Best Gadgets News

by Nilay Patel, posted May 15th 2008 at 8:02PM It’s been a controversial decision, but it looks like the OLPC XO has completed its transition from revolutionary education project to just another tiny Windows laptop with a useless keyboard — albeit one with a pleasantly whimsical design. Yep, it’s official: Microsoft and OLPC just put out a joint press release saying that XP-loaded XOs will be available starting in August or September, with some countries to get the machines as soon as next month. Users will get all the regular functionality of XP — it’s basically the same build as on the Eee and other ultraportables — but Microsoft’s spent over a year developing specialized drivers for the XO’s various features like e-book mode, the writing pad, and camera. (Read the full post about ‘OLPC XO officially gets Windows XP, children of the world to be assimilated’…)

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Remember the rumor back in February that Google was buying Plaxo for $200 million? Well, for the most part, it turned out to be a trumor.  However, instead of Google making the purchase, it turns out that Comcast is doing the buying. The cable company plans to utilize Plaxo to deliver upcoming social-networking features currently in the works for their TV, Internet, and phone service. Plaxo will be used to bridge all three Comcast services together, linking devices such as TVs, DVRs, and wireless devices. The terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, but the two companies have already been working together in developing SmartZone, an online portal available to millions of Comcast broadband and phone customers that provides easy access to several communications tools (e.g., email and voicemail)—all in one place. (Read the full post about ‘Comcast to acquire Plaxo’…)

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by Nilay Patel, posted May 15th 2008 at 9:57PM We’ve had a little love affair going on with storage vendor Mtron ever since we saw that “battleship” SSD RAID array, and it looks like the company is after our hearts once again, this time with the Pro 7500 series of SSDs, which it says are the fastest around. That’s really only half-true — while the 120MB/s write speed is definitely the fastest we’ve seen, the 130MB/s read speed is the same those Greenhouse DH-SSDGD drives we just saw a couple days ago. (Read the full post about ‘Mtron says its Pro 7500 is the fastest SSD around’…)

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The multifunctional solar-powered lounge tableMay 16, 2008 Solar-powered gadgets become very popular, useful and handy. The SOLo Lounge table is the most elegant and comfortable of them. It is made out of stainless steel and tempered glass for the table top. It was designed to store the sun power in order to charge your devices. It works in the following way: the tempered glass panels feature silicon-based solar cells that turn the sun’s energy into 73 kilowatt hours of green power per year. The device is powerful enough to charge your mobile phone 6,800 times or your notebook 168 times. It also features USB sockets, a car-style 12V socket and even a standard 3-pin mains plug. (Read the full post about ‘The multifunctional solar-powered lounge table’…)

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I love having all of my music and video files stored away on my computer, rather than messing with discs and such. When you have the file on a hard drive, you can copy it, move it and play it whenever you want without much hassle. Of course it isn’t always the easiest of tasks to get your video files to play on your TV without a computer sitting right next to it. This is why Digital Cowboy created this HDD Media Player Kit. Ally you need to do is plunk down your 2.5” hard drive which is loaded with videos, and it will put them up on your big screen TV. It features HDMI/Coaxial/Optical/Composite outputs, which means you’ll be able to use it with just about any TV. (Read the full post about ‘Play movies from your 2.5-inch drive with this media dock’…)

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