I got into the MP3 player market a little late. I was in high school during the early years of the
digital music revolution, so I couldn't really afford the players of the time. My very first foray
into MP3 hardware was with a very, very poorly made RCA MP3-CD player. I upgraded from that to a
Creative Muvo2 with the microdrive ripped out and a 512MB CompactFlash card installed. I never used
it much, because the interface was clunky and annoying to use.
Recently, Katie at BLAST Outdoors sent Julie one of DropZone Corporation’s new HangTimer extreme sports watches for review. Of course this review required the services of The Gadgeteer’s extreme sports and aberrant behavior specialist – Seth (my son). Seth gravitates towards activities known to cause skin loss, bruises, and the occasional broken bone. In a nutshell – he is nuts.
I don't know about all of you, but the first thing I do after getting seated on a flight is to open the seat back pocket to find the latest issue of the Skymall catalog. I didn't change that habit on my last trip when I went out to San Francisco for MacWorld Expo. One of the more interesting items that I saw in the catalog was the tiny iwave cube portable microwave from icube designs. Coincidently, a few days after returning from the trip, I was contacted asking if I might like to review this mini appliance. Of course I said yes. Let's take a look...
I wish I had one of these last spring when raccoons were digging up my lawn. It's a motion activated lawn sprinkler, for the express purpose of scaring away garden pests such as raccoons, dogs, cats, and other animals. When triggered by its infrared day-or-night motion sensor, it sprays a forceful stream of water at the intruders.
I've seen so many watches lately that record and display all sorts of data that I'd forgotten what a watch is really for: to tell you the time. But how do you make sure your watch has the right time? With Casio's atomic time watch, you don't need to worry about it.
The watch receives radio signals from five atomic clocks across the world, thus ensuring that your watch will tell you the correct time for the next 30 million years. Other features include the usual multiple alarms (4), timer, stopwatch, and solar power!
The HTC Dragon may not be quite the same mythical beast it once was now that the Nexus One has stolen some of its thunder, but it is still an actual device and, according to a recently leaked Dopod roadmap, it's headed for China in the second quarter of this year. Details are otherwise a bit light, but it is apparently an Android device (as expected) and packs a 3.6-inch WVGA display. Joining it over the course of the year are the 3.4-inch, Android-based A6388, the 4.3-inch Huashan (apparently now a Windows Mobile device -- possibly an HD2 successor?), the 3.2-inch Tianshan, and the considerably smaller Songshan phone, both of which are also Android phones, and should be out in either Q3 or Q4. Still no indication of a release for any of them over here, unfortunately, but something's bound to give with that many HTCphones floating about.
Dear Nokia fan clinging on to all hope that the 5230 and Nuron were two separate entities, whereby you'd have even more Espoo devices to look forward to: you're wrong. TmoNews has picked up what's purported to be another internal T-Mobile documentation for the 5230 Nuron. Like the previously-rumored leak, it's said to be going on sale on March 17 with a 3.2-inch touchscreen, on-screen keyboard, and Ovi Store. Oh, and just in case you weren't sure if you fit the target audience, see if you qualify as "connected socializers, 20 to 40 years old, who are new to the touch screen category." That's gotta count for at least a few readers out there.
We'll admit to not being leading the field of study in Best Buy-ology, but here comes a new quiz for us care of a tipster who sent TUAW a screenshot of the inventory screen that shows what looks to be the current MacBook Pro SKU with status: deleted. What that means is no new orders can be made for that unit, at least for that particular store. Sign of impending MBP refresh? Intel certainly had us riled up last month with that Core i5-infused flier, but we won't get fooled again. Don't hold your breath for this one, but if more telltale signs start popping up, we'll be sure let ya know.
Update: Giving credit where due; the image originates from the MacRumors forums.
PC World - We recently stumbled across a hack that allowed the Nokia N900 to run Mac OS X. Now another mod has surfaced, but this time it's all about gaming.
PC Magazine - Mac peripheral maker ZoomMediaPlus is attempting to knock a hole in the Apple "walled garden" approach by turning the connector interface in the iPhone, iPod touch and, soon the iPad into a peripheral storage slot.
If you're a huge space buff, you might not be surprised by anything in this video tour of the International Space Station. But it's still great to just get a simple walkthrough of this incredible project and all its corners.
Anyone else get a bit bit light-headed watching all those twists and turns? [CrunchGear]
Apple's hiring again and this time they're looking for "Performance QA Engineers" in their "iPad Media" department. Based on the description for the job, we might be seeing an increase in iPad camera rumors:
The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines.
Based on the demand for someone to work on video capture frameworks for a device which can't even capture video we could presume that Apple's exploring some future options. As if we didn't already think that. [Apple via MacRumors]
![[logo]](http://the-gadgeteer.com/graphics/feed-logo.gif "The Gadgeteer"){kind=logo}
![[logo]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif "Engadget")
![[logo]](http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/nws/th/main_142c.gif "Yahoo! News")
![[logo]](http://tags.gizmodo.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gizmodo.com.png "Gizmodo")
