Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Lenovo ThinkPad X300 is slimming hot


I’ve always wanted to buy slim laptops. Sure the Sony and Toshiba notebooks that came out before the cool Apple Macbook Air was a bit hard on the pocket but its eye catching when you bring them out at your local Starbucks. Now the lighty Macbook Air has a rival in the new Lenovo ThinkPad X300.
Businessweek has a good behind-the-scenes look at Lenovo’s 20 month journey to build the perfect slim laptop that comes out after the Macbook Air 9 Feb shipping date.
The price range for this piece of art is about $2,700 to $3,000, and it will be featured at the upcoming Beijing Olympics 2008, where Lenovo is to be one of the major sponsors. The official launch for this hotness is slated for February 26th.

Hanging printer


It's quite an obvious fact that desk space is of great importance. Hardly someone likes when there are odds and ends on the table. So for those people who try to keep their desk space clean and tidy designers create objects with small footprints. Such a device has been recently invented by Korean designers (Jin Hee Kim, Hyung Il Kim & Woo Seok Park).Their new gadget represents quite an original hanging printer that can help you a lot in saving your space. The significant part of its components is underneath the desk. So the only parts that are located on the desk are paper feed and print head. Giving concept has an embedded LCD to indicate status. Moreover gadget has 2 USB ports giving an opportunity to connect different devices to it. Another advantage of this printer consists in the fact that it has modern aesthetic design being a great solution for today's cluttered desktops. As regards the functionality and price of this gadget no information is available. In sum it should be mentioned that hanging printer can be considered as a very unusual and useful design. Moreover taking into consideration its distinctive feature I think that after some time it will probably be widely adopted. But now the only thing we can do is to look forward to its appearance on the market.

Inflatable mouse


The amount of portable devices is so huge that sometimes it seems like there is already nothing that can be made smaller. Yet creative designers think that even portable devices can become much smaller. What about you? Have you ever thought that a mouse can be even more portable? An absolutely new mouse design has been recently offered. This gadget that is named Jelly Click takes mouse portability to the extreme. All the electronic circuitry lives on a small flexible board. The body itself is just soft plastic. When the concept is inflated it looks like a usual mouse. But you can easily let the air out and roll the gadget up. So, whenever you need your mouse, just inflate, attach the USB cable and enjoy the usage. It's quite an understandable fact that such a structure has some important advantages. First of all it would be almost impossible to do any damages to such a device because it's very light. Another advantage consists in the fact that due to the used material this mouse will be water resistant. So you can use it even in the extreme conditions. To my mind this gadget represents a successful attempt of combining usefulness, portability, solidity and originality. However taking into consideration the fact that everybody is accustomed to using usual mouse it would probably be, at least at the beginning, strange to use this gadget.

A tiny projector for cell phones


Although we've heard a lot about the development of compact projectors that enable transmitting images or videos to any surface, there is still nothing of that kind. Yet, even now many companies say that they are about to produce these devices. One of such reports has been recently made by 3M Corporation. According to the given information this company designed a tiny projector, which can be integrated into the cell phones and transmit an image of VGA-quality. This gadget represents a very small projector that has about 1,3cm in width. But developers are sure that the diminutiveness of this device will not have an impact on its quality. Thus, given concept will be able to ensure VGA-quality of the image that can be considered as quite a high achievement in this domain. Moreover it is said that the diagonal of the image transmitted by this projector will reach 40 inches or even more. As Mike Kali, executive vice-president of 3M Corporation, declared their "project has finally reached compactness, efficiency, reliability and image quality that make it possible to speak about the appearance of a new competitive product". So, at least now there is no possibility to reveal positive and negative features of this gadget and the only thing we can do is to hope that all the characteristics that were mentioned above are true. Of course, it would be great if some cell phone producers started to produce their devices integrated with such a useful concept, but it's not the fact yet.

Nowadays the diversity of cell phones is so huge that it becomes more and more difficult to invent something unique and original. Despite of this many companies still succeed in doing so. Hitachi novelty - W61H - is quite a good evidence for this.Given gadget represents the clamshell that is the first in the world to come with a 2.7 inch e-ink display. Because of this it has been already nicknamed 'Silhouette screen'. Users can choose from 95 patterns of the screen, unfortunately the display is not robust enough to show text messages or email. Coming to the customers the phone has everything you would expect from a Japanese phone: a super sharp 2.7 inch 240×400 pixel display with Hitachi's Woo technology used in LCD TV's, 100MB of internal memory, Micro SD card slot, Felica for making wireless payments and EZ Nabi Walk or personal GPS to navigate through the streets. The W61H has a tuner for watching digital TV on the move with support for recording along with an EPG (Electronic programming guide). Despite the fact that there is no information about its price yet, it's said that the phone will be available in three colors: green, white and black in Japanese markets by March. Beyond doubt the design of this cell phone is really great. Moreover its characteristics can meet the requirements of any technophile. As concerns the distinctive feature of W61H I would say that it's pretty original, yet, sometimes it can be unremarkable.

Monday, February 18, 2008

The Best New Gadget You'll Never Hear Of

Jupiter analysts Michael Gartenberg and David Card go Abbott and Costello over a new portable media player called the Ibiza. Michael likes it, David doesn't, Michael explains why David's wrong, David replies, etc. Question: Did you know that there was a new media player out there called the Ibiza? We didn't, and we write about this stuff every day. From whence did this stealth device emerge?Hint: Don't bother Googling the gadget's name, unless you want to read about Spanish nightclubs. Turns out Ibiza is made by Chinese appliance maker Haier, and it's been designed specifically to work with RealNetworks' (RNWK) Rhapsody service. So it's not only a stealth product, but one tethered to a niche service. Need we point out that this is not going to knock off Apple's (AAPL) iPod line anytime soon?Most of the reviews of the Haier, by the way, are respectful -- the big step forward here is that the device provides a wireless sync to Rhapsody's subscription service, which should theoretically give users unlimited music access. But unless this thing gets out of the gadget press ghetto, those users are going to remain pretty theoretical.