Gadgets

1677 articles on Gadgets

• HP's WebOS Tablet Plays Solid Hand Against a Stacked Deck
  When the chips are down and the cards have been dealt, do you go big or go home? With the debut of its TouchPad tablet, HP's answer is clear: "We're all in, baby."
  06.29.11

• GeekDad Music Review: Marc With a C Exposes the Truth in Fidelity
  "It's a ten song story about a guy named Brian, a girl named Jenny and a squid named... Squiddy." That was the description of the latest release from Orlando, FL based Marc With a C. The album is called "Motherf--kers be Bulls--ttin'." It's a strangely obscene title for an album from an independent artist who is ...
  06.29.11

• Wakemate Wristband Monitors Your Sleep, Wakes You Refreshed
  Wakemate promises to bring you around from the land of dreams into an alert, awakened state every single morning, without a klaxon or bacon cooker in sight. It's wristband that monitors your movements throughout the night and, when you get close to your pre-set optimum waking time, it waits for the shallowest part of your sleep ...
  06.29.11

• GeekDad HipTrax #75 (Plus a Nerdapalooza Giveaway!)
  With the event itself just around the corner, Ken and I couldn't resist the opportunity to chat up the Nerdapalooza team. Herein we discuss this year's amazing artist lineup, the ever-changing nature of the Nerdapalooza festival and GeekDad's proud sponsorship of this year's iteration. We also play some songs: "That Boy Could Dance" by Insane Ian An auto-tuned ...
  06.29.11

• Pedal-Powered School Bus Cuts Kids' Calories
  In Berlin, Germany, you can regularly see toddlers being loaded into trolleys, four or more to a cart, and dragged by long-suffering teachers from school to -- well, to where I don't know, as I would always try to avoid the brats. But these kiddie convoys would go a lot easier if the Germans would ...
  06.29.11

• 9 Things Parents Should Know About Transformers: Dark of the Moon
  1. What's it about? Robots in disguise. The Autobots are fully integrated into American society when a discovery is made in Russia that leads to a secret buried on the surface of the moon -- a secret from planet Cybertron's past that could have turned the tide in the war against the Decepticons. Now it's ...
  06.29.11

• Cassettes Return for an Encore
  Cassettes are about to be cool again. Indeed, upstart labels like Crash Symbols, Volar, and Bathetic are putting out cassette-only releases.
  06.28.11

• Andy Rubin: 500,000 Android Activations Daily
  According to Google's Android boss Andy Rubin, half a million new Android devices are being activated daily. Not only that, the the numbers are growing by over four percent every week. Those numbers are frankly astonishing. Back in January, Apple announced (in a roundabout way) over 360,000 daily iOS activations, and at that time Google was ...
  06.28.11

• Fring for iPad 2 With Four-Way Video Calls
  Fring, the cross-platform mobile VoIP app, has issued an update that brings native four-way video-calling to the iPad, before Skype has even released an iPad app of any kind. The app, which is also available for Android and even in Nokia's OVI store, offers video and audio chat over both Wi-Fi and 3G (unlike FaceTime, which ...
  06.28.11

• Geek Music Review: Level Up With The Bossfights
  Every "brand" of music has a culmination. An apex that forms after years of toiling away in a genre; basically the whole "cream rising to the top" theory. There is an evolution in music that sometimes takes years to form, or sometimes it's much quicker. For example, I'm from the school of thought that believes ...
  06.28.11

• Auto-tune the N00bs with the Paper Jamz Pro Microphone
  A scant four years ago, music titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band were a dominant force in gaming. And while musicians the world over derided the games and their players for somehow cheapening the sacred rite of the guitar solo, they managed to teach an entire generation of gamers that music could (and likely ...
  06.28.11

• Apple Releases Thunderbolt Cable. Now All We Need Are Thunderbolt Devices
  Up until today, owners of Thunderbolt-equipped Macs were pretty much left to dream of the super-fast port's potential. The only useful thing you could do with the Mini DisplayPort shaped hole was to plug in the same Mini DisplayPort monitor cable you plugged into your old Mac. Thunderbolt has been pretty boring. Now, at last, you ...
  06.28.11

• Exclusive Peek: Cervélo¿s New Bike for the Tour de France
  Cervélo, which for the past decade has made some of the most coveted race bikes in cycling, is launching a new model for the Tour de France. And we have the exclusive, including the first test ride of any media outlet on the planet. Check back tomorrow for all the details and cool behind-the-scenes photos. ...
  06.28.11

