Computer Gadgets New

Motor Tunes has the noble intention to rocks your scooter, motorcycle, quad and you with its new audio system which is compatible with just about any ipod, mp3 player, or audio device - as long as they come with a headphone jack.

Scooterists and bikers have been crying out for a portable stereo system. Most motor scooters are too small for a built-in audio system. And many bikers don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars for one either. And even the do-it- yourself market is expensive, time-consuming and usually requires you to take apart your vehicle. Now you can musically enhance your motoring experience whether it’s your daily commute, your cruise in the country or your jaunt around town. And the best part is that you can instantly detach it and take your tunes with you once you’ve arrived at your destination.

Motor Tunes will be offering its audio system for just $69.99 as an introductory price, so don’t expect to pay the same amount once the promotional period is over! This system is tiny enough to fit just about anywhere on your vehicle, be it on the handle, steering console, dash, handlebar or body.

Product Page via Press Release

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Samsung’s MV100 Tower and MZ100 Slim Tower are desktops that have a heart for the environment, running on Intel’s G43 chipset and a choice between a GeForce 9600GT 512MB or 9500GS 512MB graphics cards. Despite those average specifications (you won’t be able to run Crysis at full blast, but it ought to make for a decent gaming rig still), power consumption is kept to a minimum, sipping just 1W in stand-by mode and 60W in power saving mode - presumably when you’re playing Solitaire.

Valeo will take the opportunity to roll out its new smart key at the Paris Motor Show.

The smart key provides a genuine interface between driver and car, allowing people to send information to their vehicle over a considerable distance (several hundred meters). The key’s mini screen displays information such as whether the doors are locked and the alarm is activated, tire pressure and fuel tank level. The key can be used to preprogram the seat position or radio station, to pre-ventilate the cabin, and to exchange navigation destinations downloaded from a computer. Information can also be exchanged between keys.

Sounds pretty interesting, and no longer will you have to walk away from your car only to think to yourself, “Have I locked my car?”

Press Release

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Sony’s PRS-700 Digital Book Reader has just been announced, and some of the improvements over its predecessor include a touch screen display for a more intuitive reading experience. No larger than a paperback book, the PRS-700 tips the scales at just 10 ounces and would make for a great classroom tool in order to relieve our young from carrying tons of tomes around school and campus. The 6″ display lets you flip pages simply by sliding your finger across, although multi-touch function is not supported. You can also highlight important segments of text with the included stylus, while notes can be composed on the spot thanks to the virtual keyboard. In order to cater to as many people as possible, the PRS-700 comes with five pre-set text sizes for you to peruse your e-book. Extremely readable even under direct sunlight, the PRS-700 even has a built-in LED reading light just in case ambient light isn’t enough. The PRS-700 will be able to last for up to 7,500 page flips before requiring a recharge. It will hit the market sometime next month for $400.

FROM APPLETELL - While most sites which offer online services are rushing to get into the iPhone hype, the web’s top photo sharing site, Flickr, doesn’t want to join the party yet with a native iPhone app of its own. Instead, Flickr is enhancing its Flickr mobile site to make it more iphone-friendly.… MORE »

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The LG BD300 Blu-ray player is the very first blu-ray player to also have access to Netflix’s online Watch Now library of streaming movies and TV shows. The LG BD300 works in a very similar way to the existing standalone Roku Netflix Player. Allowing you to load up the queue on your Netflix account and pair the LG BD300 together, and start watching these movies or TV shows via your broadband connection.

Netflix subscribers will have instant playback access to over 12,000 movies and TV episodes for no additional charge. This unique feature of the LG BD300 means not only will you have great quality blu-ray playback, but also instant access to a massive virtual DVD collection. Using the LG BD300’s remote, users can browse, select and rate movies, and also pause, rewind and fast forward video streams.

Specification information is still a little scarce on the blu-ray side of the LG BD300, but we do know it’s going to support the latest blu-ray Profile 2.0, which is great to see, so it will support interactive BD-Live features, and access online content. The LG BD300 also upconverts DVDs to Full HD 1080p to get the very best out of your existing collection.

Recent price sightings of the LG BD300 are showing prices of just $349, thats $50-100 cheaper than first anticipated. Expect to see the LG BD300 avaliable from October 10th.

