Hasta La Gadget!

Hope you didn’t spend your well-earned shekels on a WD TV Mini — it turns out that the HD-less wonder was just a waypoint to Western Digital’s latest. The WD TV Live HD media player is an unassuming sort that doesn’t really offer any surprises: 1080p video playback, support for all your favorite codecs, both Pandora and Live365 Internet radio apps, WiFi, two USB ports for external storage, HDMI, composite and component video outputs, SPDIF audio output, and more. No big whoop, right? All this can be yours for an MSRP of $149.99, but we hear that Best Buy has ’em for $119 — and we wouldn’t want you to pay any more than that. PR after the break.

Update: “That’s WiFi ready.” As in “WiFi adapter sold separately.”

Continue reading Western Digital WD TV Live HD media player gets official

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Western Digital WD TV Live HD media player gets official originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With the unfortunate downfall of the company’s phone business, OpenMoko is looking for some slightly greener pastures. Its first new device hardly seems to hail from the same high-end Linux places that spawned the FreeRunner, and in fact you could say the $99 WikiReader is the antitheses of a high-end smartphone. It’s a single purpose device with a monochrome screen and a simplistic touch interface and on the inside is an 8GB microSD card loaded up with three million of Wikipedia’s finest hypertexts. The device can be searched or just browsed through clicking through interlinked articles, and there are even some parental controls to keep the chilluns away from Wikipedia’s racier side. OpenMoko will have a subscription model of sorts available where folks can receive a new microSD card in the mail on a regular basis with the recent updates to the Wiki, though “power users” can update their cards themselves. The device is also relatively open to hackability thanks to its well known processor (similar to a Franklin dictionary) and easy access to the memory, but clearly OpenMoko is pointing this at people who don’t even own a smartphone, not people who want to hack themselves another one. The device is available as of today.

Filed under: Handhelds

OpenMoko branches out with new $99 WikiReader device originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We already saw the Picsio GC-FM1’s splashy debut for Japan, but now JVC is announcing the camera for a Stateside release. Its advertised “1080p” resolution is actually 1440 x 1080 at 30 fps, while the 1280 x 720 mode at 60 fps sounds much more enticing to us, and it’s all recorded to SD card (none is included) as H.264 .MOV files. There’s really not a lot to set the camera apart in a sea of pocket cams, but you can always watch the incredible all-dancing, all-crazy promo video again after the break to pique your interest. The GC-FM1 is available now for $200.

Continue reading JVC’s Picsio pocket camcorder does fake 1080p for a real $200

Filed under: Digital Cameras

JVC’s Picsio pocket camcorder does fake 1080p for a real $200 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The GlideTV is a couch mouse, something pretty handy when a lot of us are watching TV and movies on our computer screens. It works over USB, and you plug a dongle into the machine to play. From there, you can control your cursor with a touchpad, and there are a few buttons which mimic the ones most used on a keyboard, like Escape and Enter. The best part is the rim around the pad which neatly contains a lot of extra buttons. And because it works like a regular mouse and (limited) keyboard, it works with most machines, from Media Center PCs to Macs to PS3s.

But the keyboard is the problem for this otherwise sexy half-egg (it looks like a sex toy, as you can see in the photo of it being fisted, above). If you are using Windows, you can download the GlideTV Navigator software, which will give you an onscreen keyboard, but we all know how quick and easy they are to use (not very, if you were wondering).

Still, the GlideTV, which comes from the brains of the people behind VUDU and SageTV, packs a lot into a tiny device. And at $150, that’s a good thing: For the same price, you could pick up a wireless keyboard with a trackpad or trackball. Then again, the GlideTV will fulfill that other living-room remote requirement: It can be lost down the back of the sofa. Try that with a full-size QWERTY. If only the Glide people would put a vibrator inside. Then it would be perfect.

Product page [GlideTV. Thanks, Patrick!]

I don't like to misuse the word "cheap," so I won't. Instead, I'll just say that the Asus VH236H is one of the best monitor deals out there.

(Credit:
Josh P. Miller/CNET

I request a lot of monitors from various manufacturers …