Hasta La Gadget!

Kids grow up so fast. I’ve been astounded lately at just how quickly my little girl has become too grown up for all kinds of kid-stuff. We can’t watch Dora anymore, or Little Bear, she’s moved on, and even enjoys a little non-fiction entertainment now and again, and of course her beloved Cake Boss. What could get her interested in a good cuddle and a bedtime story?

Check it out! Designed to be the worlds first interactive Pajamas, Smart PJs are average looking, cozy bed clothes comprised of a top and bottom and made from 100% cotton.These unisex jammies look normal enough, but normal they’re not. Smart PJs are covered in green and blue “dot groups”, that can be scanned with a smartphone, and will tell over 45 different bedtime stories.

Simply download one of the free associated apps, scan a chosen dot group with your phone, and sit back and enjoy a story, pictures, and fun facts via your smart device. How fun is that? Smart PJs is an innovative company with the distinction of creating the worlds first, and only, interactive Pajamas. They realized just how much kids like bedtime stories, and how much parents like a comfy, quality pair of pajamas and voila! we now have Smart PJs.

I wonder where else readable code will find itself? I’m actually a bit surprised it hasn’t already found its way onto much more clothing. Anyway, if you can see your kiddo in Smart PJs this fall, you can have a pair for only around 30 bucks, from our friends at Brookstone.com, in sizes fitting most children from 1 to 10, with either pink or blue detailing. Just make sure you scan only one set of dots at a time… I’m not responsible for what kind of a story you might get if you scan too many at once.
[ Smart PJs – Pajamas that Tell a Story copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

With its AC wall charger built-in, the
new N100i smartphone from Daxian allows users to ditch the annoying
USB cable and wall-wart combination to juice up after a long day.
There are some strong drawbacks to the execution, though, so it’s a
good thing Daxian didn’t remove USB charging entirely.

Google and Motorola’s Moto X has already been made available on AT&T starting at $199 last week, with the device expected to be made available on additional carriers soon after its release. Verizon announced earlier this week they’ll be selling the Moto X on August 29, but only through their online store. Well – the day is upon us and potential Moto X customers who are Big Red subscribers can now place their orders. (more…)

Moto X Available At Verizon’s Online Store Starting At $199 original content from Ubergizmo.

Watching the Red Hot Nickel Ball destroy various materials just never gets old. So here’s a Red Hot Ball of Nickel turning a box of crayons into a rainbow of destruction.

Read more…

The PC industry may be shaken up by the rapid encroachment of tablets into consumer and enterprise spending habits — a trend that’s seeing lighter devices like the iPad, as well as cheaper tablets like Amazon’s Kindle Fire and more, eat into the market share of bigger and more expensive computers. But it’s all a matter of perspective: today IDC said that it’s actually lowering forecasts for tablet shipments this year and in the future.

“Growing competition”, IDC says, from smartphones with bigger screens (the recently-legitimized phablet) and wearables like smart watches, combined with a lack of exciting tablet product launches in Q2, are leading the analysts to says that there will be 227.4 million tablets shipped worldwide in 2013, down some 2 million from 229.3 million as previously estimated.

Yes, it’s not a huge drop, and you can argue that these are only estimates anyway. And it’s still some 57.7% higher than 2012 shipments. But IDC’s figures point to some themes that are worth watching for: whether even less-expensive tablets are possibly still too expensive for what consumers are willing to pay; whether even tablets — in some regards pared-down in functionality from PCs — are still too over specced for what many consumers want and need; and the issue of how much of our wallet we will want to dedicate to these products, as more of them enter the market.

On the enterprise side, IDC notes that right now, in fact, the tablet is pretty minor but is growing: It notes that tablet adoption in sectors like education and retail collectively accounted for 10% of all tablet sales in 2012, and that will only grow to 20% by 2017.

IDC also notes that it’s starting to see more developed markets already take their feet off the gas in terms of rapid adoption, with “maturing markets such as the U.S. now expected to cede share more rapidly to emerging markets such as Asia/Pacific.” It predicts that by 2017 there will be 407 million tablets shipped.

More immediately, competitive pressures will mean lower prices for tablets coming soon, IDC notes. “We expect average selling prices to continue to compress as more mainstream vendors utilize low-cost components to better compete with the whitebox tablet vendors that continue to enjoy widespread traction in the market despite typically offering lower-quality products and poorer customer experiences,” writes Tom Mainelli, research director for tablets.

In terms of regional activity, IDC points out that North America, Western Europe and Japan, which had traditionally been the leaders in tablet adoption, are already seeing some slow-down in sales, compared to other parts of the world. Today they account for 60.8% of the market, but that will drop to 49% by 2017, with emerging markets making up the remaining 51%. (Another proof point for why it’s so important for companies like Google, Facebook and others to build out their businesses in these markets.)

“Year-on-year growth is beginning to slow as the tablet market approaches early stages of maturity,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst for IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker. “Much of the long-term growth will be driven by countries like China where projected growth rates will be consistently higher than the worldwide average.”