Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

The Zvue Spirit, the latest MP3 player to show its face, and quite a face it has. It certainly lives up to its Spirit name, with the red, white and blue flag design, not to mention its star shaped control pad. The Zvue Spirit will retail for $36 and be available beginning July 4, 2008. Aside from its patriotic outer shell, the Zvue Spirit is a pretty basic player that offers 1GB of storage and can play MP3, WMA and WAV files. The Spirit also comes with “fifteen great rock/pop/country songs creates a fun, patriotic, listening experience.”

Product [Zvue] Via [anythingbutipod]

The latest mod to come the ever-hackable Eee PC seems like one that should have been done a long time ago. For just about $15 you can somewhat easily add a backlight to your keyboard. The mod is estimated to take about 3 hours and requires you taking your keyboard off as well as some soldering. After all your work you will indeed have a nice backlit keyboard that will allow you to comfortably type at any time of day or night, sadly the light is powered by an external battery back that runs on two AAA-batteries. While a nice little trick, it would be much cooler if this could be powered internally. Personally I would opt for a cheap external USB light as opposed to having a battery pack stuck to the top of my Eee. Keep reading to check out another pic of the battery pack, and click the Read link below for the full set of instructions.

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It’s a different kind of web that has snared Indiana Jones in his latest cinematic adventure. In his first three films, he was always lurking through some spiderweb-draped cavern of one sort or another, and he managed to survive each one. But now (cue John Williams music)...will he live through the danger that is the World Wide Web?

Its US premiere is May 22nd, but “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is screened at the Cannes Film Festival this weekend and the high-speed lines will be on fire as soon as the last credit rolls on the screen at the Salle Lumiere Palais. It’s the latest example of media conglomerates vs. the 21st century as they find themselves once again at the mercy of anonymous bloggers and web-based critics. Already there have been several traditional-media stories about negative early reviews of “Indy 4” at Harry Knowles’ Ain’t It Cool News website - the pioneer in Internet influence on the media - and how those reviews may have influenced Paramount’s Cannes plans for its Steven Spielberg blockbuster. 

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Here’s another way to accessorize your monitor besides sticking Post-It notes all over it.  This Posy Cozy by artist Darlene is a knit holder that includes a plastic vial to hold flowers and comes with a gift card and Velcro to attach to the side of your monitor.  It is available in many different colors and costs $10, $14, or $15 on Etsy.  This would be a great way to have a flower arrangement at your desk without taking up desk room.  If having water in the vial would be too messy for you, you can just put fake flowers, or put pens instead.

But let’s say that knits are not your thing and you just want the vial.  Well if you have an HP monitor, you can get this Easy Clip kitfor $9.99 that has a flower vase, plus a headphone holder and two photo holders.  I suppose these products would be more suitable for a home computer than for a work computer since flowers might look too whimsical for work.  But I think they’d make the computer look more cheerful!  The Windows XP Control Panel includes a couple of flower wallpapers, so if it’s OK to have flowers as the background for your screen then it should be OK to have flowers on the sides of the screen too.

Via [geeksugar]

It seems that John Mayer may have some more connections than just with Apple, it looks like he is also in good with RIM as well. If you remember back in January he was lucky enough to get his hands on a MacBook Air before they were available to us regular folks, now its the recently announced and still unreleased BlackBerry Bold.

Showing off the Bold on his site, he also gives a nice little statement about how the word “geek” is dead and goes on to mention that the Bold “has blazing fast 3G and twice the screen resolution, and the fonts look like something out of the New York Times.” I guess, if nothing else it at least has the geek seal of approval from John Mayer. This almost makes me wish I had stuck with those guitar lessons when I was a kid, maybe I could also be getting cool tech toys before anyone else.

Read [John Mayer]

One of Silicon Valley’s oldest companies is boosting its effort to acquire the youngest customers. CNET was at a Teens and Tech conference when Hewlett-Packard officials announced a forthcoming line of computers and other devices catering to - and in some cases, designed by - teenagers.

The HP execs quoted talked about something called its Teen Council, which will offer suggestions for product design and how they are used. I’m curious as to how many times the name of a certain Cupertino-based company with a piece of fruit as its logo was mentioned when this Teen Council offered its advice.

HP’s TouchSmart PC is mentioned as an example of an company product that was designed with teens in mind. But when I covered the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - where the TouchSmart made its debut as an example of a new Windows Vista-powered machine - the buzz on its potential use was focused on managing media in livings rooms and kitchens. Of course, it’s easy to imagine its touchscreen capabilities used by the teen in the family; I look forward to the HP television commercials (and they do produce some cool spots) highlighting that very scenario.

Read [CNET]

Two Chinese companies, Zarva and Zippo recently came together to create a new MP3 player. This new player is dubbed the Zarva Zippo MP320 and Zippo is the official partner of Zarva.

Basically, the MP320 is going to come with a small screen, and is not going to support video playback. Nearly all MP3 players these days comes with video playback, so it’s pretty rare to see a MP3 player without video playback. Additionally, for audio, MP3 and WMA are the only formats supported. Other features include 7 EQ’s, integrated microphone, A-B repeat and USB 2.0 connectivity. Furthermore, it is going to be really cheap, only 188 yuan, which is around $27 US, and only available in a 1GB model. Expect the MP320 player to only be available in China.

Via [PMP Today]

The on again and off again free Wi-Fi offer that AT&T will begin rolling out for iPhone customers will still be coming, at least sometime in the future. With some recent teasing, the roll out had been planned to go live on May 15, but was again delayed. At this point the reasons why it has gone on and off is just a mystery, maybe they messed up and maybe they were trying to test out the service on a stealth level and did not count on the blogosphere making it quite so public. Anyway, from a recently leaked AT&T internal memo, it seems they are not really worried because they have not yet officially announced anything.

“The iPhone Wi-Fi offer that was scheduled to launch today has been canceled. Nothing has been announced by the company to our customers and will not impact existing customers. Additional communication will be provided if the status the project changes.”

Via [Boy Genius Report]

Well, HTC has already sold two million Touch handsets and it seems they believe they can do just the same with the newly announced Touch Diamond. Except with the Diamond they expect to hit that two million mark within the year and with the handset being released first in June that gives them just about six months to achieve their goal. Sounds a little lofty, but DigiTimes is reporting that Taiwanese mobile carrier CHT has already ordered about 20,000 to 30,000 units, that number combined with the other large carriers across the world it almost seems doable.

Via [IntoMobile]

The Gigabyte M700, was announced back in March, but at the time not much else was known. The only features we were aware of at the time was its 1.2 GHz VIA processor, 7-inch touchscreen display (1024x600 resolution), 1GB RAM (2GB maximum), 40/60GB hard drive, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, front and rear web cams, and dual ExpressCard slots with Wi-Max support.

Fast forward to today and we now know that Gigabyte is pushing the M700 as a mobile entertainment center. The 1.43-pound device will be sporting a digital TV tuner with IPTV support in its base station, allowing it to stream TV content over a network similar to a Slingbox. The premise is to simply connect your TV source to the base station and watch streaming live TV on the tablet. The docking station will have various audio/video inputs, a SD card slot, IR port, and an optional optical drive. Gigabyte has chosen Windows Vista Home Premium as the OS and has equipped the M700 with a three hour battery life. The device is expected to go on sale Q3 2008, for a yet to be determined price tag. In the mean time, check out the video preview below.

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