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Can′t say we’ve ever heard of Eviant, but it’s tough to ignore a 4.3-inch television. No, we didn’t mistakenly write “television” in place of “digiframe” — the company is seriously pumping out 4.3-inch (T4) and 7-inch (T7) digital portable televisions, both of which are fully prepared to handle the looming DTV transition. Without any additional hardware, both sets can receive ATSC OTA signals, and there’s also a built-in Li-ion battery and inbuilt speakers for good measure. In slightly less amazing news, it’s also busting out a 19-inch (T19) digital TV with an integrated ATSC / NTSC tuner, HDMI / S-Video / VGA / composite inputs and a 1,440 x 900 native resolution. The whole trio is expected to ship this quarter for $169.99, $199.99 and $299.99 in order of mention.

Read - ͌ / ͏ release
Read - T19 release

Filed under: CES, Displays, Home Entertainment

Eviant introduces 4.3-, 7- and 19-inch digital televisions at CES originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Original post by Darren Murph

No need for a gargantuan home theater-styled soundbar? Then have a gander at iLuv’s latest, the iS𓥈. Hailed as a 2.1-channel speaker system for “laptops and desktops,” we view this more as just an easy-to-tote sound system that ought to outperform most of those weak iPod docks. The system packs 32-watts of power, SRS-XT “surround technology,” master / bass / treble audio controls, an inbuilt 3-port USB 2.0 hub and 3.5-millimeter auxiliary input. You’ll even notice that the speakers are detachable from the main unit, though the biggest knock is the omission of a rechargeable battery for true mobility. Still, not too shabby for a penny under a Benjamin; full release is after the break.

Continue reading iLuv reveals iSP200 2.1-channel portable soundbar

Filed under: Portable Audio

iLuv reveals iSP200 2.1-channel portable soundbar originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Original post by Darren Murph

iLuv certainly isn’t lacking in iPod docks these days, but those looking for something a bit more elaborate than your average desktop model will no doubt be pleased to see the company’s new i9500 system, which opts for a vertical design that can accommodate four CDs in addition to the iPod of your choice. If that’s not enough for you, the system will also handle SD cards and USB storage devices, and you′ll also get all the usual stereo features like an AM/FM radio and alarm clock functionality. With 45W of power and a separate, somewhat sizeable subwoofer, the system should also pump out some decent enough sound, at least compared to iLuv’s more modest systems. No word on a price just yet, but iLuv will apparently have more to say about that at CES.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio

iLuv announces i9500 iPod / CD sound system originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Even as a manly-man who’s never read the Twilight series, geeksugar’s feature on Bella’s upgraded geek set is worth the read. It asks “Should Book Technology be Updated for the Movie Version?”, a question that’s truly relevant to geeks, a wide-reaching demographic that ultimately, loves analyzing the most mundane of details.

Turns out that in the original book, vampire-loving lead Bella relied on a desktop computer to gain more information about Edward the pasty pretty boy—and she didn’t own a cellphone. That changed in the movie when she did her research on a black Macbook, and kept in touch through her Nokia phone.

Personally, it really doesn’t matter. Commenter “bowwowza” does have a point (”ya gotta keep up with the times for the movie or it looks old”). But in the greater scheme of things, I’d rather watch a movie that presents a well-developed cast of characters and a compelling story. It’s really more about the narrative, rather than what gadgets our heroes are using.

Story- and character-wise, Twilight quite honestly fails to provide. At least it’s a great way to show a lady-friend how much you care about her interests—though she’ll be the first to admit the franchise is only good for romantic thrills. Now she’ll return the favor come Star Trek.

(image from Wikipedia)

Tags: Bella Swan, Edward Cullen, gadgets of Twilight, Stephanie Meyer, Twilight

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Original post by Rico

Filed under: Laptops

Way back in the hazy salad days of 2001, Apple worked up a bold revamp of its flagship laptop line, the Powerbook. The company, in the pursuit of stronger, lighter, more attractive materials, moved from the black plastic casings it had used for its G3 computers to a sleek titanium shell. It was the onset of a new era in Macs. The basic look was clean and simple: squared edges, a roomy and functional layout, the matching pair of stereo speakers to either side of the keyboard, a consistent silver coloring throughout. In 2003, the company refined this design, replacing the titanium with lighter-weight aluminum and heralding in one of the most recognizable and persistent pieces of industrial design in the computer industry. The MacBook Pro (as it became known) has remained largely unchanged in the five years of its existence — in fact, the look and feel of the laptop has become such a staple of the Apple lineup that it’s almost as representative of the company as the Apple logo itself. But five years (or seven in the long view) is an awful long time to see one design, and the user outcry for significant updates has been nearly constant.

