Hasta La Gadget!

Sit back and sprinkle a few new processors into its Pavilion line up? Nope, that’s exactly what HP didn’t do this year when it came to refreshing its successful multimedia laptop brand. Instead, it has remade the entire series by subbing plastic for metal, adding a chiclet keyboard and trimming down the measurements. The 14-inch Pavilion dm4 is one of the more portable of the bunch, and though it’s only slightly thicker than an inch, our $905 review unit packed a Core i5 processor, 320GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM. It sure does sound and look like a really tempting mainstream laptop, but one thing in particular continues to hold HP back. And we’ll tell you just what that is… in our full review after the break!

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HP Pavilion dm4 review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Keepin’ it real fake: Nokia X5 goes shanzhai in record time originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google IKEA’s bent-plywood Benjamin stool and the first couple pages of results are almost all hacks, from doggy dining tables to support for pin-boards for corporate brainstorming. This ingenious bed laptop stand may be the best of them all.

The $20 Benjamin stool is simple and beautiful already, its flat top as suited to use as a table as it is to supporting lazy people’s rears. The plywood construction means that it is very easy to cut, and this is just what DIY blog ManMade did, shortening the legs to make the surface sit a few inches above the covers. ManMade also added an extension cable and a pair of cable-corralling towel hooks to the mix, but these are strictly optional.

I currently use an upturned aluminum baking tray as my go-to stand when watching movies in bed, but I’m sold on the Benjamin for the extra height and way nicer looks.

Better still, this mod itself could be reused as a convenient place to keep the coffee pot when starting work with the iPad in the morning. What, you don’t start work in bed? Sadly, it the Benjamin has been discontinued by Ikea, but the hack is still sound.

How To: Make a Laptop Riser for Watching Movies and TV in Bed [ManMade via LifeHacker]

There’s no better trial by fire for the iPad as part of a reporter’s arsenal than jumping straight into one of the biggest tech press events of the year with it. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-21539_7-20007548-10391702.html” class=”origPostedBlog”E3 2010/a/p

One of the biggest (and most overlooked) advantages of mirrorless cameras is that they can be adapted to work with almost any lens there is. The short distance between the throat of the lens-mount and the sensor means that there is a lot of space for an adapter. Rayqual, a Japanese manufacturer, has just announced a range of these adapters for the new Sony NEX-3 and NEX-5 cameras.

Lens adapters for 35mm SLRs don’t really work well as the extra thickness pushes the lens forward and prevents it from focusing at infinity (you can still shoot close up, though. In fact, macro-extension tubes exploit this focus shift to do their job). But there is a good inch of room to play with on mirrorless cameras, so the adapters work well. I use one on a Panasonic GF1 to attach Nikon lenses. You lose auto-focus, but otherwise it works great.

Rayqual’s new adapters let you mount Nikon, Canon FD, Pentax and Leica lenses onto the Sonys. If you are using modern lenses designed for crop-sensors, you will have minimal changes to the focal length, as the NEX cameras also have APS-C sized sensors.

Shipping next month, the adapters will run from ¥19,950 to ¥25,200, or $220 to $275.

NEX adapters [Rayqual via DP Review]

See Also:

• Hands-On With the Diana F Lens Adapter and Fisheye: As Bad As You …
• Adapter Puts Leica Lenses on Micro Four Thirds Cameras
• Adapter Puts Nikon and Pentax Lenses on Micro Four Thirds Cameras …
• Sony's NEX Mirrorless Cameras Are the Smallest in the World …