Hasta La Gadget!

With every American now carrying three to five electronic gadgets at all times, inventors have had to find other markets to tap. They’ve settled on our four-legged best buddies.

Witness the Dog-e-Minder, an electronic dog tag and pet minder. Use it to record the last time your pup was walked, fed, and took his or her medication. It could be a real help for busy owners or multi-pet homes. The Dog-e-Minder has a simple three-button interface; when you do one of those three activities, simply hold the appropriate button for three seconds. The casing is durable and waterproof. Pick it up for $19.95, currently with a buy-one-get-one special.

Next up is Mattel’s Puppy Tweets, one of the hits of this year’s Toy Fair. This device also attaches to your dog’s collar, but its purpose is to let your furry friend express him or herself. It monitors your pooch’s movements and turns them into tweets, such as “It’s not the catching of the tail, it’s the chase,” and “Guess what I’m licking right now.” It has a library of over 500 comments so the novelty shouldn’t wear off for a couple days, at least, and will cost $29.99 when released in the fall. Mattel doesn’t have a page on it yet, but here it is on Fast Company.

Updated: An image Carol Mangis took of Mattel’s Puppy Tweets from Toy Fair after the jump.

UK police drone grounded for flying without a license originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mobile broadband routers certainly aren’t new, but Connect One’s take on the whole thing just might be our favorite (yeah, even more than Cradlepoint‘s offerings). Of course, we’d pick up a MiFi of some sort if we were buying into the space today, but for those still under contract with a USB WWAN stick, the Wi-Reach classic adds a whole new level of utility. Put simply, this minuscule device boasts its own battery and a sole USB socket, which is used to connect with whatever 3G (and after a future firmware update, WiMAX / LTE) USB card that you slap in there. Once in place, you’re now in possession of a mobile WiFi hotspot which can be shared with up to ten WiFi-enabled devices. We’re told that the device can last for up to five hours on a full charge, and it can even be re-energized via USB. Interested? Prove it. It’s up for order right now for $99.

Battery-powered Wi-Reach Classic turns any USB 3G / 4G modem into portable WiFi hotspot originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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They might not have been revealed at MWC, but that doesn’t mean the news flow on Microsoft’s long-rumored Pink phones needs to stop. Following the FCC entries that hinted at the future character of these devices, we now have word of an industrious hacker getting hold of the firmware for both the Turtle and Pure handsets. According to his data, the Turtle (believed to look like the square-ish creature on the left) will sport a 320 x 240 screen, while the Pure will have a more generous 480 x 320. Neither would encourage much hope for seeing these as the vanguard handsets of the Windows Phone 7 movement, but a litany of references to Premium Mobile Experiences would both confirm our earlier information and suggest that Microsoft is still going to hit us with something more than a simple feature phone. This is backed up by “a strong connection” to NVIDIA’s Tegra chipset, which would be powerful enough to service the rumored video and media management capabilities. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, separate codenames of Lion and Pride have been uncovered, indicating CDMA versions of the Pure and Turtle, whose names are attached to the GSM variants of the two phones. Now if we can just get a release date, we’ll be all set.

Microsoft’s ‘Turtle’ and ‘Pure’ phones linked to Tegra chipset, expected in both GSM and CDMA varieties originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Let’s be honest, we’d scorch the Earth to eke just one more hour of power from our superphones. Fortunately, as residents of the western world we’ve got plenty of juice to power all of our gadgets. Still, we can definitely see the attraction of a solar-powered cellphone meant for the peoples of developing nations living off the grid. Throw in a flashlight and you’ve just changed somebody’s life. That’s what we’ve got in the ZTE S316, a dead simple candybar with color display and torch. Also announced is the S101 charger with its own built-in flashlight that can be used to charge select, non-solar devices and costs just $12 to $13, maybe less on volume. The third solar device comes from China’s OKWAP and is built by Inventec. The $40 GS109 (pictured above) feature phone is destined, believe it or not, to be an object of ultimate desire when slung from the neck on a lanyard as proof of ones prosperity. Spec-wise, this dual-SIM solar-powered phone packs a video camera, color display, microSD slot, MP3 player, and even Bluetooth 2.1 — a lot of features for a solar phone.

Linking the three devices is Intivations SunBoost solar conversion technology allowing the devices to charge in conditions less than ideal. The ZTE S316, for example, draws a max of about 113mA when on a call, while the solar cell pumps out about 50mA to 60mA of juice depending upon the natural lighting conditions (it even charges when cloudy). That’s about two minutes of natural light exposure required for every minute of talk time to keep the device going. The solar cell on the GS109, meanwhile, produces about 70mA in direct sunlight to keep the device humming. Remember, the idea isn’t to charge a phone from 0% to full but to keep a device continually charged at about 70% to 80%. Intivation is so confident in its tech that it claims to provide “a far better charging experience than anything else on the market today.” Both the S316 and S101 charger will be available in April while the relatively swank GS109 will hit next month. See them all in the gallery below.

ZTE and OKWAP team with Intivation to deliver next generation solar devices originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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