Showstopers
Showstoppers is a separate event to CES and features some of the best and most unique new tech products. These are the ones that the Coolest Gadgets found most interesting.
Dlink DCS-1130 motorised network camera
Not a new product category, but as usual time and technology brings products that were once the domain of big business down to a more consumer friendly level.
The DLink DCS-1130 security / web camera is motorised for pan/tilt adjustment, wireless and can be controlled via a web browser. It can store the video on a PC or send it out to the web but I like the third option of viewing it on a 3G phone so you can monitor the builders / burglers / cheating spouses live in realtime.
(Photo courtesy of Engadget)
XLink BT - Use your cell phone like a landline
The XLink BT allows you to make and receive calls from your usual land-line phone over your mobile network. Once set-up you simply need to leave your cell phone within Bluetooth range of the XLink box and then any calls to your cell will ring and be answerable around the house and calls made from your regular phone will be redirected over your cell.
One of the advantages of the XLink is it allows you to ditch your land-line and make the most of the free calls that you get with most cellphone contracts. It can be used with 3 cellphones simultaneously, with each cell generating a different ring tone on the other phones (when calling out you specify which cell to use by a numeric prefix).
XLink retails for $80 and is available from My XLink though you may want to wait for the next version as that willinclude Skype functionality.
Shapeways 3D printing
3D printers are coming down in price but everything’s relative – you’re still looking at $$$ for even the “cheap” versions. Or you could just upload your design to Shapeways. With a few limitations, pretty much anything you can create in a 3D modelling package can be created (it still feels weird to say “printed”) and delivered direct to your door.
If you don’t want to start from scratch they have a range of template designs on the website which you can personalise with your own text but for complete flexibility you can upload designs created in modelling packages like Google Sketchup.
You have a choice of materials and pricing is directly related to the type and amount of material needed to create your design (but not the complexity; it’s the same amount of work to produce a straight cube or a complicated mechanism). The small models start down in the $10 range going up to $100+ for larger objects.
EMTEC Gdium - a netbook with a G-Key
There’s a multitude of netbooks on the market at the moment, so I nearly walked straight past the new one from EMTREC, the Gdium mobile netbook. The unique selling point of the Gdium is that it has no storage and must be booted from a USB drive, known as the G-Key.
The G-Key contains the OS (Linux), applications and user data and slots undeneath the front of the machine. The idea behind it is that each user will have their own G-Key so one Gdium netbook could be shared between multiple users with no risk at all to others’ data. It’s an interesting idea, though with the relative cheap price of netbooks I’m not sure if sharing one is really needed though if you could also use the G-Key in other machines it would make carrying a PC in your pocket a something of a reality.
Further info and machine specs can be found on the Emtec site.
TruPhone update brings phone, IM to iPod touch
The latest update to the TruPhone VOIP/IM software brings the iPod touch into the community of supported devices and adds Skype compatibility.
Similar to Skype, Truphone allows users to contact other Truphone users for free and landlines around the world for not a lot.
Unlike Skype, Truphone also allows you to talk or chat to your contacts on other services including gTalk and Skype making it a complete communications solution. Plus it works on the touch (you’ll need a separate headset to provide the mic though).
Put your data in the cloud with Pogoplug
I like simple. Strange thing to say for a geek but to paraphrase Honda, sometimes it’s nice when things just work.
That’s what I find appealing about the Pogoplug. Plug a USB hard drive in to it. Plug it into your router. See your hard drive on the internet. That’s it – no config, no networking to set up, no monthly fee. It just… works!
Or at least that’s the promise. To be fair we’ll need to get our paws on one before we can confirm the claim (it’s in preproduction at the moment) but it looks easy enough.
You can access your data through a web interface but they’ve also created drivers for Windows and OSX that make the Pogoplug appear as a drive letter so you can just use the drive without worrying about where it is.
(And yes, all the transfers between you and your hard drive are encrypted.)
Roland Rock Band
Face it – making noise by hitting stuff is fun, which is why Rock Band flew off the shelves despite the high price. Roland are cashing in on this craze with two new products – the HD-1 entry level electronic drum kit and the DT-HD1 drum trainer software.
Roland drum kits are well regarded and the HD-1 has all the usual toys you’d expect from a modern instrument – velocity sensitive pads, MIDI interface etc. No real surprises there except it’s compact size. The thing that caught my attention was the training software.
Reading music is hard work so the guitar hero / Rock band games introduced a much simplified method of displaying musical notation on the screen. Roland have now adopted that approach in their training software – the practical upshot of this is that people who get interested in the drums through the video games (and there will be quite a few of those) will feel right at home when they transition to a grown-up kit. The software also offers a more traditional musical notation and has a range of options including jamming with a backing track.
Neat.
ReBit – Time Machine for Windows
“So what am I looking at?”
“Time machine for Windows.”
That was pretty much how the conversation surrounding the Rebit product went and I can’t think of a better description so I’m stealing it! (with apologies to Apple…).
Rebit copies any and all changes made to your PC onto a backup drive, silently and automatically. If you ever need to go back to a previous version of a file you can use the normal windows explorer interface to inspect the disk as it was at any given date.
The system manages space automatically – if you make a change to a file every day for example then you’ll have lots of previous versions. As the drive gets low on space it removes the oldest copies automatically to make way for the newer ones.
Because it’s a complete system copy it can also recover a failed machine. You can boot up a machine using the recovery CD, pick a date and it will restore the PC to the exact state it was in at that time.
You can buy it packaged into various capacities of USB hard drive or as a separate software install if you already have spare storage. It can use any hard drive, built in or external as it’s backup store but not a network share (yet). Personally I quite like the idea of partnering it with one of these but that’s probably just because I’m looking for an excuse to buy a fireproof hard drive!
