Asus putting out another e-reader with the DR-950

Not content to put out one e-reader with the DR-570,Asus is also planning on giving the world the DR-950.

The Asus DR-950 has a 9-inch screen with 1,024 x 768 resolution, but not in color. Instead, you’ve got 16 levels of gray. It does have a web-browser that works in portrait or landscape modes, a virtual keyboard, as well as handwriting input. Other features include text-to-speech, an RSS reader, a dictionary, real-time translation, 3.5 mm headphone jack, and stereo speakers. It should have 4GB of internal memory and SD Card expasion, as well as support for PDF, TXT, Audible, and MP3 formats.

I’m guessing that we will be seeing this DR-950 sometime this year, but like the DR-570, there is no word on price.

Monster Cable unveils Miles Davis headphones

Monster cable is offering a new version of headphones with the Miles Davis Tribute set, which will include a deluxe copy of his famous album, Kind of Blue. Of course, this isn’t the first time that Monster has released a headphone based on a music artist, as they have editions with Dr. Dre and Lady Gaga. The Miles Davis Tribute set is available for pre-order on the Monster Cable site, at a price of $399.95.

Livescribe updates the Pulse Digital Pen

Livescribe Pulse is quite a digital pen, and the company has recently announced that the memory will be updated from 2GB to 4GB. It will also have support for Macs, and Windows 7. In addition to this, it plans on expanding where customers can find the pens in stores like Best Buy, Apple stores, and even Staples.

The 4GB pulse will sell for about $199, and the 2GB version will be for $169.

Viper SmartStart lets you start your automobile from your iPhone

(Insert music from Apple iPhone Commercial here) What if you want to start your car, turn on the heat in your car, unlock the doors, unlock the trunk, or turn the alarm on or off?

There’s an app for that. In this case, it is the Viper SmartStart. The app is free, but you have to install the hardware module in the car yourself. However, you can do all the aforementioned things from anywhere as this module is connected to your iPhone via the cellular network.

Okay, now my car keys are on my iPhone. This is going to be the standard of things to come, right?

Das Keyboard Ultimate S makes its way to retail

Those looking for a keyboard with the most satisfying tactile response not to mention an equally as satisfying clicky noise, are looking for the Das Keyboard Ultimate S.

This keyboard features everything described above in addition to an external PS/2 adapter and 2 USB ports. However, with such an uber name comes a completely blank keyboard so only the most elite of typist need a apply.

Want one? It’s available now for $129.

Motorola H17 headset

H17 is the codename of the new headset produced by Motorola, which will be available for purchase in the near future, for an unknown price so far. This is the smallest and lightest headset in the Motorola product line, and its style makes it look pretty good.

Thanks to the RapidConnect function, users can easily answer a call by flipping the switch – just that. The H17 is able to inform users when the battery is low, and then the sound is mute. Additionally, the CrystalTalk function makes the talks clearer then ever before, thanks to the noice-cancellation technology. The battery system seems pretty good, taking in consideration that charging the device for 15 minutes is the same as 2 hours of battery life.

Check more details at the official Motorola website.

Sound ID 400 Bluetooth Headset

Bluetooth Handsets have been known to be a great ally, especially for people who want hands-free and quality sound for calls made to and from their mobile handset.And while you see a lot of them in the market, features are perhaps what will separate the good ones from the lackadaisical ones. Hence, if you are looking for a reliable one, the Sound ID400.Bluetooth Headset is one that comes with three striking features for your consideration.

1. PersonalSound. Three listening modes customized according do your preference for clarity.


2. Environmental Friendly. The feature that allows users to hear equally out of both ears in between calls.


3. CompanionLink Remote Microphone. A small and optional clip-on device that can be worn and then placed near a sound source to pick up audio for a richer sound experience. People who want to add this accessory can get it for $79.99 by the fourth quarter of this year.

The Sound ID400 will be available by the fourth quarter of this year and will retail for $129.99. It will come with a Universal AC charger (100-240 VAC), USB charging cable, three sizes of RealComfort EarLoops and an Ear Hook for alternative over-the-ear wearing options.

Insignia Little Buddy GPS Tracker

For those who have little ones who like to roam, then you might consider getting the Little Buddy from Insignia. The web interface can position the tracker with a map for custom “safety zones”. It will be available at Best Buy (Insignia’s parent company) shortly, but no word on cost or possible monthly fee that usually comes with these tracking services.

Else Institution: A phone that wasn’t, could be

Take a gander at the Else Institution, it isn’t really isn’t out there because it was abandoned in development years ago. It uses Access’ Linux Platform v3.0 OS, which was totally ignored by Palm. The Institution has a 3.47 inch 480×854 with OMAP 3430 processor, internal memory of 16GB, A-GPS, a five megapixel camera, plus 3.5mm headphone jack. Apparently, “worldwide operator evaluations are currently underway”. Could we be seeing this phone anytime soon?