• Two iPhones in September? Don't Hold Your Breath
  Should we expect to see two new iPhones in September? Although it's an interesting possibility, it doesn't seem very likely.
  06.27.11

• Tacky Glowing Valve Caps Look Cheap, Are Cheap
  Here's a case where tacky novelty can actually result in something that keeps you safe and also makes you look cool. The Flash Tire Wheel Valve Cap Lights pretty much sum up their function in the name: they are little LED lamps that replace your bike valve dust caps. The little battery-powered lights screw onto a ...
  06.27.11

• App Review: Wolfram Physics Course Assistant
  I am not normally an app review guy. That just isn't my thing. However, this one seems important enough to review. The app is from Wolfram - you know, the makers of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha (which I like quite a bit - I mean Alpha, not Mathematica). The app is for the iPhone ...
  06.27.11

• Opinion: Apple iCloud Won¿t Stream Music Because of AT&T; and Verizon
  You can¿t use Apple iCloud yet. When you can, which should be this fall, you¿ll notice something really peculiar: Unlike other music lockers, iCloud can¿t stream music to you over the internet or a cellular connection. Instead, it downloads the files to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, or iTunes-enabled computer, ...
  06.26.11

• First 4G Android Tablet With Netflix Launches on Outdated OS
  It's a big day of firsts for Sprint. The carrier launched its first Android tablet on Friday compatible with the new 4G "Wi-Max" network. The device is also the first Android tablet out there capable of running Netflix. Unfortunately, despite being first in line for 4G and Netflix, Sprint's HTC Evo View tablet ships with the ...
  06.24.11

• Voltaic Spark Case Powers Tablets With the Sun
  Solar-powered laptop chargers always seemed a little mis-matched. Using a trickle of Sun-power to juice a thirsty computer is a little like running your big-screen TV from a trunk full of AAA cells. But tablets, which spend much longer away from power outlets, are perfect for solar power. And the Spark Tablet Case is just the ...
  06.24.11

• Hulu Plus Hits Android, One Handful of Devices at a Time
  Finally, Hulu Plus is available on Android smartphones. Six of them, to be exact. The paid subscription service of the popular online TV site is accessible to only a handful of Android phones, according to a company blog post published Wednesday evening. "We know that a lot of people want [TV] content on their Android smartphones," wrote ...
  06.23.11

• Samsung Phone's Mammoth Screen Is Made for Multimedia
  Is a giant, 4.5-inch screen enough to differentiate the Infuse 4G from Android's numerous oversize offerings? For the most part, yes.
  06.23.11

• How Bad Could It Be? The $100 Arnova 7 Tablet
  You know how the only non-iPod MP3 players that people buy are those $10 pieces of junk in dime stores, or by the checkout in cheap supermarkets? I have a feeling that the tablet market is going the same way. With all the major players struggling to match the iPad's aggressively low price, it may be ...
  06.23.11

• iPhone Gun Accessory for Augmented Reality Shooting
  Slot your iPhone into this toy gun and you can blast away at aliens that only you can see, overlaid on top of the scene ahead of you thanks to the magic of augmented reality. The AppBlaster is a £20 ($32) plastic gun with an iPhone case. Load up the (free) companion game, called Apptoyz Alien ...
  06.23.11

• Roll Through the Ages: Civilization-Building in a Nutshell
  Overview: Rome wasn't built in a day, but you can build your own little civilization in less than an hour in Roll Through the Ages. Granted, this is only a Bronze Age civilization ¿ I imagine things like governments take a little longer to create. Roll Through the Ages is a sort of "little brother" ...
  06.23.11

• Bike Takeout Basket Carries Beer, Burritos
  If you live in Portland, you do everything on your bike. You take the kids to school. You do the weekly shop. You even bike down to the gas station to fill up a gas can and bring it home to juice your car. And of course you go to the liquor store to pick ...
  06.23.11

• Rumor: Amazon Gunning for a Tablet Release This Fall
  It looks like we could be getting an Amazon-branded tablet sooner rather than later, based on the latest reports on the retail giant's plans. According to DigiTimes, Amazon will launch its tablet PC models by August or September of this year. The company hopes to push four million units by the end of the 2011 holiday ...
  06.22.11

• Rumor Repeat: iPhone 5 Lands September With Faster A5 Chip
  Apple plans to launch a new iPhone in September that brings the handset up to speed with the iPad 2 tablet, according to reports. The fifth-generation iPhone will include the faster A5 processor that debuted in the iPad 2 in April as well as an 8-megapixel camera, according to Bloomberg, who cites "two people familiar with ...
  06.22.11