Gadgets posts

Cast your mind back to June 2007, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs appeared at D:All Things Digital alongside Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Now watch this video in which Gates describes his vision of the future of computing, which sounds remarkably like, erm, an iPad…. “I don’t think you’ll have one device. I think you’ll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that… yeah, I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor [...] You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. And then you’ll have the device that fits in your…

Attention US iPhone users — it looks like AT&T and Apple are at last making good on their long-held promise to offer tethering support through the iPhone, but not until the release of iPhone OS 4.0 later this summer. This illustration comes from inside the iPhone OS 4.0 beta that’s circulating at present, though the number given takes you to a recorded message saying “AT&T doesn’t offer tethering at this time”. Tethering — the process of using your iPhone as a 3G modem with your Mac — is really useful when traveling, or as a home back-up Internet connection for when your broadband goes…

Sure, we all like to think we know how to cope in a crisis. We all fondly imagine ourselves the heroes of the moment, the masters of the hour, but how many of us have actually put some time in before crisis cripples us and learned the right things to do when someone needs our help, or even set things up so we can get the help we need? Read on for six iPhone apps we think could maybe save someone’s life. None of these apps are a substitute for proper training, if you really want to be prepared then do take a course, but for a refresher or to boost your skills just a little bit, then tale a look at these. 1. First Aid…

Standard Chartered bankers are now being given a choice in which smartphone they would like to use. The moneylender is giving its corporate BlackBerry users the choice to switch over to the iPhone for their business dealings; this could be bad news for BlackBerry. “If more companies switch to the iPhone, this is of course bad news for [Research in Motion],” said Lu Chialin, an IT industry analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei. “However, it will take a long time for companies to do their own internal testing before deciding to change, so it will be a while before it has any effect on RIM.” The BlackBerry…

The boon of a slow news day (or morning, at the very least) is that it gives an intrepid internetsman like myself the opportunity to force upon hapless readers all sorts of awesome stuff. Take this, for example. Yes, it does look like one of those aroma therapy candles your mom would buy, doesn’t it? She’s got to hide your scent somehow, you basement-dwelling freak technology enthusiast. But a candle it’s not – this is an oracle into the state of the social web. Existing as little more than an Arduino hooked up to a WiFly (okay, so that’s all it is), this little unit scans Twitter at large for trigger words…

Using the iPhone OS, a Belgian man managed to make a wonderfully sounding guitar. Drums and background music can also be heard from the guitar, which makes him a pretty good garage band. Using multiple touch screen phones, he strums the chord he’d like to use and continues to play his “banjo”. Besides using the iPhone OS, a battery-powered speaker and some good old duct tape to keep it all together, he also uses two Android devices, two Windows Mobile devices and one iPod Touch. The app he used is called iShred and just some regular Guitar apps by Frontierdesign. iShred is an app for the iPhone which…

This robotic creature transforms into a Mini-ITX test bench.  The four adjustable legs create a spider-like effect. Designer Lian Li created it primarily for open- air PC benchmarking; the design makes it easier to build up and tear down again. You will be able to purchase your creepy-crawly friend on May 21st of 2010. Spidey comes in three colors; silver, red and black. Features: Unique eye catching design Available in red, silver and black colors For mini-ITX motherboards Supports one 5.25″ slim CD-ROM Adjustable leg angles Evolved spider design with only 4 legs Availability: Arriving…

My phone sucks. No keyboard, the 6 key is broken, FORGET emails… it’s just terrible. I was thinking about trashing it and stepping up to a Blackberry, but I’ve been holding off to see what the hullabaloo over this Blackberry tablet is all about. I may as well just go ahead with my plan, because the tablet certainly isn’t terribly exciting. At least, not in the way other tablets are.  A Bluetooth device, the Blackberry tablet has no wi-fi or 3G, and is little more than a giant screen for your existing Blackberry. Now, on the one hand, this is kind of neat – Blackberry screens are tiny, and a tiny trackball…

Twist, turn and twist it again. That pretty much sums up this neat little invention. The people at DsLabs came up with the idea of a physical knob having the same feel of your finger when applied to the screen. The point behind the invention is to make it easier to rotate objects on the screen. Since it’s so touchscreen friendly, not only does it work for the iPhone but it also works for the iPod touch and the iPad. The stylus knob was created with the same technology that other touchscreen-friendly styluses have, except this stylus only rotates. Source: UberGizmo, DsLabs…

Are virtual sex changes on the horizon? It’s doubtful, but scientists have seemingly taken their first step towards such a thing recently when they used virtual reality to study how visually attached we are to our bodies and specifically our gender. Researchers at the University of Barcelona in Spain placed 24 men in a virtual world where they became, for a short time, women. Of course, in reality nothing changed for the men other than the fact that they were now wearing a virtual reality headset. Depending on the subject, what they saw was a first-person perspective from a woman’s body or a…