Say you’ve got an iPhone and a BlackBerry, or an iPod and a laptop. Now imagine they both have dead batteries at the same time. A real horror show, right? A geek nightmare. But here comes the hero to save the day: Targus has released the Premium Laptop Charger, a sleek and sexy device that lets you charge two gadgets at the same time.
This clever charger can rotate 180 degrees vertically, so it won’t block outlets on a power strip. For convenience, it comes with 9 laptop tips, one miniUSB tip, and an iPod/iPhone tip. At $139.99, it the most expensive charger you’ll ever buy, but you can’t beat the convenience.
HP announcing that it’s going to buy Palm in a $1.2b all-cash transaction certainly took everyone by surprise, but in many ways the deal makes perfect sense. HP is a gigantic player in the tech industry but has no appreciable presence in rapidly-growing mobile space, and Palm — well, you should know how we feel about Palm by now. Even still, we can’t say we were expecting this one, and it looks like most of you weren’t either — HP only got two percent of the vote in our “who should buy Palm” poll, while Engadget (that’s us!) got… fourteen percent. Oops.
But now that we’ve had a day to wrap our heads around the news and think about what Palm and HP said to us last night and to analysts on the conference call announcing the deal, we think we’ve got a pretty good set of educated guesses on how things might shake out over the next few months. Read on!
Up until this point, when Pioneer and iPhone were uttered in the same sentence (or the same Engadget post) it’s been in the guise of some sort of integration with an existing product (such as a car stereo or home theater hardware). This time around, however, the consumer electronics company is debuting a line of a/v docks that, truth be told, don’t look nearly as boring as most do to these jaded blogsters. All of the kit included herein feature 2.1 speakers, HDMI, component video, and composite video out, and Bluetooth audio streaming. Of all of these, the HTD Series (XW-NAV1K-K) is the “jack of all trades,” featuring a DVD/CD player, FM tuner, USB connectivity for external storage, CD-to-MP3 ripping, and “scaling of DVD video to 1080p near HD resolution” via HDMI. Available in June with an MSRP of $299. For someone with simpler needs (and greater means) the Audition Series (XW-NAS3/-K) “unparalleled reproduction of compressed audio files” come April, for an MSRP of $449. Last but not least, the Duo Series systems sport dual docking ports for two different iPods or iPhones and a Double Shuffle feature for continuous playback of music between the two docked players. The XW-NAC1-K ($349) is a more modest device, while the XW-NAC3-K ($449) adds a number of features to the basic dock, including DLNA 1.5 home network support, vTuner Internet Radio, external storage support via USB, and more. Both these bad boys will be available in May. PR after the break.
In a quest to get the perfect shot, Eric Austin, a Texas-based videographer, found a neat way to fuse a remote controlled helicopter and a Canon DSLR camera so he could shoot aerial videos easily and get the kind of footage that would otherwise be difficult to pull off.
“I took a hobbyshop helicopter and modified it to hold a camera, so I can get low altitude, close and tight aerial shots,” Austin told Wired.com.
An amateur videographer turned pro, Austin got interested in remote-controlled photography just four months ago.
“As I did more photos and videos, I realized I could develop a niche where I could use the advancements in technology to provide the kind of photos most people can’t get easily,” he says.
Austin is one of the many hobbyist photographers who are finding ways to use drones and remote-controlled helicopter toys to get a more attractive camera angle. Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson helms a site called DIY Drones where users have found a way to use unmanned aerial vehicles to do aerial photography. Last year, New York City photographer Anthony Jacobs showed a helicam built using a German helicopter rig called MikroKopter. Jacobs used his helicam rig to shoot videos of neighborhooods in the city.
Austin, who has a website devoted to his RC helicopter videography, says he wanted to do something similar and offer HD-quality video and photos.
That’s why, he says, he decided to create a rig that would be reliable and produce the kind of footage that could be used by professionals. And as this clip shows, the video can be interesting.
Austin started with a remote-controlled helicopter called Align T-REX 700 and modified it to carry a special frame and camera mount. He tweaked the landing gear for the helicopter, covering it with a bright pink foam from the “noodles” used in swimming pools.
