Filed under: Wireless

Sometimes, just sometimes sanity prevails. Remember Wibree, Nokia’s proposed Bluetooth-like (but not Bluetooth) solution for short-range wireless cable replacement in low-powered devices? Well, as of this morning, Wibree, and its 10x lower power consumption (but shorter range) will become part of the Bluetooth specification for ultra low powered wireless devices. Once the spec is integrated, products like watches, toys, and even healthcare devices (er, pacemakers?) can join your Bluetooth Personal Area Network. You know, after the spec is finalized during the “first half of 2008” which will undoubtedly extend to Q3 of 2008 and then Q… ah hell, you know how it goes.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

New web storage service backs up the tunes and vids you buy.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

We’ve seen there’s a bit of confusion after a certain not-entirely-lucid portion of Steve’s WWDC keynote yesterday, wherein he announced “top to bottom” 64-bit integration in Leopard, what he characterized as a first for the industry. As we all know, Apple is only shipping on one version of Leopard, so that led some to believe they’d be left in the lurch, their G4s, G5s, Core Solos, and Core Duos rotting on Tiger and unable to make the jump past 10.4. Thankfully, that ain’t the case.

As we mentioned yesterday (but didn’t really dig into), Leopard isn’t entirely like Windows, where you’re expected to install the 32 or 64-bit variants of the OS based on the system / CPU that will run it. We discussed this with Apple, which expressed that this latest version of OS X takes a far simpler approach for the end-user than multiple hardware-centric OS versions, opting instead to run both 64 and 32-bit apps and drivers on any 64-bit machine (read: Core 2 Duo-based), and defaulting to the usual 32-bit app / driver operation on 32-bit Macs. In other words, users with 64-bit capable Intel machines will see a performance boost if running 64-bit apps, but those that don’t have a newer Apple box won’t be at all penalized — nor will they be unable to upgrade. So, we cool?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Digital Cameras

More from Kodak in the form of these four from Kodak’s M series of ultracompact shooters. The 7 megapixel M753, 8 megapixel M853 (pictured), and 8 megapixel M873 each sport 2.5-inch LCDs while the 8 megapixel M883 dials it up to a 3-incher. The top-end M883 offers face detection technology, a full metal chassis, and ISO 3200 sensitivity. All the cameras feature a panorama stitching mode and MPEG-4 video capture which maxes out with a 640 x 480 resolution at just 15fps. The $149 M753 hits in June, the $179 M853 and $199 M873 in August, and $229 M883 in September — each available in several colors. More photos as we get ’em.

[Via Photography Blog]

Continue reading Kodak’s four slim shooters: the M753, M853, M873, M883

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

Well, we knew it wasn’t going to be earth-shattering, but this first shot of the mic for EA‘s Singstar-meets-DDR Wii game Boogie doesn’t even set off mild tremors. The USB unit is the first mic for the Wii, however, and that’s gotta count for something, right? Still, we’re not giving up hope for Nintendo to finally ship the fabled Wiimote microphone that plugs into that unused “audio translator” chip — it’s gotta happen sometime. Right?

[Via Wii Fanboy]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!