Elecom releases a slew of new card readers

Everyone needs a card reader in this day and age, and Elecom has just released a whole bunch of them. The MR-C20 has a magnetic backing that allows it to stick to any metal area. It comes in lots of nice colors like black, white, fluorescent green, and hot pink for about $27.

Zgrip iPhone Pro for steady iPhone 3GS shots

For those that like to shoot video with the iPhone 3GS, this professional video grip could be what you’re looking for. This video stabilizer could be a “steadycam” for the iPhone, as there is far too much side movement when shooting on an iPhone 3GS in trying to hold it steady. The Zgrip iPhone Pro Z-ZG-IP is available at the Zaguto store for $295.00.

GlideTV Navigator remote for Mac, PC, or home theater

I’m not certain why I haven’t covered this device before, but the Glide TV Navigator is a very interesting remote. You can use it to control a PC, Mac, or home theater. It has a tiny touchpad with scrolling areas and eight buttons like directional arrows, backspace, and escape. It also has some media buttons and an on-screen keyboard. You should be able to get it for about $150.

QuickReader iPhone app

Considering all the e-readers that are hitting the market these days, I’m sure that there are many iPhone apps fit for this purpose. However, QuickReader is an eBook reader app designed to help eager readers “scan pages faster and remember more information”.

Users can set it from 100 to 2,000 words per minute, and customize it with different colors, spacing, backgrounds, fonts, and so on. QuickReader comes with some books, including the classic Black Beauty. QuickReader lite is available for free, and QuickReader pro is for $4.99.

USB TV Card Player brings SDHC card footage to your TV

The USB TV Card Player might be the easiest way to get footage from an SDHC card to your television. Of course, you have to use composite connectors, but it will support formats like DIVX, WMA, MP3, and JPEGs. It also comes with a nice IR remote.

So if you are looking for a way to get some files on your TV, feel free to head over to the Giz Fever website and lay down $53.99.

Thecus N0204 is world’s smallest NAS

Once again, another product has been slapped with the “world’s smallest” label again. In this case, it is an NAS called the Thecus N0204.

One of the reasons for its small size is because it uses 2.5 inch hard drives, and it uses HDD or SSD, with a max. capacity of 1TB. It is compatible with both Mac and PC networks and with Wi-Fi or Gigabit LAN via Ethernet connection.

You should be able to purchase it for about $150, but you will have to provide your own drives.

King Jim Pomera DM20 mobile keyboard and screen

King Jim, a Japanese stationery maker, has recently announced the Pomera DM20, it is an ultra-compact handheld device designed for one purpose: word processing. That’s right, this device has no e-mail, no web, no SMS, but for a writer like me, it is a dream. After all, it is a place with a fully functioning foldable keyboard and 5 inch TFT VGA screen. I can even save my work with a mircoSD (2GB maximum) and SDHC slot (16GB maximum).

Well, you should be able to get this for about $380.

Tuna Alarm Clock

I’m sure you are probably asking why would someone put an alarm clock in a can of tuna. Sounds like a set up for a bad joke, whose punchline would be: “just for the halibut”.

Then I realized that this would not be a clock that would go off, and you would just hit it. No, it would be a clock that you would have to think and get all concentrating on in order to open it, and by the time you opened the can and hit the “off” button, you would be awake. Especially if you cut yourself on the sharp edge.

Anyway, you can get it here for about $7.95.

Is Asus brewing a gaming laptop?

Even in the holiday season, the rumormill keeps spinning. Here’s a juicy bit about ASUS, who may or may not be making a new gaming laptop.

So what else do we suspect? It should have Intel’s dual-core Core i5-430M processor, an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730, and DDR3 memory. It also has 500GB hard drives, 4GB of RAM, and a 17.3 inch screen with 1,600 x 900 resolution. So what is the suspected price? Try $1,435. We’ll see if this rumor becomes fact.

Unitek SATA to USB adapter uses USB 3.0

Unitek has come out with a device that will probably be appreciated in the future, but I’m not certain how big the market is for it now.

This adapter can connect to a SATA hard drive, and then connect to any PC with a USB. Oh, it is USB 3.0. That’s not a problem, is it? Sure, USB 3.0 is not a standard yet, but when it does, it will mean a faster connection time, right? Anyway, you can get this device now for about $48.

Insdream SX601 e-book reader

Today i wanted to share an e-book reader with you guys. This particular one is from Insdream, and it is called the SX601.

You may notice an uncanny resemblance to a certain reader from Amazon, but this one has a 6-inch DSTN panel that is supposedly better than e-ink. It doesn’t have a wireless connection, but it can do TXT, HTML, PDF, EPUB, and PDB files. The battery life is supposedly good for about two weeks of regular reading.

We have no word on availability or price.