“The color stands out when I am flying the helicopter outdoors,” says Austin. “And if I crash into the water, my whole equipment won’t go to the bottom. It will be ruined, but at least I will get my gear back.” Austin says he hasn’t crashed his helicopter yet, but the foam ensures that in case of a hard landing, the equipment is less likely to completely fall apart.
He adjusts the camera’s settings when it’s on the ground and presses the Record button right before takeoff. For still images, Austin says he uses an external timer that activates the shutter every few seconds.
To create his flying video rig, Austin says he spent hours on the online discussion forums at the Helifreak.com website.
“I didn’t know anyone to talk to,” he says. “And then realized the only place to go was online where people were discussing this.”
One of the more challenging shoots that Austin has done with his helicam was flying over a cliff that was about 25 feet high with a river below. And he didn’t crash the copter.
“The probability that a crash will happen is there, but so far, I have been careful,” he says.
To download video, Austin has set up a 5.8-GHz video downlink feed using an on-board wireless transmitter.
All of this didn’t come cheap. Austin estimates the entire rig cost him about $15,000. But for those at home, who want to do something similar, he says there are cheaper alternatives.
“I went for the best and most expensive components because I didn’t want to risk it failing mid-air,” he says. “But you can get an RC helicopter for about $400 and put a point-and-shoot camera on it.”
U.S. Cellular announces the Samsung Stride, a simple flip phone for people who just want the basics. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-20003786-85.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Dialed In/a/p
We just spent a few minutes playing with the beta version of Skyfire 2.0 for Android that was released today, and we’ll cut to the chase: this is easily the best browser we’ve used on the platform. Clearly we’ll need to spend more time with it to make sure it can handle all the typical sites you’d want to visit while you’re on the road — but loading the desktop version of Engadget is always a great barometer for this sort of thing, and this browser rocked it. Rendering is about as reasonably fast as you can expect it to be (on our Snapdragon-powered Nexus One, anyhow), and everything we saw displayed spot-on perfect (save for embedded Flash, of course), but if you’re in a situation where you don’t need to see the full page or it looks screwy, you can toggle it to send an Android user agent right from the app’s toolbar below the URL field. It works just about as well as Steel and the built-in browser on a G1 we tested, and Flash videos work just fine there as well.
The browser touts compatibility with Flash videos, too, so we headed over to YouTube to try our hand at it; it immediately detected the presence of a video and popped up the so-called “SkyBar” at the bottom of the screen, where you can press the Video button to load the video in a new window. It doesn’t work embedded in the page, but considering how small your phone’s screen is, that’s really for the best — you get the full-screen experience, and in our testing, it looked fantastic. One downside is that you don’t seem to be able to scrub videos while they’re playing, but maybe this is something these guys can get patched up for the final release. Follow the break for our full video!
Update: One annoyance we’ve noticed is that pinch-to-zoom works in “steps” — it’s not smooth, which makes it pretty weird to use, but remember that Opera Mini doesn’t support it at all.
Sony, Intel, and Google are teaming up to produce a line of Internet-connected televisions that will run on a new version of Google’s Android operating system, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
Intel is contributing a customized version of its Atom chip that will run a new version of Google’s Android operating system called Dragonpoint, Bloomberg reported. The TVs will be announced at the Google I/O conference in May.
The Bloomberg story apparently confirms an earlier report by The New York Times that says essentially the same thing. What’s new is that Bloomberg has unearthed a name for the Android TV derivative. Logitech, as both the Times and Bloomberg reported, is working to develop a remote control/keyboard combo device to control the new TVs.
Google declined to comment on rumors and speculation.
That’s right — you’re probably already aware that tomorrow, April 30th at 5PM marks the beginning of retail availability of the 3G version of Apple’s iPad, and a lot of those who pre-ordered can expect to receive theirs in the mail tomorrow too. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, but at least one guy’s happy today — his iPad 3G arrived already! We’re sure we’ll be seeing way more of these crop up as the day progresses, but for now, here’s to the first!
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.
Say you’ve got an iPhone and a BlackBerry, or an iPod and a laptop. Now imagine they both have dead batteries at the same time. A real horror show, right? A geek nightmare. But here comes the hero to save the day: Targus has released the Premium Laptop Charger, a sleek and sexy device that lets you charge two gadgets at the same time.
