Archive for the “Gadgets” Category
“One for All” URC-8350 universal remote control has a “something different” than other remote controls.
You can control up to 4 different Audio-Video devices but with the dedicated Green Energy Saving button you can even switch off all your AV standby functions at once.
Doing so you can save over 90% of standby power consumption.
- Switch off all your devices from Standby with a single button press
- Ready-to-use energy saving button + On/Off Power Plug
- Universal remote control, controlling up to 4 devices including TV (Plasma LCD, Projector), DVD, Sat/Cable/DVB-T and surround sound AMP
More details:
- Expandable with OneForAll On/Off Power Plugs
- Future Proof Remote – wireless upgrades of any new device code
- Multiple commands by pressing just one macro-key
- Learning function for easy addition of original remote functions
- Uses 2 normal AAA batteries (could be replaced by Eneloop rechargeable ones)
French website GinjFo published a complete test of this remote and demonstrates the financial and environmental impact of such remote.
- 4 tested AV equipments in standy mode 19 hours/day equal, for a year to:
- 42.5 Watts of electrical consumption
- 50.86 US dollar
- 15.62 kg of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide)
- When they are switched off, using the Energy Saver remote control, the results appear like this :
- 0.6 Watt of electrical consumption
- 0.72 US dollar
- 0.22 kg of CO2
So, if 10 millions households connect their AV system through it, it will just save per year
- 419 MegaWatts of electrical consumption
- 501.4 millions USD
- etc…
- One for All and its dealers will get 500 millions of income the 1st year (unit price is about 50 USD).There is indeed a most Eco-Friendly and cheaper solution… Turn all equipments off manually. You all do that already, isn’t it ?
More : Complete Test results on GinjFo (in french), OneforAll.
Tags: co2, consumption, electricity, energy, green, remote, remote control, standby mode, switch
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HTC launched earlier this week in London the "Touch Diamond" the lastest smartphone of their TOUCH series.
The Touch Diamond is a stainless steel frame based of only 11.5mm thick, comes with a 2.8 inch touch-sensitive TFT 640×480 VGA screen. An integrated GPS system as well as a 3.2 megapixel camera and a second VGA CMOS one are also available.
This "iPhone-like" smartphone will be available in Europe and Asia in June 08 for about 770 USD.
Surprisingly, there is apparently no Mini-SD card slot to extend the 4 GB internal storage memory.
Highlights:
- 2.8-inch touch screen, with four times the pixels of most phones.
- Vibrant TouchFLO 3D user interface, responding perfectly to your finger gestures when scrolling through contacts, browsing the web, and launching media… all vividly displayed as photos and artwork powered by the 3D graphics processor.
- HTC Weather – providing a constant view of weather at home and abroad.
- Surf and download at broadband speed with HSDPA internet connectivity.
- 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera for quality stills and video.
- 4GB of internal storage to preserve more photos, music, files and exchanged data than ever before.
- Integrated GPS for use with maps software for a full turn-by-turn satellite navigation experience.
Technical Specifications:
All informations on HTC site
Tags: diamond, gsm, htc, iphone, mobile, network, phone, smartphone, touch, touch diamond, touch screen, touchflo, windows, windows mobile 6
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I haven't review in details all news from the CES 2008 that closed its doors on Thursday but it seems the Global Energy problem contributes to have better ideas regarding the way we can power our IT stuff.
One company, Green Plug, has identified a significant contributor to the high cost of battery-powered consumer electronics products, wasted energy and unnecessary toxic waste. A typical home or office has a dozen or more power transformers that convert between 90V and 254V wall power to device-specific DC power. Every adapter is physically unique and therefore is thrown away every time a device is replaced.
Green Plug comes with a better idea.
Creating a standardize power supply which can be used by all Green PlugTM compliant devices utilize uniform cables and connectors; so, you never have to worry about finding the right adapter for your laptop, DV camera, cell phone or power tool.
Let's hope they will be able to convinced enough partners to have a real impact on the market and we'll have soon all our electronic devices using a single and unique type of power supply.
