Gadget Of The Week: Windows XP

Last week was the week of emergent industry contempt for Windows Vista, with developers chugging down the haterade and Intel swooping in to lay a giant morsel of excrement at the feet of Microsoft's ill-begotten OS.

So it's with a mixture of schadenfreude and all-American meritocratic righteousness that I toss up Windows XP as the gadget of the week. After all - if Intel thinks XP is a better choice, that must knock most of the wind out of many remaining Vista apologists. If indeed there are any.

Ironic Update: as Den Den points out below, today is also your last chance to buy Windows XP from Microsoft: "Why muck up our current mess with reliable software?"

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 30 June 2008 · Comments (1)
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Gadget Of The Week: Firefox 3.0

With all the hype surrounding Firefox 3.0 (and given the roughly 20% market share of the free browser's current iterations), it's hard not to see Firefox 3.0 as the gadget of the week, even though its gadgetiness exists in the abstracted space of software.

Mozilla's ambitions to break the record with a million downloads in 24 hours only ads to the furor - Firefox 3.0 should be available for download at 10am PST, which is about ten minutes from the time of this writing. I'm planning on downloading a copy even if I don't install it today, just to help Mozilla prove a point to software companies still charging us hundreds of dollars for their applications: that you can make some of the best browsing and email applications (not to mention other projects, like Lightning), distribute them for free with an open-sourced development community, and still dominate your corner of the market.

Long live Mozilla!

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 17 June 2008 · Comments (1)
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Gadget Of The Week: iPhone 3G, Of Course!

The hottest thing to emerge from Den Den's excellent coverage of WWDC 2008 hardly surprised anyone, but it's still the biggest news this side of the Pleiades.

The iPhone 3G sports the much-anticipated 3G network access with doubled network speeds, built-in GPS, all metal buttons, a non-wonky headphone jack, and a much lower up-front price point. (Although Den Den has more to say on that subject.)

Now sit on your hands or whatever else floats your boat and wait until the damned thing goes on sale on July 11!

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 10 June 2008 · Comments (0)
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Gadget Of The Week: SATA HDD Multi-Function Dock

This week's featured gadget ain't too fancy. There's no touch screen, no 3G speeds, and its functions are pretty quotidian - but if and when you need it, this SATA HDD multi-function dock could be a lifesaver. It's certainly a data saver!

If you make, break or ride your PC roughshod (guilty), the $80 it'll take to buy and ship Brando's external SATA dock, USB hub and 4-way card reader could be worth it. As a PC-tinkerer with the remains of several PCs strewn about my apartment, my eyes lit up at the very existence of such a gizmo, and I'm planning to order one this week.

It reads both 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives and sports an eSATA option in case Vista SP 1 has killed your USB ports the way its sabotaged mine!

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 2 June 2008 · Comments (0)
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Gadget Of The Week: Roku

As the Madman made clear last week, Roku's Netflix set top box is a miniature orgy of instant gratification: Netflix subscribers (above the $9 mark, I believe) can now shell out a humble $99 for Roku, a device that brings streaming video straight to your television without any mucking about with iTunes, Amazon's Unbox, or Internet Explorer (where Netflix's exploratory streaming offerings have lived for the past year or so).

A limited selection of material and imperfect video performance keep Roku's initial reception cautious, but the price is dirt cheap and immensely competitive with Apple TV. And as NeonMadman pointed out, Roku arrives with an enormous pre-existing customer base to help swell its actual hardware install base in what could be record time.

Most of the complaints against Roku aren't new problems for television technology, and considering it's taken TiVo the better part of a decade to get its AV feature set together, options such as near-DVD quality video (or better, hopefully), surround sound, and UI improvements are already pretty advanced demands for a dirt-cheap box that's less than a week old. I may not snatch up a Roku right away, but I'll be keeping my eye on it for a good long while.

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 27 May 2008 · Comments (2)
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Gadget Of The Week: Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1

I know on-board sound has devoured much of the relevance of sound cards and their ilk, whilst TV tuner cards have upped the ante beyond mere sound - introducing all kinds of permutations of AV input/output mayhem and glee.

But it's nice to see a $60 sound card that can, without any mucking about in your computer's innards, deliver 5.1 surround sound with a simple USB 2.0 connection and the lucky red eye of an optical port.

Here's to inexpensive simplicity and surround sound.

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 19 May 2008 · Comments (0)
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Gadget Of The Week: BlackBerry Bold, Now Official!

While we featured the as-yet-unveiled BlackBerry 9000 as Gadget of the Week back in March, yesterday RIM officially unwrapped the BlackBerry Bold, as the handset will be known to marketing firms and eager buyers.

