Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Duracell has just introduced two new portable and pocket sized power sources. The My Pocket Charger, which is available in two models and the PowerSource Mini.

The My Pocket Charger offers a model with a connector for your MP3 player and a second model with a BlackBerry connector. The PowerSource Mini, which is a little more universal features a miniUSB connector on a pivot arm along with a second USB port, which would allow you to charge two devices at the same time.

Both models are “small and versatile” and designed to offer a convenient way to “reduce the number of extra cords, chargers and device-specific batteries required for mobile devices.”

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Powering up a laptop with portable liquid fuel? It’s genesis is closer than you might think. The company PolyFuel, which develops fuel cell membranes, recently announced that it has developed a prototype laptop (the Lenova T40 ThinkPad), which uses methanol cartridges and a fuel cell as it’s power source.

Although the working prototype is not an actual finished product, but instead a proof of concept, the company plans to show it off to consumer electronics and PC manufacturers in the coming weeks.

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The portable audio market has boomed in the last few years, and its in now thoroughly convoluted with ‘style,’ ‘good value’ and cheap rip-offs. So it would appear that the only to make an impact on this sector would be to either have a very cheap player, a very big drive or a unique design, and it is the latter that Philips has tried to utilize.

And to be fair its not that bad. With their most recent ‘Go Gear’ design they have gone for a square design which does look very sleek, mainly due to its 128 x 64 resolution OLED display with a ‘mirror finish’, which upon a touch shows you the track information.  They are fairly small, at just 41 x 41 x 15mm (which makes it another gadget easy to lose) but delivers a full sound thanks to the Philips FullSound technology which it includes. According to Philips, FullSound tweaks the dynamics, bass, treble and stereo imaging of highly compressed MP3 to revert the sound quality back to (or near enough to) where it was before it was compressed, which should give a high quality sound.

As with most MP3 player nowadays they support MP3 and WMA files, a battery life of 20 hours and (according to Phillips) a good quality set of earphones. 
The players support WMA and MP3 files, battery life is rated at 20 hours and Philips says they come with a decent set of cans. The SA2845 (4GB+FM) and SA2825 (2GB+FM) cost £45 and £35 respectively, and the non-FM SA2840 (4GB) and SA2820 (2GB) cost £40 and £30. They are not cheap, but its look like a good quality stylish MP3 player.

Via [Gizmodo]

Asus may be a little optimistic, or maybe just cocky, but they believe that they can make a 1430% increase in sales this year over last year with their Eee PC. Yes, they are predicting that they can make 5 million sales this year, and although it is unclear as to whether this just includes the Eee PC, or if this prediction incorporates many of the other products that have been given the Eee PC label, it is still very optimistic either way.

Or is it? Last year Asus had the whole of the market, which considering their 350,000 sales wasn’t massive; however the market for low cost ultra portable computers has increased massively, and Asus president Jerry Shen (who made the above prediction) also said that they expected this marked to grow to 10 million sales overall. If you then consider that HP’s Mini-Note has only been available for a few months, that Acer and MSI have yet to release their Eee PC-competitors, and Dell hasn’t even officially announced its entry into the marketplace, they may just have a good chance at getting the predicted 50% of the market.

I personally think that although they may get 50% of the market at most, 10 million sales is probably a bit to many, but we will see.

Via [Liliputing]

Iomega’s eGo external drive line has now hit 1 Terabyte of storage.  Entitled the “Super” eGo drive, the portable storage device contains one single 1 terabyte drive.  The drive’s physical size is also increased, as it is a 3.5 inch drive, as opposed to the normal 2.5 inch size portable hard drives have.  As a reference point, this thing can hold 1.5 thousand hours of video.  It comes in three colors: ruby red, midnight blue, or jet black.  However, the Super eGo only interfaces through USB 2.0, and with a drive of that size I would’ve liked to see a FireWire interface. You can pick one up now for $270.

Via [Gizmodo]

Product: Kicker iK500 iPod Speaker System
Price and Availability: Currently available and retailing for $299.99
Rating: 9/10
Pros: Simple, easy to set up and use
Cons: Docked iPod sits a little “off”
Overall: Solid sound with a great overall look

While we were able to review the iK500, which is made for the iPod, Kicker also offers the ZK500 for the Microsoft Zune, which also retails for $299.99.

The iK500, after first getting it out of the box has a nice look to it. Keep reading for the rest of the review…

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While the MSI Wind is expected to be available shortly, new details are clearing up the operating system options and pricing. We have already learned that the Wind will feature (in the US) a 10-inch display with a 1024 x 600 resolution, and have other options to include a built-in 1.3-megapixel webcam, 4-in-1 card reader along with Wi-Fi 80.211 b/g and an 80GB hard drive.

It is now clear that the Wind will also be offered with your choice of either Windows XP or Novell’s SUSE Linux pre-installed. The Windows XP based model will retail for $549 and offer a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth and a six-cell battery that is expected to give up to six-hours of life. The SUSE based model will be priced a little lower, coming in at $399 and offer up 512MB of RAM, however it will be missing the Bluetooth and also come with just a three-cell battery which is expected to give around two and a half hours of life.

Hopefully the Wind will launch as expected on June 3.

Via [CrunchGear]

The iriver D5 multimedia e-dictionary has made it to the US market and is now available at the iriver online store. Available in either a 2GB or 4GB model, the D5 is available in black or white and retails for $299 and $349 respectively.

For those prices, you’ll get features that include a 3-inch 480 x 272 TFT display, 52-key QWERTY keyboard, digital audio support, playback support for AVI video, digital photo support for JPG, GIF and BMP files, a text viewer, FM radio and voice recorder. As for the dictionaries, the D5 offers English-English, Korean-English, Korean-Japanese and Korean-Chinese.

The D5’s price may seem a bit on the expensive side, but if electronic dictionary is your kind of gadget, you might find it reasonable since you’ll get the portable media features as well.

Product [iriver] Via [Pocketables]

The latest portable media player from iriver, the P10 may seem just like your ordinary portable media player with its 4.3-inch LCD with an 800 x 480 resolution, 33GB internal memory, as well as WMV and Mpeg video support. But aside from being a cool looking player, the P10 can also be used as an e-book reader with support for PDF, Word and Excel files. So, you can listen to music while reading your favorite novel in e-book format. In addition, the P10 also features a GUI that recognized handwriting similar to the Palm Pilot’s handwriting recognition technology, aside from having several dictionaries that include English, Chinese and Japanese languages.

The iriver P10 portable media player will be available in a DMB-less Basic version for around $310 and the Pro version with DMB for around $387. Unfortunately for us living outside of Korea, the P10 will most likely have to remain on our wish list for a while.

Via [Akihabara News]

The UMPC market is a highly-competitive one, and Raon Digital doesn’t want to get left behind. The latest iteration of its Everun UMPC sees the addition of a 32GB SSD to its list of highly desirable features. And let’s not forget, the Raon Digital Everun UMPC also includes a 568MHz AMD Geode LX900 processor, 512MB of RAM, a 4.8-inch LCD screen with an 800 x 480 resolution, built-in Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, and a novel dictionary called SayDic that has text-to-speech support.

It seems to be headed to Korea for now, and unfortunately, the folks from over at Digital Raon forgot to inform us of the price. But it’s not like you’ll get a chance to purchase it anyway, unless you’re already in Korea, of course.

Via [Akihabara News]