Do you ever think back to the glory days of gaming with the one button joystick? It was simple and classic.
Well dream no more, because this classic stick is up for grabs on thumbsupuk.com. Relive the old days on your Mac or PC with the USB joystick. The controller is compatible with Mac OSX and Windows versions 98SE up to Vista. The joystick is also compatible with any game that can utilize a standard gamepad controller.
The price is £19.99 and will be available until July 6, 2009.
Without question, the hottest product in Lenovo’s lineup right now is the recently unveiled IdeaPad S12, but if you’re not up for waiting (or if you just prefer the 10-inch form factor), you can wiggle your cursor over to the outfit’s S10-2 portal. Starting today, the refreshed S10-2 is up for order, with current shipping estimates pegged at “within 16 business days.” The unit is available in black, grey, white and pink starting at $439, but as always, it’ll be tough to skip over all those customizations on the way to checkout.
[Via PortableMonkey]
Filed under: Laptops
Lenovo’s IdeaPad S10-2 now available to order originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 May 2009 12:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The ZuneHD looks like a lovely catchup to the original iPod touch—you know, before apps allowed it to be so much more—except for one thing. That damn browser. It’s not just they’re basing it off hellacious and reviled IE—it’s that it’s not WebKit-based.
There simply isn’t a better mobile browser than WebKit right now. It powers the internet in the iPhone, Android, Symbian S60 and Palm Pre, and destroyed all comers in our Battlemodo. It’s fast, it’s competent and most importantly from a development perspective, it’s open source. Meaning Microsoft could adopt it for its mobile devices with (relatively) little shame (okay, maybe a lot of shame) and it’s ready to go right now, meaning there’s no wasting time building a new engine just to attempt to play catchup to a browser that handily delivers the best mobile internet experience right now across multiple platforms.
Mozilla’s Fennec could become a contender to the throne, true, but it’s still far from final. Opera and Skyfire are interesting and good, but they’re both proprietary, meaning there’s no chance in hell they’d ever be adopted by Microsoft or RIM, much less the entire industry, as the basis for their mobile browsers. Update: BTW, Ballmer himself mentioned they might look at WebKit.
You could rail against the idea of WebKit becoming a “monopoly,” but you’d be foolish to do so: Web standards are important, and WebKit, which is again, open source, is dedicated to standards compliance and performance. A performance and compliance standard that web developers could count on in every single mobile device wouldn’t be a bad thing—far from it. It would mean even more amazing web apps, since developers would know they’d run on any mobile device, no matter what “OS” they were running underneath—the web would be the real OS.
That day is coming. I just hoped I’d see it a little sooner.
Apple this morning quietly released an upgrade to its entry-level MacBook, its only remaining white notebook.
Still priced at $999, the white MacBook received memory, processor and storage upgrades. The specs are as follows:
Overall, a small but decent upgrade: It’s great to see Apple’s cheapest MacBook getting better and better without increasing in price. Apple gave the white MacBook a small upgrade in January, too.
Product Page [Apple via TUAW]
Photo: goodrob13/Flickr
Seiko Epson Corp. announced yesterday that it’s made an important step toward realizing bigger and better HD OLED TVs.
OLED televisions offer high contrast, a wide viewing angle, and fast response time, all with low power requirements. The tricky part to the larger screens is in the manufacturing: Mass production is impossible when using conventional methods to deposit the organic materials layer evenly.
Epson’s new fabrication process uses Micro Piezo inkjet technology to enable accurate positioning of the organic material, making 37-inch and larger OLED screens possible. The company’s prototype OLED displays 38 pixels per inch on a 40-inch diagonal screen with 260,000 colors.
Look for the announcement, a prototype demo, and more details at SID 2009.
ASUS already struck a chord with portable gamers when it introduced the imposing W90, and now it’s looking to do the same with LAN party goers who need something just a wee bit less gargantuan. Details are light on the forthcoming G51, but we do know that it’ll arrive in a few form factors (15.6- and 16-inch models) and will give buyers the choice between a Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo processor. There’s also room for up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM as well as a 1GB GeForce GTX 260M graphics card; furthermore, you’ll find an optional Blu-ray drive, 2 megapixel camera, dual 500GB hard drives and a white glossy shell. Mum’s the word on pricing, but we expect to hear more on this July-bound beauty at Computex next month.
[Via PCWorld]
Filed under: Laptops
ASUS’ potent G51 gaming laptop headed for Computex originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 May 2009 11:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If you’re a gadget lover, and something tells me you are, you know the problem of too few USB ports. Computers simply don’t come with enough of them, so you find yourself unplugging devices throughout the day so that you can plug something else in. What you need is a USB hub, and LaCie has just introduced two new well-designed ones. Both work on Windows or Macintosh computers.
