Hasta La Gadget!

Hard to say why this here fad is just now catching on — after all, select studios warmed to the idea of putting their content onto portable flash storage years ago. That said, we’ve seen both Flix on Stix and this here contraption surface within the same month, but honestly, we’re having a hard time believing that it’s a niche waiting to explode. Mo-DV has just announced a new Universal Player for microSD cards, enabling Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile and your everyday Windows PC to play back DRM’d movies stored on a microscopic slab of memory. As for Android users, they’ll need version 2.1 or newer, and while few details are given, the company has confessed that more platform support is coming (good luck, Windows Phone 7). No one’s talking pricing or release information just yet, but potentially more frightening is this: has anyone ever considered just how inconvenient it is to keep a handful of microSD cards around, let alone swap them in and out of your smartphone?

Continue reading Mo-DV bringing major motion pictures to microSD cards

Mo-DV bringing major motion pictures to microSD cards originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 19:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This little SD card reader is like a tiny plastic toaster for your camera’s memory cards. The little cube has four slots, each of which can take its own SDHC card, and the box comes with a detachable USB cable – essential for traveling light where you don’t want every single gadget to come with its own tail.

The blurb says that Elecom’ reader is compatible with all things SD: SD, microSD, and miniSD, but it really looks like the tiny pinky-sized microSD cards would need an adapter or get lost in the slot, just like the last runty slice of bread gets lost in the toaster and burns on the hot elements.

Why use this? Pros in the field will appreciate being able to drop a whole shoot’s worth of cars into one reader and then go grab a coffee. Surely that’s worth the $48? Available mid-December in Japan.

Four-slot SD reader product page [GeekStuff4U]

See Also:

• ZoomIt: An SD Card-Reader for iPhone
• AirStash Wireless SD Card Reader: Perfect iPad Companion?
• Flush-Fitting SD-Card Reader Swings Both Ways
• Tiny USB Card Reader Packs 16GB, Is Smaller Than USB Port

Quantum anything has typically fallen into our oft-used category of ‘awesome things that’ll never happen,’ but if a crew of researchers at the California Institute of Technology have anything to say about it, they’ll soon be changing the fortunes of that segment. The team has recently demonstrated quantum entanglement for a quantum state stored in four spatially distinct atomic memories, and while that probably just blew your mind a little bit, the breakdown is fairly interesting. Essentially, they’ve uncovered a quantum interface between the atomic memories, which is said to “represent something akin to a computer hard drive for entanglement.” If extended, it could pave the way toward quantum networks, and in turn, massive webs of quantum computers. We’re obviously decades out from understanding what this all means for the common computer user, but just remember this: “for an entangled quantum system, there exists no objective physical reality for the system’s properties.” And you thought The Matrix was deep.

Caltech research could lead to quantum hard drives, networks, parallel universes originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Nov 2010 11:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re a current Windows Home Server user there’s a very good chance you’ve taken advantage of the drive pooling features of the OS. Need more storage? Pop in a new HDD, watch some lights blink for a bit, and then you’re ready to get back to downloading… whatever it is you’re downloading. Granted things didn’t always work perfectly, but this tech, formally called Drive Extender, makes adding storage easy, makes it possible to replicate only the data that needs it, and is completely hardware independent. And now it’s going away. Microsoft has confirmed that the next release of Windows Home Server, Vail (due in the first half of 2011), will not feature Drive Extender, indicating you’ll need to simply buy bigger drives and manually handle data replication or rely on RAID to make this happen, solutions that are decidedly less intuitive for non-techie users. The reaction among WHS fans has been overwhelmingly negative, with 148 comments (and counting) on the announcement post, most telling MS where it can shove its RAID controller. Feel free to keep on venting here if you like.

Update: Malcom dropped this link into comments, where Windows guru Paul Thurrott indicates the issue is related to MS trying to position this to the small business sector — that Drive Extender can’t keep up with more professional loads.

Windows Home Server ‘Vail’ drops drive extender support, MS suggests you buy bigger HDDs originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are many reasons to be excited about Windows Phone 7, but a bleak spot has been Microsoft’s message — or lack thereof — on user-expandable storage, and the situation finally came to a head last week when AT&T told Samsung Focus owners to hold off on buying microSD cards altogether until Microsoft had a chance to certify some for use with the platform. How did it get to this point? Why wasn’t it communicated to users that this was such a problem before the phones ever went on sale? And if it really is such a problem, why did Samsung dare to make the microSD slot user-accessible in the Focus the first place? All good questions — and in talking with a number of sources the past few days, we’ve pieced together some of the answers. Read on.

Continue reading Windows Phone 7’s microSD mess: the full story (and how Nokia can help you out of it)

Windows Phone 7’s microSD mess: the full story (and how Nokia can help you out of it) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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