B Movie Victims

You can have this for ?14.95

Tags: consumer technology, Hi-fi, dvr, design

If you’ve been waiting on the Eee PC’s big brother to hit the US, you’ll be happy to hear that your wait will be over before too long. The Eee PC 900 features upgrades in just about every department, which of course includes a bigger price tag. Starting on May 12th, you’ll be able to pick up this slightly larger notebook from Asus. You’ll be treated to a 9-inch screen (which should still be comfortably small) running at 1024 x 600, 1GB of RAM and 12GB of hard drive space (for the Windows XP version, 20GB if you choose Linux). While you’re still going to be expected to shell out more than the $399 price tag of its predacessor, $549 really isn’t a bad deal for everything you get. (Read the full post about ‘Asus Eee PC 900 gets an official price and launch date’…)

Uniross are ahead of the current “Green” game with the long established rechargeable battery business. Now you can push that a little further by reducing the amount of electricity you use to recharge your batteries. The blister packaging was easy to remove, and involved no hacking with scissors like usual. The Uniross Fast Charger comes packaged with 4 x 2700mAh AA batteries, great for high drain applications like digital cameras and flashes, remote control toys etc. As an added bonus to the 3 pin mains supply, you also get a 12 volt car lighter socket adapter for on the more “power ups” . The base charger supports both AA and AAA batteries, in pairs of two. (Read the full post about ‘1hr Turn Around Uniross Battery Charger’…)

Let me make this clear from the start, my idea of “roughing it” is when there’s no 24-hour room service. Still, I love this itty bitty camping lantern from Coghlan, which makes camping and outdoorsy accessories. Weighing less than one ounce with batteries and coming in under two inches, the Micro Lantern features an LED light with a conical reflector which makes it incredibly bright. As it’s designed to clip onto clothes and gear, I commandeered it for a keychain. And it’s not just adorable, it has an emergency strobe feature that will flash for 50 hours. See? It’s very practical, even for us city-dwelling types. A mere $7.99 at Coghlans. (Read the full post about ‘LED Micro Lantern begs “Take me camping”’…)

The future is interconnected, and that’s where the Papyrus e-book reader concept gets all its strength. Designed to be a low-cost and better alternative to current generation e-book readers, the Papyrus will be a student-oriented e-book reader that will take advantage of collaboration and connectivity. It’ll have a stylus-based touchscreen where contents on the current page can be tagged, to be gone back to at a later time or answered, just like discussion threads in a forum. The designers hope to put its price at lower than $100 in order to hit a far larger market than today’s e-readers can, and can last for up to 30 hours, which seems reasonable since most people can only really keep reading for a few hours a day. (Read the full post about ‘Student-oriented Papyrus could be e-book reader 2.0′…)

by Donald Melanson, posted Apr 18th 2008 at 4:14PM You don’t have to look very far to find e-book concepts these days, but this so-called Papyrus device from the folks at Greener Grass aims a bit higher than most, with it promising to be nothing short of an inexpensive replacement for students’ textbooks. If the designers have their way, the device would cost less than $100, while still packing an E Ink-based touchscreen (with handwriting recognition, it seems), and a battery that lasts for a full 30 hours — not to mention some sort of networking functionality, as the device is apparently also designed to let teachers and students interact with one another. (Read the full post about ‘Papyrus e-book concept takes aim at students’…)

X-Ploda Roulette Xploda is the type of game that puts your heart in your mouth, though not in a Hannibal Lechter way. It's a bit like Russian Roulette, except that the bang at the end isn't terminal unless you suffer from a dodgy ticker. You can have this for ?9.99 Tags: MP3, lcd, games, Hi-fi (Read the full post about ‘X-Ploda Roulette’…)

You may have heard that Motorola is quietly readying a few new handsets for a comeback in the mobile handset making game, like the 5-megapixel packing Motorola ZN5 Zine and the Motoming A1600 smartphone. While both of these handsets aren’t exactly packing high-end tech behind their casings, we were still hoping that Motorola would roll out a few more handsets including one that would be worthy of being called its flagship. Well, our wait ends today as detailed specs and information are revealed about Moto’s upcoming phones for 2008. (Read the full post about ‘Motorola handset lineup for 2008 leaked, doesn’t impress’…)

by Donald Melanson, posted Apr 18th 2008 at 12:59PM16:9 lcd panels designed for computer use aren’t exactly all that uncommon, but this latest batch announced by LG will likely generate a bit more interest than most, especially given that they’re apparently intended specifically for use in low-cost laptops. According to DigiTimes, LG will first roll out a standard 16:10 aspect ratio, 8.9-inch panel with a resolution of 1024 x 600 in August, which will then be followed by a 16:9, 10.1-inch panel with a 1024 x 576 resolution in October, and finally a 9.4-inch panel of unspecified resolution in April of 2009. Making things even more interesting is that some unspecified “industry sources” say the panels are “expected” (Read the full post about ‘LG said to be prepping 16:9 LCD panels for low-cost laptops’…)

Asus has finally announced that the Eee PC 900 will be hitting US stores on May 12. Retail price will be $549 for both Linux and Windows XP versions. I would say this is a good deal already and we should all thank Asus for not putting too much on the price tag of the Eee PC 900, considering all the upgrades that it has put into the little machine. U.S. consumers would be treated with all the good stuff that we reported a couple of days ago: “The Eee PC 900 will feature an 8.9-inch display with a much improved 1024 x 600 resolution, standard 1GB of RAM, an improved 1.3-megapixel webcam as well as the new FingerGlide trackpad. (Read the full post about ‘Asus to ship the Eee PC 900 to US stores on May 12′…)