The LacCie Core7, pictured above, offers six USB ports and a built-in mini-USB cable for connecting many cell phones and other devices. I love that LaCie is recognizing the popularity of the mini-USB plug. This is great for people who don’t want to carry around a phone cable. One USB port is on top of the hub for quick Flash-drive access, while the others are in channels on the sides. You can get one for $19.99.
The second offering is the even more compact LaCie Core4, a portable hub that includes three standard USB ports and one mini-USB cable. It comes in orange or blue and sells for a low $9.99.
We’ve known it’s coming for ages now, but AT&T today officially announced they’re rolling out HSDPA 7.2, the latest version of their 3G network. HSDPA 7.2 should double AT&T’s effective 3G download speeds.
According to AT&T, the network upgrades will start later this year and be completed in 2011. AT&T isn’t promising any specific real-life speeds, but they’ll presumably be about double what we’re getting today with AT&T’s HSDPA 3.6 devices.
The only problem there is, in our tests we’ve gotten wildly varying speeds with HSDPA 3.6 devices – anywhere from about 400 kbps up to 1.6 mbps downstream, with speeds heavily affected by what metro area we were testing in. So the only thing we can promise with HSDPA 7.2 is, speeds will be better than they are now.
HSDPA 7.2 is just one of several steps AT&T has going forwards. AT&T is moving more of their valuable 850 Mhz spectrum to 3G, which will dramatically improve capacity in pinched cities like New York. They’re deploying 2,100 new cell sites and adding more bandwidth at the sites themselves, which should also expand coverage. And they’re testing 3G microcells, which will let people put tiny cell sites in their homes and offices.
I have it on good authority that Donald Trump himself scans the Cheap Geek column every day for the day’s best online tech deals. No, not really.
1. Summer is coming, and Amazon has a deal to help you capture the memories. Get a JVC Everio S GZ-MS100 camcorder for the low price of $179.99, which includes free shipping. This video camera has a 35X optical zoom, one-touch YouTube uploading, and records directly to an SD/SDHC memory card.
2. Get more storage to go when you grab this Kingston 8GB DataTraveler from Buy.com. It offers the same compact size that’s made Flash drives popular, but far more memory than usual. You can get it for $18.85, which includes the shipping price.
3. Oh, here’s an unusual one for you. If you’re one of the 50,000 men who donated DNA samples to the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation’s database, today’s your lucky day. Those men can now access their profiles through the foundation’s Web site for the discounted price of $49.95. The site lets you search and connect with genetic relatives. Planning the family reunion is presumably up to you.
Bonus deal: Print out this coupon to get a two-for-one offer on 31° Below ice cream desserts from Baskin-Robbins. The offer is good until June 21, 2009.
At All Things D, my friends at Fullpower did a demo of a accelerometer-equipped headset that can pick up a call by tapping it in a different way than you tap a regular headset.
That’s not so new in concept, but the trick is, they use math to filter out the background noise—in this case, motion from walking, jumping, etc—so it doesn’t hang up on you when you move around while doing it.
The headset, a modified also knows when you place it on a table and powers down. All by using math and a regular accelerometer.
You’ve seen games and GPS apps from Fullpower but those are just apps demoing the company’s tech. Fullpower’s motion detection engine tech is described as doing for motion what voice recognition does for voice. It interprets the raw data and figures out what a person is doing, eliminating confusing data, which I think is interesting because up to now, most developers have just had to deal with raw accelerometer XYZ information. Hard to parse in itself, but up to now, really hard to take that info and decipher what exactly the person holding the device is doing.
Next up is an AMAZING demo of a camera app that filters out motion using the accelerometer. Typically, software that have done this has done it by using gyroscopes, or mechanical parts, or by digitally scanning the image as you move it. The accelerometer here helped the camera, mounted on a wildly shaking platform. The images are taken on a crappy smartphone sensor (a slow sensor), came out very sharp when stabilization is applied. I’m unsure if its timing it properly to snap when the motion is at its slowest, but that would make sense, since there’s no way to increase shutter speed. The tech can scale to all sorts of high end cameras, using just cheap accelerometer parts, not the typically high end stuff you see in DSLRs now. I look forward to getting this stuff in smartphones.
The demos were just concepts, but I’m sure we’ll see more of this tech in products, soon. [Fullpower]
[Disclosure: these guys are my friends.]
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
