hardware - page 24

Our friends over at iFixIt may have been beaten to the punch by the gadget dissectors over at the FCC when it came to tearing down the new iPod Touch and spilling its secrets-stuffed guts onto the table for the whole world to see, but they’ve still got what it takes: their quick teardown of the new iPod Shuffle is now up on their website as an easy-to-follow tutorial.

We say “easy-to-follow.” We don’t mean “easy-to-perform.” A device this small is made up of component parts that are even tinier, and iFixIt says the new iPod Shuffle is incredibly difficult to vivisect, which is bad news for modders and DIYers… especially if you want to replace the new Shuffle’s miniscule 3.7-volt battery, which is soldered right to the logic board. Then again, for $49, if the Apple Store won’t replace your bum battery after a year, you might as well just pick up a new one.

From Vienna comes news of one of the most striking homes (and Mac home offices) I’ve ever seen. Designed by architects Najjar & Najjar, the owner of Villa F is an IT entrepreneur and aficionado of Macs and Lamborghinis.  He wanted a living space that reflected his passions.  The futuristic result is something which wouldn’t be out of place on the Starship Enterprise.

There is a vast open space that connects the entrepreneur’s working space with a lounge area, a bar and a kitchen.  Almost everything inside the Villa F is digitally controlled.  There are Plasma TVs, a huge aquarium with computer generated graphics, LED lighting and sound systems that respond at a click of the mouse. [Born Rich]

The full import of the announcement didn’t exactly sink in at the time, but when Steve Jobs announced last Wednesday that AirTunes was becoming AirPlay, he was really announcing that media-streaming on Apple devices was getting a lot more open. Not only would AirTunes be extended to hardware beyond AirPort Expresses, making every AirPlay-compatible peripheral capable of sucking up tunes across the room, and not only was he opening AirTunes to an expanded gamut of media types including video and photos, but he was also opening the door for iOS devices to stream media directly to other devices, with no iTunes intermediary required.

I have to admit that as someone with three AirPort Expresses, I’m embarrassed that I didn’t realize immediately how cool this was. Thankfully, third-party accessory makers were quicker on the uptake than I was, and iHome has already announced their first AirPlay compatible wireless speaker system. Scant details so far (except for a rechargeable battery) and obviously — since this is just a speaker — it’s humble beginnings. But just you wait. An AirPlay compatible television is coming, mark my words.

[via TUAW]

LaCie’s latest, the MosKeyTo thumb drive — get it? Har. — is a product that manages to pull off the nearly miraculous: it’s not only just 20mm long, or about the same size as the nanoreceiver of some wireless mice, but it’s actually garnered our interest enough to break our oath and yet again hit the keyboard to write something about the most boring species of gadget on earth: the USB storage dongle.

It’s not the specs, which are standard. It’s not the price: 4GB for $17.99, or 8GB for $27.99. It’s not even the drive’s tininess. No, we’re writing about it to call attention to the official product image above, featuring a giant mosquito wildly fornicating with its namesake on the lid of a MacBook Pro.

Congrats on catching our attention, LaCie! Time to give someone in your art department a raise.

There are a lot of iPod docks on the market, but not a lot of them have docking trays big enough to accommodate the iPad without snapping it in half over your knee first… a tact which has some obvious repercussions on the resulting music’s audio quality.

Phillips’ latest dock changes that with a docking tray wide enough to accommodate the iPad’s chunky width. Called the Fidelio, the dock also features Bluetooth so that your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch doesn’t even need to be plugged in to avail itself of a nicer, room-filling speaker.

The Fidelio is also portable, with a battery that allows you to play music up to five hours per charge. Unfortunately, the Fidelio’s price and release date has yet to be announced.

[via, image Slashgear]

Apple’s fastest Mac is the 12-Core Mac Pro, featuring two 2.93 GHz Xeon processors. Configure it with 25GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM, and Apple’s fastest Mac will cost you $8,749.00.

Yowza. That’s an extraordinary amount of money. If you don’t mind dropping an extra $300, though, you might be interested in Macintouch’s guide to building not Apple’s fastest Mac, but the world’s fastest Mac yourself.

Yup, according to Macintouch’s tests, their Hackintoshed monstrosity — a total beast of a machine running two 3.33GHz hexacore Westmere processors overclocked to 4.2GHz each and supplemented with 24GB of DDR3 RAM — melted the Mac Pro’s face off.

