iPod shuffle and Sony W202 Walkman are some of the fine examples of wearable MP3 players. Style-conscious folks who may already own a full-featured smartphone maybe looking for either one as an exercise companion. Now they have another choice – iAudio E2 from Cowon. The iAudio E2 – like the Apple and Sony offering – is also screen-less.
Even though the E2 hasn’t been released, Cowon has uploaded a teaser showing a bunch of unexplained icons which may suggest the functions of their new DAP. Among the icons are a camera, snowman, door, mug, a pair of glasses, chopsticks, radio, and a flash drive. Hardware-wise, the door knob sign-lookalike E2 has an integrated keyring, and a very minimalist form factor.
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It’s not ergonomic and it will probably tempt you into visiting the office vending machine more throughout the day—but what chocoholic can resist the Chocomouse?
Product Page ($33)
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Kodak’s Zi is taking it to the next level for portable camcorders with a major update to its portable camcorder. The first and most obvious is the polished new look and 3 glossy color options to choose from. The bright 2.5 inch LCD looks to be the same quality and size as previous models. That’s about the only feature that hasn’t been upgraded. The Zi8 can now shoot 1080p video at 30fps. An hour of 1080p HD video will take up 3GBs of space so up to 10 hours can be recorded on a 32GB SDHC card.
Once you get over the shock at such a tiny package being able to capture 1080p, Kodak has also added image stabilization to its list of features to help combat any jitter or bounce on your
travels. There’s an jack for an external mic so you can
enhance your audio over the built in mic. You can also snap off 5 MegaPixel digital stills if you need to. Another notable addition is the ability to buy spare rechargeable batteries for it which is a must if you plan to use it for more than just occasional videos. Use the swing out USB arm and the included software to quickly get your indie movie aspirations up on youtube. Priced at a reasonable $179 this could make you an instant star of your own movies.
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Not sure how this made it past Brando but Matsunaga wants you to clip on it’s Wink Glasses to keep you alert. A small sensor and screen clip onto your glasses and attempt to keep keep you on your toes. This is accomplished by nuisance factor as the sensor detects slowed blinking, which is a sign of both of “spacing out” and drooping lids preparing for sleep. The lens starts to fog in just the one eye which is enough of a disturbance to your brain to bring you out of a stupor. While this may not seem like much of a distraction to keep one awake but anyone who’s lost a contact will tell you just how disturbing that is.
The Wink device can run wirelessly off of 2 pill sized watch batteries for 8 hours or can run off of USB power by wire. Wink can be attached to prescription frames as well as the included non-prescription frames. This is targeted towards tech workers trying to pull long shifts or for reading/studying. They are shockingly proud of their foggy-screen-thingy though. The Wink device will cost about $167 and the stylish frames are $265.
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Can your notebook survive global warming or increased heat output from higher speed processors and increased memory capacities? Last year I reviewed the highly recommended Antec USB Notebook Cooler 200 and today I am going to tackle Choiix’s Air Through Stash Notebook Cooling Pad that is suitable for notebooks up to 15″ in size and that also adds a USB-to-SATA 2.5″ drive dock as well as a 3-port USB hub. Can Choiix trump Antec’s design in both performance and design? Read on to discover the whole truth.
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2.5″ hard drive already reaches 1TB, only two years after 3.5″ hits the same mark. The credit goes to the Western Digital for bringing this spacious drive to the market in the form of internal and external USB storage. Others like Seagate and Hitachi however won’t be far behind. As good as this may sound, the WD Scorpio Blue 2.5″ 1TB is 3mm too thick for notebooks, most of which only accept 9.5mm drives.
Even though the Scorpio Blue maybe a tad too big for the majority of laptops, it’s perfect for portable USB drives like WD’s
My Passport Essential SE. While offering
twice the size competitors offer, one caveat is that the 1TB as well as its 750GB sibling spins a 5200-rpm, a bit slower than what is usually expected. It’s uncertain how this may affect performance, but you can’t beat the convenience of carrying around a tetrabyte data in a single USB-powerd enclosure. The drive is also bundled with sync+encryption software. The My Passport Essential SE 750GB and 1TB will join the rest of the family with a MSRP of $199.99 and $299.99.
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Portableapps.com almost single-handedly is bringing the digital nomad lifestyle into the main stream. This week brings the second coming of the launcher that helps weave it all together. John T. Haller, the head honcho over at Portableapps.com has done a lot of work on the menu launching system that has limited adoption by hardcore portable users. The dozens of great apps that he has culled into his site’s offering have free, open-source, full featured versions of just about every type of software you can imagine. MS Office, digital post-its, Photoshop, Internet browsers, all can run from a flash drive and keep all your settings the same on ANY computer that you use. One of the main groups of people that can benefit from giving this a try is office workers. If you have a computer at home and a computer at the office why do you need a laptop? Keep your data synchronized and ready to travel at a moment’s notice on a flash drive. These applications will also run the same amongst different versions of Windows. XP, Vista, 2003, 2008, Windows 7 all seem to have very little problems running these programs.
Where Portableapps.com seems to have redoubled its efforts recently is in the menu launcher system. This is effectively the program that helps you sort, organize and run all of the programs you get in this suite or otherwise collect including music or documents. It very strongly resembles the Start button menu of Windows Vista and with almost more features than the whole operating system. Prior versions of the Portableapps menu left those who adopted the lifestyle wanting more. This version promises to bring many of those who went looking for alternatives back to the collective. While the menu may not have been its strong point before take a look at the
awards won by the project as a whole. (Note: Page has an error that keeps it from displaying in FF.)
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It’s been a long wait, but Razer’s Megalodon gaming headset is finally here. While physically composed of only two 40mm drivers, the headset is capable of simulating immersive 7.1 surround sound without the need for any software installation – ensuring true USB plug and play operation across platforms. We at Everything USB have put the Megalodon’s quality, compatibility, and LAN party readiness to the test in a wide variety of applications for both Windows XP and Vista. Curious to see how the Megalodon stacked up? Read all about it after the jump.
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Early adopters wanting to try USB 3.0 now have another upgrade path other than replacing the motherboard with Asus P6X58. Ratoc Systems from Japan has leaked out two cards adding two SuperSpeed USB ports to a PC.
The REX-PEU3 is a PCI Express 1x internal card for desktop computer; with a 4-pin auxiliary power jack, the PCI-E card can supply a maximum of 900mA current to each port. The REX-EXU3 is a ExpressCard/34 intended for laptops, but like older USB 2.0 cards, you will need to connect the bundled AC adapter to provide enough power for external drives. According to Ratoc, one can expect close to 200MB/s when transferring from a USB 3.0-to-SATA drive to a PC and about 155MB/s when writing files to the same HDD. Granted, that all depends on the bridge chip efficiency as well as the SATA drive performance.
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