Tags: 2008, adaptor, art, ATT, blog, cable, camera, ces, electricity, energy, find, fon, Gadgets, global, global power efficiency, green, ia, im, Impact, lan, laptop, nomadcom.net, phone, power, power adaptor, review, supply, web, wp, www
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Since, mid-2006 mobile phones with a built-in 3 MP camera and optical zoon are available on the market and already represent an alternative to low end digital camera. More than 70 models are available today with a 3 to 5 MP resolution. One of the first phone with a "real camera" was the famous one Nokia N93 and its Carl Zeiss Optics.
Samsung is now putting even more pressure on camera makers with the soon release (first on European market) of its G800. A 5 MP digital camera with 3x optical zoom into mobile phone… or is it the opposite?
The specifications are rather attractive:
- Quad bands (900 / 1800 / 1900 / 2100 )
- Data network HSDPA 7.2 Mbps
- 2.4 inches TFT display with 256K colors
- Size 101x52x19mm for 129 gr (25% lighter than the Nokia N93)
- Standby 220 hours, talk time 3.5 hours.
- Memory 160 MB + MicroSD slot
- Document views (Office, PPT, PDF,)
- Email (POP3, IMAP), SMS, MMS,
- Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB 2.0, PCSync, OutlookSync, etc..
- FM Receiver, Java embedded, MP3, etc..
and indeed the built-in camera:
- 5 Mio Pixel
- 2592х1944 pixels
- autofocus
- video recording mode: MPEG4, 3GPP, H.263, H.264
- xenon flash
- 3x optical zoom /4x digital
- 4 shot modes
- 4 quality settings
- brightness adjustment
All other specs are here
The big plus is definitively the 3x optical zoom which makes the difference with other 5 MP phones. The resolution race continues as Samsung (them again) Electro-Mechanics announced on November 15th that 8 MP camera phones may be available by next summer following the successful development of a 10.5 x 11.5 x 9.4mm 8 megapixel CMOS censor.
Will camera makers develop new "point and shoot" camera with built-in phones and multimedia facilities such MP3 player and FM receiver ?
I'm impatient to have one "box" less to carry when traveling…
What will you drop first ? your camera or your phone ?
Tags: 2007, 5 MP, 8 MP, api, ATT, blog, camera, ces, connectivity, development, digital, europe, flash, fon, gap, ia, im, lan, light, map, megapixels, memory, mobile, mobile phone, models, network, nokia, nomadcom.net, PDF, phone, phones, photo, point and shoot, press, release, resolution, samsung, sms, sun, Travel, uk, usb, video, wp, www
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Swiss Post launches new stamps with a built-in two-dimensional mobile tag (kind of barecode) which can be captured using the camera available on most mobile phone using Beetagg reader and connect you to a particular Internet page
New Swiss Post "Beetagged" stamps will promote Swiss Tourism.
Similar codes are widely used in Japan for quite some time and most of modern mobile phones operating systems have all needed capabilities to read these tags.
BeeTaggs are developed by connvision AG, a Zug-based company, can have logos, images or text attached to it and are also readable in very small formats.
Last year, PostBus Switzerland and yellowworld trialled BeeTaggs on signposts and at approximately 100 Postbus stops could be used to access timetables.
Mobile operating systems supported: Java, Palm, WM5, Symbian, Symbian 9.x, UIQ3, Symbian UIQ.
WM6 doesn't seem to be supported yet and WM5 version doesn't run on a WM6 phone.
Nomadcom Beetagg. Try it !
More infos: Swiss Post, Beetagg. Source: Nouvo
Tags: 2007, access, art, ATT, barcode, beetagg, blog, camera, ces, ia, im, internet, japan, lan, launch, LED, mobile, Mobile Communications, mobile phohe, mobile phone, nomadcom.net, phone, phones, post, reader, stamps, swiss, swiss post, switzerland, symbian, tagging, Telecommunications, uk, vision, WM5, WM6, world, wp, www
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76% of 1200 American consumers who participated to Digital Life America – Holiday 2007 Edition survey have included at least one digital lifestyle product on their wish list.
