Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Contrary to popular belief, the first laser wasn’t really reverse-engineered from Megatron of the Transformers. It was actually created by a guy named Theodore Maiman by shining a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod with silver-coated surfaces. And if he hadn’t made the first laser work on May 16, 1960 at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California, there wouldn’t be laser etched Nokia Prism phones, laser printers, or convenience in the laser-powered supermarket check-out counter. Just think how much we would have lost if not for that one great innovation. Today’s the day to be thankful for it, because it’s the laser’s 48th year anniversary. Here’s to many more years, and I hope they finish my laser death rays in time for the 50th anniversary!

Via [Google]

One week ago, we reported about how Google added new features to its translation service, like new languages and language detection, but back then it still had not even been announced by Google yet. The day for that has come, though, and that day is today.

Google now officially announces the addition of 10 new languages to its translation service, including Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish. Also, as noted in our earlier post, there is a new feature called “Detect Language” that saves you from having to figure out the language of origin of the text or web page you’re translating. Certainly adds convenience to the service, much more than anything else.

Head on over to the official Google Blog for the details.

Read [Official Google Blog]

Standing by their tag line, Fujitsu will truly “make your data portable” with its new Handy Drive 400, offering 400GB of space for any kind of digital contraption you can throw at it. The drive measures a convenient 3.23 x 5.57 x 0.87-inches and weighs 8.12-ounces. This 4200rpm hard drive will connect to your PC just fine over USB 2.0, although there’s no word whether this will support Firewire. Available now in Japan for 216€ or just a little over $330 USD. Yes, it’s pricey.

Via [Akihabara News]

Sony is offering to help brighten up your home by adding a splash of fruity colors to its most recent Bravia HDTV models, as part of their “Draw the Line” concept for kitchens and brightening up the home. You’ll see this in the 20-inch KLV-20S400A, which is available in fruity pink, green, and orange, as well as the classics - white or black. This would be perfect for the kids’ room, but unfortunately, it will only start appearing in Asia by June.

The Bravia V4-series, meanwhile, is a new lineup announced alongside the fruity variants, likewise featuring a 2008 Bravia Engine 2 video processor and 1080p24 input capability. The only difference the V4-series has over the former is that it has an extra “Digital Media Port” for iPods and other MP3 players, as well as Sony Ericsson Bluetooth-enabled handsets.

The S4 and V4 series also come in 40- and 46-inch sizes, in case that’s your thing. And as earlier mentioned, won’t hit stores until June. No word on pricing has been made available yet.

Via [Crave]

If there’s anything I’ve learned about Apple, in all these years of reading, and just recently, writing about them, it’s that you don’t mess with them. Ever. That’s a lesson a lot of would-be Apple product burglars would do good in learning, lest they want to be the ones pictured and talked about in this article here. The two men you see here are the burglars that we reported about previously, responsible for stealing flat-screen TVs, computer games, iPods, DVDs, a box of liquor and even a set of car rims from an apartment shared by three roommates. The one on top is Edmon Shahikian, while the one on the bottom is Ian Frias. They were apprehended shortly after the owner of one of their stolen wares, a Mac laptop, used the Back To My Mac feature to photograph them and show their photos to the police. I wonder when anyone will be able to do that with their Windows lappies.

Read [NY Times]

The GBDisk RS1 series of Serial ATA (SATA)-compatible industrial silicon disks is the latest addition to TDK’s roster, which will be made available in June with up to 16GB capacities. High-speed, frequent data writing and maintaining data reliability come first with the GBDisk RS1 series. And because of that, it features single level cell (SLC) NAND Flash memory, and GBDriver RS1 SATA controllers for use in NAND Flash memory controller ICs.

It also offers complete power interruption tolerance, error correction, distributed data writing, and bad block management. Basically, these are new types of hard disks, coming in at the same size as current generation HDD’s (2.5-inches) that should offer fast start up, stringent shock resistance, and low power consumption. It’s been reported to be already Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL)-certified, and now if only they could bump up the storage a bit more than 16GB’s, then we’d all be happy. Or at least, those who need to use hard disks in industrial equipment.

As of now, pricing is unknown, but as earlier mentioned, production will start in June 2008.

Via [Tech On]

If you think your laptop bag has enough room in it for a gadget that will give you more USB ports than you’ll ever need, then you’ll be glad to set your sights upon Elecom’s newest little number. It’s a small USB hub that offers not three, not five, but a total of seven free USB ports for you to connect your other gadgets simultaneously. It measures only 23x144x23mm, and weighs 66g. Other than an external hard drive, iPod and digicam, I don’t know what else you’d want to plug in it. But if you want to get a feel of its 480Mbps transfer rate, then by all means, feel free.

Via [Akihabara News]

As if we have not yet seen enough of all these new touchscreen phones that have been jumping out of the woodwork lately, here comes yet another, featuring the same old touchscreen, and almost the same specifications as well. Although this time, it could have one thing that separates it from the myriad of other touchscreen phones out there - herculean battery life. That’s because this new touchscreen phone falls under the Philips Xenium brand, which, in case you don’t know, has a reputation for churning out gadgets with incredibly long-lasting batteries. And knowing that this same company completed its very own touchscreen phone (Philips Xenium 9@9v) a couple of months back, this new rumor becomes quite believable. But until the day that we see it get official, that’s all that it is: a faceless rumor.

Via [Unwired View]

On the lookout for a new hi-def camcorder? Then you might want to take a look at Samsung’s latest release, dubbed the SC-HMX20 Full HD camcorder. It’s got a 6.4-megapixel CMOS sensor, 10x zoom and also functions as an 8-megapixel still camera, capable of capturing photos in super slow motion at 300 frames per second. As it belongs to Samsung’s HMX20 line, you can expect it to be of top-notch quality.

The Samsung Full HD camcorder also features a 2.7-inch touchscreen LCD so you can easily navigate through the menus and photos, and it accepts SDHC cards through a built-in card slot in addition to the 8GB of internal memory. Just 2.4 seconds is all it takes to activate the camera, and battery life is improved thanks to the use of flash memory. The package will include a cradle with a built-in charging port, USB and of course a TV-out cable so you can view all your photos and videos in high definition glory. It’s a little bit on the heavy side, at 456 grams, but rest assured that the Samsung Full HD camcorder is well worth its weight.

The price? Just 899,000 South Korean Won or about $850 USD for you, my dear.

Read [Samsung]

An honest and innocent letter sent out as an invitation for application developers has turned out to be the main source of our primary info on two possibly upcoming Palm devices - the Palm Zeppelin and the Skywriter. Nothing about the specs, availability, and pricing of these new phones have been made clear so far, other than the fact that Palm is currently looking for software developers for it. The invitation letter was sent to smartphone blog TamsPPC, who later did a rendering of the Skywriter, which they say could be a Palm 500-style device running on Windows Mobile 6.1. It is also suggested that these new phones might be released by Q3 2008. I know it seems pretty far-fetched but go ahead read a copy of the e-mail for yourself.

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