New Gadgets

RadioShack  has been the go to place for all manner of weird electronics gear and RC toys for a long time. The company is trying to make itself into something more than a place you can buy toys and other obsolete components with the addition of a ton of mobile phones.

The company has announced that it will be offering the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone with three different carriers in one place. The Shack will sell you the Samsung Epic for Sprint, the Vibrant for T-Mobile, and the Captivate on AT&T. All of the devices are one and the same.

We already know the specs for the Galaxy S with a super AMOLED screen racking in at 4-inches, a 1GHz CPU, and HD multimedia capability. RadioShack will be selling the device at 4000 stores across the country starting on August 31 with pre sales kicking off on August 13. The T-Mo offering will come with Avatar movie, The Sims 3 game, the Vibrant will come with a $50 RadioShack gift card by mail, and the Captivate, which is $50 more than the Vibrant, will get a $20 accessory credit immediately in store.

The Japanese have done it again. They’ve made a prototype device that proves that GPS navigation systems can be fit into regular everyday use glasses. Simply called the “Wearable Personal Navigation System” the system consists of a battery, a microcomputer with GPS receiver, magnetic directional sensor, and a few LEDs.

So don’t get your hopes up so much. There won’t be any maps or virtual reality with these glasses. It just points to the direction you need to follow by lighting up a few LEDs. And the destination has to be entered on your computer first and then transferred to the prototype GPS glasses. It really just seems like a student project that’s getting a lot of attention.

When a huge companies which are mainly specializing in the IT and PC gadgets are making a shift in the production we always see unexpected results.

But I bet this is not the case with the Asus. This company which can be truly and objectively called one of the most outstanding companies in the production of various IT products. This is smoothly proved by the fact that the company received the title of the best informational technology companies for over 5 years.

But where to integrate all of the discoveries made during this all rather fruitful years of strong efforts? I think the mobile production is one of the best solutions. This product has a large demand and especially if taking into account of the fact that some of the leading companies are losing their share in the market due to the fact that they do not satisfy the demand.

Asus is trying to produce the phones based on only one basic principle: to include most of the necessary features on the phones which are based upon the latest innovations in the field. That’s why the Asus phones seem to be so much diverse in their appearance and functions.

Anyways this is good technique to gain more and more customers: each of the customers can find something to satisfy his/her need in both design and the functioning.

It feels like the company is dealing with the problem of market share increase- it’s having minor raises here. This is just a start and hopefully in couple of years the company will be able to surprise us with some outrageous products.

It’s often nowadays that we find two devices in one structure. And if this Epson PictureMate Show surprises you, then you might be out of touch with technology for a long time.

The Epson PictureMate Show has a 7-inch LCD display screen that flashes your photos by loading them through a USB or memory card port. You can also edit them using the display and print them at a class-leading 5760×1440 dpi.

This half-printer half-photo frame is available for $300. Although I don’t see the point of printing an index of pictures, I can still see the need for something as ingenio

This device from ZyXel is said to be the first LTE (long-term evolution) CPE/SOHO router in the world. Known for its name ZLR-2070S, this device is an all-in-one, multi-service gateway that can deliver cost-effective LTE connectivity to the masses.

LTE is the next big thing in the world of wireless communication technology. It is capable of delivering multimedia content through an all-IP format, as well as opening up a whole new era of connectivity across industries like consumer electronics, appliances, health care, public utilities and telematics.

This router has a hardware that is devoid of the usual junk, and instead focuses on what is important—broadband Internet connectivity, two VoIP ports, home networking through its four-port, 11n wireless switch and USB port. You can hook up printers and other storage extensions through the USB hub.

It also has an enabled Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) support and other home automation services.

For more information, including the release date and price, for this device, you can check them out at the CES in January of next year.

By now the odd designs and unorthodox functionality are not a surprise when it comes to Tokyo Flash watches, but when a particularly fashionable timepiece is released it’s worth noting. The new Kisai Tenmetsu comes in black and silver is definitely one of the better designed devices in the company’s minimalist arsenal.

Of course there’s the requisite arcane time telling functions to figure out, but thankfully the watch comes with instructions in Japanese and English. You can pick up the aluminum design gem for just 21,000 yen ($238) and see video of it in action here.

We gadget nerds have to endure unspeakable atrocities in order to slake that early adoption jones: first-run gear shipped DOA, buggy pre-release software, and months of waiting after a product leaks only to be greeted by a jacked-up price premium at launch. So we feel your pain, original Kindle owners, after Amazon announced a major firmware update that brings native PDF support to the 6-inch Kindle 2 and DX readers with the promise of a staggering 85% increase in battery life to all Kindle 2 devices — if you haven’t already received it OTA, the 2.3 software update is now available for download and installation via USB tethering. At least owners of “some earlier versions of Kindle” (quote from the press release) will receive native PDF support whenever the 1st generation firmware update (currently at version 1.2) is released. It’s worth noting that Amazon’s PDF reader lacks a zoom function which makes many PDFs entirely unreadable on the device. Good thing Amazon’s store is chock full of easily zoomable books in a proprietary format then, huh?

The video you see above shows the Earth’s weather from August 17 to August 26 this year. With the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) GEOS-5 atmospheric general circulation model, the agency was able to shoot this 7-kilometer resolution of the Earth’s weather.

The GEOS-5 atmospheric general circulation model, which was based on the Earth System Modeling Framework, was developed by NASA Goddard’s scientists. It is an open source project “for building climate, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation and other Earth science software application.”

There is also a 1080p high definition of this same video over at NASA’s website so if you want to see this thing more clearly, you can head over there.

But really, isn’t it amazing what technology can do? The visual display of the Earth’s weather in something this simple and basic only makes us realize how insignificant we really are.

We’ll be honest — before today, we had never heard of Simon Aldous, but it sure seems as if he’s trying hard to get his name out there. Mr. Aldous, a group manager at Microsoft, recently sat down for a rather lengthy talk with PCR. Most of the back-and-forth revolved around receiving input from partners and other mildly boring topics, but one particular Q&A was pointed directly at the outfit’s newest operating system. When asked if Windows 7 was “really a much more agile operating system,” Simon made a deliberate decision to say the following:

“One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics.”

Of course, he followed that up by slamming OS X’s general stability, noting that Vista’s core technology — on which Win7 is built — is “far more stable than the current Mac platform.” We know we’re opening up a giant can here, but… um, thoughts?

Update: Microsoft has issued its response, and it’s none too happy, and apparently the Microsoft employee in question was “not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7.” From the official Windows Blog: ” I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed.” We imagine there were lots of frowny faces around the office today.

We’ve had a soft spot for Polymer Vision in the fetid hollows of that place youcall a heart ever since we pressed flesh to its Readius back in February 2008. Unfortunately, we had to let go of any hope for the bendy e-reader to ever hit the market after delays turned into bankruptcy turned into cries of noooo! the world over. Now coddled in the corporate arms of Wistron we hear from Brian Chong, head of Wistron’s product planning, that a 5-to-6 inch device with a pull-out flexible e-paper display of similar design to the Readius will launch in 2010. By similar design we hope they’ve included Bluetooth, dual-band HSDPA, tri-band GSM / EDGE, microSD expansion and SMS capabilities of the original.