olympics Spectacular Entertainment

Behind the HDTV Scenes at the 2008 Summer Olympics
The 2008 Summer Olympics has begun. As we recommended, we think you should stay at home, save gas, and watch HDTV. NBC has promised to make this Olympics a high-def extravaganza using over 1,000 HD cameras to create thousands of hours of high-def programming. For a guide to all the high def Olympics programming check out this page on HD Sports Guide. A PDF file of the complete Olympic schedule for the NBC family of networks is available here.

Slo-motion in High Definition
Contributing to the high-def experience, will be high speed, high definition cameras named the Fastcam SA1 from San Diego-based Photron which is integrated into a new imaging system called SprintCam V2 from i-Movix, of Mons, Belgium. The SprintCam Live 2 HDTV cameras will be recording high definition images at 5,400 frames per second which will be available for immediate slow-motion replay.

Sounds of the Olympics in 5.1 Channel Audio
Adding to the high-def experience, NBC has selected five Calrec Omega with Bluefin consoles as part of its coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. "This is the first time the games will be produced totally in high definition with 5.1 discrete channels of audio," said Bob Dixon, NBC's Director of Sound Design and Communication.

Sony HD Cameras Going to Beijing
NBC Universal will use Sony XDCAM HD systems as its primary ENG (electronic news gathering) source. The Sony PDW-700 uses big 2/3 inch CCDs to records 1080i or 720p high quality, MPEG HD422 video on 50 GB optical discs. NBC will also be using Sony’s companion PDW-HD1500 decks.

The Olympics on Windows Media Center
Wavepress’ TVTonic will put high quality video of the Summer Olympics on your Windows Media Center. Users will be able to subscribe to their favorite sports and then watch the events on any Windows Vista Ultimate or Home Premium PC.

“This service will provide a fantastic viewing experience for Olympic fans with Windows Vista Media Center,” said Wavexpress President Michael Sprague. “They can choose their favorite sports, from diving to water polo to gymnastics, and extended coverage is automatically synchronized to their PC in the middle of the night.”

Motorized HD Cameras
Camera Corps of Shepperton, UK-based will have more than 200 HD camera systems including 18 motorized tracking systems, remote heads and large camera cranes. According to Camera Corps, “The inventory of cameras to be positioned in and around Beijing includes 39 Camera Corps HD MiniZoom, 68 Hitachi, four Iconix and four Toshiba cameras. An Abakus fisheye stadium lens will be installed above the Velodrome at Shi Jing Shan to cover the 250m-circumference cycle track. “

Special HD Olympic Programming
In addition to the thousands of hours of programming that NBC will be generating, other channels like MOJO HD will offer a 10-Part series of high-def profiles exploring the mindsets and motivations of U.S. Olympic athletes, beginning July 28. Experts in each sport will be featured, detailing the psychological and body strength needed to compete including how to overcome injuries and setbacks and how these new competitors compare with previous champions.

Enjoy Watching 2008 Olympics on these HDTVs

That magical, good luck date of 8/8/8 (August 8, 2008) is almost here. It’s still time to run out and get an HDTV set and upgrade your cable or satellite service to high definition. NBC has promised to make this Olympics a high def extravaganza using over 1,000 HD cameras to create thousands of hours of high def programming. Everything looks better in high def, even the commercials. All swimming finals and some of men’s and women’s gymnastics and beach volleyball will all be televised live in prime time. In addition to NBC, NBCU cable networks CNBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC and Oxygen will also televise Olympic events.

To make the job of choosing an HDTV set we've singled out a handful of big screen HDTV sets for some exceptional quality.

Plasma TVs
The Panasonic TH-50PZ700U VIERA Plasma TV: Consumer Reports raved about this Plasma TV calling it the best Plasma TV they had ever tested. Users agree, giving it high marks for image quality. The price has dropped more than 40% in the last 4 months possibly due to the introduction of the Panasonic 50PZ800U which rivals Pioneer plasmas for deep black levels and color quality.

LCD TVs
Samsung LNT5265F: The Samsung LNT5265F is a 52-Inch 1080p LCD HDTV. It has 3 HDMI ports and gets high marks from most reviewers with the exception of PC Magazine who found it deficient in many areas.

Samsung LN52A650: The newer Samsung LN52A650 offers 120 Hz refresh with "Auto Motion Plus" to reduce blurring of fast action programming and gets very high marks from users.

Westinghouse Digital TX-52F480S : The Westinghouse Digital-TX-52F480S is a 52 inch 1080P HDTV with 4 HDMI ports. It gets high marks from reviewers and is available at Costco for a very low price of $1499. The only drawback is that it features HDMI 1.2, not the latest version, 1.3 which gets you "Deep Color."


Rear Projection TVs
Mitsubishi WD-57734 TV : The Mitsubishi WD-57734 TV is a 57 inch DLP rear projection TV that supports 1080p resolution and has 4 HDMI ports including one on the front of the TV. It gets good marks from users for a clear and bright picture.

Mitsubishi WD-73734 : You can move up to the 73-Inch 1080p DLP HDTV for a few dollars more. Rear projection TVs offer the best value in these super sizes. This set gets very good marks from users although there is a new model which just came out, the Mitsubishi WD-73736 which promises to deliver a bright picture and natural colors.

Projectors
Epson Ensemble HD Home Cinema : It's not cheap but for $6,999 you get a 1080p home theater projector, a 100 inch motorized screen, an upconverting DVD player (alas no Blu-ray), a 5.1 speaker system, mounts, cables, and everything else you need to hook up everything up.

Optoma HD72 : If you can live with a 720p projector, the Optoma HD72 DLP projector offers a highly rated home theater projector for well under $1,000.