Hasta La Gadget!

The Cobra Tag helps you find lost keys with your Android phone (hint: look behind the sofa)

Ever wish you could Google your car keys? Well, keep wishing, as that day hasn’t come yet. But the Cobra Tag is the next best thing, and may stop you losing those keys in the first place.

The tag can be attached to keys, a bag, or pretty much anything that is easy to lose or to forget. It then talks to your Android phone via Bluetooth and from there can do one of several things. You can set the app — called Phone Halo — to sound an alarm when the tag goes out of range. If this sounds annoying, then the app can also grab your location when the tag’s signal blinks out, so when you realize you have lost something at least you’ll know where you left it. This will be less useful if you left it on a train.

Finally, both the tag and the phone can be used to find each other if in range. Press the button on one and the other will bleep.

The Cobra Tag costs $60 and the app is free. The maker of the Phone Halo app also sells an uglier tag for $30, and an iOS version of the app should be out in the summer.

And if you don’t want to spend $60 just to find your misplaced keys. Try checking the pocket of the jacket you were wearing yesterday. No, the other one. That’s it! You’re welcome.

Cobra Tag product page [Cobra]

Phone Halo product page [Phone Halo]

See Also:

• Locator
• How Smartphones Can Improve Public Transit
• P2P Key Finder Almost Lets You Google Your Keys
• Keyport Concept Coming to Market

Sony has shown off a pair of tablets that will launch later this year. The S1 is little more than yet another Honeycomb tablet in a Sony-designed box, with a 9.4-inch widescreen display and a wedge-shaped case.

Way more interesting is the S2, a clamshell tablet with two 5.5-inch screens. Each section has a rounded back, making it look like a squashed burrito when closed. When open, you can use it as a tablet with a black stripe down the middle, or each screen can display different content, similar to the dual-screen Nintendo DS consoles.

And the gaming analogy is apt. The tablets will work with the PlayStation Suite platform, which is Sony’s way of putting PS software onto various devices. We got our first glimpse of it on the PlayStation phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. For more on the gaming aspects of the tablets, head over to our sister site Game|Life where Chris Kohler takes a look.

Both tablets will come with Wi-Fi and optionally 3G or 4G, and run Honeycomb. And both tablets will also pack infrared lamps to control Sony Bravia devices. They’ll also beam music and video to compatible devices via the DLNA wireless protocol, which is similar in concept to Apple’s AirPlay.

All in all, these look like pretty neat devices, especially if you are already heavily invested in Sony gear. Price and availability are both as yet unannounced, but if you pencil in “expensive” and “later this year” then you won’t go far wrong.

Lastly, a weird quote lifted from Sony’s press release. Talking about the OS, Google’s Android boss Andy Ruben apparently said the following: “Android 3.0 is a new version of the Android platform with a new holographic user interface that is designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes, particularly tablets.” Holographic?

Sony tablet press release [Sony]

Photos: Sony Global

See Also:

• Gallery: Sony Readies 2 'PlayStation Certified' Tablets for Fall
• Video: Hands-On With PlayStation Phone
• Gadget Lab Podcast: Android Tablets Galore, PlayStation Phone
• What We Know About Honeycomb, the Android for Tablets

The Titan is the PB&J of the clock radio world

A clock radio with separate speakers and display is so lame. It’s like taking bread, peanut butter and jelly and deciding to make two different-flavored sandwiches instead of one delicious PB&J. Thankfully, one French company has realized that the great tastes of grille and LED taste great together.

Lexon’s Titan clock radio, designed by Jeremy and Adrian Wright of Design Wright, puts the LED lamps behind the speaker grille, blinking out the time with the aesthetics of a dot-matrix display. In this regard it’s a lot like the Spotify Radio we saw earlier this month, only a real, shipping product rather than a cool concept.

Other than its lovely design, the radio works like any other clock radio, soothing you to sleep and then yanking you back out of it several hours later. The radio has several presets, you can snooze (what I call “sleep procrastination”) and you can jack in some of your own tunes via the 3.5mm socket.

The price? You’ll have to go to a real store to find out. You know the cool looking but overpriced gadgets you find in the museum gift shop? A lot of that is from Lexon. You may recognize this radio, for example:

Have I seen you somewhere before?

There is a list of stores on the website if you want to track one down, or you can just try to be happy with your dumb old clock radio, with its separate display and speakers. Good luck with that.

Lexon Titan product page [Lexon via Yanko]

See Also:

• Darth Vader Clock Radio
• Review: Internet Clock Radio Is Your Passport To International …
• Gorgeous Tuned Up Clock Radio Also Has an Alarming Price Tag …
• Mr. Clock Radio Wakes Up the Horror

The US had to wait for its Eee Pad Transformer launch a little longer than the rest of the world, but it’s finally gotten its wish today and consumers’ reaction seems to have been nothing short of voracious. Amazon’s order page for the $400 Android 3.0 tablet appears to have gone from “in stock” to “out of stock” within mere minutes, while Target — the supplier fulfilling orders on behalf of Amazon — also lists the Transformer as presently unavailable. ASUS’ own Where To Buy page leads us to a bunch of dead ends as well, with Best Buy being the only retailer we can currently find with stock in the US. We can’t say for sure whether we’re looking at overwhelming demand or just limited supply, but it’s hard to argue with ASUS’ excellent value proposition here: a 10-inch IPS display, a dual-core SOC and a feature-rich tablet OS all for less than four Benjamins. You’ll just need to be quick on the trigger if you want one.

[Thanks, Noah]

ASUS Eee Pad Transformer goes on sale in US, immediately sells out at Amazon originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Apr 2011 04:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Okay, so it’s not quite 8K video, we’re not there yet, but the Adler Planetarium and its brand new Grainger Sky Theater are about to show us what 64 megapixel images look like on a big screen. Described as the “largest single seamless digital image in the world,” the picture inside the planetarium will come from 20 projectors hooked up to 45 computers processing data, and should provide the most lucid and captivating view unto our universe that one can get without actually exiting the Earth’s atmosphere. The new show kicks off on July 8th, having been put together with aid from NASA and IBM among others. Jump past the break for the full press release.

Continue reading Chicago’s Adler Planetarium to start projecting 8K by 8K images from this July, put cinema screens to shame

Chicago’s Adler Planetarium to start projecting 8K by 8K images from this July, put cinema screens to shame originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Apr 2011 03:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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