If you think the coming wave of tablets is about to make e-book readers obsolete, guess again. Although dozens of tablets are scheduled to hit the market this year — from companies like Apple, HP and Dell, as well as upstarts like JooJoo — executives in the e-reader industry aren’t particularly worried. Instead, they say, tablets and E Ink-based reading devices are likely to co-exist, targeting …  Read More →

The light from the lamps in your house could carry a wireless signal that could power internet connectivity at home, say a group of German researchers who say they have found a way to encode the signals into visible frequency. Though it would provide much lower speeds than Wi-Fi signals, it can offer less interference and is likely to offer great protection from hackers, say the researchers. Currently, most homes use radio-frequency based Wi-Fi... 

Plastic Logic, which was set to ship its large screen Que e-reader in April, is now delaying it to “sometime this summer.” The company sent notifications to pre-order customers late Thursday afternoon announcing the delay and saying it needed the time to “fine-tune features and enhance the overall product.” Plastic Logic launched the Que at the Consumer Electronics Show in …  Read More →

When it began taking pre-orders for the iPad this morning, Apple also published some new details about how the tablet device will function as an e-book reader. It turns out the iPad will read books out loud to you with audio dictation, a controversial feature that caused some trouble for Amazon’s Kindle last year. Also, Apple indicated that you’ll be able to use the iPad to read EPUB titles from sources outside of the iBooks store.... 

As we comb through the updated Apple website for more iPad-related clues, up pops this new picture detailing the physical buttons on the iPad. Now, in addition to the sleep/wake, home and volume buttons familiar to iPhone users, there is a new button named screen rotation lock . And thank God. One of the most annoying things about the auto-rotating iPhone screen is the way it flips into landscape mode if you lie down whilst reading. Some apps... 

The Apple Store was down for a short spell this morning, and it has popped back up with a pre-order page for the iPad. If you want to get your shiny new Wi-Fi Apple tablet delivered on April 3rd, you can buy it now. If you are holding out for the 3G version, you can still pre-order, but you’ll be kept waiting until the infuriatingly vague &#…  Read More →

JooJoo, the tablet formerly known as CrunchPad, is set to land at the end of this month with several new features that weren’t seen in the early prototype. Most noticeably, the drab, solid-colored home screen seen in the JooJoo prototype (below) has been replaced with an elegantly polished icon grid laid on top of a customizable wallpaper (above). Engadget, who first reported the story, has some exclusive screenshots posted, in addition... 

Intel’s first 32-nanometer, six-core processor is ready for prime time. It’s clunky moniker aside, the chip called the Core i7-980X Extreme edition will offer some serious artillery for gamers and heavy multimedia users looking for a faster processor. The chip is based on Intel’s platform codenamed “ Gulftown ” and will include features that improve on computing speed and power efficiency. Intel launched the first... 

Motorola will be loading Microsoft’s Bing search onto its Android cellphones in China this month, ousting Google on its own smartphone platform. Motorola Android models will get the new feature when they are launched in this quarter. Google isn’t being completely ejected from its own party: Bing, along with an alternative to Google maps, will be offered as a choice to customers when they first fire up the phone. We imagine that,... 

We’d be naive to think manufacturers were twiddling their thumbs while Apple pimps out its iPad. Sure enough, there could be as many as 50 tablet devices from competing manufacturers worldwide this year, according to mobile microprocessor company ARM. In anticipation of the upcoming tablet invasion, ARM has rented out more space at the Computex electronics trade show in Taipei to accommodate the new devices, according to ComputerWorld... 

If you have watched too many episodes of Criminal Minds , you probably already have a panic room in your home, ready for when golf-club and baseball-bat wielding psychopaths invade your house. But what of the other place where you spend so much of your time? What if you car plunges down a steep ravine into the rushing waters below, or you flip your ride on its roof and hang, dangling helplessly from the seatbelt while the gasoline drips ever... 

Pentax has gone large with the new 645D medium-format DSLR. The 40MP monster has a 33  Read More →

Cisco Tuesday announced a new router, the CRS-3 , that it says is capable of delivering 322 terabits per second. Now, we don’t usually cover routers and similar enterprise hardware here in Gadget Lab, but this one’s worth a brief mention. Let’s leave aside Cisco’s breathless hype (it will “forever change the internet” — yeah, we’ll believe that when we see it). And nevermind the fact that, actually,... 

MacHeist, an annual Mac software promotion, is nearing the end of its NanoBundle sale. At the last minute, the bundle just added our favorite Twitter app Tweetie. Other apps in the MacHeist NanoBundle include Flow, an FTP app, Tales of Monkey Island , a five-episode adventure game, and RipIt, a DVD ripping utility, among others. With the retail prices of the eight apps added together, the collection is worth $280 but will cost you $20 as a bundle.... 

For years, man has been trying to build a jetpack which would actually be safe and cheap enough to be used by anyone other than Lee Majors on the title sequence of The Fall Guy . It turns out that we’ve been doing it wrong. Instead of starting with a pack and adding on the jet, we should have torn the giant engines from a plane and strapped them to some poor schmuck. This is what the New Zealand Martin Aircraft Company did, resulting in...