Paul Ridden
There's nothing quite like an auction room to bring the past into sharp focus. Where collectors and bargain hunters might once have had to trudge wearily from showroom to showroom for a pre-sale peek, the interweb now makes it possible to have a virtual look at items of interest before making a bid. An online auction later this month offers students of technology the opportunity to snag some bleeding edge gadgetry from what old blokes like me might refer to as the good old days, though many of the hundreds of lots up for sale go back much, much further. Gizmag takes a quick look through the antique innovation window and picks out a few favorites. Read More
If you're a mobile music lover who also happens to be the active or adventurous type, you've probably been cursed with an earbud or two falling out, interrupting your rhythm or breaking your concentration while you try and shove it back in place. Even if your buds stay put, danger can lurk on every street corner and at every curb thanks to the immersive passive isolation resulting from a snug fit. These are issues that users of the ITreq Micro Audio Player shouldn't be troubled with. Whether you're at the gym, riding a bike, skateboarding, or just aggressively gardening, the device should stay in place behind one ear, leaving your other one on alert for potential hazards. Read More
While waiting anxiously for the release of a 5-megapixel camera module might sound a bit crazy, for owners of a Raspberry Pi, it couldn't come soon enough. For those in the UK, the wait is finally over as retailers opened up their virtual doors today and Pi camera boards started flying off the warehouse shelves. Read More
Most popular e-readers available today tend to be based around a 6-inch screen. Though you can read technical manuals, textbooks (with graphics and tables), comic strips or electronic magazines on these devices, the roughly paperback-sized display does tend to feel just a little cramped. The Kno double-screened digital textbook offered hope of bigger display real estate a few years back, but dedicated hardware was abandoned in favor of a multi-device app. Together with E Ink Holdings, Sony has developed a new flexible electronic paper display technology called Mobius, that will make its debut in a new 13.3-inch Reader prototype at EDIX 2013 in Tokyo between May 15 and 17. Read More
If you've ever thought that the rider platform of an electric scooter is just crying out for a solar panel, you're not alone. California renewable energy veterans Mike Donnell and Tony VanMeeteren have spent the last four years working on some PV-panel-packing, adult-sized, emission-free electric scooters called SES, and are now moving toward mass production. Read More
If that great night on the town turns into an after-hours party at a friend's house and you want to show off your Digital Disc Jockey mettle, the odds of you happening to have a Numark iDJ about your person are pretty remote. You may well have an iPhone packing IK Multimedia's DJ Rig app, but what are the chances you've also remembered to bring an iRig MIX? Korea's JD Sound is busy readying its PDJ portable stand-alone DJ system and music production studio for US release, which puts everything you need to get your groove on into one fairly pocket-friendly unit. Read More
Packing powerful processors supported by a healthy amount of system memory and storage, modern smartphones are just like mini computers that can be carried around in your pocket. As a mobile office, however, such devices do have some practical limitations. Even with the relatively large display offered by Samsung's new Galaxy S4, for example, having to use a finger to input text can be a real productivity killer. What's needed is a comfortable physical keyboard and more spacious display real estate. That's precisely what's on offer with the Casetop from Livi Design, a netbook-like LCD panel, keyboard and battery pack combination that uses a smartphone for its computing power. Read More
About this time last year, Samsung announced three new Wi-Fi-packing additions to its NX mirrorless camera range. Since then, smartphone cameras have come on in leaps and bounds – increasing the megapixel count to within spitting distance of dedicated cameras, while also bumping up overall image quality. Rather than square up to the ubiquitous smartphone, like Samsung's Galaxy Camera for instance, the new NX2000 reaches out and taps mobile devices on the shoulder to offer a friendly greeting. Thanks to the inclusion of near field communication (NFC), that quick tap is all that's needed to set up direct wireless communication for instant photo sharing and file backup. Read More
Multi-tone performance pickup specialist AweSome Musical Instruments has unveiled what's claimed to be the first commercially available 3D-printed guitar made in the US. Touted as virtually impossible to break (though the same can't be said for the supplied light gauge strings), the Les Paul-style AWE-3DG also sports a bank of rather interesting pickup selectors that open the door to otherwise hidden coil combinations for up to 76 different analog tones. Read More
