As gaming’s big week prepares to kick off tonight with a circus-themed blow-out in downtown Los Angeles, the rumors are beginning to hit a fevered pitch. Three bits of news came to our attention this weekend. Let’s run through them from most likely to least likely: Patrice Désilets is headed to THQ Montreal: We know Patrice Désilets, the creative director for Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, may have left his job just as the publisher is speeding the sequelization of the very successful franchise. But now we’re hearing that Désilets has landed comfortably at [...]

Continue Reading...

In 1986, Radio Shack sold that decade’s approximation of the e-book reader: the “Electronic Book.” It only cost $25 and hooked up with a computer to provide an interactive learning experience — it was geared toward teaching children rather than adult reading. While the reader itself was $25, the software/page packets were just as expensive at $20 to $25 a pop. These weren’t fresh titles like the latest novel. Instead, you were looking to buy educational packages such as “Solar Explorer” and “Word Master” and “The Number Factory.” [...]

Continue Reading...

Andrew Devigal, multimedia editor for The New York Times, is a far braver man that I. Why? He’s entrusting the safety of his $500+ iPad to a $0.69 business card holder from Office Depot. It isn’t the disparity in price that gets me — there’s just something about seeing the iPad perched on that small piece of plastic that makes me nervous. It seems to be working for Devigal, though: Of course, this isn’t made for the iPad. So don’t expect the stability you’d want from rough handling or turbulence on a flight. And when used in tilt mode for on-screen keyboard [...]

Continue Reading...

Crossing the great divide between printed documents and the digital world just got easier with Doxie, a 600dpi scanner smart enough to rotate, crop, and then send digital versions of those paper docs and pics directly to the cloud. Now you can take a stack of photos, run them through this small black magic wand, and they can be deposited directly and effortlessly on your Flickr account, and other cloud apps such as Picnik, Google Docs or Evernote. The $129 scanner is wise to the desktop, too, playing nice with Acrobat, Preview, iPhoto, and Picasa. It’s cheaper than most good flatbed scanners, [...]

Continue Reading...

Toshiba — the world’s No. 2 NAND flash memory maker behind Samsung according to Reuters — is preparing the next advance in flash technology with even denser memory chips (similar to the silicon wafer pictured above). The company currently products circuitry with widths of 32 and 43 nanometers, and wants to move into the 20s with 25nm chips. Denser chips means more memory can be packed into the same-sized space. It’s advances like this that are why flash drives have gone from half a gigabyte to multiple gigs over the last decade. It’s not as simple as just flicking [...]

Continue Reading...

Just when we thought our days of writing Minority Report in a headline were over, MIT students Tony Hyun Kim and Nevada Sanchez had to roll up with a concept so faithful to the movie it has us excited all over again. Called “Glove Mouse,” the device has microprocessors on the back of each glove to translate the movements of fingers into button presses, allowing all the pinching, pointing, grabbing and waving you saw in the movie. Hell, they even added sexy little LEDs to the tip of each index finger. The most amazing part isn’t actually the Glove Mouse itself, though — it’s [...]

Continue Reading...

You’re looking at the future of graphics cards, NVIDIA’s GTX 480 and GTX 470, touted as the world’s fastest. This is the next generation, the first cards with superfast tech NVIDIA calls Fermi — that means faster frame rates at higher resolutions, a guaranteed lure for serious PC gamers. These two ultra-fast cards, with their red-hot graphics processing units (GPUs), are especially well suited for the latest trend in computing: getting the GPU itself to do much of the heavy lifting, leaving the CPU to work on other data at the same time. These two hotshots are NVIDIA’s [...]

Continue Reading...

It felt like just yesterday we were writing about flexible displays as if they were some far-flung concept. Now, several companies are pursuing the technology, and HP is making some great strides at streamlining the processes behind the bendy displays so that they could make their way into consumer gadgetry. HP is working on refining a production method it’s calling Self-Aligned Imprint Lithography, or SAIL. Instead of making the flexible displays in sheets, HP manufactures them as rolls, which cuts down on the time and money involved — key, if we ever want to see those awesome flexible [...]

Continue Reading...

Buffalo is back with the MiniStation Cobalt, a new, smaller USB 3.0 drive capable of speeds up to 5 Gbps, said to be ten times faster than USB 2.0. Back in October, we showcased the first external hard drive with USB 3.0, available in 1T and 1.5TB flavors from Buffalo. The MiniStation Cobalt has a 2.5-inch drive and is powered through the USB bus. The Cobalt is backwards-compatible with USB 2.0 and is compatible with Mac and PC. It comes with TurboPC to boost transfer speeds from a PC by about 26% compared to other USB 3.0 drives. The new MiniStation drive will have 500 GB and 640 GB versions, [...]

Continue Reading...

Here’s another one of those dead-simple ideas that makes you wonder just how it’s taken this long for someone to have it: USB plugs that are able to be chained together, sharing one USB port among multiple devices. Sure, this will work only to a point where you have a ludicrous stack of USB plugs, but for a small number of devices this is a genius solution. The plugs are even color-coded, so you can tell which belongs to what device. Clever stuff! Now let’s just see it move from the concept phase into reality. Via Yanko Design

Continue Reading...