Hasta La Gadget!

Garmin has more or less had a monopoly on the GPS watch market for years now. But since September’s launch of the Timex Global Trainer GPS ($250 street), Garmin has a new competitor. While the Global Trainer is a valiant effort from Timex, it’s going to have a hard time challenging the breadth of Garmin’s line, especially the Garmin Forerunner 110, as well as its range of price points.

The first thing that strikes you when you first lay eyes on the Global Trainer is the sheer size of it. This behemoth of a sports watch has a huge face — wider even than my wrist. On the plus side, this means that it can show a lot of data on the screen while you’re running, but this also makes it a bit cumbersome. Luckily it’s still on the light side, so the watch won’t weigh you down when you hit the road.

Otherwise, the design is unremarkable; it’s a plain black watch with a main button for starts and splits on the face, and power and menu buttons on the side. One gripe is that the start button does not also function as the stop button. While having a start/split button is intuitive if you’re keeping track of splits, you have to train yourself to press the smaller stop button on the right-hand side instead when you’re done with your workout. If you’re concerned with exact timekeeping, this will be a bit of a pain for your first few runs. I do appreciate that the Indiglo button is easy to find. Other GPS watches, like the Suunto X10, make it harder to activate the light, which makes tracking your progress tricky on night runs.

The biggest gripe I’ve heard about GPS watches is how difficult it is to sync them with satellites. While testing in New York City, I’ve found that the tall buildings and general lack of open space can make it particularly difficult to find a signal. This is one area where the Garmin watches have the advantage. While the Garmin I tested quickly synced most times I used it, the Timex was a bit more finicky. The trick, I discovered, was to start it, let it try to sync for a minute or two, then restart it. Usually the second go-round would go a lot smoother, with the watch syncing within seconds, or a minute at most. Without a restart, the watch could fail to sync for 10 minutes or more. I never had the patience to see if it would ever eventually find the satellite signal. Of course, the syncing occurred faster in wide-open spaces like parks.

[photo by Flickr user gillyberlin]

Finally, it looks like someone has managed to pick the perfect hardware upgrade for all the embattled hedge-fund managers out there. Researchers have found that garbage collection methods on SSDs can often make data completely unrecoverable using available forensics techniques. According to an article published by Macworld, garbage collection purged all but a small percentage of 316,666 test files placed on the hard drive by researchers only three minutes after they were deleted. In a standard spinning drive, all of these files were recoverable.

Even after connecting a write blocker, a device designed to stop a hard drive from purging or writing over files, almost 20 percent of the contents of the drive were unrecoverable. According to the article, this is the first time write blockers have been ineffective in preserving the disk for future analysis.

Forensics experts are worried about the potential impact this has for investigating crimes, especially when the growing capacity of USB sticks and other solid-state media may one day lead to similar garbage collection being implemented there. Add that to the fact that it’s difficult or impossible to tell if this data wiping is done intentionally as a way to cover up evidence or if the average user just wanted more space for their Blu-Ray rip of Inception, and you’ve got a bunch of very nervous security professionals.

[via Macworld]

The Wi-Fi version of  the Motorola Xoom has apparently been spotted at Sam’s Club for the low, low price of $539.99. Photos have been floating around the Web showing the Xoom selling for a slightly lower price than the iPad.

Could this mark the beginning of a tablet pricing war? With the original iPad price dropping, other manufactures need to price the tablets accordingly.

Via ZDnet

The thing about really expensive wallets: the people who can buy them tend not to have any trouble filling them. Wallets don’t get much more expensive than this $299 fancy pants model from iWallet. Why so pricey? Well, the thing is designed to do everything imaginable to keep people from stealing your money.

Steve Jobs didn’t discuss it, and the information is conspicuously absent from Apple’s tech specs page, but according to Korean analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, from the firm, Concord Securities, the iPad 2 will sport 512MB of RAM. That’s twice as much as its predecessor–and it’s the same amount available in the iPhone 4.