hardware - page 26

For the green-conscious looking for big sound on the go, Logitech has just unveiled it S715i Speaker Dock, a custom-tuned portable speaker dock that comes with an eight-hour rechargeable battery to save on your AA cost.

Although it’s larger than some luggable speaker dock solutions, the S715i offers big sound to boot, thanks to eight custom-designed drivers that separate and enrich specific sound frequencies, with each channel getting a half-inch tweeter, a 3-inch midrange driver and dual 2-inch passive radiators.

The S715i also comes with a wireless remote, allowing you to control your music, turn down the volume or put your playlist on shuffle even across the room.

The S715i works with any device supporting Apple’s Universal Dock Connector, short of the iPad, and will both play and charge from the built-in battery. If for some reason you got made the sucker by buying a non-Apple MP3 player, or just have an older iPod or iPad, you can connect them too, thanks to a standard 3.5mm auxiliary input.

The Logitech S715i goes on sale today, and costs €179. It will ship this month.

While it’s not too hard to imagine a luxury accessory company coming up with an iPod dock similar to this NeverNeverLand fever dream of one of Yanko Design’s Lost Boy designers, no effort has been made on Yanko’s part to explain just how that iPod Touch would hover in mid-air. Pixy dust, perhaps.

All that Yanko will venture to say is that “it streams music, connects to your iPod and computer and daisy chains with other units should you want to expand the system.” It also defies gravity, which is a first in consumer electronics: I hope the designer’s got a patent to back that up.

Buy a case or a dock at an Apple store emblazoned with the “Made for iPod” seal of official Cupertino approval, and you put a twenty percent commission directly into Apple’s pockets.

Needless to say, Apple’s just as protective of that revenue stream as some shadier third-party accessory makers are of trying to weasel their way out of paying it. Now there’s a showdown coming: Apple is taking a number of these more scurrilous and skinflint accessory makers to court, saying that the products they make “are of inferior quality and reliability, raising significant concerns over compatibility with and damage to Apple’s products.”

Apple’s suit names Accstation, Boxware Corporation, Crazyondigital, Eforcity Corporation, Everydaysource, Itrimming, and United Integral, and might expand to include twenty other companies.

Of course, this isn’t the only front where Apple is waging this particular crusade: they also frequently change their “Made for iPod” specifications, rendering old accessories obsolete with every new product or new firmware release.

In total, Apple’s out for blood… but something tells me that no matter how far they take this, there’s little they can do to squeeze that blood from the stone of all third-party accessory makers, especially the ones originating from Chinese companies and Taiwanese gadget sweatshops.

The iPhone and iPod Touch would make great universal remotes, except for their sad lack of built-in infrared functionality. There’s more than a few third-parties who will add the functionality to your iOS device for a price, but these usually involve bulky cases or easy-to-lose dongles.

That’s why I like GEAR4’s solution so much. Called the Unity Remote, it’s an infrared hub that talks to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad via Bluetooth through a free to download app. You place it anywhere, and when you send it a command from your device, it uses five infrared emitters to blast out the appropriate signals to any home theater device within its 360 degree line of site.

Very cool. It will be available in October, and it looks like it’ll sell for $99.

It only makes sense that the company who brought us the first mouse would try to re-invent the way desktop computers are used. Apple is attempting to bring multi-touch to the masses with its new Magic Trackpad. While this might seem like just a trackpad, this could be a sneak peek on how Apple plans to implement iOS onto OS X. Regardless of their intentions, this is the most exciting input device since the Magic Mouse. Read the rest after the break.

In the wake of the flood of Apple toys launched earlier this week, we missed the launch yesterday of the The $500 HDC-SDX1 by Panasonic, which they’re calling the world’s lightest 1080i HD camcorder.

Besides a dry weight of 185 grams — about the same weight as the first iPod — the camcorder can be attached to a Mac and used as a webcam (albeit an expensive one). And like the much-less expensive HM-TA1 we mentioned yesterday, the SDX1 supports Apple’s iFrame format introduced last October.

Other stuff worth noting includes a 35.8mm wide-angle lens, 23x zoom and a new optical-electrical hybrid image-stabilization system.

If you type a lot on your iPhone and haven’t upgraded to iOS4,  BTstack available on Cydia is worth checking out.

