Devices Site

Slacker Portable, the WiFi-equipped streaming media player that has enchanted gadgethounds and excited music industry lawyers, appears to be ready to play. The company will start shipping orders tomorrow.

Based on the PC streaming service, the Slacker Portable plays personalized Slacker Radio stations. You get live streaming when connected to a hotspot, and the gadget caches tunes for listening when you’re out in the wild. Prices vary according to how many stations the gadget can handle, starting at $200 for a 15-station model.

Slacker Portable Ships Tomorrow. What’s Next? [Laptop]

Posted Jan 31st 2008 5:04PM by Richard Lawler
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment Alienware’s Hangar 18:HD 1080p media server — the rackmountable high end edition of the already impressive Hangar 18 — has officially launched. The silver beast promises up to 4TB of hard drive space, Blu-ray read/write, 1080p output, CableCard support and Dolby Digital 7.1 sounds. We suggest you don’t ask how much it costs, it just shows how woefully far we you are away from being able to afford it. Those ready to jump into the high priced media server market can contact their local authorized reseller and loose themselves of the Benjamins that can so uselessly clog ones bank account.

Read - Homes Fall Under Control of New Alienware High Definition Media Server
Read - Digital Home Channel Program Resellers

Toyota is the first in the world to release a car seat fabric which prevents mite allergens from becoming active in a vehicle’s cabin. Those who want this new fabric will have to wait for vehicle models that are released in Japan in the near future. The new seat fabric comes with an anti-allergen agent which envelops nearly 98% of the mite allergens that settle on a seat’s treated surfaces. It does so without affecting the color or texture of the seat fabric. Is there any fabric that helps secrete chemicals to keep backseat drivers quiet?

Valve has this week decided to release a free set of tools to help developers get their games published both at retail and through digital distribution. The tools suite is called Steamworks and has already been used to aid the distribution of Half-Life 2 and The Orange Box.

The tools in the package provide the following functionality:

• Real-time stats on sales, gameplay, and product activation
• State-of-the-art encryption system to thwart pirates
• Territory and version control
• Automatic game update system
• Voice chat
• Multiplayer matchmaking
• Social networking services, including achievements, avatars, rewards system, and player tracking
• Development tools including private beta creation, data collection for quality assurance, play testing, and usability reviews

Gabe Newell, president of Valve said in a statement:

Developers and publishers are spending more and more time and money cobbling together all the tools and backend systems needed to build and launch a successful title in today’s market … Steamworks puts all those tools and systems together in one free package, liberating publishers and developers to concentrate on the game instead of the plumbing.

This move will obviously benefit Valve through pushing more developers to look into using digital distribution services. But these tools offer more than that and allow for easier retail distribution as well. The anti-piracy feature alone is worthy of mention and will surely upset a few companies out there charging game developers for anti-piracy solutions.

Read more in the Valve press release.

We’ve all experienced console rage, especially when playing Mario Kart and Princess sneaks up from the back to beat you at the last second. But few of us take it as far as Tyrone Spellman aka Anwar Salahuddin, who beat his 17 month old daughter to death after she knocked over his XBox 360 while he was playing it.

Spellman, of Philadelphia, punched her continually and possibly threw her across the room. Susan Arendt at Game|Life has the full story of the conviction and possible 47 year sentence. We’re sure that video games will be blamed for this incident, as usual, especially as Spellman was hitting the ‘Box for up to seven hours a day, but what kind of person gets angry at a baby for just knocking something over?

Man Convicted of Killing Daughter Over Xbox Accident [Game|Life via CrunchGear]

Posted Jan 31st 2008 7:42AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Laptops
That special Intel processor found in the MacBook Air could be getting a lot less special. PC Advisor, citing “a source familiar with Intel’s plans,” claims that a pair of PC makers will use the MBA processor. Not that this would be unexpected. The custom-built 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz Intel procs remember, are 60% smaller and consume less power than the typical Core 2 Duo while using the same 65-nm manufacturing processes. Of course, with Intel’s 45-nm Montevina platform scheduled to ship as early as May, the advantages gained by the processor will likely be short lived, though glorious if a PC maker can dethrone Apple of its claim to the world’s smallest thinnest laptop.

Posted Jan 31st 2008 5:43AM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Misc. GadgetsCarbon nanotubes have a ton of promise, and we’ve seen a lot of prospective applications for the tech, but researchers at Stanford, working with Toshiba, have managed to demonstrate the first use of nanotubes in chips that run at commercially-viable speeds. The chip features 256 ring oscillators and packs over 11,000 transistors in just one hundredth of a square inch. When wired with the nanotubes and powered up, the chip ran at speeds between 800MHz and 1.06GHz — not desktop speeds, to be sure, but still promising. The team says that while the experiment bodes well for the future, we shouldn’t expect any direct applications yet — but you know we’re dreaming of tiny implantable supercomputers anyway.

Congrats to Kenwood for the launch of their very first digital PCM recorder. It comes with 2GB of internal memory and SDHC card support. The MGR-A7 supports MP3 and WMA files, uses the Wolfson WM8985 digital amplifier, and has continuous recording time of 12.5h in PCM or 19h in both MP3 and WMA modes. No word on pricing or availability for this badboy.
[Source]

Posted Jan 30th 2008 8:12PM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Cellphones, Features, GPS
We’re not sure it was a real great idea on Garmin’s part to put its new smartphone / GPS / iPhone wannabe in a darkly lit room, on a bright pole, with a shiny globe around it… but hey, it’s not our company. Needless to say, it was pretty difficult to get a shot of this thing, and impossible to get it in our hands. Imagine if the Samsung Blackjack was all screen, and you can pretty much get an idea of what this little guy is like in person. Check the gallery below for our attempt at photos.

Gallery: Hands-off with Garmin’s nuvifone

Eye-Fi’s claim to fame would be to create the first wireless memory card for digital cameras in the world, and it comes as no surprise that the company has just announced that it will be working with Nikon Corporation to deliver “enhanced integration of the Eye-Fi Card with Nikon’s new D60 digital SLR camera”. Sounds pretty exciting to all you shutterbugs out there, doesn’t it? Anyways, Eye-Fi will also throw in Nikon’s “my Picturetown” online photography community to its Eye-Fi Service as yet another photo sharing option for users - as if there aren’t enough of these available in the market already today.

This collaboration will see Nikon’s D60 digital SLR make life much easier for photographers to wirelessly upload images via an Eye-Fi Card to their computer or favorite online photo sharing site. I like the hassle free environment instead of cursing oneself for not bringing the correct cable, especially if you’re a few hundred miles away from home. The recently introduced Nikon D60 DSLR will also hold the honor of being the first camera to be part of the “Eye-Fi
Connected” program. I guess that sometime down the road, there will be other digital cameras joining the D60’s rank where Eye-Fi endorsement is concerned.

According to Tadashi Nakayama, General Manager of Marketing for Nikon, “Nikon has been on the forefront of embracing wireless photography and finding innovative ways for users to share memories. By working with Eye-Fi, we’re making it easier than ever to save and share pictures without the inconveniences of wires and cables.” Amen to that, brother. Nikon’s D60 is smart enough to detect the Eye-Fi card when it is inserted, automatically adjusting its power timer settings to ensure that photos upload effortlessly for sharing and storing without having you to lift a finger.

Press Release