Those cries were answered last Tuesday, when the company announced the long-rumored (and badly leaked) refreshes for both the MacBook Pro and MacBook lines. As with most of the modern designs emanating from Cupertino, these are evolutionary — not revolutionary — steps, but they’re drastic in comparison to the stale, familiar versions of our not-so-distant past. Beyond the spit and polish of the Air- and iMac-inspired casings, the company has re-upped the internals as well; new graphics chips, a completely new motherboard design, and some slashing and burning of familiar ports are part of the new packages. So did Apple deliver the goods on what is arguably the most anticipated laptop release in recent memory, or has it failed to meet the absurdly high expectations placed upon it… and is that even possible? Read on to find out.

Continue reading MacBook and MacBook Pro review

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Ask Engadget, Displays

Tim from Australia sent in a question via our super-sophisticated submission method (that’d be e-mailing one in to ask at engadget dawt com) regarding e-readers, and given that Sony just pushed out a new one of its own, we found this one particularly timely:

“I’m starting a PhD next year and I’m looking to get an e-book reader so I can read PDFs of journal articles on the bus. It would have to be readable in direct sunlight and have a display large enough to read pages of about 400 to 500 words. Stylishness would also be nice. I don’t know the going rate for decent e-readers but I’d be prepared to spend up to $500.”

So, intellects — what’s the best piece of kit to snag for visually inhaling those scholarly articles in PDF form? Will it handle the occasional FCC user manual, too? Because that’s really important, you know.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Continuing the coverage of the big Skype for Asterisk news I covered earlier today… In a nutshell, the Asterisk server acts as a Skype-to-SIP gateway, a very popular requested feature, mapping Asterisk SIP-based phones onto the Skype network via the Asterisk Skype channel driver. Technically, you could call Asterisk a Skype-to-IAX gateway as well.

So how does it work?

Well, on an inbound call to your Skype username, both your Skype desktop client rings (if running) and your Asterisk IP phone rings. You can take the call using either your PC’s Skype software or your IP phone. Similarly, if someone calls your SkypeIn number, both will ring. Further, if someone dials your corporate auto-attendant, and then enters an extension number, it will still ring both your Skype client and your regular IP phone. That’s huge! You can be remote and use Skype as your remote IP phone.

Essentially, Skype becomes a softphone extension of the Asterisk IP-PBX. Although, it’s important to note that that outbound calls from the Skype client go through the Skype network and not through Asterisk, so it’s not a full-fledged softphone application which does inbound & outbound.

Also, using Skype for Asterisk you can assign Skype IDs/usernames to an Asterisk call queues. So for instance, you can setup ‘tmcsupport’ or ‘tmcsales′ Skype usernames and then anyone in the world can call into these call queues. Skype’s rich presence will be integrated into Asterisk, but it isn’t currently part of the beta, but should be part of the final release. What that would allow is a remote agent to set their presence to Away or Available and then take inbound calls to the Asterisk queue based on their presence.

When asked how Skype gateway appliances are affected by this announcement, Stefan Öberg VP & GM Telecom for Skype said, “The appliances that are out there now have built their solutions on standard Linux client. They’ve used the public API on that and basically are running many instances of Skype Linux client. Obviously, that’s not the way the Linux client was meant to be implemented. So those solutions are not scalable or reliable to the extend that businesses would want them to be. The difference with this solution is that we’ve built it together to scale and to be reliable.”

When asked, “What about video integration?” Danny Wyndam responded, “The beta product that is available today does not support video. It is our plan to be able to support everything you can do in Skype through Asterisk. It’s just an evolution of the connector to this platform that we can add the video support.”

Danny pointed out that in Asterisk you will be able to define calling rules with least cost routing (LCR) and determine if the call should go out through the T1/PRI/analog trunk or over SkypeOut to save on the costs.

When asked, “How long have you been working on this?”, Danny answered that they have been in talks for at least 3 years - but very serious for a few months in integrating Asterisk with Skype.

