Hasta La Gadget!

This November marks the fifth year of Wired magazine’s annual pop-up store. The Wired Store offers many of the neat gadgets seen in the magazine, and, for the first time, it will feature a design collaboration with Moby (yes, that world-famous musician guy).

Located at 415 West 13th St. in New York City, the store will have more than 150 items on display, including TVs, laptops, cell phones, clothing, kids toys, and more. The Wired Store will also host regular events, like Geek Dad Saturdays, and Game Day Sundays, as well as wine tastings and chef demos in the WIRED Cafe.

There will also be a green
section curated by Adrian Grenier and Peter Glatzer of SHFT.COM, and a gaming section curated by non other than Tony Hawk.

The Wired Store will be open to the public from November 21, 2009 through
December 27, 2009. Visit the store’s Web site for more information.

The $99 Roku Player, a tiny box that streams content from Netflix’s on-demand content as well as Amazon Video On Demand, just got two new siblings. Available immediately via Roku’s website and Amazon (and for a limited time, with free shipping), the Roku SD ($79.99) and the Roku HD-XR ($129.99) expand the line in opposite directions. At only $20 cheaper then the original Roku Player, its hard to see the immediate impact or value that the Roku SD will have over its predecessor. The Roku HD-XR, however, offers 802.11n Wi-Fi compatibility, which should translate into better streaming at higher resolutions with less interruption. This, of course, is contingent upon your set-up providing 802.11n Wi-Fi signal to begin with. Streaming HD content has not been gracefully achieved by any media extender as of yet; the best solution is still the iTunes method, which downloads to a hard drive and plays seamlessly once the minimum buffer is met. That, technically, is not streaming, but actual streaming of HD content usually falls apart fairly quickly, so we are eager to check out Roku’s purported solution. Look for reviews at PCMag.com in the coming weeks.

Motorola tonight released the full specifications and a photo gallery of the highly-awaited Droid phone on their public Web site, pre-empting the anticipated October 28 announcement of Verizon Wireless’s first Android smartphone.

According to the Motorola site, which was first noticed by the Boy Genius Report blog but then independently confirmed and loaded by PCMag, the Droid is a large touchscreen phone with a sliding keyboard. It’s 2.4 x 4.6 x .5 inches in size and weighs six ounces. That’s relatively heavy, but slim. Its color will be “licorice w/brown sugar accents.”

The phone has an unusually high-resolution, 3.7″ 480×854 touch screen; the iPhone’s touch screen is only 320×480 resolution.

The Droid’s OS is Android 2.0, as Verizon previously showed on their teaser Web site for the device. It is the first Android 2.0 phone.

The Droid has a 550 Mhz processor, according to the site, which didn’t describe the processor architecture. The architecture is important because most Android phones up until now have run on 528 Mhz ARM11 processors, which some users consider sluggish in some circumstances. The recently announced Samsung Moment upped the ante to an 800 Mhz ARM11. If the Droid runs a newer form of architecture, known as Cortex-A8, it could be faster with a lower clock speed.

More details and photos after the jump.

Amazon has slimmed down both the number of Kindle e-readers the e-tailer is offering, as well as the price.

At its Kindle store, Amazon now offers just two versions of the Kindle: the widescreen DX, for $489, and a 6-inch version of the Kindle optimized for both domestic and international wireless downloads. (Previously, the two versions were separate devices.) As of now, the price of the latter Kindle is $259, down from $279, the launch price of the international Kindle. Amazon’s domestic and international Kindles both use the GSM international wireless standard.

The most reasonable explanation for the price cut is a competitive one; the rival Barnes & Noble Nook costs $259 as well.

Wired also discovered
that the international version does offer some Web browsing, as long as
the only site users want to visit is Wikipedia. Pictures that appear on
the site, however, are not rendered, Wired reported.

It wasn’t exactly the best-kept secret in the industry. After months of rumors and a few proverbial cats let out of the bag the morning of by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Barnes & Noble yesterday made official its stab at the e-book market–The Nook.

The book giant’s Kindle killer is Android-based, as speculated, and features two screens (also rumored prior to release)–one a standard electronic ink display for reader and one color touch screen. The reader also features 3G connectivity via AT&T (good luck using it in New York) and Wi-Fi, which can be accessed in Barnes & Noble retail locations.

The reader will begin shipping the end of next month for $259. The first 10,000 customers who pre-order will receive a free copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.