Tech Gadgets Reviews

The future is interconnected, and that’s where the Papyrus e-book reader concept gets all its strength. Designed to be a low-cost and better alternative to current generation e-book readers, the Papyrus will be a student-oriented e-book reader that will take advantage of collaboration and connectivity. It’ll have a stylus-based touchscreen where contents on the current page can be tagged, to be gone back to at a later time or answered, just like discussion threads in a forum. The designers hope to put its price at lower than $100 in order to hit a far larger market than today’s e-readers can, and can last for up to 30 hours, which seems reasonable since most people can only really keep reading for a few hours a day. We’re convinced that the Papyrus certainly looks good on paper (pun intended), but the question is, who will have the will to realize such a concept? That’s right, unfortunately, this is only a concept. For now at least. I guess I’ll have to stick with my good old paperbacks, then.

Read [The Greener Grass] Via [Engadget]

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Wise men say, “The world is your technological oyster.” Or not, but do you know what that means? Us neither. We’re just so digging this new pair of unconventional wedding rings designed for geeks to the bone who might want to get hitched. The female ring, the one on the left, will be available in four colors: turquoise, white, orange and black. While the male ring comes in only one version, transparent. Standing tall and probably prepared to strike anywhere with an Ethernet port. The maker Jana Brevick would be glad to ship an order of these to you for $7 a piece (only $5 when ordered with a separate item). What better item to promote the way of the geek?

Product [Etsy] Via [Geek Sugar]

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Uniross are ahead of the current “Green” game with the long established rechargeable battery business. Now you can push that a little further by reducing the amount of electricity you use to recharge your batteries.

The blister packaging was easy to remove, and involved no hacking with scissors like usual.

The Uniross Fast Charger comes packaged with 4 x 2700mAh AA batteries, great for high drain applications like digital cameras and flashes, remote control toys etc. As an added bonus to the 3 pin mains supply, you also get a 12 volt car lighter socket adapter for on the more “power ups” .

The base charger supports both AA and AAA batteries, in pairs of two. I found the AAA flip down spacer built in to the charger was a little loose and often meant the batteries didn’t make decent contact - preventing them from charge.

Two LED indicators are mounted to the side of each pair of batteries, flashing green indicating charge complete, whilst solid red letting you now they batteries are being re-charged. Or at least that’s what I assume; even though the packaging states you should read the instructions — none appeared to be contained in the box nor printed on the reverse of the inlay card.

Due to the interchangeable power supply facility, it does mean the charger comes in two parts, which feels a little messy in comparison to the all-in-one Uniross units such as the RC101129. It also means you need to keep tabs on two things when storing the charger.

I’ve been using a USB battery charger recently, hooked up to the Nintendo Wii USB port to charge batteries whilst playing on the console. The Nintendo Wii remotes (and XBox 360 controllers too) are well known for their battery consumption due to the Bluetooth wireless technology. The problem with USB battery chargers is the charge time. Due to the drip charge nature of the power provided by the USB connection it can take a long time, as much as 8 hours.

The Uniross Fast Charge’s claim of a 1 hour turn around for 4 x AA batteries is too much of a good claim to not test.

I found that, the supplied new batteries re-charged in around the 1 hour quoted, by my older batteries took a lot longer to recharge.

So over all - faster than the usual charger, but you’ll not get 1 hour charging forever. But with everybody wanting to appear to be more environmentally friendly this year, a quicker battery charger is a small step in the righ direction for everyone.

The Uniross Fast Charge is available now in all good battery retailers!

by Darren Murph, posted Apr 18th 2008 at 3:07PM

Under most circumstances, we too would take one glance at the monolith pictured above and scream in horror. But of course, we’re entirely sure you’re familiar with the wacky machines emerging from NextComputing. The ultra-tough Vigor Evo HD is hailed as the company’s “highest performance rugged workstation,” and besides offering up a floating chassis which absorbs all sorts of bumps and shocks, it also comes with a 17-inch LCD plastered right on the side. Said panel is covered with a hard-coated protective screen, and sitting just beneath that is your choice of AMD / Intel processors, up to four PCIe or PCI-X 64-bit slots, a dual-layer DVD writer, up to 3TB of internal HDD space and most everything else you’d find in a pre-fab desktop. Of course, it loses the vast majority of its intimidation factor when equipped with the optional wheels / telescoping handle package, but we won’t tell anyone if you’re not man / woman enough to lug it over your shoulder.

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Filed under: Desktops

In the last year or two, I’ve started doing a lot of my monetary transactions via a little site called PayPal. I’m sure that if you’ve used eBay at all, you have yourself a PayPal account. Unfortunately for Mac users, if you use Safari as your primary browser, you’re going to have some issues accessing the site.

If you didn’t know, Safari doesn’t include any anti-phishing technologies, unlike FireFox and IE. PayPal frowns very much upon this, and has decided that they will soon begin blocking access to their site from any browser they deem “unsecure,” which would include even the latest versions of Apple’s browser.

Sure, this sounds like a raw deal for Mac users, but really it’s for your own safety. Wouldn’t you much rather install FireFox than have to put up with someone stealing your PayPal info? Besides, FireFox is an awesome browser.

Source: CrunchGear

by Donald Melanson, posted Apr 18th 2008 at 4:14PM

You don’t have to look very far to find e-book concepts these days, but this so-called Papyrus device from the folks at Greener Grass aims a bit higher than most, with it promising to be nothing short of an inexpensive replacement for students’ textbooks. If the designers have their way, the device would cost less than $100, while still packing an E Ink-based touchscreen (with handwriting recognition, it seems), and a battery that lasts for a full 30 hours — not to mention some sort of networking functionality, as the device is apparently also designed to let teachers and students interact with one another. Not exactly something you can expect to pick up anytime soon, to be sure, but the designers don’t appear to have any presumptions about it actually getting made, with them saying instead that they simply want it to be a “catalyst for discussion about improving the classroom experience,” and that’s certainly hard to argue with.

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Filed under: Handhelds

Let me make this clear from the start, my idea of “roughing it” is when there’s no 24-hour room service. Still, I love this itty bitty camping lantern from Coghlan, which makes camping and outdoorsy accessories.

Weighing less than one ounce with batteries and coming in under two inches, the Micro Lantern features an LED light with a conical reflector which makes it incredibly bright. As it’s designed to clip onto clothes and gear, I commandeered it for a keychain. And it’s not just adorable, it has an emergency strobe feature that will flash for 50 hours. See? It’s very practical, even for us city-dwelling types.

A mere $7.99 at Coghlans.

by Paul Miller, posted Apr 18th 2008 at 2:34PM

You knew this day would come: Intel positioned Atom perfectly to compete with VIA’s low-power offerings, and VIA is trying to stay one step ahead in the low power game with its Isaiah processor. Who will be the winner? Well, we’d say it’s still a little early to call it, but German site Eee PC News did some quick and dirty benchmarks that show Isaiah on top by a decent margin. At this point the numbers are just in “ALU” and “FPU,” but hopefully some real world benchmarks from some retail products can clear this up before long.

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Filed under: Laptops

X-Ploda Roulette
Xploda is the type of game that puts your heart in your mouth, though not in a Hannibal Lechter way. It's a bit like Russian Roulette, except that the bang at the end isn't terminal unless you suffer from a dodgy ticker.

You can have this for ?9.99

Colour Changing Egg
Makes for great mood lighting in the home and excellent entertainment in the dark!

See price