Hasta La Gadget!

CES is a couple of days from officially starting, and I’m already suffering from a bit of tablet overload–and believe me, ASUS, you aren’t helping. During its press conference today, the company launched the Eee Pad MeMO, a seven inch tablet, which harkens back to a simpler time, when people used a thing called a “stylus” for their touchscreen devices.

The device, which is set to launch in June, will run a future version of Android (the company is calling it “Android 3.0,” incidentally) and ships with a capacitive stylus for note taking and picture drawing (it comes pre-loaded with Media Note and Painter, for precisely those things). There’s a 1,2GHz Qualcomm processor inside and front and rear facing cameras, for all of your teleconferencing needs.

The device also ships with a MeMic Bluetooth headset, to make it all the more smartphone-like. The thing will run you $499, when it launches this summer.

“Oregon Scientific” and “home weather station” kind of go hand in hand, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the company’s unleashing a new three-pack of colorful weather units here at CES this week. Starting on the left, the $24.99 model displays indoor temperature along with up to three channels of outdoor temps; it also includes a clock and calendar with alarm, which makes it a serviceable bedside clock if you’re really into the weather. Moving upmarket a tad, the $39.99 Touch Weather Thermometer with Humidity (pictured center) is exactly that: the aforementioned temperature features plus a daily min / max display and both indoor and outdoor humidity stats. Finally, the $49.99 Touch Advanced Weather Station (right) adds a 12-hour weather forecast along with 24 hours’ worth of historical barometric data. All are powered by a pair of AA batteries and have touchscreen control — hence the names, we imagine.

Oregon Scientific’s Touch Weather Series tells the temperature, doesn’t break the bank originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Asus EE Pad Slider attempts to solve the problem some of us have with software keyboards by including a hardware keyboard.

Originally posted at CES 2011

The news we were all hoping for finally hit this week: HP is getting ready to show off its new webOS-based tablet.

Sadly for those of us in Las Vegas, it’s not going to happen at the Consumer Electronics Show here. Instead, HP’s planning an “exciting webOS announcement” for February 9 in San Francisco.

The invitations (shown above) went out today, and while they don’t mention a tablet, it’s a good bet that a webOS-based slate will be on the agenda — plus, perhaps, HP-branded successors to Palm’s tepidly successful webOS-based smartphones, the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi.

Hewlett-Packard acquired Palm in 2010 for about $1.2 billion, a purchase that more or less saved Palm from yet another ignominious decline into obscurity, but left many observers wondering what HP was thinking.

The Palm and Pre (and their successors, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus) were ambitious attempts to compete with Android phones and the iPhone, and the phones offer striking industrial design, elegant user interfaces, clever multitasking and a web-based development environment.

But the phones haven’t proven popular with consumers, thanks in part to poor battery life and the relative lack of webOS applications.

HP’s intentions became clearer in July, 2010, when HP CTO Phil McKinney started promising a webOS-based tablet and webOS-based printer to come in “early 2011.” For such devices, a lightweight, web-based mobile operating system makes a lot of sense, and competitors have less of a head start than in the smartphone market.

This article was written on June 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

The last several months I have been using Windows Vista, and I’ve really gotten used to having my sidebar filled with gadgets. I love that I can put nearly anything in the sidebar like games, maps, gas prices, photos, etc. While I think the sidebar looks fine the way it is, there are ways that you can tweak it to add something more to it.  One of the applications that helps you do this is called Windows Sidebar Styler.

Windows Sidebar Styler is described as an application that takes advantage of new technology introduced with Windows Vista to provide “extensions to the existing functionality of Windows Sidebar.” In other words, it allows users to tweak their Sidebar so that they’re presented with a customized interface. Today I’ll be explaining how to style your sidebar through the use of Windows Sidebar Styler and Sidebar Styles from WinCustomize.

1. Download and install Windows Sidebar Styler. Installation is pretty typical, and only takes a few minutes. Download is found here (32–bit or 64–bit)
2. Once the installation process is complete, head on over to Win Customize to pick-out the sidebar styler that you’d like to use. There’s two-pages to choose from, and they’ve done a great job designing them. I downloaded several of them myself to try them out.
3. When you find one that you like, click on the image to download the file.
    
   You’ll want to save the file to disk because it’s a zip file and it will need to be extracted.
4. Next, extract the file that you downloaded and double click the file in the folder (the one that’s not an image). The key thing to remember is that the Windows Sidebar Styler program you downloaded earlier does not need to be open. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.
   
5. After you double click on the file, you’ll get a message asking if you’d like to close the Windows Sidebar if it’s currently running. Click yes.
   
6. After you click yes to the above prompt, your style will be applied. Here’s an example of what my sidebar looked like with the “Cardboard” style, and the BrickWall style. They have several subtle styles, but I chose two that would stand out well.
         
7. Without the use of Windows Sidebar Styler, you wouldn’t be able to apply any of the sidebar styles that you found over at WinCustomize. So while the program doesn’t need to be open to apply a new style, it’s still necessary for you to download it and have it on your computer.
8. If you’d like to get creative and change the individual items like the background, or the buttons in your sidebar, you can open Windows Sidebar Styler Advanced Settings and right click on any of the available image resources found in the menu and click replace. Then you can replace it with your own image.
   Note: This is really more work than what is needed. People have done a great job putting together a variety of stylers on WinCustomize that you can use. If you really want to be creative then by all means, play around with the advanced options with the Sidebar Styler program.

Changing the look for your sidebar really is a very simple process and doesn’t take much time. You could have a whole look for your Vista Sidebar within 5 minutes. Not bad!

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