Hasta La Gadget!

Believe it or not, DigiLife has actually been cranking out wares in the consumer electronics space for awhile now. Trouble is, there aren’t too many people that seem to care here in the States. All that has a chance to change at IFA this Fall, as that’s where DigiLife will be revealing a price and ship date for its impending I-One e-reader / projector hybrid device. Shown this week at Computex for the first time, the multifaceted slate is billed as an e-book reader, with WiFi, a 10.4-inch LCD display and a rather sharp looking design to go along with it. But unlike every other alternative out there, this one actually has an integrated projector and multimedia player, though it’s difficult to say what the final resolution will be (we’re betting on VGA at best). Betcha never thought to project the person you’re video chatting with upside the wall, did you? On second thought, don’t answer that.

DigiLife I-One e-reader smuggles along integrated projector, gets white glove treatment at Computex originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS‘ ARES line of gaming PCs has been kicking for a few years now, but regardless of how many iterations we see, we’re still a wee bit terrified when approaching a chassis this gargantuan. Just after the outfit’s press conference in Taipei, we daintily hurried over to the newest member of the family in order to snag a few shots and get the low-down on what users could expect when it ships between now and next century. Aesthetically, we’re told that the CG8490 was inspired by “ancient and modern armor of both Eastern and Western cultures,” likely a politically correct statement with no actual meaning. Regardless, this monster can overclock itself by as much as 20 percent without boiling over, and the six-core Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition CPU is suited for slicing up even the most complex of tasks. There’s also 12GB of DDR3 memory, 2TB of hard drive space, a standard DVD burner and a pair of overclocked ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPUs to handle DirectX 11 and Eyefinity duties. Mum’s the word on a price or release date, but we’re going with “too much” and “not soon enough.”

Oh, and be sure to peek the limited edition ARES GPU as well as the company’s Rampage III Extreme motherboard in the gallery below.

Continue reading ASUS showcases ROG CG8490 gaming desktop: Core i7-980X, dual OC’d Radeon HD 5870s

ASUS showcases ROG CG8490 gaming desktop: Core i7-980X, dual OC’d Radeon HD 5870s originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 May 2010 19:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Normally when you’ve got industrial design students going wild on computer concepts, you get a lot of wild, unrealistic computer concepts. There’s plenty of that here, but this 10 week collaboration between Freescale, some of its top partners, and Savannah College of Art and Design students is yielding a bit of fruit. We particularly like this docking tablet that can slot into different docks depending on use case — the two primary ones shown being a home entertainment setup and a pro audio breakout. Sure, it’s still not the most realistic way to use a tablet — we’d much rather have solid support for 3rd party USB devices in the near term — but with a bit of Light Peak and some as-ye-unseen pricing, this could make for some pretty slick use cases.

Freescale partners with Savannah school for some leg-stretching tablet concepts, makes a nice use case for Light Peak originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 01:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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She’s but a concept at the moment, but David Boyce’s flOw mockup certainly has legs. The five-speaker set can be arranged in a fanciful iPod docking station for in-home use, and on a whim, any of the speaker balls can be grabbed and taken elsewhere, all while the music follows via a touch of wireless magic. But that’s hardly the kicker — each ball has integrated gesture sensors and accelerometers, enabling the user to quiet the volume by turning it over or switch from “Smooth Operator” to “Master of Puppets” by simply jostling the speaker with an intense level of force. Talk about revolutionizing a played market sector.

[Thanks, Paul]

flOw wireless speaker concept flips jams based on your handling originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 23 May 2010 08:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Concept cameras are usually little more than a GGI-rendered wish-list, the creator’s own dream-machine mocked up on-screen. But this concept Sony Alpha DSLR from Abel Verdezoto is both restrained and remarkably smart.

Well, almost. Verdezoto has decided to swap around and detail the positions of every button and dial, but the big design win is the face-friendly rear panel. Instead of being a vertical, cliff-like slab, the back of the camera slopes inward from the top, away from you. This gets the LCD panel and everything else out of the way of your nose and cheeks and lets your eye rest comfortably on the viewfinder. And lest you worry that the angle of view on that LCD will be compromised, the panel is hinged to flip out when needed.

The sloping back has another advantage: a more natural angle for the wrist when holding the camera to the eye. The hands tip back and the camera sits atop the meat of the thumb instead of tipping forward. Ingenious.

After that, though, it all gets a little crazy. The add-on flash, for instance, has a couple of telescoping legs to let you get it further from the lens-axis. Go take a look: it seems ready to snap as fast as Olive Oyl’s legs. Otherwise, though, the design is excellent.

Prototipo reflex con nueva ergonomía [Tecnofotografía via Yanko. Thanks, Radhika!]