The iPhone’s on-screen keyboard and auto-correction are great, but if you write long missives or are used to hammering out complex messages on a keyboard, you’ve probably wanted to use an external keyboard to get your point across at one time or another.

This is where BTstack keyboard comes in: it’s a simple paid application that lets you hook up most external Bluetooth HID keyboards to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Keep in mind that it doesn’t support more sophisticated commands for your mobile opus (selection, copy/paste, etc.) but it works like a charm for straight typing. Here’s Cult of Mac’s quick guide to get you started.

Amid all the new product news on Tuesday Apple quietly shipped a driver update titled: Magic Trackpad and Multi-Touch Update 1.0. I discovered the 78.6MB update last night via Software Update on my Macbook Pro and promptly installed it.

I highly recommend this update for most recent Macbook and Macbook Pro notebooks since it adds support of the new $69 Multi-Touch Trackpad as well as adding gestures for inertial scrolling and three-finger dragging. The three-fingered gesture is my favorite since it allows me to quickly drag windows around.

A complete list of notebooks that support the new gestures can be found in this Apple support document https://support.apple.com/kb/ht4254.

Also Tuesday, Apple released updates for Windows that add support for the Magic Trackpad hardware. A 6.62MB update is available for 32-bit versions of Windows and another for the 64-bit versions of Windows is 3.98MB. It works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 as well as Macs running the operating system via Boot Camp.

Panasonic has just announced their newest camcorder, the HM-TA1, a high-definition pocket cam fully compatible with the iFrame standard.

Available in black, red, gray and purple, Panasonic camcorder is compact, weighing less than a quarter of a pound. The HM-TA1’s software is streamlined for social networking, making it easy to upload videos to YouTube or Facebook, while also boasting electric image stabilization and a 4x digital zoom.

Other features of the HM-TA1 include support for SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards, a 2-inch LCD and an integrated USB port. If you want one, the HM-TA1 will be available in August for $169.95.

Although Apple’s new 27-Inch LED Display is a wonderful addition to their product line-up, finally bringing the 27-inch iMac’s gorgeous 2560×1440 display to other Macs, it has come at a cost: Apple has discontinued the 24- and 30-inch display.

That’s disappointing: the 30-incher, in particular, is a gorgeous display, boasting a few more vertical pixels than the new 27-incher. The good news is that if you want Apple’s biggest display, you still have an opportunity to buy it: Apple will continue to sell the 24- and 30-inch Cinema Displays until their stock runs out.

We overlooked it in yesterday’s gluttony of new Apple products, but Cupertino’s quietest new product might, in many ways, be its most interesting: a battery charger.

The battery charger costs $29.99, and is remarkably green friendly: it has the lowest vampire rating in its class, intelligently shutting off power when batteries are full, and the six batteries that ship with the device itself are specced to last ten years.

It’s a strangely practical and unflashy device for Apple to release, even though Apple’s trademark design elements are infused into the device to the core. It makes sense that Apple would release something like this, though, as more and more of its peripherals go wireless.

What may be most interesting to me about the charger, though, is that it’s the first Apple product in recent memory that was launched to everyone’s complete surprise. No one seems to have had the slightest inkling that Apple was working on this.

I’ve got to admit: even though my job is to follow rumors and sift through patent filings, it’s just really nice to be surprised. That, in and of itself, is enough to lay down $30.

Now shipping for the Mac, the Warpia Easy Dock promises to divorce your MacBook from the myriad cables usually deployed at your working station.

Simply slap the Warpia wireless dongle into your Mac and it’ll wirelessly connect you to a keyboard and mouse. Better, it’ll also bridge you to your external speakers and even an external monitor, as long as it ranges between fifteen and twenty one inches and maxes out at a resolution of 1440 x 1040. In fact, the wireless monitor latency is good enough to stream 720p HD video from your MacBook to an external monitor.

Interested? You can purchase the Warpia Easy Dock online for just online. About the only thing it won’t do wirelessly is the power.

Harking back to a time when Lost‘s mysteries had not been explained away with the MacGuffin of a stupid magic light, the original Dharma Initiative Apple II Plus computer used in the Pearl Station to release electromagnetic radiation every 108 minutes way back in Season Two is soon to go on sale.

