Hasta La Gadget!

"Heartbeat is all wrong…his body temperature is–Jim, this man is a Klingon!"

(Credit: Entertainment Earth)

Oh, man. They’re just trying to kill me. Which, I suppose, is a bit ironic, as this is a replica of a medical device.

Seriously, though, check it out. For a …

Leave it the mad scientists at Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to concoct this one. Rather than just figuring out a way to read back information in one-way fashion on one’s glasses (think Sixth Sense, but with eyewear), these folks are diving right in to the real stuff: bidirectional communication. In essence, their goal for the interactive data eyeglasses is to track eye movement in order to allow ones retinas to scroll through menus, flip through options and zoom in / out on a map. Obviously, a microdisplay will be necessary as well, but that’s just half the battle. We’ll confess — we’re still not humble enough to take our Vuzix HMD out in public, but we just might swap our Transitions[TM] for a set of these.

[Via OLED-Display]

Filed under: Wearables

Interactive data eyeglasses could bring the PC to your face, won’t fix nearsightedness originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you take more than a few snaps a month, you’ll eventually end up buying a memory card reader. There are many advantages. First, even a junky dime store card reader will be make quicker transfers than hooking the camera up via a cable. Second, all the time your camera is talking to your computer it is switched on, and this drains batteries fast. Way faster than shooting actual pictures, in fact. Third, it’s a lot easier to just plug the card into a reader.

If you have a netbook and a camera that shoots SD cards, it’s even easier — you just slide the card into the slot in the side of the computer. But for anyone else, or people using DSLRs with Compact Flash cards, a reader is the way to go. But are they all equal?

The short answer? No way. I have a cheap, no-brand unit I bought for less than €10 ($15). I also have a swanky Lexar “professional” reader that I paid over €50 ($70) for (although in the US you can get one for just $45). And guess which one is already broken?

The long answer:

I tested both readers with 500MB of RAW photos on the same SanDisk Ultra III SD card (4GB). I would have tried with CF, too, but one of the pins inside the cheap card has already broken. Both cards are USB 2.0 and were connected by a cable directly to the USB port on a MacBook. Transfer was drag and drop via the Finder to test transfer time without the image-processing overhead of Lightroom or Aperture. Here are the numbers.

• Lexar: 23 seconds
• No-Name: 27 seconds

I was surprised that they’re so close. Scale this up, though, to the full four gigs, and you’re looking over a half minute difference. Small, but significant for some professionals. Of course, those same pros would probably be using an even faster FireWire reader (assuming they have a computer with a FireWire port. Are you listening, Apple?) Remember too that if you are using SDHC cards, or UDMA Compact Flash, the cheap reader can’t handle them.

So, read and write speeds aren’t that much different. Is there really a reason to spend five times the price of the commodity reader? For me, yes. First, as I mentioned, the cheap-o unit is already broken. It lasted a few weeks before a pin bent. Thankfully it didn’t damage the CF card (itself pretty expensive). The Lexar, on the other hand, is solid, closes down into its own case to protect the slots from dust and, most importantly, has proper guide-rails for locating a CF card, making it almost impossible to jam it in at an angle. It also comes with a two-year warranty.

The bottom line is that, while the performance differences are small, the build quality differs hugely. I expect to be using the Lexar reader for many years. If I stuck with the cheap, non-name readers, I’d be dropping $10 a month to replace them. Which of those sounds cheaper to you?

Product page [Lexar]

We’ll be straight with you, we have no idea if the linked document (that builds on the original) is authentic or not. Then again, why would someone go to the trouble of faking a 31 page PDF file showing Palm Pre inventories for every Best Buy in the US and Puerto Rico — the internet just can’t be so sad. Anyway, given the positive reviews received, we expected demand to outstrip the meager inventories on-hand at launch. As we figure it, anything that might help you sort out the mess on Saturday will be appreciated.

[Via Everything Pre, thanks John]

Read — PDF share 1
Read — PDF share 2

Filed under: Cellphones

Palm Pre stock levels at Best Buy for entire US now leaked in full? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I may be wrong, but in-car cup holders seem to be a mostly US-only phenomenon. It might be that Europeans simply don’t live in their cars like Statesiders, or that our coffee tends to be smaller — espresso sized rather than delivered in buckets, the weak, watery brew sucked through a plastic teat while sitting safely inside the protective steel and rubber womb.

Which is a shame, as this little cup-holder mounted gizmo looks genuinely useful. The $30 Coffee Cup Power Inverter plugs into the 12v cigarette lighter socket and up-converts the power to 120v AC. There’s even a USB socket on there for charging iPods and the like. The unit can supply a continuous 200 watts, so unless you’re hooking up hair dryers and soldering irons, you should be good for anything. Actually, I’ve just thought of another reason this wouldn’t work here in Europe (aside from us needing 220v to power our gear): We tend to use our car cigarette lighters for lighting our cigarettes.

Product page [ThinkGeek via BoingBoingBeschizza]