Netflix coming to devices from all sides

If one thing is certain at CES, is that Netflix has been very busy striking deals with a lot of companies. Not only has Sony confirmed Netflix for all its Blu-ray players, now Funai, Sanyo, Sharp, LG and Panasonic have all confirmed that they’re integrating Netflix not just into their Blu-ray players, but HDTVs as well. It’s seems that it’ll be very difficult to buy a new device in 2010 and not have Netflix in it. Which pretty much rocks, as you might expect.

Intel announces a bunch of new CPUs at CES

Intel has announced a load of new processors at this year’s CES, most of them for the mobile market. The Core i3 and i5, all manufactured on 32nm process, have integrated graphics and memory controller, and while overall performance has increased by an average of 20% (depending on the application), power consumption is slightly lower, which is always a good thing.

Aliph Jawbone Icon comes with fancy MyTalk feature

Aliph’s Jawbone Icon has just been announced, and it has some very interesting features that set it apart from the other Bluetooth headsets out there.

For example, the Icon has a feature called MyTalk which is “an operating system on a chip”. This allows an iPhone user to see the Icon’s battery life from the iPhone screen itself. MyTalk also allows you to plug the Icon in your computer and customize it with many apps.

You should be able to get the Icon for about $99.99 in the custom colors that you see above. They are called (clockwise from top left) The Thinker, The Rogue, The Hero, The Ace, The Catch, and The Bombshell.

Samsung Trill Cell Phone Review–Lots of Control

The Samsung Trill is a strange sort of cell phone in that all the complaints I have about it are small ones, but all the good things I have to say about it are also small.  This doesn’t exactly reconcile itself well in my head, so it wasn’t easy to talk about this one.

The Samsung Trill is a slider style phone with a full QWERTY keyboard, a dedicated music button, one gig of internal memory, a 1.3 megapixel camera, an alphanumeric keypad on the front cover, a microSD slot that’ll get you an extra thirty two gig of memory,B and Bang & Olufsen ICEpower to improve audio quality.

I found the menu on this one to be a bit too small to easily read and understand, and I was less than impressed by the trackpad controls.  But there are plenty of nice features here, and the audio quality is indeed pretty darn good.

Thus, the Samsung Trill is a solid phone overall–though there are much better out there, there are also vastly worse.

The Good

Plenty of control options

Plenty of features

The Bad

Less than reliable trackpad controls

Small menus

Score: 7 / 10

HP’s three new portable computers

HP has recently presented a bunch of product that I must have missed while I was at CES 2010.

The first is the TouchSmart TM2 convertible tablet with a SU7300 1.3GHz ULV processor, 3GB of DDR3 memory, and a 12-inch multitouch display. You can also get the DV6T, which has a 2.4 GHz Core i5-520M, an NVidea GeForce GT 320M, 1GB of onboard memory. As for the DV7T, it has a 17.3 inch display for 1600 x 900 resolution.

You can get the Touchsmart TM2 for about $950 (the price is a little higher if you want the SU9600 CPU and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4550 discrete graphics). The DV6T is about $929, and the DV7T runs about $999.

Motorola MOTOROI: First Android phone for the South Korean market

Motorola has recently announced the first Android-powered phone for the South Korean market with the MOTOROI.

The MOTOROI has a 3.7 inch WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera, 720p video capture, HDMI out, as well as support for T-DMB television tuning. It also has a home charging dock, and it is going to be available from SK Telecom starting next month.

iRiver K1 Smart HD

The company iRiver has put out a lot of interesting mobile devices in the past, and they have just announced the K1 Smart HD. The K1 Smart HD is a Portable Media Player with a 3.5 inch screen, and supports many formats including AVI, WMV, MP4, TP, MPG, ASF, and even MKV. It has a battery life for 18 hours audio and 6 hours worth of video.

The K1 Smart HD is only going to be available in Korea, for now. A basic 8GB model costs about $204. A 16GB with a DMB mobile television tuner costs about $266, and $310 will get you WiFi, DMB, and the 16GB.

Anyone want a 22-inch iMac touchscreen?

In a recent report by the Chinese Commercial Times, it was revealed that Apple is planning on launching a 22-inch iMac display.

This display is built by Quanta, and is a full touchscreen. This is about all we know about this screen for now, but Apple is planning on having a huge press conference on January 27th. Of course, it’s already rumored that Apple will officially announce the iSlate there. Do they want to squeeze in an official announcement for this 22-inch touchscreen as well?

LG GW620 to be released in the UK

You know how some phones have a delayed launch? I suppose this is the case for the LG GW620, or InTouch Max.

Images of the GW620 showed up in Septemer, and it is now going to be released in the United Kingdom through Virgin Mobile and T-Mobile. It has Android 1.5 and a touchscreen, and British citizens can sign up for the GW620 for about $32.50 a month.