Hasta La Gadget!

If tech battles were kung-fu movies, Steve Jobs would be Jackie Chan. Earlier this week, the Apple CEO took on all comers, smack-talking Google, BlackBerry, and practically anyone else who dared do battle with his precious iPhone and iPad.

All in all, it was a pretty impressive display, and it was enough to get executives at Google, RIM, and TweetDeck all up in his grill. But how does it compare to some of the all-time best tech battles?

We’ve broken down some of our favorites from over the years to see how Jobs vs. Google/RIM stacks up. Let’s just say that nothing puts a verbal tiff into perspective quite like watching some grainy footage of a circus elephant getting electrocuted on Coney Island.

Announcing a upcoming, far-off Android tablet is the new black. It’s the perfect manner of non-committed committal from companies attempting to position themselves on the iPad consumer tablet bandwagon. Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo is doing just that. The company announced that it is working on a new Android-based tablet due out “as early as” summer 2011.

Yeesh.

Why the epic wait? The company is waiting for a new version of Android. Google has made it pretty clear that Android 2.2 Froyo is not a great operating system for tablets–and Lenovo appears to agree. “I don’t believe Froyo is the right base to have a fully functioning pad,” the company’s COO told the press yesterday.

Instead, the company is waiting for the release of Honeycomb, a version of the mobile OS designed specifically for tablets. As for a Lenovo Windows 7 tablet? I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one…

Once upon a time, computers were called “typewriters.” They
ran on ink, which got all over the place and stained fingers and clothes.
Sometimes if you typed too fast, the mechanized parts got tangled and required
you to stick your fingers in to set them free. Also, editing was a complete
nightmare. And now, thanks to one crafty
DIYer, you can relive those glory days of techno-yore!

Starting at a mere $499, you can buy a refurbished standard
typewriter fitted with a USB cable to hook into your computer, laptop, or even
iPad (available via the artists’ Etsy page–$59 DIY kits are
also available). The keyboard is refurbished from actual old school
keyboards–non-standard keys like the F1 through F12 can be activated via a
special toggle key. 

The price for such a gadget is fairly ridiculous, but there
really is something about the feel of a typewriter and the clickity clack of thoughts pouring through fingers. So, if you can
put a price on nostalgia, I guess that is it.

Now we can all Facebook-stalk our friends and download
illegal music just like our grandparents did when they were procrastinating at
work.

Via unplggd,
USB Typewriter

Post by Evan Dashevsky

All right, just more thing from Steve Jobs’s unexpected–and, frankly, pretty awesome–earnings call crashing from last night. After the executive was finished saying some mean things about Google and BlackBerry, he tore into the tablet market.

First on his list were the new crop of seven inch tablets that seem to be popping up all over the place. “One naturally thinks that a seven inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10 inch screen,” Jobs told the press. “Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a seven inch screen is only 45 percent as large as iPad’s 10 inch screen. You heard me right-just 45 percent as large.”

Of course, Jobs wasn’t just attacking the tablets that have been announced thus far–he was putting the kibosh on all of those rumors of a seven inch “iPad Mini.”

Users of a seven inch tablet, he added, oddly, would have to “sand down their fingers” to use the thing. Yep, that’s right, sand down their fingers,

Once you increase the resolution of the display to make up some of the difference, it’s meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one-quarter of their present size.

Last month Apple filed suit against HyperMac and their parent company, Sanho, accusing them of parent infringement over the HyperMac line of external laptop batteries – and more importantly – the Apple MagSafe connectors that the external batteries use to charge the Mac or MacBook Pro that the HyperMac battery is connected to. Today, according to an e-mail from Sanho Corporation CEO Daniel Chin, Sanho and HyperMac will stop selling the HyperMac batteries with the MagSafe connectors on November 2nd, 2010 while they negotiate with Apple.

HyperMac states you’ll still be able to buy the external batteries after that date, but without the MagSafe connector, they won’t be able to charge your device over anything but USB, unless you already have a connector cable. Only time will tell whether the lawsuit blows over and HyperMac is able to sell the external battery packs again, but in the interim, this is the last opportunity to pick one up before they’re gone for good in their current form.