If you’re interested in picking up this bit of Apple-centric television history, it’ll be auctioned off on August 21st. If you win, don’t worry about typing in the numbers: like everything in Lost, failure to follow the rules set down by the show’s creators will ultimately have no consequence whatsoever.

Samsung isn’t the first smartphone maker to try to capitalize on the iPhone 4 antenna issues, but they are the only one who stand to directly benefit from Apple’s latest handset’s success.

That’s what makes a recent campaign by Samsung USA so curious. They have begun giving away free Samsung Galaxy S Series smartphones to Brit’s complaining about their iPhone 4 on Twitter.

What’s so odd here is that Samsung makes an estimated $2 billion a year supplying components to Apple for sale in the iPhone. In fact, as 9to5Mac notes, they make $50 for every 16GB iPhone sold, and $75 on every 32GB iPhone sold.

In other words, Samsung’s playing the strange game of competing against itself: stressing the iPhone 4 antenna issue in order to get some free publicity for its own series of handsets, even while profiting directly from every iPhone 4 sold. It’s hard to tell whether or not this is win-win or lose-lose.

Your average digicam already takes care of almost every step of the photographic process for you. From selecting an ISO, to autofocus, to opening the aperture, to adjusting the shutter sped, today’s digicam is truly an idiot-proof affair… providing said idiot is trying to take pictures of it, as opposed to, say, eating it.

Unfortunately, while the hardware is streamlined enough that any swollen-tongued moron can use it, photographic composition itself is still very much thwartable by the dumb and untrained.

Enter the prototypical Nadia digicam, which eschews an LCD live view display for a simple read-out gauging a photograph’s composition against its own programmed aesthetic beliefs in percentage form.

Inside, there’s a Nokia N73 cellphone, communicating with a Mac via Bluetooth, which is in turn running an “aesthetic inference engine” linked to Acquine. Unfortunately, Acquine’s aesthetic taste seems pretty questionable: Goatse.cx (Wikipedia link, work safe) scored an astonishing 67.5%, for example, while a photo of the Nadia itself scores a paltry 32.5%.

Still, the theory’s sound. After all, digicams already do everything short of telling you if your shot is good, and they already boast every other software feature under the sun in the ongoing quest for brand differentiation. Why stop there?

[via Gadget Lab]

Newton Peripherals carved out a niche in the gadget-universe, guided by the simple principle that the best gadget is the one you take with you — because that’s the one you’ll use. They created the MoGo Mouse, a mouse-remote hybrid that tucks away into a laptop’s pc-card slot, then followed it with the MoGo Talk: an ultra-slim Bluetooth headset that resides in — and actually forms part of — a case which attaches to the back of the iPhone 3G/s.

But while the design concept is brilliant, engineering-wise, the Talk wasn’t quite ready for prime-time when originally released; complaints surfaced that the headset was difficult to eject from the case, and more alarmingly, that the case’s pop-up charging port was fragile and often broke, removing the only method available for charging the headset.

ID8-Mobile has since snapped up Newton Peripherals, addressed the Talk’s problems, made a few other minor improvements to the case (while leaving the headset unchanged) and re-released it as the MoGo Talk XD. So did they get it right?

While the iPhone and iPad are incredibly useful devices for the road warrior or mobile worker aiming to live a digital lifestyle unburdened of dead tree flesh, their inability to interface directly with the likes of scanners can make getting a digital copy of a commonly-used document onto your device a little convoluted.

Doxie’s button-cute, 10.9-ounce scanner gets around this quite nicely by interacting with iTunes. Slot in a document, push a button and Doxie will scan the page at 600 dots-per-inch, convert it into a PDF an plug it right into iTunes, ready to be read on any iOS device with the latest version of iBooks.

It’s a neat little road scanner, small enough to fit into any gear bag. You can buy the Doxie now for just $129 directly from the official website.

If you’re tempted to pick up a new iMac sometime soon, you might just want to wait: according to Apple Insider, new iMacs may well be imminent.

According to their sources, Apple is informing distributors not to expect any further stock of the entry level, 21.5-inch, 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac, while advising other retailers to sell off their existing iMac models.

Such moves generally tip a hardware refresh. In this case, we’ll probably just see a speedbump, except for the entry-level iMacs, which boast last-generation Intel Core 2 Duo chips instead of Intel’s quad-core i5 and i7 CPUs. The most obvious assumption, then, is that the low-range iMacs will get Intel’s low-end quad-core processor, the Core i3.

