Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Although James Dyson may not actually have been the first person to “reinvent” the unhygienic ol’ hand dryer, his company’s Airblade does seem to be the most powerful option out there for getting the wet stuff off (save for FIU’s Wall of Wind), so folks are naturally concerned that its 400mph blast of air will cut through their tender skin like a laser. Well fear not, frequenters of public restrooms, because Popular Science has gone head hand-to-head with one of the new blowers, risking life and limb to make sure that your next trip to the bathroom won’t be even more dangerous than usual. Oddly enough, the PopSci guinea pig tester didn’t actually use the machine to dry his mitts, but rather chose a few more visually-expressive experiments to evaluate the Airblade’s power (and safety). In the linked video, you can check out what happens to a human hand under the effects of the Dyson (spoiler: it dimples the skin, but doesn’t leave the bloody welts that some were expecting), along with its ability to blast away tiny Post-It notes and completely pwn a sheet of newspaper. Just remember, we’re not responsible for what happens when you get caught by a business owner making a mess of his / her restroom during your attempts at replicating these experiments, so proceed with caution.

[Thanks, Drakonen]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Filed under: Features, Peripherals

We got to take an early look at Logitech’s new flagship keyboard — the diNovo Edge — and we liked what we saw. Sure, we could go on about the lack of a Mac diNovo version (or about the fact that the control and Windows keys are no longer the same size, making it impossible to rearrange them in a Mac-like fashion), but there’s still so much good to find. The soft touch plastic wrist-rest has been replaced by a slick aluminum finish; the surface of the 0.75-inch thick keyboard, while now the same fingerprint-magnetized plastic finish as one would expect to find on their iPod or like devices, is refreshing amongst the many-shades-of-gray diNovo line. The sensors both on the volume strip and on the touch pad both worked well, and the circular scrolling motion on the pad is a nice touch. Watching the function keys light up from beneath is rather entertaining for those easily amused by LEDs (such as ourselves), and it finally solves the issue of knowing which key mode one’s keyboard is in (i.e. no more hitting F5 ten times during a Jobsnote until remembering to hit the function key to re-enable it). All in all we think Logitech is off to a great start on their new line, even though it’s still sans numeric keypad in the same unit. But as a HTPC / Media Center keyboard that you might move off the desk and onto the couch every once in a while, we’d be more than happy to have this thing furnishing our living room. Click on for a up-close of the light up keys.

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SPONSORED BY: BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time.

Filed under: Features, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Obviously we’re all a little underwhelmed that the 5.5G iPod isn’t the true video iPod we thought would be debuted with the movie store, but the screen is definitely brighter, those hard drives are definitely bigger, and you really just can’t argue with a $50 drop in price. Or games, which cost a small chunk of change. But at least it’s nice to know what you’re getting yourself into here, and that’s a 5G iPod with a 60% brighter screen.

Pac Man! Haww yeah.

Ok, so it was a little out of focus, but this is the new 30GB model. Unfortunately the 80GB wasn’t around for size comparison, but we doubt it’s any larger than yesterday’s 60GB device.

This one’s a personal favorite of our spammers.

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Filed under: Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment

The world’s first THX-certified, dual CableCARD DVR has finally arrived in the form of TiVo’s Series3. It doesn’t come cheap with a price tag of $799 (don’t forget service!), but it’s a fine cable company DVR replacement if your budget allows it. What are you waiting for, click on for the full rundown and lots more pics!

Design

Oh come on, like you need us to tell you that the S3 is TiVo’s best looking DVR to date. The solid unit has a gleaming black top with a stylish black and silver front bezel. From a couch, the front-panel OLED display serves little practical purpose without Chuck Yeager vision (or better), though we’ve really enjoyed studying it up close. TiVo’s trademark peanut remote is glossy, well balanced, and features pleasantly glowing buttons.

Functionality

The TiVo interface is exactly what you’d expect: after all these years, the competition still hasn’t been able to match the intuitiveness, ease, and power of the original DVR. Familiar features such as Wishlists, Suggestions, and Season Passes are present. Music and photo streaming from Mac or PC also work as expected.

Toggling between tuners can be performed via the programming info menu or by pressing the LiveTV button on the remote. Any two incoming signals can be recorded simultaneously with the option of watching a third signal of recorded content.

