Hasta La Gadget!

We here at Engadget believe that, while keeping data in the cloud is certainly convenient, one can never have too much local storage space. Hitachi shares our enthusiasm for commodious HDDs, and has rolled out a pair of 4TB drives to keep all your movies, music, and photos close to home. For those wanting to up the ante in their desktop machine, the Deskstar 5K4000 should do the trick with a SATA 6Gb/s connection and 32MB buffer. Its stablemate, the Touro Desk External Drive, brings the same HDD in an onyx enclosure and connects to your computer via USB 3.0 — plus you get 3GB of cloud storage free from Hitachi. (Who says you can’t eat your cake and have it too?) The 5K4000 is available now for a penny under $400, while the Touro will cost $420 once it hits the market in January.

Continue reading Hitachi outs a pair of 4TB HDDs for your storing pleasure

Hitachi outs a pair of 4TB HDDs for your storing pleasure originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Take that, Xperia Play. USB gamepads are already supported in Honeycomb, so we had plenty of hope that Android 4.0 — also lovingly referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich — would offer the same functionality. We finally have the answer, and it’s a resounding yes, courtesy of Google framework engineer Romain Guy’s Twitter account. The cool part, though, is that HDMI’s playing nice as well. In short, you could hook up an external gamepad to a USB-to-microUSB adapter on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, connect it to your TV and transform your handset into a fancy portable gaming console. It’s definitely something we can see developers flock towards, and we’ll expect some cool stuff to come out of it. Just in case you thought the Nexus wouldn’t let you get anything else done around the house already, this pretty much seals the deal. Move below the break to see a screenshot from the SDK.

Continue reading Ice Cream Sandwich supports USB game controllers and HDMI, turns your phone into full game console

Ice Cream Sandwich supports USB game controllers and HDMI, turns your phone into full game console originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 08, 2010 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Hard drive performance is something a lot of people never think twice about. What would your response be if you were asked what the read/write speed of your hard drive was?

You can get the answer to that question pretty easily. A free and portable utility called HD_Speed will test the transfer speed of a hard drive, CD/DVD drive, USB drive, memory card, and just about anything else that shows up as a drive letter on your PC. You can also have it measure either sustained or data burst rates.

The nice thing is that this app is simple, but still includes all of the features you really need. You can choose whether you want to test read, write, read/write, or read/write/verify speeds. You can also put in a specific duration that you want the test to run for, which makes it easier to get an accurate average speed.

It’s not a ground-breaking program, but it is easy to keep stored on a USB drive since it consists of a single 92KB executable. Go ahead and grab it if you’re wondering just how well one of your drives performs.

HD_Speed Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Easy to use, and easy to lose: the Apple iPhone Micro USB Adapter

Last year, the European Commission decreed that all future cellphones would have but one kind of charger. No longer would we see different cables for Nokia, Sony, and Samsung. Instead, there would be one charger to rule them all: Micro USB.

Which of course led everybody to wonder if Apple would play ball. There was of course no way that it would drop its proprietary 30-pin dock connector, so how would it comply with EU rules?

With a dongle, of course. Over in Europe, you can now buy an adapter which will let you charge your iPhone (or other iOS device) with a Micro USB cable. It’s a tiny chunk of plastic which slots into the dock connector and provides a standard socket into which any USB cable can be shoved in order to charge or sync the phone.

The adapters cost €9, or £8 in the UK, and will presumably come bundled with the iPhone 4S when it ships. Does this also mean that Apple will begin to ship plain USB cables with its various chargers? I doubt it — the adapter likely takes care of obeying the rules.

Still, for many people this will mean one less charger to carry, and this tiny dongle can be kept in a wallet. I actually do things the other way around, carrying my iPad charger along with a handful of other USB cables to charge other gadgets from it when needed.

Apple iPhone Micro USB Adapter [Apple]

See Also:

• Europeans Realize Dream of a Single Charger for All Cellphones …

JBL On Tour iBT Bluetooth speaker now available for $150, iPad stand included originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 06:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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