Of course, there’s a lot of drawbacks to this approach, including compatibility issues and a much louder system than the Mac Pro, as well as a desktop footprint that makes the Pro look compact. But as of right now, it seems that a Hackintosh is the fastest Mac in the world. God help us.

[via Hardmac]

iPad-slash-Pogoplug users, quit yer whining that your iPad doesn’t print, find an iPad-sans-Pogoplug user and launch into an obnoxious victory dance in their immediate vicinity.

That’s right, Pogoplug has just begun rolling out a firmware update that’ll enable printing from any iDevice (so iPhone/iPt users get to shake a little booty also) to any 2005-or-newer vintage Epson or HP printer. The release says the rollout will stretch out over a week, so be patient.

All-business, pink-hating Pogopluggers and ‘Pluggers with their ‘Plugs way over on the other side of the room from their routers will be happy to hear that the $300 Pogoplug Biz (which ditches the hot pink highlights for stark grey and comes with a whole bunch of enterprise upgrades) and the $30 Wireless Extender (a USB dongle that obviously obviates the need for an ethernet cable connection) ship today. More good news: Current Pogoplug owners get the Wireless Extender for free.

If you want the excellent low-light performance and changeable lenses of an SLR in a form factor closer to the pocketability of a point-and-shoot, Olympus’ PEN series of mirrorless, Micro Four Thirds cameras have always been easy to recommend (See our review: Olympus PEN E-PL1 Camera Is Almost Perfect). Now they’ve expanded an already great camera line with a new model… as well as a couple of new lenses to fit onto it.

The Olympus PEN E-P2 is a black smart looking 12.3 megapixel mirrorless that comes with a matching M.ZUIKO Digital Ed 17mm pancake lens and a matching FL-14 flash. All together, the kit will cost $999.99 when it drops in October… although if you’d rather exchange the flash for a black VF-2 electronic viewfinder, you can opt for that and pay about $80 more.

In addition, Olympus has expanded its lens line-up with a pricy new 75-300MM zoom, which (at 35mm equivalency) Olympus proclaims to be the world’s smallest and lightest 600mm super telephoto lens. It’s priced at $800, but don’t expect spectacular low-light performance, since it is specced for an f-stop range between 4.8-6.7. It will drop in December.

As for the other lens, it’s a far cheaper 40-150MM (35mm equivalent is 80-300mm) affair rated at f4.0-5.6. It will cost just $299 when it is released in November.

Miss the meaty mechanical kerchunk of slapping down your old Macintosh Plus Keyboard? Feel as if the Apple Wireless Keyboard’s soft and barely yielding keys barely convey the shaking gravity of your prose? Instructables has you covered, with an excellent guide on how to convert an old typewriter into a USB keyboard capable of being used with any Mac, bringing back to your computer the mighty hammering of the Underwoods of old.

Just don’t expect the project to be easy: according to Instructables contributor Jack Zylkin, the modification will take anywhere between five to ten hours to complete.

Open source devotees, iPhone users and hedonists unite! News today that low cost, OpenBTS GSM cell phone service is being tested at Burning Man in a true trial-by-fire fashion:

Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that’s revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. Where do you want me to begin?

“We make GSM look like a wireless access point. We make it that simple,” describes one of the project’s three founders, Glenn Edens. [Network World]

The economic and environmental potential of the system is promising, particularly for remote and under-developed areas.

Sony’s attractive new line of speakers might look like some strange hybrid between a thermos and an iPod dock, but there’s no madness behind the weird engineering of the Sony SRS-V500IP… just smart, practical design.

You see, the thermos or travel-mug-like pod you see above is actually a removable speaker, inside of which is Sony’s Circle Sound Stage System, which blasts 16 watts of stereo in a 360 degree bubble. Use it at home and that sound pod sits in a bundled iPod cradle, but if you want to beef up your car’s stereo, you can remove it, hook it up to your in-car power adapter and position it in your vehicle’s drink tray. Cute.

The Sony SRS-V500IP is available now for just $239.99

The iPhone 4’s incredible retina display boasts pixels so small and tightly packed that they are almost indistinguishable to the human eye…. but if a new technology created by University of Michigan researchers ever hits the market, the Retina Display might end up looking as antediluvian as VGA.

