Hasta La Gadget!

Poor Pentax. The company’s just three days away from the much-hyped May 21 launch of the K-7, and here we’ve already seen specs and press pics, and now we’ve got a whole slew of hands-on shots. Just as we’d heard before, the K-7 will pack a 14.6 megapixel sensor with a 720p movie mode and a 3-inch VGA display in a body just a hair smaller than the K200D. Of course, we’re really wondering how this guy’ll be priced — if it comes in around $1000, it’ll be a solid competitor to the Canon Rebel T1i and the Nikon D5000. Guess Pentax still has one surprise in store, eh? Tons more pics at the read link.

[Thanks, Rye]

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Pentax K-7 hands-on shots leak out originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 May 2009 12:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mmm, PCI-Express-based SSD storage. Be honest, is there anything more delicious? The camera-wielding cats over at Hot Hardware managed to climb behind the scenes at OCZ Technology and snap a bevy of shots of the outfit’s highly anticipated Z-Drive in prototype form, and while the device doesn’t look all that different than the press shots we peeked last month, there seems to be some ways yet to go before this bad boy’s available for purchase. At any rate, the innards look about as you’d expect ’em to, with loads of green PCB littered about with oodles of ultra-speedy flash storage. The drive pictured above is actually a 512GB version with a single 4-pin molex power connector and an X4 PCI-e slot, and it benched at upwards of 500MB/sec during read tests and 400MB/sec on write tests. Check the read link for a closer look — just don’t forget to prep the drool rag before heading over.

Filed under: Storage

Prototype OCZ Z-Drive PCI-Express SSD splayed, scoped out originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 May 2009 08:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Upstart company Interead is looking to jump into the ever-expanding library of e-book readers with its debut, the COOL-ER. Company founder Neil Jones describes it as the “iPod moment that e-readers have been waiting for,” calling the device the first of its kind to be designed specifically for the non-technologically inclined reader in mind. Indeed, the aesthetics seems to borrow liberally from the iPod nano, and features eight different color options. It weighs in at 6.3 ounces, or a little less than half of the Kindle 2, with the same 6-inch e-ink screen, and is small enough to fit comfortably in your jacket pocket, he says. It’s got 1GB internal memory and a SD card slot, as well as a 2.5mm headphone jack with a 3.5mm converter bundled with every device. The feature set is pretty barebones, with no keyboard, text-to-speech, WiFi, or Whispernet equivalent — all files have to be loaded via USB or SD card — but in its place is a more attractive $250 MSRP, and Jones assures us at that price the company’ll be making a profit on each unit sold. Format support includes EPUB, TXT, JPEG, any kind of PDF, MP3 for audio, and eight languages including Russian and traditional / simplified Chinese. The company’s also launching an e-book store and offering an extra discount for customers who register their COOL-ER. It’ll go on sale May 29th for US and Europe via its website, with retail distribution partner expected to be announced closer to the launch date. We’re gonna wait until we get a few chapters into Alice in Wonderland before giving a final verdict, but in the meantime, check out our initial hands-on in the gallery below.

Read – Product page
Read – Online store

Filed under: Displays, Handhelds

Interead’s COOL-ER claims to be the ‘iPod moment’ for e-readers originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 May 2009 09:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh hey, guess what else Engadget Chinese got hands-on with today? The MSI Wind U200 that leaked yesterday. Official specs on the Wind U100 followup are just like we said: 12-inch, 1366 x 768 pixel LED-backlit display, Celeron ULV SFF 723 processor, GMA 4500M graphics, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, 2GB of DDR2 memory, and 250GB disk, and 1.4-kg with 3-cell battery. Still no pricing or release but we’re sure that Computex (kicking off June 2nd) will change all that.

Filed under: Laptops

MSI Wind U200 gets official, handled in Taipei originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 May 2009 06:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yeah, sure, we knew the Harmony IR-to-Bluetooth remote adapter was coming down the pike, but even with FCC filings and official confirmation of the device from Harmony, the PS3 owners among us are breathing a small sigh of relief now that we’ve got our hands on a unit that prove it will make it to market. We have a love/hate relationship with the PS3’s Bluetooth remote control — the range and total non-directionality of it are great, but having a separate remote control just for the PS3 is a real stick in the eye of our couch potato lifestyles. There are a few choices for solving the PS3 remote control conundrum, but on first blush this unit has three things going for it: support from a big name like Logitech (of course including codes in the Harmony database), it does not eat up one of your PS3’s USB ports, and it handles switching the PS3 on and off (not unique, but some other solutions don’t). We’ll give the IR-to-Bluetooth converter a full rundown in due course, but follow us past the break for our initial impressions, an official fact sheet and a link to a Q&A section on the Logitech blog.

Continue reading Logitech Harmony Adapter for Playstation 3 — official, real, and in our hands

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Peripherals

Logitech Harmony Adapter for Playstation 3 — official, real, and in our hands originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 May 2009 04:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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