Hasta La Gadget!

It’s one thing to have to choose between an ultra-capacious, relatively sluggish hard drive and a cramped, relatively speedy solid state drive, but it’s another thing entirely to get the best of both worlds. OCZ Technology is finally pushing laptop SSDs to the 400GB+ range, giving road warriors a fair chance at swapping out their existing HDD without taking a hit in the capacity department. Both the 2.5-inch Agility 2 and Vertex 2 lines are seeing 400GB and 480GB models added, with 250MB/sec read and 240MB/sec write rates promised. The new spinners are slated to hit shelves any moment now, and frankly, we’re terrified to even look for pricing.

OCZ pushes Agility 2 and Vertex 2 SSD families to 480GB, us further from HDDs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 10:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While LaCie has certainly created some fanciful product designs over the years, its product naming is often quite succinct. Take the Rugged series, the drop-proof external storage solution, which is now welcoming the Rugged Safe model into the family. This version adds a fingerprint scanner recessed into its armor-plated case, which encapsulates either 500GB or 1TB of storage that is now also cloaked in 128-bit AES encryption. Up to 10 registered users can be added, who can access files via USB or FireWire, but sadly neither USB 3.0 nor eSATA are on offer. Despite the limited connectivity you’ll naturally be paying a more for the added security, with the 500GB model costing $189 and the 1TB version jumping to $299. Compare that to $119 and $159 for the biometric-free versions and you can see just how much that little fingerprint of yours can cost you.

Continue reading LaCie’s Rugged Safe external HDD is rugged, safe

LaCie’s Rugged Safe external HDD is rugged, safe originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 09:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ve been biding your time, enduring the evils of Firefox, Safari, Opera and perhaps even Internet Explorer (dare we speak its name), slowly summoning your courage to give Google’s alternative a try. Well, kiddo, we’ve got good news and bad. The good news is that if your box lovingly depicts fruit or a well-dressed penguin, you’ll no longer get short shrift: Chrome 5 is out of beta and stable across Mac and Linux for the first time, with browser sync and a host of new HTML5 functionality to boot. The bad news is that Chrome has some quirks of its own… but hey, let’s not spoil the experience — no matter what platform you try it on, the WebKit browser is definitely speedy. Those flyin’ french fries aren’t just for show.

Google Chrome hits version 5, brings stability to Mac and Linux originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 09:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The HTC EVO, “America’s first 4G Android Phone”, is getting an HDMI dock. The dock, which will let you hook up the cellphone to watch hi-def video the same way you hook up an iPhone to play music, will be on sale “soon” in Best Buy.

Don’t get too excited, though. The folks at PC Mag were “quite disappointed with the HDMI experience on the Sprint EVO 4G” when they tested the output straight through the cable: A Viewsonic TV only saw the a 480p signal instead of the EVO’s actual 720p output, and an H.264 clip watched on a Samsung TV “displayed horrible artifacting in any scene with much movement.” Ouch.

Still, if you plan on watching a lot of video piped from the EVO to the big screen, a dock is certainly convenient. The price is to be confirmed, but as a cable alone will cost $17 up, don’t expect it to be cheap.

Micro HDMI dock for Sprint EVO coming to Best Buy [Android and Me via Engadget]

Hands On: HTC EVO 4G’s HDMI Cable [PC Mag]

A new application called Air Display will let you use your iPad as an external display for your Mac. Coupled with a 13-inch MacBook, this adds around half the screen again to your work area. The connection is made over Wi-Fi, and you need a small helper application on your Mac. How well does it work? I tested it out.

The app costs $10, which is either expensive (it does just one thing) or incredibly cheap ($10 for a monitor). Once downloaded, you follow the on-screen instructions for installing the helper app on the Mac, a simple and standard process. One reboot later and you’re ready.

To use it, you just launch Air Display on the iPad and then choose it in a drop down list that is now in your Mac’s menubar. It shows up as a normal external monitor in the Display’s section of the Mac’s system preferences, and you can drag it around in the “arrangement” tab just like you could with a real monitor. Here’s my setup (the iPad is the little one at the bottom):

Because this works over the air (both machines need to be on the same Wi-Fi network), there is some lag. Watching videos on the iPad screen is choppy, and if you drag a window across it then there is a delay and the image pixellates somewhat. Once it is settled, though, after a second or so, the image is as clear as you’d expect. Better, in fact, as the iPad has a pretty high-resolution screen.

The touch screen works, although you can mouse into the space as well. Touching is a little freaky, as multi-touch gestures don’t work. If you quit the app to do something else, the Mac resets back to a single screen, but if you get push-notifications they pop up on the iPad as normal, and you can tap to dismiss as normal. It’s pretty neat.

You wouldn’t want to use this for anything motion-intensive, but as a place to keep your Twitter and IM clients, or even as an extra screen for something like Photoshop Lightroom, it is ideal. Plus, if you have you Mac laptop with you, you probably have the iPad too, and you don’t even have to pack a cable. Available now, Windows version coming soon.

Air Display [iTunes]

Introducing Air Display [Avatron]