Hasta La Gadget!

If half your wardrobe is promotional t-shirts you’ve gotten at trade shows, you might be a cheap geek.

1. Finding excellent digital cameras at around $100 is what this column is all about, and today Office Max is offering a great one. You can grab a Nikon Coolpix P60 for $99.99, which is half the list price. This baby has 8.1 megapixels, a 5x optical zoom, red-eye reduction, and face priority technology. Sounds like a great bring-along for that summer vacation you’re planning.

2. Logitech makes some of the best peripherals around, so if you’re in need of a new keyboard take advantage of this deal from Office Depot. It’s selling the Logitech Deluxe 250 keyboard for $7.95. This is a black keyboard and it connects with a USB cable.

3. iPhone owners know how slippery their favorite phone can be. If you don’t want a hard fall or a cracked screen ruining your iPhone, get OtterBox’s iPhone Defender case from Amazon. While it originally sold for $76.29, Amazon has this handsome black and yellow case for $19.25.

It’s a problem sports and outdoor enthusiasts (and maybe some of the rest of us) know all too well:  You desperately want to shoot high-quality video of something, but you don’t always have the free hands available to hold your hardware.  (Bikes, oars, and skis don’t keep themselves moving, you know.)  The Seattle-based VholdR has come up with a way to change all that: ContourHD, the first wearable HD camcorder.

The water-resistant, 4-ounce ContourHD can attach to your goggles or helmet (or, if absolutely necessary, your bicycle or car) and can shoot videos in either 30-frames-per-second (fps) 720p HD or 60-fps High Action SD format.  It can record up to 8 hours of HD video on its internal microSD card, and is powered by a removable, rechargeable lithium-ion battery.  Two lasesrs and a 192-degree rotating lens help you line up your shots.

The $299.99 ContourHD will be available in May from Abt Electronics, Amazon.com, B&H Photo, and HelmetCameraCentral.com.

(Click here for a hands-on look at a previous VholdR wearable camcorder.)

Man, talk about a lightning quick turnaround. Just over two months ago, Toshiba was caught showing off 32 nanometer NAND flash chips, and now the firm’s gloating about being the world’s first to hit the “ship” button. Er, it will be should everything continue as planned. As the story goes, Tosh will start mass production of 32Gb NAND flash memories in July 2009, while 16Gb products will begin to ship in Q3 of this year. The point to this madness? To get more memory into smaller devices, which ought to make future smartphone / MID / UMPC buyers quite jovial.

[Image courtesy of Tech-On]

Filed under: Storage

Toshiba to ship 32nm process NAND flash memory originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Korea Telecom really wants to get you on the WiBro tip. The aptly-named (if a wee bit uninspired) Egg is essentially a router for connecting WiFi devices (such as the Nintendo DS or iPod Touch) to the company’s wireless broadband network. According to the Korea Times, both KT and SK Telecom (the country’s two main WiBro operators) have mere 170,000 WiBro customers total, “making a mockery” of its “most wired nation” aspirations — so they can certainly stand to expand their customer base a little bit. Subscribers to the company’s flat-rate data plan will get the device for free (trust us, they’ve paid enough). Or you can pick one up for yourself at the Apple store in Samseong-dong or Myeong-dong, the next time you’re in Seoul. This guy should be hitting the shelves sometime in May for ₩220,000 (that’s about $163).

[Thanks, Stafford]

Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless

KT’s Egg gives your WiFi device access to the wonderful world of WiBro originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 10:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here we go again. On CNN, a caller by the name of Alberto told HLN money expert Clark Howard that he was charged $62,000 to download the movie WALL-E for his nephew while vacationing in Mexico, according to Ars Technica. As is probably obvious to everyone by now, the caller forgot to activate a data roaming plan on his cellular data card before leaving for the trip.

Of course, the carrier would never think to alert the customer of such a thing beforehand–and any text alerts about extra charges get lost in the ether when you’re using a data card. After some haggling on the phone, the carrier “reduced the bill to $17,000, arguing that the five-figure charge was what it cost them to deliver the movie”–which is baloney, given the existence of said international data roaming plans.

It’s tempting to blame the customer, and granted, he should have checked into this. But at the same time, I run into well-meaning folks all the time who forget to update their virus definitions on their PCs, or even install a security suite in the first place. A beginner’s mistake, but no worse or better than not knowing about how to reconfigure a data plan. A $17,000 bill isn’t fair, period.