Engadget
Engadget

Engadget
  • iRobot (still) working on lawn-mowing Roomba?

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    Not that it's any surprise, but according to a patent filing (which we were unable to ourselves unearth from the abyss that is the USPTO), iRobot would appear to still be working on the "Mowba," or whatever the hell the lawn-cutting robot is that they were talking up years ago. We're not sure you really need to pore over 80+ pages of sketches and drawings to get the idea though, especially since there are already a number of autonomous grass-cutting machines out there.
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  • New report says SSDs are, in fact, more efficient

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    So LAPTOP magazine published a report confirming what most people already believe to be true about SSDs (that is, before last week when SSDs supposedly hit the fan): they use less power than traditional drives. Apparently they got up to 20 minutes more battery life when testing an SSD against a platter-based drive in an Eee PC and Gateway T-6828 (which jibes with our own experiences using SSDs in laptops), but if you ask us, the discussion seems a little moot. SSDs perform way faster and are far better suited to portable computing where drives are moved, bumped, and jostled -- the power savings is great, but the speed and reliability are still our top two reasons for going SSD.
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  • Study says more than 10,000 laptops go missing at US airports each week

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    As we've seen, laptops have a tendency of getting stolen from even the most unsuspecting places, but a new study has now found one not entirely surprising place where your laptop is particularly unsafe: the airport. According to the Ponemon Institute, more than 10,000 laptops are reported lost at the 36 largest airports in the US each week and, of those, 65 percent are not reclaimed. They also reported a further 2,000 laptops lost at medium-sized airports, with 69 percent of those not reclaimed. According to the institute, folks also aren't very confident that they'll ever see their laptop again once it goes missing, with 77 percent of the people surveyed saying they had "no hope" of ever recovering a laptop lost at the airport, and 16 percent saying they wouldn't even do anything to attempt to recover it. Of course, there's no shortage of suggestions out there for preventing your laptop from getting lost or stolen, and Network World's Richard Stiennon has a couple of good ones at the link below.

    [Via Network World]
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  • Samsung U4 DAP emerges on Korean website

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    If you found yourself infatuated with Samsung's YP-U3, you're sure to love the U4... we think. There's a complete dearth of information regarding the device itself, but given that it already has a placeholder and image on the outfit's Korean Yepp site, we'd say there's a pretty good chance it'll be getting real soon enough. Hold tight, miniature DAP lovers, Sammy won't keep you in the dark much longer.

    [Via AnythingButiPod]
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  • The BMW Museum's kinetic sculpture takes your brain to another dimension

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    Ready to have your gray matter softly stroked? Perhaps you should take a trip to BMW's recently opened museum in Munich, where a kinetic sculpture comprising 714 metallic balls suspended in air will soothe your weary mind. It's one of those things that's better seen than described, but if you can imagine a wave of undulating orbs that appear to weightlessly float, you'll start to get the idea. Can't afford the flight? Check out the video -- which features some serious easy listening jams -- after the break and see the installation in action.

    [Via BMWCCA]

    Continue reading The BMW Museum's kinetic sculpture takes your brain to another dimension

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  • Keepin' it real fake, part CXXIII: the Wiimote candy dispenser

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    According to the reader who sent this our way, this candy dispenser looks "exactly" like a Wiimote, except it fires candy out of the spot where the IR transmitter should be. Apparently the instructions suggest that you "Do not aim at face," so... it's kind of like the real thing.

    [Thanks, Timothy]
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  • Author Nick Hornby not feeling the fever pitch over e-books

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    Irex Iliad
    This won't come as a massive surprise to most, but author Nick Hornby isn't so into e-books. After walking into a British Borders book store to find the £399 ($790) Iliad for sale next to some £4 paperbacks, he poo-poo'd the platform in a guest column on the Penguin Blog. So here we have a book author blogging on a book publisher's site about the downfalls of a technology that could supplant his industry. To be fair, he does make some salient points about the unlikelihood that e-books will replace print in the same way iPods have undermined CD sales. He points out that people, on average, only buy seven books a year compared to the number of CDs they used to buy. In addition, book readers just like books and tend to be suspicious of new technology. Finally, he goes back to the iPod: the popularity of portable entertainment devices, what with their TV shows, games, movies, and other fancy schmancy doohickeys will continue to make the notion of reading a book -- even in electronic format -- not so tempting.

    [Via Shiny Shiny]
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  • OS X-installing EFiX device gets a price, release date

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    The folks at EFiX don't exactly have the best record of sticking to promised release dates, but the company's CEO and lead engineer, Wilhelm von Vnukov, now tells us that the V2 edition of the OSX-installing device for desktop PCs will be available on Monday (July 7th), "I think," with the V1 version set to follow three to four weeks later (still no word on the promised device for laptops). According to the website, the only difference between the two is the addition for support of "several motherboards" on the V2, as well as "experimental support for some prototype motherboards." What's more, the company has also now confirmed that the price for the initial batch will be €80 (or about $125), although availability seems to be confined to Taiwan and Bulgaria at the moment, with a number of other countries (including the United States) listed as being "in negotiation." The company is also promiising that the price will be substantially lower once the device enters mass production, although it's unsurprisingly not making any promises as to when that might happen.
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  • Teardown party: the MSI Wind and Acer Aspire One get ripped open

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    You knew this was bound to happen. Like any good piece of gadgetry, there's always someone who can't wait to get their grubby hands all over it... and rip it to shreds to see how it works. Today we present the disemboweling of two of the latest challengers to the Eee's netbook throne: the MSI Wind, and the Acer Aspire One. The Aspire One at least gets the courtesy of a proper unboxing before the medical proceedings begin; the Wind just gets cracked open like a cold PBR at your cousin's barbecue. Don't take our word for it, however -- truck on over to the read links and see the messes with your very own eyes.

    Read - Breaking Wind
    Read - Acer Aspire One Unboxed and Disassembled
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  • Next Vista Media Center leaked -- no DirecTV HD till 2010?

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    Fiji update for Vista Media Center
    Engadget HD has gotten the latest on the highly anticipated update for Vista Media Center and it doesn't look good. The first release candidate made it into testers hands recently and they weren't happy to see that the most anticipated features -- support for a DirecTV HD tuner and native H.264 support -- got pushed to Windows 7. So head over to Engadget HD for more details (screen shots included).
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