The green trend has always been finding new ways to harness renewable energy. The Shiro SQ-S Solar Media Player has also jumped onto the green bandwagon with its solar panel dominating its back as an alternate power source to good old USB. Though, even under direct sun, the Shiro still needs a full 6 hours to completely recharge the PMP’s internal battery; USB cuts recharging time to 4 hours, in comparison. This isn’t bad knowing you won’t be leaving more carbon footprint during camping.
The
Shiro Solar PMP actually passes as a decent MP3 player with wide range of audio support for WMA, WAV, M4A, FLAC, APE, and OGG, and its FM tuner may make for an emergency radio since the player is technically self-sufficient in power. Its 1.8″ 128×160 CSTN 65k color screen however looks like it comes from some leftover supplies back in the early 2000s. But seriously, if Shiro has to make this PMP commerically available, why not try to materialize this
Bonsai Solar Tree instead.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
Trying to plug in a Cruzer Enterprise flash drive into a Mac will only mount its public partition, and there’s nothing more you can do afterwards to get through the 256-bit AES encryption. You couldn’t unlock your encrypted data even if you have the correct password due to the fact that the flash drive’s CruzerPro utility is written for Windows only. Now, you can grab a free firmware update from Sandisk website to gain Mac support for your Cruzer Enterprise.
Re-writing the firmware is necessary, because the public partition that stores the CruzerPro utility is read-only for good reason. An additional benefit after the upgrade is that the Cruzer Enterprise will become cross-platform friendly, allowing access to protected files on either Mac or PC. Enterprise with the Mac firmware is presumably centrally manageable (e.g. remote termination, password changes, etc.) if the admin installs a copy of
Sandisk’s CMC. Alternatively,
Ironkey is another HW-encrypted flash drive that is also Mac friendly.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
One of the early players to the party, Cables Unlimited’s Wireless USB Adapter Set promises the elusive cable-less connection of your USB devices. Based on Wisair Certified Wireless USB chipset and drivers, the Windows XP and Vista only two dongle adapter set is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce USB cable clutter. But how well does it work? And is the performance and range good enough to shed those USB cables forever? Read on to find out.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
With the advances of processor, graphics and memory technologies pushing their way from the desktop to the notebook and computer user demands on the rise, it seems inevitable that the notebook cooler market is set to heat up. Today we’ll look at Antec’s latest USB-powered notebook cooler and discover if it can adopt some of the sleek looks of today’s notebooks and still deliver efficient near-silent cooling to make it worth your purchase.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
For multi-monitor fans, workaholics, and Bill Gates, two screens may already look cramped with all apps they are running – three is the magic number for these folks. Bill actually has a three screen setup with a list of e-mails on the left monitor, the specific email opened in the center, and a browser on the right-hand LCD. However, if you are just beginning to look into multi-monitor setup, Witech Multi-i Two-channel USB external video card from Korea has you covered.
Think of Witech Multi-i as two
IOGear USB 2.0 Video Card squeezed in a single package. The Witech basically has two D-sub connectors for hooking up to two monitors; its on-board dual USB ports are designed to daisy-chain two more of these video adapters. Maximum resolution you get from each video connection is 1400×1050 (interestingly, 1366×768 and 1280×768 are also supported). The
Witech Multi-i will require an AC adapter to give the unit juice for all the extra load. Since it is essentially powered by Displaylink core, you can expect
Mac compatibility out of the box.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
It’s not easy to sell one billion of anything let alone a $50 mouse. Logitech today brags it has shipped billionth mouse after in the market for over 20 years. The first mouse from the Switzerland-based Logitech was the P4 (pictured above), which began mass production in 1985 at the company’s birthplace. Logitech reached the 100 millionth mouse mark in 1996, and subsequently, topped 500 millionth 7 years later. The company is now selling at a rate of 376,000 mice per day and 7.8 million every month.
Looking back all these years, we’ve seen several major revolutions: first upgrading serial to USB; adding a wheel for more control over scrolling; moving completely to optical and recently laser sensor from mechanical ball for increasing pointing accuracy; and last but not least, expanding from a single-function pointing device that detects merely two-dimensional motion to a multi-purpose 3D gesture-based controller. Thanks to Logitech (mostly), mouse now becomes an essential part of the lives for
mobile workers,
hardcore gamers, and even
couch potatoes.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
For most of us, the last thing we would lose is our wallet. (Well, at least we try to keep it safe in our pocket.) This is naturally one place where we would try to put our flash drives, but but in reality, very few of these tiny storage devices will fit inside a wallet due to their size and/or fragility. LaCie’s latest CurrenKey however is designed from ground up to be a wallet-friendly flash drive, and its die-cast metal body allows it to go along well with other real currencies like our loonies, quarters and pennies in the coin compartment in your wallet.
LaCie CurrenKey – a wordplay by the 5.5 designers – has a nifty rotation system that easily reveals and hides the USB connector with a twist of the coin’s edge. It comes in two colors: bronze for the
4GB and silver for the
8GB. Keep in mind that there’s risk of actually mistaking these for a real coin. Perhaps that’s why LaCie engaved a USB topology symbol and its company logo on one side and the capacity on the other.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
What do you get when you combine a flagship industrial design with three action-packed interfaces and an oh-so-beautiful 1.5 terabytes of magnetic mayhem? A pirate’s wet dream The Seagate FreeAgent XTreme, that’s what! With multiple-revision automated backups and a name too good for the initial ‘E’, will you need to ask your geek if you are healthy enough to handle the XTreme? We’ve managed to pull it together and get our hands on one, so press on for our in-depth review to find out.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
Samsung YP-P2 is universally accepted as the most successful MP3 player in the entire Yepp-series history, so one can expect a follow-up to the Korean company’s flagship touch screen PMP. Early reports now indicate that Samsung does plan to unleash YP-P3 during 2009 CES, and it would seem some of improvements are borrowed from Samsung’s TouchWiz inteface. Basically, TouchWiz centers around a widget tray that can be customized to include shortcuts to complete apps like photo gallery, memo, clocks, and etc.
While the Samsung YP-P3 remains largely the same with a 480×272 3″ screen, the new flagship PMP now comes with haptic feedback, built-in speakers, Bluetooth 2.1 (supposedly supporting A2DP, AVRCP & HFP profile), aforementioned widget support, and an all-new aluminum chassis (in either black or silver). Additionally, the YP-P3 appears to have a touch sensitive bar in place of the P2′s circular LED. Samsung also gives in to customers’ demand to extend audio and video format compatibility to FLAC and H.264 respectively. All these don’t seem much when compared to iPod touch, which now totally rocks with third party apps and games. Perhaps Samsung could invest a decent 3-megapixel camera on the YP-P3 since its nemesis doesn’t have one, yet.
Permanent Link
No Comments »
Entries (RSS)