Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re not a car person there’s a good chance you don’t know much about the OBD-II lurking mysteriously beneath your dash. It’s there — if your car was built since the first Bush administration, anyway. Usually its needs go unfulfilled until your check-engine light pops on and some mechanic with greasy paws clumsily stuffs a code checker in there, but more and more tools are coming out to change that. The Autobot Mavia is one, and now Griffin is doing similar with the CarTrip. It’s an OBD-II adapter that connects wirelessly to an iOS device or writes directly to SD card, storing information on information related to car mileage, even giving you a real-time efficiency readout on your display with the CleanDrive app. And, yes, it’ll even pull warning codes and the like if things aren’t quite running how they should. All that for $89.99, a fair bit less than the Mavia will potentially be and available sooner — sometime before the first quarter is through.

Griffin gets an iPhone all up in your car’s OBD-II port with the CarTrip Bluetooth adapter originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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.

What was that number? 80 tablets being introduced at this year’s CES? Odds are that most of them will be long forgotten by this time next year. One that will likely make a bit of a splash amongst enthusiasts, if only because of sheer aesthetic awesomeness, is Lenovo’s entry.

This time last year, we caught a glimpse of the U1 hybrid. Now the thing is official–officially awesome, from the looks of it. The device shifts between laptop and slate tablet (the Le Pad). The whole will run a lofty $1,300–or just $520 for the Le Pad tablet portion.

There’s one other major caveat, aside from price, unfortunate–for the time being, the thing (like the LePhone that we saw at last year’s show) is only available in China.

If you’re still reading this because you A. Live in China, B. Know an Importer, or C. like to drool over things you can’t have (we fall into the latter category, by the way), here are some more specs:

The UI Hybrid has a 10 inch 1,280 by 800 pixel display, an ARM SnapDragon 1.3GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM (as a laptop and 1GB as a tablet),and runs Windows 7 in its laptop form.

Both configurations will be available in March.

It’s not the first time that Samsung’s pimped up their hard drives with some USB 3.0 goodness, but come April, the Korean giant will be delivering three new product lines that are yet to be named. The first one is a basic portable model that goes up to 1TB, and comes encased in a smudge-resistant matte housing with a choice of four colors. The next one up is simply a premium version of the portable drive that not only looks prettier (as pictured above), but also beefed up with auto backup software and 256-bit Full Disk Encryption. A USB dock will be available for both portable lines.

Last but not least, those looking for more storage space (and presumably faster spinning speeds) can turn to the desktop version, which will be available in three flavors: 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB. Press release after the break.

Continue reading Samsung spices up the USB 3.0 hard drive party with three new models

Samsung spices up the USB 3.0 hard drive party with three new models originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here they are: ASUS’s duo of Tegra 2-powered, 10.1-inch tablets with unique physical keyboards. Starting with the craziest of them, is the Eee Pad Slider (pictured on the left), which reminds us a lot of HTC’s old school Shift with its slide out QWERTY keyboard. The device is planned to run Google’s Honeycomb, sports a IPS, 1280 x 800-resolution display, and houses mini-HDMI and miniUSB ports as well as a microSD card slot. The 2.2-pound / .5-inch thick slab also has dual cameras — a 1.2 megapixel front-facing one and a 5 megapixel one with an LED flash on the back. We have to say we love the idea of always having that keyboard around, but if you don’t want to drag along a physical keyboard all the time, ASUS has something for you too. It’s the Transformer, and like the Eee Pad we saw at Computex, it’s a 10.1-inch tablet that will come with a laptop like dock with a full size keyboard and touchpad. The tablet part — like the Slider — will run Android 3.0 and packs a dual-core Tegra 2 processor, two cameras, and a 1280 x 800-resolution IPS display, however, the dock has an integrated battery that will keep the tablet running for 16 hours on a charge — the tablet on its own should last eight. We’re obviously aching in our seats here waiting to get these two in our hands so stay tuned for some crazy videos of the two in action — until then we leave you with the specs after the break.

Update: How much will it cost you to keyboard-ify your slate and how long will you have to wait? ASUS says the Transformer will run between $400 and $700 and the Slider from $500 to $800. Expect them in April and May respectively.

Continue reading ASUS Eee Pad Slider and Transformer are here for those that can’t imagine using a tablet without a physical keyboard

ASUS Eee Pad Slider and Transformer are here for those that can’t imagine using a tablet without a physical keyboard originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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