GadgetReview

It’s…um…about ten thirty AM.  Do you know where your children are?

If you can’t answer yes to that, and even if you can, you may still want to get your hands on a Little Buddy Child Tracker from Insignia.

The Little Buddy Child Tracker does pretty much what it says on the box, and it tracks your children.  Relentlessly.  Like non stop.  You can get the location of the unit at pretty much any time from your cell phone.

Yes, it’s a homing device.  For children.  Now, you may want to start getting cranked up about how children aren’t branded cattle to be tracked relentlessly, though you’d probably love to have this on hand if something happened to Junior.  My concern, however, comes into play in the “misuse” category.  Like instead of, say, tracking Junior someone decides to track Tammy Stalkerbait down the street by slipping it in her car.

Are we as a society ready for tracking devices?  I’m not sure.  But we’ll find out if you can shell out a hundred bucks for your very own Little Buddy Child Tracker.

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In a land where product names have nothing to do with anything, Yubz reigns supreme.  Put the word Magnum next to Yubz and now you’re onto something.

The Yubz Magnum is a wireless speaker that will connect to any BlueTooth device.  The Magnum is capable of playing music as well as acting as a hands-free loudspeaker for your cell phone.

Resembling a “pleather” meat log of sorts, the Yubz Magnum is a cylindrical device with speakers on both ends.  It feels really nice actually, and is soft and lightweight. …Continue reading: Yubz Magnum BlueTooth Speaker Review

Just in time for the holidays, Roku has announced an all new Roku Player…sort of.  Actually, the HD-XR model just adds a USB port (not enabled) and support for 802.11n to the HD version of the box.  You can grab one now for $129.99 or opt for the now discounted SD version for $79.99.  For some the $30 for the HD-XR version might not be worth it, but for those streaming users that want to move their box further from their router it might make sense, and who knows, maybe that currently disabled USB port will actually facilitate not only local play from an attached hard drive but enable it to be a NAS.

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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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Oh Thanko…have I told you lately that I love you…r insane brand of gadget lunacy?

The boys and girls out at Thanko have truly done it again.  They’re offering up a waterproof USB camera that will remain waterproof up to 20 meters deep, which is approximately sixty feet.

It’s got four gigs of onboard memory, USB, stores files in AVI at 736X280 resolution at 20 frames per second.  Even better, the battery takes up to two full hours of nonstop running to go blank, so you’ll have plenty of time to learn all its various features.

But yes, you read that right…they’re actually offering up a waterproof diving USB camera.  I admit there are plenty of other possible uses for it, but the fact that you can actually use it as a diving camera strikes me as a bit outlandish.  But if you ever wanted to hunt gold in the Caribbean, and don’t mind shelling out a hundred and forty bucks worth of that gold in advance, this has GOT to be the way to do it.

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Well folks, a new bit of data has emerged about the idea of cell phones and brain tumors.

Seems that Environmental Working Group released data just recently that detailed just how much radiation you’re sucking up when you’re on the phone.  And then the Los Angeles Times followed that up with a strange study.  Check this out:  when the data from 23 studies was pooled together, there was no conclusive link between brain tumors and cell phone use.  This by itself would be interesting if not necessarily newsworthy, but when the Times jiggered the evidence a bit, comparing data from the “eight strongest studies”, they found out that cell phone users had between a 10 and 30 percent higher chance of getting tumors, with the more time spent on the phone being higher risk than those who spent less.

And then, here’s the weirdest point: seven out of eight of those “strongest studies” were all conducted by the SAME GUY IN SWEDEN.

So it’s not really time to freak out yet, but it’s probably a good idea to get that hands-free gear out, just in case.

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This gadget is currently huge in the Bahamas (and a couple others by the look of it), but will likely catch on everywhere fairly soon.  If you’ve ever been out in a downtown area swimming with parking meters, you likely know how horrible it is to forget or not have sufficient change for the meter.  Or worse, to accidentally overshoot your prepaid time on the meter and have to face down a parking ticket.

But the EasyPark device is making that a thing of the past–it’s a wireless device that begins communicating with parking meters the second you pull up to one.  It then keeps track of how long you’re in the space and pays the correct parking costs for you from a bank of prepaid credit.  If you’re in a parking space that runs $.75 per half hour (just for the sake of example) and you’re gone an hour and a half, the EasyPark automatically deducts $2.25 as soon as you drive away.  Your parking is now paid.

Of course, most municipalities would likely never allow this to be used as it would gut about ninety percent of revenue from parking fines and penalties, but it’s still an awesome idea that we could all use.

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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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For those of you that have a computer hooked up to your home theater full time, the new GlideTV Navigator is designed with you in mind. The palm sized wireless remote can take you away from a bulkier wireless keyboard you might have been using and looks much more at home in your living room.

The touch pad and various backlit buttons control a variety of programmable features and the whole unit is compatible with popular media applications such as: Windows Media Center, Apple iTunes, Boxee, Apple Front Row, SageTV, Firefox, or any other web browser.

On sale now through select retailers for $150. …Continue reading: GlideTV Navigator: Looks Like An Ashtray Cover

LG is coming out with an amazing new gadget that’ll quite possibly change the way you think about summer: the solar-powered e-reader.

This is actually a whole lot of amazing in one sentence, so I’ll try and break it down into more manageable chunklets for you.  One, an e-reader that runs entirely on solar power is an exciting development.  Reading a book outside in the spring–or in some cases, summer–sun has long been a popular activity, but now you can take a library outside with you and have your choice when you finally settle in under that tree and set out to read.

Two, this is one of the first e-readers to be powered by the sun, thus every other e-reader is now going to have a significant bit of competition on its hands.  None of the other e-readers are powered by free sunlight, you know.  And buying batteries over and over, or paying the power company to recharge batteries, will always lose out to free recharge.  Every time.

Three, a solar panel capable of powering a gadget by itself, and still be portable?  This might be the start of something new and different in the whole solar panel industry.  It might take an entire roof’s worth of solar panels to make a five thousand watt generator, but one panel running an e-reader?  That’s interesting.

The LG solar e-reader represents several significant strides forward, and hopefully, we can get our hands on them fairly soon.

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