Using nano-thin sheets of metal with precisely spaced slits that act as resonators, the team of researchers built a tiny high-definition display with pixels eight times smaller than those on the iPhone 4. These nano-resonating displays are incredibly green-friendly, since they don’t require the chemicals needed to make an LCD; better, they’re far more energy-efficient to boot.

Need proof? The above image of the University of Michigan logo might look blurry, but that’s only because it’s magnified up from its original size, which is just nine microns wide. Six of these logos would fit in the width of a human hair.

If this technology ever hits the market, a fully high-definition 1080p display could be fit in the area of a postage stamp. Don’t be surprised if half-a-decade down the line, a grizzled and hunched Steve Jobs holds aloft the iPhone 9 and introduces the world to their hot new marketing buzz term: Nanoresonators.

Dealing with overheating engines by running cold air over them is fine for old Volkswagen Beetles with almost the horsepower of an electric toothbrush and weird French cars (I know, the word “weird” there is redundant). As engines have become more powerful though, air-cooling has become less attractive — at least, in the automotive world. Computers still lag behind though. Mostly.

Zack Fanning, who handles (surprise) marketing for computer cooling system expert Asetek, asked the outfit’s engineers to mod his Mac Pro with a liquid cooling system. The results are pretty interesting: He’s able to overclock his 2.8 ghz Mac Pro to 3.18 while reducing noise — due to the fan not having to work as hard — by 13 decibels over a strictly air-cooled Mac Pro running at the same speed. Pretty cool.

Want one? While Zack’s is a one-off, lovingly handcrafted custom job, Corsair’s H50 liquid cooling system (actually made for them by Asetek) can be had for about $80; just make sure to check first about compatibility, because the H50’ll only work with later-model Mac Pros.

When we reviewed ID8-Mobile’s sneaky little MoGo Talk XD a month ago, we mentioned that it was only available for the 3G/s, but ID8-Mobile said they had an iPhone 4 version in the works. Turns out they weren’t kidding.

The iPhone 4 MoGo Talk — which hides a thin Bluetooth headset in a sleek case —  is a little lumpier than its predecessor due to the fact that they’ve dropped the problematic flip-up charging port in favor of a port completely housed within the case; on the other hand, the case is still better-looking than a bumper.

At $99, the iPhone 4 MoGo Talk XD is $30 less than the older version; current owners of the older case can upgrade to the iPhone 4 case for $20 through the company’s website.

For those who like to work when they travel – and can afford a chauffeured Mercedes – news today of the iPad Car!  High end tuning shop Brabus has created iBusiness, a mobile office on wheels.

Based on the Mercedes-Benz S600, the Brabus iBusiness four-seater luxury sedan packs in a range of multimedia features, including two iPads in the rear seats with Bluetooth keyboards and mouse, an ultra-small Mac minicomputer under the rear shelf and a 64GB Apple iPod Touch. The German super tuners have fitted the Mercedes S600 iBusiness with a 15.2-inch TFT display with 16:9 aspect ratio and USB 2.0 ports in the rear compartment to hook up peripherals to the Mac. You can connect to the internet via UMTS and HSDPA. The two iPads control the complete BRABUS multimedia system and the car’s standard S-Class COMAND system with all functions such as radio, navigation system and telephone. [Born Rich]

With this setup, I don’t know that I’d want to get out of the car when I arrived at my destination.

Apple’s long history of design consolidation is obvious at every level, from the no-button Magic Mouse and Trackpad, to the adoption of MiniDisplayPort, to the iPhone’s iconic home button.

But Cupertino doesn’t want to stop there: a new patent filing, Apple is now exploring ways to combine the headphone jack with the microphone on their iPhone and iPod Touch.

The patent says that “”in addition to using housing real estate, sound input apertures and electrical connectors introduce openings in the housing and breach the barrier that protects components inside the housing.”

In other words, drop a hole from an iPhone and you have less risk of dust and moisture making its way in. The advantages don’t seem to lie just in hardware reliability either: apparently, the two-in-one design would also enhance voice quality through a noise-cancelling technology Apple’s calling “audio beamforming.”

We’d say this one’s a lock: it’s not a pie-in-the-sky patent, but a natural extension of Apple’s predilection for the utmost in simplicity.

