Hasta La Gadget!

It seems there is always someone Poking you on Facebook. To be honest, I’ve never replied to Pokes since they’re pretty silly, but Facebook has recently launched a new mobile app that will take things beyond the usual Poke.

Facebook Poke allows users to alert to their Facebook friends, sending quick, disposable messages, photos or video in order to share them without posting them to your timeline.

Pokes are set to self-destruct, lasting for 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds after viewing. Basically, if you use it to send racy pictures to your boyfriend/girlfriend, knowing that they will be erased fairly quickly. In addition, Facebook says they are wiping out all of the Pokes encryption keys 2 days after viewing the message, so they can’t be recovered. Then again, you never know what Facebook will do with them. Ultimately, don’t they need to monetize them? After all, they do have shareholders these days.

iOS users can grab Facebook Poke on the App Store now. There’s no word on an Android version as of yet.

[via Facebook]

There’s just something so retro-futuristic about the idea of giant wrist-worn communicators. In the real world, we pretty much skipped right over these  contraptions and went straight to smartphones. So if you don’t have a Pip-Boy 3000 lying around, here’s the next best thing.

What you’re looking at is a fully-functional wrist-worn Bluetooth keyboard. Its been done up in a sort of Steampunk leather and brass arm guard, which should offer both protection and computing on the go. From the pics, it actually looks like there are two variants of the keyboard floating around – one with square keys (which I prefer), and the other with little round ones.

They were built by Thomas Willeford of Brute Force Studios, and appear to have gotten their start as those cheap little Bluetooth keyboards with the touchpad built in. But that’s where the similarities end. The leather and brass work is quite intricate, and that’s probably why these things are selling for $1200(USD) each.

Head on over to Etsy to check out more pics.

For some people, 8TB might sound like a lot of storage, but depending on your data usage (*cough* BitTorrent *cough*), it might be just the right amount. I know that I could use a RAID storage device like this one on my workstation desk.

The Western Digital My Book Live Duo is a dual-drive RAID tablet-top device, which allows RAID 0 or 1 settings, though the 8TB model is only available with the RAID 0 setting, sacrificing redundancy for speed. The Ethernet-connected drives can work as a media server, streaming content to DLNA/UPnP devices, and offer secure remote access.

The 8TB box will set you back $660(USD), which is a lot, but we’re talking about a massive amount of storage. The 6TB model sells for $440 and the 4TB unit sells for $375. They’re available for pre-order now over at B&H Photo.

In my experience, Western Digital makes awesome hard drives and they’ve got an excellent warranty as well as customer care, so I buy all of my hard drives from them these days.

[via Ubergizmo]

Even though there are apps for using smartphones as portable scanners, they don’t always get all of the details, and it’s tough to get a steady image. That’s one of the reasons why Doxie’s portable scanners are useful for people trying to rid themselves of paper in their offices.

The latest iteration of the Doxie Go is pretty small – about as large as two office staplers. It operates anywhere thanks to a built-in battery and can transmit them wirelessly (with an optional upgrade). You can scan in color or black and white, at 300 dpi or 600 dpi to the internal memory of the device, then transfer them over via USB or insert an EyeFi SD card to automatically transfer the scans over Wi-Fi. While you’ll need to recharge the battery every 100 pages or so, it only takes about 2 hours to juice up.

The flexible scanner mechanism can handle documents ranging in size from business card up to 8.5″x15″ too. Of course, the scanner also comes with software for image correction and OCR for converting scanned images to editable text or PDFs.

The Doxie Go sells for $199(USD). The Wi-Fi card will set you back another $30, which is actually cheaper than you can buy the Eye-Fi Connect X2 for elsewhere. You’ll definitely want to check it out if you’re trying to go paperless.

This morning we’re having a peek at a few products that you’re going to flip over, starting with the fabulous Transporter from the folks that brought you the Drobo – offline safety! There’s been a rapid prototyping project initiated that’s created the Project Glass from Google in just two hours. The photo editing app known as Snapseed has been re-released with an update that makes it free, for not just iOS this time but Android as well!

There are now 235 million Google+ users in the Google+ universe, believe it or not! The Google+ universe also has a new element by the name of Google+ Communities The BMW Concept 4 Series Coupe has been previewed as a mid-range “lust magnet” as Chris Davies calls it – lust magnet indeed!

Apple has made a few announcements today via its CEO Tim Cook starting with the fact that they’ll be making products in the USA starting in 2013. Meanwhile Cook has again said that Apple TV is “an area of intense interest”. Meanwhile Apple and Samsung are back in court over the $1 billion dollar fine laid upon the latter earlier this year.

Analysts have now claimed that Microsoft’s big bet with the Surface tablet (the RT version, as that’s the only one out thus far) will yield just around 500,000 Surface RT units sold, and it’s not good news. Warhammer games is about to get some help from SEGA and Creative Assembly. For those of you looking to work with the iPad mini with EE in the UK, you’ll be able to do so for just £50 – with a 2-year contract, of course.

SlashGear Morning Wrap-up: December 6th, 2012 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
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