If true, this rumor’s worth getting excited about if you’re looking for a new iMac. Let’s just hope that the update brings something beefier than just an updated processor to the table. USB 3.0 support would be very nice indeed, Apple.

If you’re interested in maximizing your iTuneage, Onkyo’s less-than-memorably named CS-545UK micro hi-f doesn’t just boast excellent sound quality, bass control and treble in a compact form factor… it also boasts a built-in dock capable of piping tunes from any iDevice north of the Shuffle into your living room.

Otherwise, we’re looking at a pretty high range micro hi-fi, including two 50 watt speakers, a DAB/FM tuner with RDS with 30 presets each, alarm clock functionality and support for CDs, Auxiliary and even USB.

The CS-545UK isn”t exactly a cheap piece of kit at £349, but if you’re looking for something beefier than your standard iHome dock, Onkyo’s latest is a room-filling piece of kit. It’ll be available from September.

Samsung have just announced two new mid-range compact digicams with a novel twist: a screen embedded in the front to assist with your subjects’ posing, activated with a simple tap.

Called the ST100 and ST600, both cameras feature 14MP sensors, ISO levels up to 3200 (you’ll be lucky to get acceptable images at a fourth of that) and come with KREUZNACH lenses featuring optical and digital image stabilization, as well as five degrees of optical zoom.

Those lenses are the only thing that really distinguish the ST100 from the ST600: the 27mm ST600 has a wider-angle lens than the 35mm ST100, and is also a bit more sensitive to light thanks to the ST600’s f4.9 aperture, compared to the ST100’s f6.3.

Both the Samsung ST600 and ST100 will be available in September and are, of course, fully Mac-compatible. Expect the ST600 to cost $349.99, while the ST100 will cost just $20 less.

The Pogoplug is a great little gadget that connects up to four hard drives to the Internet. It’s very handy for serving up files, music and movies to anyone, anywhere. We reviewed it very favorably.

Now there’s about to be a business version, the Pogoplug Biz, which adds a bunch of features for small and medium business (SMB) users. It’s like Dropbox, except the data is not on some other company’s servers. The Pogoplug Biz is available for pre-order for $299 and includes lifetime Pogoplug service.

In early 2009, Apple loudly announced support for the hardware interface concept — a fusion between third party hardware and apps created specifically to communicate with that hardware. Unfortunately, no one came to the party, and our initial enthusiasm faded.

But it may be time to get excited again, especially if outfits like Wilmington, North Carolina-based New Potato has anything to say about it. They’ve even trademarked a name for their new gadgets — they’re calling them “appcessories.”

The AirStash is a $100 USB card reader with a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot. It is used to stream media to other devices, which means broadcasting movies, music, and video to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and other gadgets with limited amounts of memory.

If only it worked.

“Big” changes rumored for Apple’s approach to customer service at the retail level are bound to impress legions of the company’s newest consumers while raising the enmity of long-time customers and customer service employees alike.

New guidelines for handling on-site service requests and repair jobs at Apple’s retail stores are coming down the pike, according to a report Wednesday, as well as to communiques rumored to have recently hit Apple’s internal Retail News Network.

The gist of the company line is that walk-in customer service issues will soon be addressed in tandem with those presented by customers already holding scheduled Genius Bar appointments, and that as many repairs as can be done so will be queued for overnight turnaround — all without the hiring of additional staff to meet what is clearly growing retail traffic and demand for service interactions.

Not only will retail staff be expected to possess Genius-level understanding of the product line, they will also exhibit model habits of efficiency and productivity, according to the company’s plan.

Looking for a new NAS that will play nice with your iTunes collection? Seagate has just announced the BlackArmor NAS 400 that promises to do just that.

The BlackArmor NAS 400 comes without storage bays, so you’ll have to plug your own drives into the four available storage bays, but it supports RAID 0/1/5/10, as well as JBOD configurations. The BlackArmor 400 also comes with a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB ports and ten licenses for Windows backup software.

Other than that, the usual features of a NAS are all here, including encryption support and robust security settings for data protection. The 400 is, as mentioned, also iTunes and DLNA server capable.

Don’t expect the 400 to be cheap though: without drive, the BlackArmor NAS 400 will cost you $399.99.