GadgetReview

Soon to appear in the style section of a men’s magazine, these new external hard drives from Brinell ooze some serious swank.  Available in leather, carbon, wood, or stainless steel, these drives go from 160GB’s to 500GB’s.

Each drive comes with a cleaning cloth for first impressions, a mini-USB cable, and back-up and sync tool software called PureSync by Jumping Bytes.

What won’t be so cool is the asking price:  Starting at $277 and ending at $337.  Boo!!  Better check if these things fit in your suit pocket before purchase.

[via GearDiary]

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Way back in the depths of 2005, we talked about a kind of ultra portable scanner called the Docupen.  Well, the company that makes these has just released a brand new kind that they’re hoping will be so extreme you’ll likely ignore the mostly pointlessness of the device and buy several.  It’s the Docupen X-Series, and the X is almost certainly for X-treeeeeeme.

The Docupen is essentially a scanner the size of a standard ballpoint pen, and allows you to scan a document or a photo into JPEG format by rolling the scanner part along the surface of the thing you want scanned.  It has 64 gigs of internal memory, microSD card compatibility, and can scan to 600 dpi, which is no mean feat for a pen-sized scanner.

If you do a lot of photo manipulation or deal with a lot of actual paper documents–like, say, business cards at trade shows–then you might feel pretty good about the Docupen X-Series.  But you likely won’t feel good about its price, a whopping $369.

Chances are you’ll almost never need to use this, and chances are even greater that you’ll lose it in short order anyway, so it’s probably not what you’d call a good investment.

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As the list of creative USB flash drive hits beyond endless, this is the first tried and true instrument I’m seeing as a storage device.  Measuring in at a tiny 3 1/4″, you can even get one preloaded with a QuickTime instructional video to help you play it.

Handmade in the USA by some rusty barnacle, you can get this USB Harmonica multiple GB sizes at various price points.  Another cool holiday 09′ gift idea!

[via CoolestGadgets]

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Coming to you today from the folks at fu-bi is the Retro Cube Mini Speaker With MP3 Player.

Basically, it’s pretty much what it says on the box.  It’s a speaker that hooks to your iPod or your PC, with either a headphone jack or a USB cable, and will give you about three hours of music for roughly every hour spent charging the battery.  You can also fill up a USB stick, MMC card or SD / SDHC card with music and play them directly from the speaker itself.

It looks like nothing so much as a old fashioned guitar amp, and this is probably where the “Retro” part comes into play.  They sell for about fifty bucks each, but only can be had in Japan for right now.  It’s kind of a nifty idea, but it’s a little bit short on execution.  I mean, great, congratulations. It’s a speaker.  I’ve got several.  But I like that it can be taken anywhere and will play music from outside media, turning it into a pocket stereo.  It’s the kind of thing I could’ve used back when I was in high school.

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So remember just yesterday, when I was getting all poingy happy about the half e-reader / half netbook hybrid?  Well, I think I may have just beat that level of awesome but in a totally different direction.  Today I’m talking about the Kohjinsha PA, a combination netbook and tablet PC.

No, seriously–this sucker has a 4.8″ WSVGA touchscreen, 1.33GHz Atom CPU, 512 meg of RAM and a 32 GB SDD.  The battery is slated to run for 7.5 hours, and it even comes with an SD slot and a 1.3 MP webcam, all in a netsurfing portable tablet PC.

I am profoundly impressed by this, even though my chances of ever using such a device are so slim as to approach zero.  I draw like a cat with a pen in its mouth after ingesting large quantities of peyote, so a tablet PC to me is almost less than useless. But still, I’m impressed–and the price is pretty impressive too.

If you want one of these bad boys, you’ll have to shell out a whopping $758 in Japan.  Preorders are going on, and the prices range between $867 and $921.

