Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

In efforts to showcase the best looking portable media player’s and digital audio player’s at IFA, iriver has announced a new PMP and a GPS with media capabilities.

The first device announced is the iriver P20, which was originally shown off at the past CES in January 2008. It sports a 4.1-inch AMOLED touch screen, which is a bigger screen than most PMP’s these days. In addition, the battery life is pretty good, 12 hours for music, 9 hours for video, and up to 8 hours with DMB TV. Although, I do think the battery life when just playing music should be a bit higher, but for video and DMB TV, it’s good. It is expected to come with either an 80GB or 120GB hard drive. 

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Back in January, duringCES 2008, Dr. Dre, an artist Jimmy Lovine, and Monster all teamed up to create a new type of headphone, marketed by Dr. Dre. These new headphones were designed by Dr. Dre and his goal was to create headphones with superior quality, “extreme clarity”, and crystal clear sounds.

With the help of Jimmy Lovine, Interscope Geffen A&M Chairman, and Monster, he created a pair of headphones, called Beats, with quality similar to what artists and producers use in recording studios. Being an artist and producer himself, he knows firsthand what recording studio headphones are like, and he wanted to give the public something similar. Here is what Dr. Dre said about recording studio headphones and what his goals were in his Beats. 

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One of the proudly showcased iRiver PMP’s at CES, the E100 is set to start shipping today in Europe. So far, it seems to be a basic PMP, nothing too fancy, but still a nice one overall.

Basically, it comes with a 2.4-inch QVGA screen and it supports many audio and video formats. These formats include FLAC, MP3, ASF, OGG, WMA, WMV9, and XVID. Additionally, it comes with a nice integrated FM tuner and stereo speakers. So far, there are only 2 versions the 2GB and the 8GB. This isn’t a lot of internal storage, but more memory can be added on via microSD expansion. You can get your very own iRiver E100 with the 2GB starting at $119 and the 8GB selling for $194.

Via [PMP Today]

During CES 2008, LG announced their new GPS LN series, and they recently added a new model to it, called the LN845.

This new GPS sports a 4.3-inch touch screen, has 5 hours of battery life along with Bluetooth connectivity for hands free calling. The only difference it has from the LN855 is that it does not come with a TMC receiver, which provides traffic updates. Unfortunately, no word on pricing as of yet, however, it has passed the FCC so it should be on sale in the States relatively soon.

Via [NaviGadget]

At CES, the company SkullCandy unveiled a pretty cool new pair of headphones that have a unique feature. It comes with a SD slot so all you have to do is load in a SD card filled with music and you can listen to it without the need of an MP3 player.

It can even work with any type of SD cards, so if you own let’s say an 8GB or even a 16GB one, it will work and then you have access to loads of music. It will also come in 3 different colors, orange/brown, yellow/white, and black. Furthermore, it comes with a rechargeable battery, and all the controls on the side of the headphones. This pair of headphones look to be pretty cool and I’m not sure why SkullCandy kept it so low profile during CES.

Expect it to start shipping in March/April for an unspecified price.

Via [Ubergizmo]

The Consumer Electronics Show has been the launching board for many new products.  Amoung them this year is this amazing recharger, the ZPAC 40 Zinc Air Powerpack, which represents the first commercial product from the Power Air Corporation. This lightweight, compact, recyclable “CellPac” that easily fits inside a shirt pocket provides the equivalent energy to 40 AA alkaline batteries. For those who may not know, this is enough to recharge a mobile phone more than ten times!

The ZPAC 40, which can be used anywhere and anytime, is guaranteed to provide safe, personal portable power without need of an electrical outlet. It provides extra runtime for travel, emergency, remote and recharging power applications by supplying

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At CES, Magellan released more information on their RoadMate 1400, which one of the three announced in the new RoadMate series, the others being the RoadMate 1412 and the RoadMate 1430. 

The RoadMate 1400 comes with a 4.3 inch touch screen, preloaded Navteq maps of continental U.S., Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Additionally, it comes with 1.3 million POI’s and is priced at $300, a very crowded price point.  It’s features should make it a stand out.

And those features are:

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Recently at CES, Kingston - known for their flash storage devices, announced the availability of a few new flash drives.

The first is called the DataTraveler (DT) 400, comes preloaded with MigoSync, which is a form of data synchronization software which allows you to work with many computers and synchronize files, emails, etc. pretty easily. This flash drive is available in a few different models, a 2GB, 4GB, and a 8GB. They will be selling for $31, $56, and $137, respectively.

Next we have the DataTraveler HyperX, this name, you may or may not know, comes from Kingston’s HyperX D-RAM gaming module. This device comes with a fast write speed of 20MB/second and a read speed of 30MB/second. It also comes with

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CES proved the green movement is here and chugging along as countless products aimed at being eco-friendly were exhibited.  Most of those products cost a bit more for assuaging your conscious about the environment.  But what if you wanted to be green and save some green?  Enter the lowly surge protector.

Belkin’s new Conserve Surge Protector, which is on display at CES, allows you to shut down six of the eight outlets with the flick of the giant remote control switch. This translates into the simple fact that with this surge protector you can now shut down all of your plugged in devices at once instead of one at a time. This is important when considering that devices left on that aren’t being used are a big and completely unnecessary drain of energy.

By simply turning things off that aren’t in use, we can all save as much as 20 percent on our energy bills!
That is nothing to sneeze at despite its somewhat hefty $50 price tag.

The Belkin Surge Protector is due out in May of this year.

Read[MobileMag]

Toshiba is making a considerable splash at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with its newest addition to the small form factor HDD market marked by an entry into 1.8-inch external HDDs. The highest available capacity, for a 2.5-inch external HDD is now available in bigger sizes, some as big as 320GB. The featured 1.8-inch external drives are expected to have backup and encryption and be available in 60GB, 80GB and 120GB capacities.

As if this isn’t amazing enough, Toshiba has also redesigned their storage devices to reflect modern tastes. They now have a smaller footprint and a sleeker visual design and a different color scheme that features three-color splash designs.

The new 12.5-inch 320GB HDD is available for sale now, that is, if you are willing to part with $199.99. The 1.8-inch external drives will be available later this year, in the spring. Prices are not available for these models at this time.

Read [Mobile Mag]