[via Gizmodo]

If the main reason you’re hoping for Apple to announce the new, iOS-driven iTV is for the promise of some app gaming on your 50-inch plasma, you don’t have to bank on Cupertino. Accessory maker Griffin has a new dock in the works that allows you to hook your iPhone or iPod Touch up to your television and then use it to play multiplayer games with up to four players at once.

Don’t expect it to work with just any game: the Griffin PartyDock will only work with select Griffin games, which have yet to be announced and are of unknown quality, with no word yet if Griffin will open the PartyDock up to third-parties.

Download a supported game, though, and you can play an iOS game multiplayer without having to awkwardly hot seat it by passing your iPhone around. Instead, four included remotes allow you to control the action from across the room.

Obviously, a lot of this device’s niche could be filled by a $99 iTV, but if that doesn’t materialize next month — or doesn’t support apps — the Griffin PartyDock might be the only solution in town to treat your iOS device like a game console.

Another story today of a dramatic, satisfying – yet sadly illegal – way to end one’s career: go out for some brews after a hard day at work, then return with a gun and shoot the company server.

A Salt Lake City mortgage company employee allegedly got drunk, opened fired on his firm’s computer server with a .45-caliber automatic, and then told police someone had stolen his gun and caused the damage.

I’ve often had this urge, but not owning a firearm nor wishing to go to jail, subtler methods of sabotage have had to suffice.

I-O Data’s new portable hard drive has the standard specs for its class, maxing out at USB 2.0 and 500GB of storage, but it’s the HDPN-U500/V’s video functionality that intrigues: just plug it into a Sanyo Xacti, JVC Everio or Sony Handcam camcorder and it’ll suck in all the video with no bridge computer required.

The big advantage here is to video bugs who find themselves filling up their camcorder’s storage out in the field. If they buy I-O Data’s drive, they can leave the MacBook at home and if they fill up their camera, easily slurp out the footage and keep shooting within seconds.

It’s hard to say, but since it hooks up to your camera via USB, it could theoretically be used with an iPhone too. I’d be interested to know if the drive can offload iPhone 4 videos if you connect it with an Apple Connector Cable.

The seems to be Japan only right now, so if you want one, you’ll need to find an import shop and lay down ¥14,600 (or about $170) for the drive. That’s actually very expensive for a 500GB drive, but if you’re constantly running out of drive space on your camcorder, it may very well be worth it.

[via Gadget Lab]

Apple’s iOS devices clearly aren’t built with styluses in mind, and Apple institutionally loathes them but some of us feel a more nuanced and precise control when using styluses, particularly when it comes to digital drawing.

There’s a lot of companies who are willing to sell you a little plastic pointing stick for your iPad, if you don’t just go the cheap route and use a SlimJim instead, but one problem with these styluses is that they obscure what’s underneath the stylus, making it hard to see what letter you’re tapping on the onscreen keyboard or even if you’ve completed that circle.

We’d prefer someone figure out how to make a fine-tipped stylus work with an iPad, but until then, the DAGi Pen is a neat solution: it makes the tip of the stylus transparent and suspends a red dot in the middle so you always know where the stylus contact area is in relation to your iPhone’s display.

Pretty clever, and cheap to boot: each DAGi Pen costs just $20.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flzYD_kfXiw&feature=player_embedded

The first of the would-be, Android-toting iPad killers is about to arrive in the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It’s set to debut at next week’s IFA conference in Berlin, but as you can see, Samsung’s already teasing the device.

We’ve got to admit: the rapid fire staccato of intercut images in the promotional video actually does get our pulse pounding a bit… well, as much as our pulse ever pounds for an Apple knock-off product, that is.

As far as specs, nothing’s official except it’s 7-inch form factor yet, but the Galaxy Tab is tagged to feature an AMOLED display (distressingly rumored to run at a resolution of only 800 x 480, the same resolution as the four-inch Galaxy S smartphone) and run Android 2.2. As you can see, the Tab’s shape is different than the iPad too, allowing for one-handed holding.

The one obvious advantage the Tab has over the iPad is video-calling support, thanks to a forward facing camera… but that camera’s also rumored to be pretty chintzy, only supporting a 320×240 resolution. There’s also a rear mounted 3.1MP camera, according to scuttlebutt.