- flat screen high definition TV set – 35% (men 37% – women 33%)
- laptop (windows) – 20% (21% – 19%)
- digital camera – 17% (16% – 18%)
- desktop PC – 14% (13% – 15%)
- GPS navigation unit for the car – 10% (11% – 10%)
- cell phone – 10% (9% – 12%)
- digital video camera – 9% (8% – 11%)
- Nintendo Wii – 9% (8% – 9%)
- Sony PS3 – 7%
- Blu-ray or HD-DVD player – 6%
First Apple product (laptop) is on rank 11 (9 among women) buzz maker iPhone is 15. Survey participants clearly prefers laptop to desktop computers.
Unfortunately the survey doesn't reveal details about the type of cell phone ("simple" ones or smartphone) and I'm surprised to not ear anything about MP3 players nor PDA. Not trendy anymore or everybody already has one ?
What your wish list would be made of ?
source: Solutions Research Group.
Tags: 2007, apple, arc, art, blog, camera, christmas, computer, computers, digital, digital life, im, iphone, lan, laptop, list, nomadcom.net, nyt, pda, phone, screen, search, simple, smartphone, sony, space, survey, trend, video, windows, wishlist, wp, www
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Geek generation ? If you are, ThinkGeek has all what you need. After the Equalizer and Pong t-shirt, among many others, one of their last creation is a t-shirt with a built-in 802.11b/g wireless detector.
When the detector is turned on, the glowing bars located in front if the t-shirt dynamically shows the strength of 802.11 wireless signal around you.
The detector is powered by 3 AAA batteries located in a small pocket sewed under the shirt.
Price tag: 30 US$
Tags: 2007, 802.11, ATT, batteries, blog, detector, geek, im, lan, nomadcom.net, power, t shirt, thinkgeek, wifi, wireless, wp, www
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AirTalkr is another multiple IM client application immediately available in its beta version for Windows, Linux , Mac OSX as well as on Web-based version.
IM supported protocols are MSN, ICQ, GTalk, Yahoo and AIM but AirTalkr also connects you to your YouTube and Flickr accounts. In addition, AirTalkr creator Hu Shunjie comes with an interesting concept called "AirCards". AirCards are profiling cards where you can add of your buddies information such their Twitter and blog updates, their photos on Flickr as well as their profiles on MySpace and Friendster.
AirTalkr is a very light application but requires the installation of Abobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) which enables developers to use Flash, Flex, Ajax and HTML to create rich interface applications.
The AirTalkr version is still beta and some bugs have been reported but I personaly like this very smooth application and really looking to see what will come next (Skype, more social networking plateforms supported, etc..)
It definitively worth a try. Did I mention that AirTalkr is free and totally Ads-Free (Thanks Hu!).
Download AirTalkr here and Abobe AIR here.
Tags: 2007, account, adobe, aim, air, airtalkr, Ajax, blog, card, flash, Flex, Flickr, free, GTalk, HP, Hu Shunjie, ia, icq, im, install, instant messenger, King, lan, LED, light, msn, network, nomadcom.net, pda, photo, skype, social, social networking, space, twit, Twitter, update, web, windows, wp, www, XP, yahoo, youtube
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2 years after Sanyo launched its Eneloop batteries, Duracell announces the introduction, on US market, of nickel metal hydride (NiMH) Pre-Charged Rechargeable batteries.
Designed specifically for use in high-drain gadgets including digital cameras, portable gaming devices and MP3 players, Pre-Charged Rechargeable batteries eliminate the need to charge cells before using them for the first time. In addition, these new batteries retains power for up to 365 days while not in use.
Street price: 13 USD for a pack of 4
Tags: 2007, ATT, batteries, blog, camera, ces, design, digital, duracell, eneloop, Gadgets, im, lan, launch, nickel metal hydride, nimh, nomadcom.net, portable, power, pre charged, rechargeable, sanyo, space, wp, www
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Posted by Cedric in Fun, Gadgets

Look for the error. Found it ?
Available for pre-sale (34 USD) at the Art Lebedev Studio . The ideal geek gift ?
Tags: 2007, art, blog, bush, geek, im, indivisible bit, lan, lebedev studio, Matryoshka, Matryoshkus, nomadcom.net, Russian dolls, space, wp, www
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