Hasta La Gadget!

At CES earlier this year, Turtle Beach was quiet about new products might be coming down the pike and didn’t show off much in the way of new audio hardware. But the company has a long and storied history of superior audio quality, especially among gamers and audiophiles, both for its sound cards and its gaming headsets. Today, Turtle Beach announced it would build on the popularity of its X1 gaming headset for the Xbox 360 with the Ear Force X11 headset for the Xbox 360 and PC.

The X11 adopts the design and some of the popular features of Turtle Beach’s X31 and X41 headsets, such as an extra-long audio cable that allows you to game on the couch without worrying about pulling your XBox out of your entertainment center, and large ear cups that fit all the way around your ears for maximum comfort during long gaming sessions.
 

Small- and medium-size businesses, LaCie has your storage needs covered with a line of three new big data solutions. They include the d2 Network 2 (with a single disk), the 2big Network 2 (with two disks), and the 5big Network 2 (shown above, with five disks). The line offers data access of up to 70MB per second and lets users share files or back up networked Windows and Macintosh computers.

LaCie designed the Web-based administration tool to be extra-easy, and it can be used to manage users, groups, and shares, as well as to place data use quotas easily. Admins can also join a Windows domain using Active Directory, to automatically import users and existing permissions.

The 2Big Network 2 and 5big Network 2 offer RAID 1 for redundancy, while the 5big Network 2 offers RAID 6. Each comes with a three-year warranty. The line starts at $229.99 and is available from the LaCie Online Store.

Good news: if you thought the current CompactFlash 4.0 storage limit of 137 Gbytes was too restrictive, the new CF 5.0 standard should shatter that barrier for a good long time.

The CompactFlash 5.0 standard creates an upper boundary of 144 petabytes, an almost unfathomably high capacity of storage: almost 147,500 terabytes. One and two-terabyte hard drives are common, but 147,000? On a flash card? That will only be achieved in the far, far future.

The CompactFlash Association competes with the Secure Digital (SD) card, which has announced its own SDXC standard, taking capacity points up to 2 terabytes. Panasonic announced its first SDXC cards in January.

Adesso is looking beyond the office with its latest keyboard: it wants to take over your living room and conference rooms, as well. The Adesso WKB-4200UB has a slim shape so you can easily tuck it away, perhaps between the couch and wall, when it’s not in use. It also communicates wirelessly (with 2.4-GHz RF connectivity) at a 30-foot range. That should be more than enough, right? At 30 feet, you couldn’t see the screen anyway.

If that was all it had going for it, the WKB-4200UB would be indistinguishable from dozens of other wireless keyboards, but there’s more. It includes a touchpad on the right side, so you can mouse around the screen without an actual mouse, and an LCD that shows the time and date. The Sleep mode prevents you from draining the battery too quickly, or you could just use the On/Off switch. The keys on this full-size keyboard are pleasantly soft. Sadly, it only works with Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000 systems. It’s available now for the slightly steep price of $119.99.

Faster. Smaller. That explains so much of what happens in the computing world, and especially today’s announcement from Kingston Digital. The memory giant announced the availability of a 16GB microSDHC Class 10 card. If you’re not familiar with the “Class” business, that means it meets Class 10 requirements spelled out in the SD Association Specification 3.00: it has a minimum data transfer rate of 10MB/second.

The card comes with a lifetime warranty and Kingston’s 24/7 tech support. Nice. I wish more tech companies stood behind their products like that. You can buy it alone for $138, with an SD adapter for $139, or with a miniSD and SD adapter for $140. Those numbers are a little high, but you know how memory prices drop quickly. Just check the specs of your product before you buy: this card is compatible with microSDHC, miniSDHD, and SDHC devices, but not with standard microSD-enabled devices or readers.