The Series3 is designed to replace a cable box, not control it. The S3 supports OTA broadcasts (both ATSC and NTSC) in addition to analog cable, but to fully appreciate the unit a pair of CableCARDs are needed. If our experience is representative, getting them installed will test your patience. The S3 supports CableCARD 1.0, and it’s our understanding a single M-Card (CC 1.0+) will replace 2 CableCARDs once they become available.

HD details

Obviously, the primary selling point of this unit is its ability to handle HD. Not only does the S2 handle OTA and digital NTSC, it includes a variety of settings to optimize incoming content for specific screen types. Unlike analog recordings, digital content is directly recorded bit for bit without any degradation of quality. The trade-off is that the unit only stores about 30 hours of HD programming (or up to 300 hours of SD). Tribune guide data now includes information source video resolution in case your eyes still can’t tell the difference between a nice cable signal and a fat HD pipe. The Now Playing list includes a dedicated HD folder.

Specifications

While the Series3 provides only two inputs (antenna and cable), the THX-certified unit finally provides numerous outputs including HDMI and optical audio. The S3 contains a 250GB Western Digital Caviar hard drive plus an eSATA port, which paves the way for future storage options. While we weren’t able to receive confirmation from TiVo, we feel it’s likely the internal hard drive can be upgraded. Connectivity to the mother ship is (still) handled via phone, Ethernet, or supported USB network adapters. The hardware supports AVC (aka H.264) though it hasn’t been enabled in the software yet, which leaves us wondering what TiVoCast might have in store for us down the road.

Disappointments and concerns

TiVo continues to develop and evaluate Multi-Room Viewing, TiVoToGo, and external hard drive support in relation to CableLabs certification. While we recognize certain aspects of this issue are largely out of TiVo’s control, the absence of these value-added features makes the MSRP more difficult to swallow. And while we were pleasantly surprised that the Series3 allows you to scan and tune unencrypted QAM programming, we were disappointed in the inability to manually map those channels to their respective networks. TiVo tells us this functionality is being evaluated for a future software update. Lastly, the cable industry appears to be in flux and it’s not clear when/if technologies such as OCAP and SDV might impact Series3 functionality.

Cost and Availability

Being an early adopter is gonna cost you. Those leaks and our own forecast were spot-on: $799 will be the price of admission. Unfortunately for potential S3 consumers, TiVo is at a disadvantage compared to the deep-pocketed cable companies and satellite providers who operate under a different business model and underwrite hardware costs. If it’s any consolation, the 30-hour Series1 and the HD DirecTiVo both retailed for $1k at launch (and then proceeded to drop in price).

Service fees remain $12.95 a month, or $6.95/month for those who currently have a non-bundled pricing unit subscription. TiVo also offers pre-paid pricing at the rate of $155.40 for one year or $299 for two years. TiVo is offering two promotions in conjunction with the release of the S3. First, you can prepay three years of service for the price of two ($299). Second, as we revealed last week, $199 lets you move Lifetime Service from a S1 or S2 unit to the new S3.

Units go on sale today at TiVo.com and should be showing up within the next week or so at Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry’s, and Ultimate Electronics. Good luck on that decision!

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This morning Intel officially announced its Core 2 Duo processors, and Dell has provided Gizmodo with a blazing fast Dell Precision Workstation 390 just in time for a Day Zero hands-on review. At first glance, the machine doesn’t look much different from previous Dell Precision Workstations, but inside is a completely different story.

Our test machine ($3893) arrived equipped far beyond its basic $1050 configuration, powered by the fastest Core 2 Duo processor, a dual core 2.66GHz “Conroe” chip that’s the next-to-the-fastest in the group of today’s Core releases, the fastest of which is the Core 2 Extreme 2.93GHz chip.

Along for the ride is 2GB of DDR2 533MHz RAM, a workstation-class NVIDIA PCIe Quadro FX 3500 graphics card, and an 80GB SATAII 7200RPM system drive. Then there’s a little high-tech jewel, a Raid-0 array with two tiny one-inch 146GB SAS hard drives spinning at 15,000RPM, a brand new piece of technology which gave us remarkable speed test results.

How fast was this monster workstation from Dell? Find out after the jump.

Don’t be fooled by that 2.66GHz clock speed, because this is the fastest processor we’ve ever seen here at the Midwest Test Facility. That’s because these Conroe processors have an extra speedy front-side bus design, a 4MB L2 cache and a 64-bit dual core architecture. They’re just more efficient all around, and Intel’s blather about how they’re faster by 50% or more is not really blather, it’s all true.