Update: We have just recevied the official spec sheet, which provdes some more light.  The HDMI 1.3 output will support LG’s SimpLink Connectivity, 24p, Deep Color and x.v.Color. Audio wise we are seeing Dolby® Digital True HD, DTS-HD Advanced Digital output, Linear PCM output, and 7.1-channel audio output.

When researchers at Hewlett Packard chanced upon a locked, previously unnoticed door, they kicked it open and found a weak, almost dead iPAQ wheezing on the floor. Acting quickly, they hooked it up to life support (via a serial cable!) and desperately tried to resuscitate the poor neglected creature. The only thing possible was a complete brain transplant.

Opening up the almost forgotten device, the engineers decided that, while they were in there, they might as well add a few upgrades. In went Windows Mobile 6.1, and a touch screen was hastily grafted onto its face. The iPAQ’s heart fluttered and settled on a regular beat — the phone now much smarter than when it was forgotten all those years ago. It lit up.

The engineers jumped back, but their shock quickly turned to joy. “It’s alive” they shouted. The noise attracted a cadaverous, grey denizen from the nearby marketing department, dragging a small bandwagon behind him. “This,” he announced, “will be adequate for the European market.” He tossed the small, living body onto his trolley, rolling it towards its certain doom.

H-P Plans to Unveil Smart Phone [Wall Street Journal]

A long while ago there was the brick maker that turned your stacks of newspaper into little bricks to make starting a fire much easier.  It was condensed newspaper so it didn’t just burn all up immediately, it burned a little slower but was still easy to light.  Well now there is this device which rolls the newspapers for you and I have to admit I’m a little torn.  These are more meant to be used as logs, which is nice because that means no more trees need to be cut down.  It would be especially great for anyone who saved a lot of newspapers and didn’t really burn a fire that much.

Maybe they’d light a fire for the occasionally chilly night and that’s it.  Now if you were to actually heat your house off of these, I think it would become a lot more complex. Mostly because it’s going to take several pieces of newspaper to make one of those logs.  Now one nice thing is that you might be able to cut costs on buying wood, which anyone that heats their house by burning wood usually has had to do at least once.  Yes, perhaps you could roll up your own newspapers, but I question if by hand you could get it as tightly wound as with this little device.  It’s at a cheap price ($33.97) so if nothing else you could at least give it a try.

Source: bbgadgets

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A few days ago, our friends over at Appletell reported on a possible increase in royalty rates that could spell out a problem for iTunes, and possibly other digital music stores.  A meeting took place on Thursday, and royalties were set on digital downloads and ringtones for the first time ever.  The good news for those who buy songs and albums online: prices probably won’t be going up any time soon, at least not because of this.  The Copyright Royalty Board set the royalty rate for songs on albums and songs downloaded online at 9.1 cents, or the same rate it was.  This rate will remain into effect into 2012.

The interesting rates announced were actually those of master tones.  That rate is a comparatively astounding 24 cents.  Yeah, you read that right, 24 cents. 

Apparently before this rate, all the rates were negotiated between copyright holders and the people who wanted to use them.  If those prices were anything like the rate now, I can see why almost every single gets a ringtone for it.  If 100 people buy a ringtone, that’s $24 in the pocket of the copyright holder, compared to $9.10 for 100 songs downloaded.  If there’s any money to be made in music aside from performances, I would imagine it be getting a ton of people to buy ringtones of your songs.

It is possible that the move might be due to Apple’s statement that it would severely impact the fate of the iTunes Music Store if the rates increased to 15 cents that publishers requested.  The reason why doesn’t really make that much of a difference.  The important part here is that consumers can buy their songs at the same prices they’ve been getting them from.  As the New York Times article points out, it might not make up for the losses of piracy, but it’s doubtful that those losses will ever be made up for given the state of the Internet at the moment.

Read [New York Times]

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Sony Ericsson is working on its new automatic zoom feature that will probably make an appearance in its - yes, wait for it, 12 megapixel cell phone that will be released sometime next year. This improvement will see the zoom functionality improve in addition to shutter an autofocus speeds, most probably in its line of Cyber Shot handsets. What does the automatic zooming feature constitute anyways? Well, it follows the handset movement, allowing you to zoom in by moving the camera away from your body, while moving it back will let the image zoom out.