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I thought Thanko represented the weirdest gadgets Japan had to offer until I heard about Chindogu, a concept that describes that special kind of gadget that defies all description.  You read about one such gadget right here with the Baby Mop, a onesie that featured dust mop fibers, allowing your baby to crawl around freely and clean the floor while doing so.

Another Chindogu gadget is the Hay Fever Hat, a picture of which you can see directly above.  It’s basically a toilet paper roll mounted to a hat, so that the toilet paper flows down your face and allows you easy access to a way to blow your nose, as well as possibly being able to block sneezes.  It’s enough to make you wonder if someone’s just trying to pull one over on us.

As useful as it is to have an easily reached quantity of nose wipes handy, especially during hay fever season, there’s no way to avoid the fact that anyone wearing this hat winds up looking like a complete tool.  That and the paper in question is actually toilet paper, so you’re basically wandering around with a roll of toilet paper on your head, plus the hat is chinstrapped into place, so now you need a chin strap to cart around your roll of toilet paper.

This kind of thing apparently only happens in Japan, because I’ve never seen anyone walk around with one of these on their head, and I visit Wal-Mart on a regular basis.

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So the early word is that, finally, we may have a Kindle killer on our hands, and it’s from a little known outfit called Plastic Logic.

The Que, as it’s called, will see the light of day for the first time ever at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (booth 11840, in case you want to know exactly where to go) on January 7th.

What’s interesting about the Que is that it’s less than a third of an inch thick, yet is WiFi enabled and can handle PDFs, Word documents, and Excel documents.  Plus, the battery life, according to reports, will be measurable in days, as opposed to hours.

The early reports that call this a Kindle killer have one significant hurdle in front of them–namely, answering questions about the price of the device.  The Kindle runs $279, and Sony’s model runs $199…but how much does the Que sell for?  No one knows yet, and we likely won’t know until we can hit booth 11840 for ourselves.

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While the mass adoption of USB 3.0 is currently a long, dark and lonely road, a few storage companies have come forth with details regarding their impending drives that boast such compatibility.

Coming December 11th (of this year) Dane-elec’s line of USB 3.0 compatible hard drives, called Superspeed, will be available for purchase starting at $149.99.  Course at that price you’ll be scoring just 500GB of storage, but drop another $100 (or so) and you’ll quadruple your storage capacity.  Throw a bit more cash around and you’ll get your hands on an SSD version, which of course will maximize the drive’s USB 3.0 abilities of 250mbps.  …Continue reading: Dane-elec Announces USB 3.0 Hard Drives, Superspeed SO

If you’re looking for media streaming on a very, VERY tight budget, then the Patriot media streamer is EXACTLY what you had in mind.  You’ll need to bring your own hard disk drive, but each Patriot comes with a remote, three USB slots, Ethernet support and support for several different file formats.

Sure, it’s not that great that you have to provide your own hard drive before this thing will actually work, but given the price of the unit and the hard drive itself, chances are you’ll be doing all right.  They provide everything else–all you have to do is bring your picnic basket and enjoy.

And when I said, “very, VERY tight budget”, I meant it.  This sucker retails for a downright reasonable $130.  Of course, you’ll have to tack on a little extra for the hard drive, but new ones aren’t so pricey these days.

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Sometimes, you wish you could get access to shaky, variable quality information about just about any topic.  it’s times like these that we usually turn to the internet–but what if we’re away from the wireless internet or what have you?

That’s where the WikiReader device comes in.  It’s powered by two AAA batteries that are estimated to last a full year in this device, and comes with a monochrome touchscreen so you can scroll and track things.

I admit, it’s probably pretty cool to have access to three million articles worth of Wikipedia, especially wherever you happen to be at the time.  Updates are delivered on a quarterly basis, and you can also get a microSD card option added to your WikiReader for just an extra $29 a year.  It will probably do horrible things to barroom trivia contests–NTN is probably freaking out and wetting itself as we speak–but the idea is still plenty cool.

The base unit itself costs $99, and will be available on Amazon on the order of Real Soon Now.

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