Along with that efficiency comes serene quietude. Dell has always been expert at hushing even its most powerful workstations, and this Precision Workstation 390 is no exception. Of the dozens of workstations we’ve tested here, this one is the quietest, and a few times we wondered if it was even running, only confirming such by observing its backlit power button on the front. Yes, this speedster is quiet enough to be in “church mouse” territory.

Exactly how fast is it? Let’s start with that pair of 146GB SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard disk drives. This is the next generation of hard disk drives, and these 15,000RPM babies lashed together in a RAID-0 array added $1000 to the price this configuration, but showed us astonishing speed, tipping our disk speed benchmarks at 160MB per second writing and an even faster read speed of 178MB per second.

The main event? Since this is the workstation-class machine, we ran a suite of benchmarks concentrating on Adobe After Effects compositions, and the Dell Precision Workstation 390 blew the doors off every machine we’ve ever tested using our suite of After Effects benchmarks. It lags slightly behind an HP dual core dual Opteron machine we tested a few months back on CineBench rendering tests, which determine 3-D graphics performance, but then that dual core dual Opteron machine costs $1500 more than this one.

Overall, the Dell Precision Workstation 390 performs as advertised, with its Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz processor delivering speed on some benchmarks that were nearly twice as fast as a dual-core dual-processor Opteron 280 machine. If you’re looking for speed, efficiency, and quietude, look no further. – Charlie White

Full review [Digital Video Editing]

Filed under: Cellphones

The iPod slips right into the hole in the iSkin silicone layer, which then in turns goes into the hard shell by way sliding down and removing the front of the case. Drop the iPod in there and slide the case back on for a tight fit. The case feels really solid and looks like it can take some abuse. The kickstand on the back of the case extends out for video playback, and the click wheel is still accessible even with both “layers” on there.

So we decided to test out the “ClaroCoat” on the outer casing to see if it really protects the iPod from scratches. Other than being smudged by my greasy paws, there wasn’t a scratch to be found on the case. You won’t have to worry about the screen portion of the case being opaque with scratches after throwing it into your bag with your keys. – Jason Chen

Product Page [iSkin]

Filed under: Handsets, Reviews, Samsung, Windows Mobile, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS

Filed under: Gaming

We knew we should have taken that call from Miyamoto the other day, but our loss was TIME magazine's gain, because the Mario and Zelda creator was looking for someone to, wouldn't you know it, take the upcoming Wii for a little spin. TIME's five page article is so full of interesting deets that we barely have room to scratch the surface here, but suffice it to say that Lev Grossman not only reports on his hands-on experiences with a number of games, he's also able to get inside Nintendo's head, if you will, and tease out a bit of the methodology behind what some hardcore gamers perceive as the company's madness (Wii? those controllers? Nintendogs?). As for the actual gaming, Grossman got to play some tennis (the sensors even allow you to add spin), slay some dragons (brandishing the controller like a sword in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess), and bring those wacky Warioware minigames into the third dimension (think: fishing, weight lifting, cooking, etc.). Geez, this thing sound like so much fun that we may just skip the Sony keynote this afternoon and see if the folks from Nintendo will let us play with their goodies.

Filed under: Handsets, Features, Reviews, Others, Helio, EV-DO, CDMA

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Well, Helio sent us our href="http://www.engadgetmobile.com/search/?q=kickflip">Kickflip in the mail today, and we can’t really stop
playing with it. The EV-DO is the usual walled garden media business; href="http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2006/05/02/helios-media-services/">H.O.T. isn’t bad, but won’t let you add
feeds; generally the apps work well and are easy on the eyes, even if they aren’t always incredibly flexible. We’ll go
more into the software later (anything you want to know?) though, it’s the hardware where the Kickflip really shines.
We freaking can’t stop flipping the thing open. It’s like tactile crack, and we have to put it away under some papers
to free our hands and get any work done, instead of engaging in the idle addictive sensation of nudging the screen and
flipping it open, then closing it again with that little click. Not that it’ll do it justice, but if you want to peep a
video of the Kickflip’s opening mechanism in action, check out the link below. Otherwise click on for a bunch of hands
on pics of the device.

Watch [19.5MB Quicktime]

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Great box, the packaging is first-rate.
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It’s got a
clean, minimal face, but if the screen’s off you don’t know which way is up.

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