Hasta La Gadget!

Booq is well known for interesting bag designs. The Mamba Shift was designed to be a backpack with an endless array of pockets and sleeves for gadgets and peripherals, and the Taipan Shadow is a comfortable messenger bag with professional looks and clean lines. Now, Booq has unveiled the Mamba Catch, which combines the bottomless feel of the Mamba Shift with the form factor of traditional messenger bags.

The Mamba Catch opens more like a backpack than a messenger, with a zipper at the bottom that you pull up and over the top of the bag, revealing a clamshell-like interior, full of pockets for all of your essential items. It comes in 13-and 15-inch varieties, and has external zipped pockets that keep the items you need frequent access to safe from probing hands or accidents. It also comes with a removable accessory pouch for your wallet, cell phone, or other important items, and over 20 other pockets and compartments for items of all sizes. The bag can be carried by the included shoulder strap and pad, or using the padded handle at the top for a briefcase look.  

The Mamba Catch is available now at retailers that partner with Booq or in their online store for $129.95 for the 13-inch model and $149.95 for the 15-inch model. 

A new breed of projectors with short-throw capabilities lets your laptop and projector remain close to the screen rather than back in the audience. With a short-throw projector, it’s harder to cast your shadow on the screen or for the audience to trip over cables or for restless students to jostle a projector cart. With a price premium of as little as 15% over a comparable normal throw projector, short- and ultra-short projectors now make up almost one in five projector sales. Classrooms are the primary drivers for short-throw projectors, along with businesses and gamers.

Tritton’s gaming headsets are well known and loved by people who own them, and by gamers looking for high-end audio peripherals that are portable enough to be connected to any gaming console or their PC when they’re ready to fire up their favorite title. The AX 180 has been one of Tritton’s most popular wired headsets for a while, but at E3 this week the company unveiled a 2.4 GHz wireless version of the AX 180 Gaming Headset that features the sound quality of the wired version just without the wires.

Additionally, the Wireless AX 180 is a USB device, so it connects easily to your PC, Mac, XBox 360, or PlayStation 3. The headset comes with a compact receiver that plugs into your console or PC, and Tritton’s “Portable Control Unit” that features independent game and voice volume controls so you can tweak the volume of the game versus the chatter of your teammates and friends individually. The controller also has a monitor switch so you can mute or hear your own voice when you speak, and a 3D audio switch that toggles surround sound on or off. The Wireless AX 180 gaming headset will be available this fall, and retail for $149.99. 

When Google TV was shown to the world a couple weeks ago, only Logitech was on stage as a hardware partner for peripherals. Google would do well to check out the offerings of the Taiwanese-based Cideko. At Computex, it’s showing several new devices that would fit very nicely within the Google TV ecosystem–or, since it’s DLNA-compliant, even the Windows environment.

The Air Player (photo after the jump) is a device that can stream audio and video from multiple interfaces over to your HDTV. It can connect to your PC, external hard drive, or memory card and wirelessly transmit audio and video. And the Air Sender delivers up to 1080p A/V programming from your PC, external hard drive, or memory card and transmit it wirelessly up to 100 meters. The Air Player can then receive those signals and play them on your HDTV or any other remote monitor.

Although no one wants to keep a keyboard on the coffee table, console controllers have certainly found a home there. Cideko’s Air Keyboard Conqueror (above) offers the flexibility of a game controller with a full QWERTY keyboard. It also works as a 3D gyro mouse, so you can point and click on icons on your HDTV.

Cideko reps can’t say when, or if, these products will hit the U.S. But if the connected living room is going to catch on it will need products like this, or something a lot like them.

Check out our ever-growing slideshow of Computex 2010 at PCMag.com.

When Chairman Jonney Shih unveiled the Asus Eee Pad on stage at Computex today, the crowd of journalists almost rushed the stage with excitement. Unlike the similarly named Asus Eee Tablet, which is designed to compete with e-Readers like the Nook and the Kindle, the Eee Pad is designed to go head-to-head with the Apple iPad.
 
The Eee Pad is a Windows 7-based device that uses an Intel CULV Core 2 Duo processor and a touch-sensitive capacitive screen. It can be used as a multimedia player, e-reader, Web-browser, or, with the help of a keyboard docking station, full-featured PC.  Asus will be releasing two versions of the Eee Pad. The EP101TC will come with a 10-inch screen and the EP121 will ship with a 12-inch screen. Asus claims both systems will deliver at least 10 hours of battery life.

Shih says that tablet devices like this will bridge the conventional divide between business and consumer products. “We envision a different kind of usage scenario,” Shih said. “You can be both a premier professional and a housewife.”

Question is, can Asus get an Eee Pad in her hands before she buys an iPad? No specific ship date was given.

Want to see more? Check out our Computex 2010 slideshow at PCMag.com.