Hasta La Gadget!

Leap Motion, makers of the innovative Leap Motion controller for PCs, today announced that at launch, it will sell its device exclusively through Best Buy’s physical and online stores in the U.S., as the only other sales channel for the device besides its own website. Leap Motion will also be available soon for pre-order from Best Buy beginning in February, and will come to Europe and other world markets through other partners not yet announced.

I spoke with Leap Motion President and COO Andy Miller about the arrangement, and asked him why Best Buy represented a good fit for the hardware startup. Miller said that Best Buy had been very excited at the prospect of selling Leap’s controller, which can track a computer user’s movements with a high degree of accuracy and no lag time.

“They had been following our progress, and they invited us up to Minneapolis and they got their hands on the Leap Motion, and they decided that this was for them,” he said. “They’re a pretty forward-thinking company and we love the way they can tell the story. It’s really about partnering with someone who has the training to show off to potential customers what we can do.”

Miller added that for Best Buy, the value is in helping the company to show its consumers that it is still on the cutting edge, and capable of bringing them the latest in consumer interaction design. Leap Motion will be working with Best Buy to craft in-store end cap displays, which will feature the controller and games and apps selected by both the retailer and the hardware maker specifically to show off the device’s capabilities. The fact that this deal makes for a great software showcase was also at the forefront of Leap’s decision-making in going with Best Buy as a launch partner.

“It’s not just a startup with a website where we’ve been fortunate to have a lot of interest; now, people will be able to see the apps they build for the Leap platform in stores all across the U.S.,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge audience for developers here. Developers have a choice about where they spend their time and money, and we’re trying to make a strong case for why they should do it at Leap.”

Another launch-time move from Leap is its recently announced partnership with Asus to ship the controller with new PCs in 2013. That, too, is a way for the company to prove to potential developers that far from being vaporware or a niche product, this is intended as a mass market device, and will have all the distribution efforts that kind of project implies. The Best Buy partnership is also a key ingredient for getting Leap Motion somewhere where users can actually try before they buy, which is absolutely crucial for this kind of device coming new to market without the power of a big brand like Microsoft or Sony.

The Best Buy arrangement is a limited time exclusive, and Miller said Leap fully intends to offer the controller through other retailers as well in the future. Pre-orders for those who signed up via Leap’s website are expected to ship out sometime later this quarter.

At CES 2013, we did talk about at least one pocket-friendly router – be it in size or price point, but this time around, there is the Asus WL-330NUL Pocket Router that certainly looks as though it is going to be a worthy purchase for those who want a Wi-Fi router that is diminutive enough to snuggle in your pocket without missing a beat. In fact, it will also be powered when connected to a USB port, letting you use it plugged into your notebook without having to tote around an additional power cable. Nifty, to say the least.

Apart from that, the Asus WL-330NUL Pocket Router will also come with an Ethernet jack that enables you to plug in a cable from your modem or from a wired connection wherever you are, turning the small router into a device that lets you share the wired connection wirelessly with other devices – talk about an instant portable wireless hotspot! Tipping the scales at under an ounce, it will not be able to deliver uber strong signals, but for one or two users on the road, it ought to be sufficient.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner , Garmin BarkLimiter And Delta Series For Your Four-Legged Buddy,

PC shipments are still heading the wrong way down the gadget freeway, according to Gartner, who thinks that we’re now consuming media mostly on tablets and just flitting over to the PC for grunt work. The survey outfit theorized that a single shared computer can often suffice for a family, with individuals getting their own tablet instead of a laptop or desktop for personal stuff — especially with compelling, inexpensive new entries like the Nexus 7. Gift-givers were less inclined to wrap up PCs this Christmas, and Windows 8 didn’t give them much of a boost either, according to the figures. The only companies with anything to celebrate during the period were Lenovo and Asus, who experienced 8.2 and 6.4 percent boosts respectively, reflecting another trend that competitors like HP and Dell will want to nip in the bud — and fast.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

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Source: Gartner

ASUS has dropped another fanless graphics card ‘GeForce GT 610′ for the Japanese market. Codenamed GT610-SL-1GD3-L, the card is packed with 48 CUDA Cores, a 64-bit memory interface, a core clock of 810MHz and a 1GB of DDR3 memory set @ 1200MHz, and features 1x D-Sub, 1x DVI-I and 1x HDMI outputs. The GT610-SL-1GD3-L retails for around 4,000 Yen (about $45). [ASUS]

Despite a strong showing of slates in 2012, ASUS showed precious few tablets at CES last week. Missing from the show? Its latest MeMo Pad — a 7-inch 1024 x 600 tablet rocking Jelly Bean, 16GB of storage, a Mali 400 GPU, 1GB of RAM and a 1MP front-facing camera. ASUS didn’t name the tablet by model number, but it’s a dead ringer for the ME172V that slipped through GLBenchmarks last month, and fits the bill of a recent federal authorization. The new slab isn’t quite as nice as the Nexus 7 its predecessor became, but at $150, it’s a little easier on the wallet. ASUS also cautions buyers that the MeMo pad is a “tablet-only product,” clarifying that it won’t be getting a Transformer Pad-like keyboard dock — assuming you could type on a 7-inch keyboard, that is. Check out the slate’s official press release after the break.

Continue reading ASUS MeMo Pad makes quiet post-CES debut, offers Jelly Bean and 16GB of storage for $150

Filed under: Tablets, ASUS

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