Archive for the ‘Peripherals’ Category

I’m not sure what the fascination is with plastering diamonds on everything, but the trend shows no signs of dying down. In the latest bit of news, you can purchase covers, that’s right. Covers, for your iPod earphones, which are encrusted in diamonds. The diamonds are worth $60,000 dollars. If you’re troubled by recent the recent economic crisis and don’t want to fork over quite that much cash, you could always opt to purchase a $4,500 set which is encrusted wit black or white diamonds, or even cheaper, a set covered in Swarvoski crystals for just $110.

The Azentek SmartMirror was a hot topic in August, with only a few units available, many back orders and waiting lists began popping up, along with a few disgruntled customers who were tired of waiting. If you find yourself in the disgruntled customer category, today is your lucky day! Azentek is ramping up production of their GPS mirrors and stated the mirrors will be available at major retailers by the end of the year. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, the $800 rear view mirror crams a 4″ GPS unit alongside its standard sizedrear view mirror. The GPS system doesn’t skimp on features and has hands free Bluetooth calling, a built in speaker, and text to speech functionality. The mirror also has an SD card slot for expansion.

There’s not a room in your house that doesn’t have at least one light bulb in it, unless you’re The Phantom of the Opera, so having light bulbs as a means to carry data seems an extremely intelligent idea. At least, that’s what researches at Boston University’s College of Engineering though, too. A team at the school has been working on low-power LED lights which could utilize optical communication to carry data wirelessly. This is a huge step in making houses across America fully “wired”… wirelessly. Imagine a home where your computer, your phone, hell, even your gaming device could instantly communicate with you as soon as you flip the light switch in your room. Someone call the Jetsons, we’re moving in next door!

As if you needed another reason to constantly check your email. This little device sits neatly on your desktop, cleverly disguised as an envelope. Whenever you receive email, the light inside the notifier will light up, either in green, blue or red. The color depends on what location you’ve received the mail from, for those of you with multiple inboxes, or you can use it to set the volume of your inbox, letting you know when its time to clean out your inbox. The device is priced at $17 and would make a great gift for the email addict you know.

Ergonomic mice aren’t new to the market, in fact, it seems just about every month, there’s a new company releasing a new mouse which is advertised as a great way to relieve the stress in your wrists. The HandshoeMouse by Hippus just might be the real thing. The mouse was developed at two medical universities in Holland, which gives it a solid background. The mouse’s main feature is the ability to place the whole palm of your hand on the mouse, without grasping it. Because of this, the mouse is somewhat tilted, to allow easy access to the buttons and scroll wheel. The HandshoeMouse comes in three sizes which are based on how large your hand is. It also comes in two colors, black and white, and is priced around $166.

Got a ton of cell phones that you still use? We’re talking multiple cell phones from different makers that are all still active? Well if that’s the case, then chances are you’ve been dreaming of this charger. This ugly little brick has ports for 8 different connectors including Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Siemens, and Sony Ericcson. Don’t expect it to be comfortable to carry around either, as it doesn’t come with a case and is quite pokey with all those chargers.

While your cell phone bill may be through the rough, this charger will only run you $18.

Looking for a large yet affordable laptop hard drive? Well if you missed out on the Samsung SpinPoint M6, you’ll be happy to hear that Western Digital has started shipping their own 9.5 mm x 2.5 inch 500GB laptop drive. They’re coming out and bulk and coming out fast under the name WD Scorpio Blue. These bad boys have an 8MB cache, runs through SATA 3Gbps transfer with 12 ms access, and is considered to be one of the quietest 2.5 inch 5,400 rpm hard drives on the market.

The 500GB model will be available shortly for the price of $220. You can currently get the 400GB version for $190.

Apparently, the iPhone and iPod Touch just don’t have enough of a gaming feel to it at least in Belkins eyes. Their newest peripheral, the iControlPad or the JoyPod is meant to make your device of choice into the perfect gaming controller. It would appear from these screenshots that this device actually slips over your iPhone or iPod Touch making it all fit together for a nice controller feeling. Not to sure on the specific of this as the image unfortunately is in Spanish and there is much speculation that this may in fact be a fake, but either way we’ve got a while before we can actually figure out whether it’s legit or not.

Oh Belkin…

Creative has always been well know for their….creativity. So when it comes to cool little devices, we’re never really surprised at just how far they will go to appease the masses. We usually just squeal with glee at how cool the devices are. At this years IFA, Creative unleashed their new X-FI Go! mobile sound card. This little doohickey is quite the enhancement over their old Soundblaster Play! and easily turns any USB 2.0 port into a full functioning soundcard.

You’ll have plenty of features to take advantage of, including a Crystallizer, CMSS-3D, EAX Advanced HD, OpenAL support, and even 1GB of flash storage. What’s nice about this storage is that it even comes loaded with Alchemy, WaveStudio, and a few other apps. Right now, the X-FI Go! is Singapore only for about $56, but we should see it debuting stateside shortly.

It looks like the geniuses over at MIT have done it again. This time, their achievements have come from developing a microbattery. All of our gadgets and toys seem to run off batteries these days, so the talented engineers from MIT have developed a method for both creating and installing these microbatteries. These batteries are small enough to be used with medical sensors and directly on microchips.

While this won’t mean that your battery on the next iPhone will be smaller than you can actually see, it does mean that there will be a lot smaller technologies coming forward (think nano technology) in the coming years do to achievements like this.