Gadgets and New Technologies

by Paul Miller, posted Jul 18th 2008 at 12:03PM Happy 40th birthday, Intel! Now that you’re over the hill, we’d suggest buying a Porsche, building completely custom one-off chips for Apple, or in some other way jeopardizing your financial well being in order to actualize pent-up childhood dreams, but we’d say AMD’s recent struggles are just about the best present you could’ve asked for. Sure, the EU is trying its best to put a damper on things, but don’t let that get you down, your best years are still to come. (Read the full post about ‘Intel turns 40′…)

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FROM APPLETELL - The iphone 3G was such a big hit that there were lines for the product even for a few days after it came out. This was bound to bring shortages, and it did. MORE » Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed → (Read the full post about ‘iPhone shortage to last 2-4 weeks, hurting businesses?’…)

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Today marks one week since the iPhone 3G went on sale. I waited in line but at least there was a 16GB black iphone 3G at the end of it. We’re now receiving reports of continued long lines, and at the end of those lines people are either being turned away because of a store closing for the night, or because of stock issues. In some cases people are being left with only an 8GB black or a 16GB white.

As of mid-afternoon yesterday, MacLife was reporting upwards of a two hour wait outside some Apple stores.

(Read the full post about ‘Lines still long for iPhone 3G and could be for 2-4 more weeks’…)

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Photo shows the Gadget Lab ipod Touch eBook reader project So you’ve got your shiny, new iPhone 3G, you’ve discovered that you still can’t get a signal in the house and 3G doesn’t cover your area. And worst of all, you have an all but useless first gen phone on the kitchen table which, despite it’s mechanical poker-face, looks to be giving you puppy eyes. "Why?" it seems to ask in a wheedling tone, "what was wrong with me?" Sure, you could pass it on to friends or family, but who wants old hardware? Metal-backed iPhones are soo 2007. What you need to do is press your faithful old friend into a new role, something useful enough to assuage your guilt. (Read the full post about ‘Five Things to Do With Your Old iPhone’…)

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Use of disk encryption is a growing trend for individuals and companies alike. But new research carried out at the University of Washington points to a few cracks appearing when encryption is used in a certain way.

The research covers encryption used only on a section of a hard drive, rather than a fully encrypted disk. We can set these areas up on a drive, much like a partition, to allow us to have a secure area on disk to store files. The problem is that certain programs functioning inside the encrypted area don’t operate within its boundaries.

Examples include applications such as Google Desktop or Microsoft Word.

(Read the full post about ‘Partial disk encryption not enough to keep some data secure’…)

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So sad for those hoping that the blackberry Bold would be landing shortly at T-Mobile here in the US, but instead pricing information has been announced for T-Mobile Germany. The price is set at €219.95 (about $350 US), which is a bit higher than the $299 that has already been announced for Rogers, which will begin offering their version next Friday on July 25. T-Mobile Germany currently has the available date simply listed as July, with the option to reserve now, but it is rumored to be coming on July 21, which is this Monday. Coming back to the US release, at this time we have only seen a confirmation come from AT&T, but they are still having trouble setting an official availability date. (Read the full post about ‘BlackBerry Bold heading to T-Mobile, in Germany’…)

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Remember all those bizarre Thanko products that were exclusive to Japan?  Well, turns out Thanko is opening up a shop for those of us in the US.  Which is partially great news, because then I won’t have to mess with translating the page just to see the speccs of all their strange products.  It won’t open till August, so as of now we still have to translate things over to English.  Which includes this USB Cooler Mouse. (Read the full post about ‘The USB Cooler Mouse straight from Thanko’…)

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A few weeks ago, we covered Creative’s latest Portable Media Player (PMP), the Zen X-Fi. Believe it or not, Creative has already rolled out another PMP with the Zen Krystal.

The Zen Krystal looks like the Zen Stone Plus with Display (a PMP which I highly recommend), but has a more rectangular look. It appears to only be available with 4GB worth of memory, which is enough for about 2,000 songs. Songs and other audio files are easily downloaded with the drag and drop function with no drivers to install.

In addition to its 10 hour battery life, the Zen Krystal has a lot of other nifty features like a voice recorder and a radio with 32 preset stations.

(Read the full post about ‘Zen Krystal from Creative’…)

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The long awaited iPhone 3G was released on Friday, July 11th. But what should have been a happy and joyous day for iPhone fans, ended up being an exercise in frustration for many. AT&T’s insistence on trying to activate the phones in store taxed Apple’s authentication server (more info) and caused lines to move at a snail’s pace or sent buyers home with a phone only good for making emergency calls. During last year’s iPhone 1.0 launch Apple had everyone activate their own phone at home through iTunes. Worse yet, AT&T outlets were allowed to sell far fewer phones that Apple Stores, forcing them to turn away customers who waited hours to get their hands on one. (Read the full post about ‘iPhone 3G Launch and Network Problems’…)

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Who would have thought that someday dancing the Electric Slide could actually generate - well, electricity.

But that is what is happening with Club Surya in London, England, part of the Club4Climate project aiming at self-creating 60% percent of the energy needed to run a club.

Part of the power generated for the club is created by a special bouncing dance floor that takes the movements of dancers and converts it to electricity.  The way it works is by a piezoelectric process where blocks made of crystals create electricity when smashed and this power is then diverted to batteries.

(Read the full post about ‘UK Club gets dance floor that creates electricity’…)

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