Can the Galaxy Tab trump the iPad? We doubt it: spec-wise, the Tab is looking underwhelming, even in the areas where it bests the iPad. Still, can’t fault an electronics manufacturer for trying.

Pioneer’s latest iPod speaker dock is the KODO XW-NAW1, which sounds more like a jive-speaking droid’s designation than a product to be interested in, but look beyond the engineer branding and what you will find is a gorgeously svelte wafer of a dock that doesn’t sacrifice big sound for footprint.

Perhaps designed to be wall mounted, the KODO XW-NAW1 is only 83mm thick, but still contains a couple of thirty watt speakers. The buttons are as touch-sensitive as your iPhone, and while the ports on the KODO are few, there is a component video output for hooking up to a TV.

It’s a gorgeous dock that would elegantly fit any entertainment center decor, but one big problem is the small width of the docking bay, meaning iPad owners can’t avail themselves of the KODO’s docking abilities without snapping their tablet in half and cramming it in a crunch of aluminum and glass into the bay.

It’ll also be pretty expensive when it drops in September, costing around $300.

Read more at Pioneer

If your Time Capsule or Airport just won’t blanket your entire house with sweet, invisible WiFi, Western Digital has a new, easy to use solution to extend your network to the basement, the attic or the back yard: the Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit.

The kit includes two Livewire network adapter boxes, each with four ethernet ports. All you do is plug one Livewire adapter into your router or Time Capsule as well as a wall socket. Then plug the other adapter into a wall socket in any room in your house where you don’t have networking. As long as those two outlets are on the same power grid, which most newer homes are, your internet connection will be shot through your electrical socket to the Livewire in the other room.

A practical use for this would be to extend your network to a room that is too far away to get WiFi. For example, if you wanted to set your basement up as an office, you could just set the Livewire adapters up and plug your iMac into the second one. Easy networking, without extending your WiFi network with repeaters or wiring up the room for Ethernet.

According to Western Digital, the Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit can provide data transfer speeds of up to 200 megabits per second, which should, theoretically, be enough to stream even 1080p video. At $140 for a pair of adapters, this is a solution to consider if you’ve got any dead spots in your home network you’re feeling an itch to fill.

Not that we ever expect elegant, fully-realized products from China’s plucky constabulary of Apple knock-off shops, but apparently, it takes a lot more to make an iPad killer than just aping the design and slapping Android on it.

Reviewed by Giz-China, the ePad seems to be an excellent example of what you get if you try to save yourself a couple of hundred bucks when you buy yourself a tablet.

It looks like an iPad superficially, but where the iPad has an aluminum unibody casing, the ePad has a cheap plastic back that’s easy to break. Unlike the iPad, though, at least the ePad has you covered with all your missing features, including a USB port, HDMI port, a microSD card reader and even a front-facing camera.

The display is where things really start falling apart, though. According to Giz-China, the ePad’s display looks “dull and washed out” and is “terrible” compared to the iPad.

As for performance, sure, the ePad boasts a 1GHz ARM A8 CPU… but apparently, even that isn’t enough to get this baby running right. The ePad is apparently plagued by choppy video and app launching so slow, the reviewer compares it to Commodore 64.

Bizarrely, after that litany of complaints, Giz-China ultimately declared the ePad a better device than the iPad in their head-to-head faceoff… only to contradict themselves a sentence later. I’ll have a snootful of whatever you guys are having, it seems like a real loosener.

[via Gadget Lab]

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Fantastic. This LED-embedded jacket might just be the glue gun and rhinestone vest of the iPhone generation.

Created by Art and Program after collaboration between Yutaka Takahashi and Junpei Wada, the Vanilla Jacket is simple to use. Just shrug it on on and plug your iPhone or iPod Touch into it. Not only will the Vanilla display a graphic visualizer of the beats you are jamming to on the 8 x 8 LED matrix embedded into the back of the jacket, but you can even use the coat as a turn signal: just flick your wrist to let people behind you know if you’re turning left or right. You can even use the jacket to pump out a Twitter message.

The Vanilla jacket series will supposedly be available for purchase later this year at an undisclosed price, but what I love most about this video is how it seems to be a callback to Apple’s own “dancing silhouettes” iPod ads. I could easily see Apple outfitting a bunch of dancers in Vanilla jackets and starting out the September iPod event with a choreographed, LED equalized dance.

[via Gizmodo]