Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Does the keypad lock on your phone annoy you? Well, you just might think different after you hear this. A soldier in Afghanistan accidentally called his parents while he was in the middle of a heated battle. The result was a terrifying voicemail that included the son yelling about needing more ammo and his gun having problems-and cutting off just as another soldier yelled “INCOMING!” His parents were understandably shaken but managed to get a hold of their embarrassed son, who assured them he was okay. Thank goodness there was a happy ending, but am I the only one wondering which provider offers battlefield coverage? Talk about great cell coverage! We also have to mention the thanks that should go out to the soldier, hopefully his next call will be a little less stressful for those at home. Keep reading to listen to the chilling call…

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Not enough time in the day to get everything done? Now it may be possible to squeeze in a fitness walk while working on that new proposal. Well, not exactly, but you can keep moving while working. TrekDesk can help you loose weight, relieve your stress and give you more time with love ones. Seriously, now you can walk, sit or bounce on your treadmill while working on your laptop, reading a manuscript or clearing out your in box.

TrekDesk fits on most treadmills and adjusts to fit the user. In case you need to slow your pace just lift the clear panel for access to your treadmill controls. If you are sweating the assembly - don’t. No tools are required. That goes for the TrekDesk Chair as well. The TrekDesk team thought of just about everything. You know that if something is not handy you won’t use it so the chair swings out of the way when not in use and the desk can say in place when not in use.

I am all for saving time and I think the TrekDesk is a great idea – but I want to send out one warning. Unless you truly multitask well don’t try this. An unplanned distraction could trip you up.

Product [TrekDesk] Via [Oh Gizmo!]

A woman is suing Best Buy for $50,000 after a Geek Squad employee admitted viewing, and later stealing the nude photos she had on her PC. He copied them to his flash drive, shared them with his fellow employees and put them on the hard drives of other customers. While employee, William E. Giffels fully admitted to viewing and copying the photos to his flash drive, he claimed they ended up on other computers computers solely by accident when he forgot to delete them from the drive before allowing other employees to use it to access the diagnostic tools he also had stored on it. 

There hasn’t been any comment from Best Buy yet, but one can assume Mr. Giffels will be seeking new employment soon. While he is clearly in the wrong for what he did, you have to wonder why anyone would hand over a computer for repair without removing such sensitive and private content? When you think about it it could have been much worse. What if he had copied her banking or credit card info instead? I think the lesson here is if you have to take your PC in for repair, make sure there’s nothing on it you wouldn’t want the whole world to see!

Read [The Consumerist]

iRex has just announced a new and soon-to-be-available e-book reader, the iLiad Book Edition and with it comes some unique features. The iLiad notably offers an 8.1-inch XGA touchscreen-capable display. Other features include 256MB of flash memory, a 3.5mm output, USB connectivity, support for MMC and CF memory cards and the ability to read Mobipocket, PDF, HTML, TXT, JPG, BMP, and PNG files. The iLiad is powered by a 400MHz XScale CPU with 64MB of RAM.

The iLiad Book Edition is scheduled to go on sale Friday May 9 and retail for €499 (about $770 US), but will only be available in the European market.

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Mother’s Day is just around the corner, and maybe you’d like to give your mom a digital picture frame.  But here’s something to think about, in the U.S. News & World Report issue for the week ending May 5, 2008, Marianne Lavelle writes,

“Look at just one of the new energy guzzlers: the digital photo frame.  This always-on gadget burns a barely noticeable $9 extra a year into the average household electric bill, says the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.  But the impact could be staggering.  EPRI estimates that if every household in America owned one, it would take five medium-sized power plants just to keep those family photo slide shows rolling in the nation’s living rooms.  ‘I call these electronics the sleeping giants in our homes,’ says Thomas Reddoch, EPRI’s director of energy utilization.”

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A recent purchase from a Best Buy of a PureDigital Flip camera offered a little more than you would expect from a standard retail version. This camera in particular was an open box item, and true to the word, you never know what to expect when you buy something that has already been used and returned.

In this case it was two stupid kids, who forgot (and when you read on its easy to understand why) to delete their footage before returning the camera. They left three videos which ran a total of about 40 minutes worth of footage on the camera of themselves smoking up. Hence the, making it easy to forget to delete the footage comment.

In what could possibly make the perfect anti-drug ad, or if at the very least should make you think twice about filming yourself doing something illegal, acts as nothing more than entertainment for the rest of us. While I was not able to sit through the nearly 13 minutes of footage uploaded by the new owner of the Flip, the first few minutes were quite entertaining, especially the parts when the camera was shaking due to the bass, not to mention their goofy attitudes. When will people learn not to film themselves doing illegal activities, I am sure this will make their parents more than proud. If you feel so inclined you can check out the videos over on Viddler.

Read [Skippy.net] Via [CrunchGear]

Electronics product maker Sharp is thinking of the kids with their latest PMP, and adds a little educational functionality to the thing aside from its regular multimedia features. The name of their new product is the RD-CX310, and it’s a little PMP that other than playing your music and converted videos, tells you the meaning of words via a built in dictionary. But mind you, it doesn’t only have a single dictionary, but a total of 82 dictionaries with English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean. Twenty unspecified audio books are also included in the package, supposedly from the world’s best novelists. And let’s not forget it has the capabilities of any other portable media player, and these include a 4.3-inch color screen, a 30GB internal HDD, built-in FM tuner, video recorder and support for a multitude of file types: WMV9, MPEG-4 DivX, Mp3 and WMA to be exact. Sadly, this seems to be only available to all the cool kids in Korea for now. Oh well, we can dream, can’t we?

Via [Akihabara News]

As if the CompUSA saga has not been dragged out enough. The stores were being closed, then some were snapped up by Tiger Direct and now we are learning that yet another big-box retail giant will be assuming some of the remaining locations.

Reports are claiming that Best Buy has snapped up 17 of the CompUSA retail location leases, which range from three years up to fourteen years for a total of $13.5 million. It seems like CompUSA may have gone away, but instead of something new and exciting coming in return, it appears to be just more of the same standard electronic retail locations.

Best Buy is planning on opening a mix of new Best Buy and Pacific Sales stores at these locations over the next two years.

Via [Twin Cities BizJournals]

Watches usually aren’t specifically themed into TV shows, or anything really. They usually just perform a few special functions and some even offer things like video, music, and more. However, this new watch by Skullcandy is MacGvyer themed and will basically play music in addition to telling you the time.

If you are a hard-core MacGyver fan, it’s going to be hard to turn away from this watch. Basically, it’s like an iPod Shuffle, but only in the sense it shuffles up the music that you add to it and offers up 1GB of storage. Some other cool features are that its flash-based storage, also works as an audio recorder and has a built-in USB plug. Furthermore, it supports both MP3 and WMA audio files.

The MacGyver themed watch is currently available on the Skullcandy website, for a slightly expensive price of $200.

Read [Skullcandy] Via [Crunch Gear]

What ever happened to killing two birds with one stone? This - the Sigma APO dual USB charger from Japan. As the name suggests, it will have a total of two USB ports so you can charge two devices with it simultaneously. Not exactly groundbreaking technology, but it’s something road warriors such as yourself would gladly appreciate, I’m sure. It’s light, weighing in on only 43 grams, and runs 1000 mA in total for each port. Meaning that each device gets half of that, 500 mA whenever it is plugged in to it. So now you can relax, and watch your iPod and cellphone get charged while you do nothing. You know you can’t play with devices that are charging, don’t you? Ah, multi-functional devices. How could we have ever lived without them?

Via [jkontherun]