Tags: Asterisk, Danny Wyndam, Skype, Skype for Asterisk

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Original post by nafiz

Mod a flatbed scanner to take photos that decontruct time and motion with wild results
Thanks go to Mike_Golembewski for the original article in Make Volume 14.
To download The Scanner Camera MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete Scanner Camera article MAKE 14 “Scanner Camera”
and you can see that in our digital edition.

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Original post by KipKay

The good old Zip Drive introduced by Iomega in late 1994 served it’s purpose as a medium-capacity removable disk storage system until obsolescence kicked in as it was replaced by flash drives as well as rewritable CDs and DVDs. Here are a few things you can do to give new life to that outdated drive. Have you made creative use of yours? If so, tell us.

To download The New Life For Old Zip Drives MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the Zippy the Marionette article MAKE 13 “Zippy The Marionette”
and you can see that in our digital edition.

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Original post by KipKay

Whoa, looks like HTC is going full-device touchscreen in a hurry. We don’t know much more than what we can scrape off the screen, but this BlackBerry Thunder(storm)-like handset looks to be running TouchFLO 3D atop WinMo 6.1 and a Qualcomm 7201a processor kicking 528MHz. But that display, WVGA, please HTC we want to believe. One more after the break, plenty beyond the read link.

Continue reading HTC Touch HD takes 480 x 800 pixels fullscreen

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Desktops

Shuttle’s SN78SH7 was briefly caught struttin’ its stuff at CES this year, but after months on end of waiting, the thing is just about ready to start shipping to eager consumers. Hailed as the first small-form-factor PC to support NVIDIA’s Hybrid SLI technology, this block can be equipped with AMD’s Phenom ʹ processor, 4GB of RAM and Windows Vista (among other things). No word on a price, but it should be quite apparent come Friday.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Peripherals, Portable Video

It looks like those wanting to churn out some high-definition media away from their computers now have a new option to consider courtesy of Hitachi, which has just introduced its DZ-WR90 Blu-ray burner designed to be used with hard drive-based camcorders equipped with an eSATA port (which Hitachi just happens to make). That combo will apparently let you burn three hours of full-res footage onto a Blu-ray disc in one and half hours flat or, if you prefer, you can also cram an hour of 720 x 480 video onto a plain old DVD. No word on a price just yet, but you can apparently look for this one to hit Japan in mid-July.

[Via Slash Gear]

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Storage

Hitachi went and sucked more desktop performance out of a 2.5-inch, durable laptop drive once again. Their new 2.5-inch Travelstar 7K320 spins at 7200RPM with a 320GB storage capacity. It also boasts 12ms seek times and optional Bulk Data Encryption, which scrambles and unscrambles data as its written just in case you lose your little precious on the road. This drive is shipping now unless you want the enhanced availability version — meant for media servers and 24/7 uptime — which should ship this fall. And let’s be honest: until solid-state drives hit that elusive price / storage sweet spot, drives like this may just be your best bet in compact computing.

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Original post by Joshua Fruhlinger

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Here at Engadget HQ, we have a certain respect for tesla-based DIY endeavors. That being said, we still can’t fathom who in their right mind would actually fling sparks around their laptop just to feel a little closer to that WoW raid. Nevertheless, the High voltage “antivirus″ protection project claims to play nice with Macs or PCs and utilizes a ZVS flyback supply driving a 4-stage CW multiplier. According to the mad scientist who arranged this thing, the shot on the right was taken by a camera forced to hold its shutter open for ten seconds before capturing, and he even took a number of shots (check ‘em all in the read link) to defuse the “Photoshopped!1one!” arguments. If you can’t sense the fear in our fingertips, trust us, it’s there.

 

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Laptops

According to a report on the lately-talkative Acer, the company’s first iteration of Eee PC-competition will be somewhat cheaper than ASUS’ current (and future) sticker prices. In a scant article, speculation abounds that the first wave of Acer-made 8.9-inch laptops will be priced around $350 to $400, while ASUS will market its 8.9-inch micro-top for $50 to $100 more. Word on the street is that Acer will launch its cheapo solution sometime in May, but ASUS will preempt the introduction with an April landing for the 2nd generation Eee. Of course, we’re looking forward to the glorious future where laptops are simply free, all men live in harmony, and multi-colored unicorns once again roam the Earth.

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky