Hasta La Gadget!

Oh sure, it looks like some glorious Palm / HP Web OS tablets are headed our way (even if we are hearing it won’t be until late summer / early fall), but you know what has been supposedly headed our way for over two months now? The HP Slate 500. Yep, HP’s seemingly-abandoned Windows 7 tablet is still suffering from major delays, and according to our sources and an HP customer support rep, a “material shortage” combined with a “high volume of orders” are causing these tablets to be held up. We don’t have any real details on the numbers — although, last month we had heard they received about 9,000 orders thus far — but we do know that our very own HP Slate, which we ordered back on November 9th, still hasn’t shipped and is now slated to ship out on January 22nd. And we’re definitely not the only ones still patiently waiting — a look through the TabletPC Review forums reveals that a number of irate customers are still longing for their 8.9-inch, Atom-powered tablets — although, many of them were offered a $100 discount in exchange for not having their tablets in time for the holidays. We’ve reached out to HP for further comment on this, but in the meantime, we’ll be refreshing our account page and hoping our Slate finally ships out before the end of the month or, you know, at least before HP starts announcing new ones in early February.

HP Slate orders still delayed, still blaming ‘high volume of orders’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Water Scale is ingenious in its simplicity, using little more than a piston and a tube to weigh your cooking ingredients. The scale, from designers Muzaffer Kocer and Ayca Guven, uses Archimedes’ Principle to measure weight.

The bowl of the scale is connected to a plunger that floats on top of water inside the scale’s body. When the bowl is pushed down, the water is displaced and flows up a tube. This tube – which also contains a floating plastic ball to make it easier to see – is graduated. You read it just like a thermometer.

Archimedes’ Principle says that – for a floating object – the amount if water displaced is equal to the mass of that object. Thus a potato weighing half a kilo (a big potato, to be sure) and dropped into a floating bowl will shove aside half a kilo of water. Thus a scale can be calibrated.

This design keeps the Water Scale incredibly simple, as you can see from the rendered images above, requiring no electronic or complex mechanical parts. I have one question though. The scale is designed to weigh objects of up to a kilogram (2.2-pounds). Doesn’t this mean that you’d have to have a kilo (liter) of water on board to do that?

Water Scale product page [Muzaffer Kocer via Yanko]

See Also:

• Weigh to Go: Luggage Tag and Scale Combo
• Wi-Fi Scale Tweets Your Weight
• IPhone-Connected Weighing Scale for Your iDiet
• Folding Digital Kitchen Scale is Easily Hidden
• Optical Mouse with Built in Weighing Scale: You Know What it's For …
• Weigh Your Bodybag With a Portable Scale

AirView is a free iOS app that lets you send video wirelessly between iOS devices, and from iTunes to iPhones and iPads.

The app does this by tapping into Apple’s AirPlay, the technology introduced in iOS 4.2 that lets you send music and movies from your iPhone to compatible devices. Up until now, “compatible devices” has meant either the AirPort Express router, the AppleTV v2 and a handful of third-party stereos.

Run the AirView app on any iOS device and it will then show up on your Wi-Fi network as a new destination for video, just like any other, and you’ll be able to choose it in the pop up list in iTunes or another iOS device. This lets you stream from iTunes to an iPad (previously impossible), or to send a movie from your iPhone to your friend’s iPad when you go visit.

It works perfectly in testing, with one big caveat: the app is for video-only. You can’t stream audio (although movie audio is transmitted, of course). This means you can’t use an old, broken iPod Touch as a makeshift AirPort Express. Not yet, anyway.

It’s worth grabbing this one now, as you never know when you may need it, it’s free, and it’s only 400k in size.

Also worth a mention is AirFoil, a well-established Mac (and now Windows) application from Rogue Amoeba which lets you stream any audio from a Mac (not just from iTunes) to an Airport Express or iOS device. That costs $25.

AirView product page [iTunes]

See Also:

• The Hidden Secrets of Apple's AirPlay
• AirPlay Can Stream to Apple TV From Any iOS App – Not Just iTunes …
• 3 Secret Apple TV Features Steve Jobs Hasn't Told You About …
• AirPlayer Lets You Stream Video From iOS to Mac

Egads, ASUS, has it really come to this? The company synonymous with netbooks needs to seriously rethink its product strategy if it believes that its Eee PC “Sirocco” truly deserved a teaser and launch event — two marketing ploys typically reserved for items of high consumer interest. Turns out that its “making waves” tag line was (as we feared) just a coat of texturized purple, gold, or pink paint applied to the company’s otherwise bland 10.1-inch Eee PC 1015PEM netbook that runs Windows 7 Starter on a dual-core Atom N550 CPU. An embarrassing slab of meh in the age of Fusion. Even worse, we already saw the “new” Eee PC 1015PW announced in some official capacity back in October. Apparently, when you offer over 30 models of 10-inch Eee PCs this is the only way to get any attention. Click through for a quick video overview shot behind closed doors at CES by our friends over at NewGadgets. Otherwise hit up Mobile + Notebook who’ve been burdened with bringing you the live coverage of something that’s already happened.

Continue reading ASUS Eee PC 1015PW ‘Sirocco’ was not worth the fuss (video)

ASUS Eee PC 1015PW ‘Sirocco’ was not worth the fuss (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 05:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Way back in August of last year, when temperatures were above zero and Honeycomb was still a great unknown, HP promised us the first webOS tablet will come “in early 2011.” Just yesterday, however, our noteworthy exposure of the vanguard members of the webOS tablet family led us to believe that at least one of them, the Opal, would take until September to arrive. That may still be the case, but DigiTimes is bringing us back around to HP’s original pledge, with word that Inventec has received instructions from HP to start producing and shipping a webOS slate (most probably the Topaz) in March. As usual, this comes from the (in)famous insider sources that tend to miss as often as they hit, but it does make sense for HP to follow up its February event with a relatively rapid product rollout.

HP’s first webOS tablet may start shipping in March, fulfill longstanding promise originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 04:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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