Hasta La Gadget!

Generating digital content for the media you already own is a frustrating experience.

Whether it’s buying up a single online you couldn’t get out of an old vinyl, or getting a digital version of a favorite book to read on your iPhone, it always takes just a little too long for a little too much money.

This is why plenty of people turn to pirated content and gadgets like the Book Reader V100, which his being shown at CES 2009 this year. Plustek’s $700 Reader scans books through a cool optical character recognition tech that understands words even when they’re faded or smudged on the physical page. It can duplicate books in PDF and various other file types.

But the killer app, and one whose ease of use is probably a bit controversial, is that the scan also automatically creates MP3 files of books. This means you can make an audio file of any book you own in only a few steps. This might not be Audible.com’s worst nightmare, if only because of the nice presentation of celebrity voice-overs of most audio books, but there’s no way they’d like their customers to know about it.

According to the company, setting up the book scan is simple – you just place the book on the base and the machine does the rest. (The sensitive curved lamp scan every word, even in the crack of the book’s spine).

We haven’t tried out the natural voice synthesis when the file reads the book back to you, but we can’t wait to try it. As long as it doesn’t crank up the high notes or sound like a robot, it could be a good gadget if the price goes down significantly.

Check out a video of the previous version of the scanner after the jump.

We got a quick look at ASUS’s new Eee PC tablets today, the T91 and T101H. The netbook heritage is unmistakable — you only have to peep the 8.9-inch and 10-inch respective screen sizes and Atom processors — but the two machines offer up full-on swivel tablet functionality, and look pretty good doing it. The chiclet keyboard on the T101H is a slight improvement over the standard Eee PC keyboard on the T91 — which is a tad less firm, and with less room for distinct spacing. We found the hinge to be just alright, only rotating in a clockwise direction, and showing bit of “give.” Otherwise it’s pretty standard Eee, with ASUS’s standard march toward sexy and the deepest stack of SKUs in the industry.

Filed under: Tablet PCs

ASUS Eee PC T91 and T101H touchscreen tablet hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Green is the new black and Motorola is ready to ride that fashion trend. The company’s new candy bar shaped W233 Renew handset is pretty basic but has solid green credentials.

The casing on the phone is made of plastic from recycled water bottles. The device’s smaller form factor takes 20 percent less energy to create compared to many other phones, says the company and it even comes with an envelope to send in your old phone for recycling.

The W233 Renew has 2GB memory and offers a whopping nine hours of talk time. But if you are looking for features, you are in the wrong lawn. The phone has a music player but no camera or internet browsing capability.

While a good first step in the trend towards greener devices, this lightweight phone will make the grass seem greener on the other side for its buyers.

Product Page [Motorola]

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

CES has big, fancy products like the new Palm OS, and then they have stuff like this. In a little pod in the Sands, a Chinese company called SATY is showing this rather blocky music and video player with some unusual features. It’s got a flashlight. It’s got a radio. It’s got a mosquito repeller (which just means it plays a really high-pitched tone, so it’s probably also a teenager repeller.) It has a breathalyzer. And if the battery runs down, you can power it by pulling on a string repeatedly.

When I asked the guy at the booth why it has a breathalyzer, he looked at me like I was insane and said, “for driving.”

Will you ever be able to buy this thing in the US? Would you want to? Who knows? But it’s definitely creative.

LAS VEGAS — It was probably the lack of any exciting new products from the Sony stable that the keynote address by company Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer was high on the celeb quotient and low on new product news.

At CES, Stringer paraded a list of stars including Tom Hanks, Usher, Oprah’s favorite doctor Mehmet Oz (better known as Dr. Oz on TV), the Yankees baseball hall-of-famer Reggie Jackson and Hollywood power executives, John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Disney and Pixar and Jeffery Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks.

Hanks and Stringer kicked off the keynote with banter about some of the prototype products that Sony is working on. This includes new eyeglasses that would allow the wearer to watch a movie on their glass and see their surroundings at the same time.

Sony didn’t offer any details on when early products based on the prototype will be available. But if successful in bringing it to market, the company would have eliminated the biggest problem in wrap-around personal movie viewer-glasses: claustrophobia.

Glasses from companies such as Myvu and Vuzix are not popular among most consumers because they completely cut off peripheral vision and awareness of the surroundings.

With its new glasses, Sony hopes to eliminate that problem and make it more acceptable to users.

Sony also showed a prototype of a flexible display screen. The organic TFT OLED called Flex can be squeezed and manipulated even as it displays on-screen video.

On Wednesday, the company announced a new mini-notebook called the Vaio Lifestyle PC. The size of a small business envelope, it sports a eight-inch LCD screen.

At CES, Sony is also showing a prototype of its sugar-based bio battery that generates electricty based on the breakdown of carbohydrates and GreenHeart concept phone that has a recycled plastic keypad and greener packaging among other things.