Gadgets & Gizmos » Gadgets

Nintendo Wii users happier than iPod’s

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:31:39 +0000

The Nintendo Wii has beaten off the iPod to become the gadget that “makes people most happy”, says a new British poll.

According to the survey of over 2,500 callers to The Gadget Helpline, a phone service that consumers having problems with broken electrical equipment can call for help, the results underline the increasing popularity of games consoles, once considered a hobby for young men.

The Wii, made by Japanese giant Nintendo, topped the poll, with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 coming in fourth place and the handheld DS console coming in eighth place, reports The Telegraph.

The ‘crowned’ gadget allows players to use a hand-held controller to simulate a sport, such as golf or bowls, pretend to ski jump or even play the ukulele — activities far removed from the fast cars and shooting games favoured by software manufacturers in the past.

A spokesman said, “With the world now quite literally at our fingertips, we’re fast being robbed of the need to socialise with other humans, but the success of games consoles shows that there remains huge appeal in the concept of sharing time and space with friends and loved ones.”

The top 10 gadgets that make people happy are:

1. Nintendo Wii

2. iPod

3. iPhone 3G

4. Xbox 360

5. Blackberry

6. Sky+

7. Mac Book

8. Nintendo DS

9. Tom Tom 930 Satellite Navigation System

10. Sony PRS-505 Reader.

Transcend launched 1.8-inch eSATA/USB portable Solid State Drive

admin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:02:38 +0000

Transcend has launched a 1.8-inch eSATA/USB portable Solid State Drive and a 2.5-inch StoreJet 25F portable hard drive.

The 1.8-inch SSD is available in 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB capacities. The new 2.5-inch StoreJet 25F portable hard disk is available in 500GB storage capacity. Transcend hasn’t announced the price for either of the drives.

Transcend’s 1.8-inch portable SSD18M has a casing with a glossy finish and offers a USB and eSATA connectivity interface.

eSATA interface offers a maximum read speed of 90MB/s and a write speed of 50MB/s. The SSD is portable and is available in capacities of up to 128GB.

The company also announced 2.5-inch StoreJet 25F portable hard disk drive, which offers data transfer speeds of up to 480MB/sec over the USB 2.0 interface. A slew of data management tools are packed in StoreJet 25F that makes it compatible with the Windows, Mac, and Linux platform.

Portable HDDs and SSDs having increased storage capacities and are coming into the mainstream market, which can turn out to be an interesting scenario.

Dell Inspiron Mini 12 netbook in India

admin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:54:32 +0000

The netbook market is hotting up in the country and the latest is Dell’s newly launched Inspiron Mini 12 netbook in India.

Inspiron Mini 12 is powered by the 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530, and has a 533MHz FSB, a Intel US15W chipset, and a 1GB DDR2 533MHz and 80GB 4200RPM HDD.

Weighing 1.24 kg, other features include WiFi (802.11b/g), 1.3 megapixel webcam, and Bluetooth. Mini 12 runs on the Windows XP Home edition instead of Windows Vista offered in the US.

Announcing the launch, Girish Mehta, director of consumer marketing, Dell India said, “Mini 12 is designed specifically for mobile, hi-def lifestyles. With its slim lightweight design and 12″ widescreen display, it is the ideal for on-the-go generation.”

Netbook’s 3-cell battery lasts about 3 hours, while the 6-cell offers approximately 6.5 hours of battery life.

Dell Inspiron Mini 12 will be available through select Croma Stores in India before the end of January for Rs 31,000 approximately.

Palm touts its gaming roots, Pre conspicuously missing

admin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:48:04 +0000

Hey, Palm, you know when isn’t a good time to brag about your rich, time-honored tradition of gaming software stretching back some ten-plus years? Right before the release of webOS and the Pre, a device you’ve straight-up told us isn’t intended for games — that’s when. A lighthearted post on Palm’s official blog today waxes poetic about the top Palm OS game downloads on Handango and mentions a few favorite classics from around the blogosphere, but here’s the thing: unless Palm wants to get serious about bringing entertainment to the Pre, this just rubs salt in our TurboGrafx-16 emulator-craving wounds. The TI-sourced OMAP3430 underneath the Pre’s skin is more than capable of knocking console-quality games out of the park, so we’ll just have to twiddle our thumbs for a few months and see how this plays out; at the end of the day, it might simply be a question of how open Palm ultimately wants to get with its SDK.