That 480x320 half-VGA screen with 65k colors sounds pretty bold indeed, and the word is it looks even better than it sounds - excellent video playback and an interface competitive with the iPhone. Also: leatherette texture on the back of the handset and superfast 3.5G tri-band HSDPA/UMTS support. Try finding an iPhone with download speeds as fast as 7.2 Mbps!

Wi-Fi a/b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and full A2DP support, and built-in GPS round out the feature set.

I'm just coming back from a wedding in Carmel where I picked the brains of what seemed like an endless stream of high-powered techies and business types who - without exception - bemoaned the iPhones they all owned. Former BlackBerry devotees, none of the moguls and madams I talked to could say a single good thing about the buttonless device that they all seemed to use a lot anyway: "It's impossible to send email," said one; "typing anything longer than an SMS is agonizing," said another.

It's important to remember that while the iPhone has all the hype and style going for it, there are armies of QWERTY keyboard-using BlackBerry addicts out there - and for them, Bold is not only beautiful, it's better.

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff, In the News on 12 May 2008
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Gadget Of The Week: Eco Bamboo Computer

The last few Gadgets of the Week have been pretty shallow - bedazzled cable plugs and bedazzled MacBook Airs - so I thought this week, as we properly introduce the merry spring month of May, the Homotron Laboratories, Dungeons & Mad-Scientist-Volcano-Lairs could try putting forth something green: namely, the Dell Eco Bamboo Computer that our resident tree-hugger Den Den Boy brought us last week.

By consuming 70% power and taking up 81% less space than traditional desktops, the Eco Bamboo manages to be friendly to both eye and planet - and the recycled innards, composed of "old bottles, milk jugs and detergent cases" give this $500-$700 bamboo-wrapped PC a pleasingly small eco footprint.

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff, In Your House on 5 May 2008
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Gadget Of The Week: Gold & Sapphire MacBook Air

Sure, it's beyond ridiculous, but I feel I'd be betraying, as a gay man, along-seated love affair with all things bling if I didn't make sure that this gold-plated, sapphire-encrusted MacBook Air from Computer Choppers spent at least a week on the Homotron pedestal of pride.

It'll set you back $8k, or $5k if you opt out of the rainbow sapphire-set Apple logo. (Which would be stupid, if you're the kind of person who spends $5k on a gold-plated computer but thinks denying yourself a rainbow logo of precious stones somehow balances out the scales of karmic ridiculousness.)

Mostly, I just want to see a photograph of the Paris Hilton of notebooks out in the wild. Preferably not in a sex tape.

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 28 April 2008
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Gadget Of The Week: Ridiculous CrystalCON Swarovski-Encrusted XLR Connector

Bless Neutrik's absurd little corporate heart for making the CrystalCON, a 3-pole female XLR cable connector bedazzled with Swarovski crystals. One of its two features is "Fancy, noble, valuable, attractive package - an eye catcher." That's right, fancy and noble - just like you!

Considering that an XLR connector isn't going to crop up in your standard home AV-rig, this unpriced product has to be targeting... that girl from The Hills. Or maybe Prince? You'll see XLRs in industrial applications like sound mixers, studio equipment, loudspeakers and - what I'm guessing is the selling point here - microphones.

But how many of the people who'd be silly enough to spring for a jewel-encrusted mic plug will actually know about the existence of a jewel-encrusted mic plug? A product this absurdly, uselessly fabulous deserves nothing less than a single week of exposure on the gayest tech site on the webnet. What else could it possibly be good for?

The first conceited cable connector [Crave]

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 21 April 2008
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Gadget Of The Week: Van Der Led WM2

We here at Homotron usually adhere to the rules of good taste, which do not condone such things as calculator watches, wrist cameras, and touch screens attached to the body. However, the Van Der Led WM2, as Den Den Boy pointed out last week, combines all three - and then some:

• Quad band GSM phone
• Bluetooth with dual stereo support
• FM tuner
• 1GB storage
• 1.3MP camera
• 1.3" touch screen (there's a point when a touch screen can be too small here, Van Der Led.)
• 300 min call time, 240 hour stand-by

You may want it, you may need it, you may see it and vomit explosively - but this ticker's got more features than, well, the James Bond style gadgets that undoubtedly inspired it.

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff on 15 April 2008
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Gadget Of The Week: LaCie Neil Poulton HDD

One of the hazards of building a tech site, I've noticed, is the tendency for your weekly editorial product highlights to reflect the neat products you may have seen the week before. Certainly, that's true this week - but the new LaCie Neil Poulton HDD is not only gorgeous, affordable, and just pretentious enough to be desirable without being snotty - it's also a stellar homage to Arthur C. Clarke, on account of looking like a giant black monolith from the "Space Odyssey" books and films.

Plus: It stores data!

tiny dancer
Posted to Gadget of the Week, Hot Stuff, In Your House, On Your Desk on 7 April 2008
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