Hasta La Gadget!

Apple has finally made its $29 iPad camera connection kit available fro pre-order. The kit consists of two little plastic dongles which hook into the iPad’s dock port. On has an SD card reader on the other end, the other has a plain old USB port for plugging the camera in direct.

If you order it now, you won’t get it until the end of April. You may also be a little upset by the price. But some of you may remember another, very similar little dongle Apple made way back in 2005: The iPod Camera Connector. This device, almost identical to the new USB version, cost $29 on its own. Adjusted for inflation, that comes to $31.59, which makes it over double the price (you get two widgets in the new kit).

Will the old dongle work with the new iPad? We won’t know until somebody who still has an old one lying around tries it out, but we’d guess that this is simply the same product relaunched. Finally, a word of advice: If you shoot RAW photographs, you may not want to order this kit just yet. The iPad supports the RAW format, but until Apple publishes a list of supported RAW cameras, you’d better just wait.

iPad Camera Connection Kit [Apple]

USB 3.0 is slowly but surely popping up on more and more new machines, but finding a rig with SuperSpeed support is still a chore. ASUS is working hard to make sure that finding the good stuff is easy when looking at its wares, and judging by the support it has already shown for the protocol, we actually have reason to believe ’em. The company has just issued a rather gloat-filled press release extolling the virtues of supporting USB 3.0 in every facet of their product line, but it’s the breakdown that really has us interested. We already heard that the Eee Box 1510U and 1210U would support the format, along with the N Series of laptops and Eee PC 1018/1015/1016. There’s also a full slate of mainboards that have joined the party, and we get the impression that every Eee PC from here on out will do the same. Imagine that — the company credited with sparking the netbook revolution, now sparking the USB 3.0 netbook revolution. Fitting, no?

ASUS cramming USB 3.0 into Eee PC line, N Series laptops, loads more originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 01:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Buying USB cables is like buying plastic shopping bags: both normally come free with a purchase (and both end up stuffed into the back of a cupboard or drawer). But Gonglue Jiang’s USB cable concept design would actually get me to part with some cash.

The cables solve the problem of overloaded USB ports without resorting to a messy hub. Each plug is both male and female, letting it both give and receive USB data and power. The hermaphroditic cords can be daisy-chained, letting you stack several plugs together for some hot multiple gadget-on-port action.

The only limit we see is that of power, just the same as when you use a non-powered hub to hook up too many devices to one port. Other than that, this design is so good we’d like to see it incorporated into every USB cable out there. That way we could go back to not paying for them.

Running Out Of USB Ports? [Yanko]

Are we gazing onto the cusp of a new horizon, one where our Xbox 360 storage needs aren’t shackled to overpriced proprietary hard drives? Probably not quite. Our best friends at Joystiq have managed to obtain documents (corroborated with multiple sources) showing that the folks in Redmond are mulling over an option to enable USB mass storage support for its game machine. To elaborate, that means downloaded Xbox Live and Arcade games, DLC, other associated game files, and even installed disc-based games can be saved to an external HDD of your choosing. The documents further elaborate that the storage device itself must be 1GB or more; a system partition of 512MB is required, and by default beyond that the consumer partition (i.e. your games and the like) will occupy the remainder of the drive or 16GB, whichever is smaller — and unfortunately, that’s as much as you’re gonna get. This could be another way for Microsoft to, alongside the rumored Valhalla motherboard, trim some fat for a slimmer future… but given the size constraints, we’re guessing it’s more likely to be a more spacious alternative to Memory Units than the main HDD itself. Word has it the feature will be rolled out in a Spring 2010 firmware update — that is, if Microsoft keeps to its paperwork here. Excited? We are. Read the full documentation over at Joystiq.

Xbox 360 getting USB storage support in Spring 2010 firmware update originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Plug your cell phone charger into the wall. Feel it. Is it warm? Then like it or not, you’re wasting electricity. AT&T would like to change all that with this new Zero charger, a tiny black brick which automatically cuts power to itself whenever your cell phone is disconnected. While it’s not quite as amusing as an ejector seat, it’s certainly more practical, and the wall wart’s modular USB design means you can charge almost any mobile with interchangeable cables (sold separately, of course) while you wait oh-so-patiently for the cellphone industry to finally stop using proprietary ports. If you’ve got a vampire draw problem, let AT&T be your garlic this May.

AT&T zeroes in on energy waste with Zero cellphone charger originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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