Insignia's Little Buddy Child Tracker encourages kids to run away

With a name like "Little Buddy Child Tracker," you know this thing has to be awful, right? Insignia, Best Buy's house brand, has just listed an incredibly invasive and humiliating new GPS tracker on its site, and rather than promoting it as just that, the marketing brains have decided it best to aim this at paranoid mums and dads who've done such a poor job raising their offspring that they can't even trust 'em to trek out on their own. All sensationalism aside, there's little Insignia can say or do to remedy the product labeling job, but if you're okay with shoving this extra-small stick into your youngster's lunch box, you can keep tabs on his / her exact location and have alerts sent to you via SMS if they leave a designated area. Just make sure they don't ever know that you were responsible for planting this thing on their person, else you can forget about junior footing those nursing home bills when the time comes.

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Magic Mouse The Apple's newest peripheral

As rumored, Apple has just introduced a new mouse called the Magic Mouse. This mouse will bring Multi-Touch capabilities to desktop Macs for the first time, something that the iPhone has had since its release in June 2007 and the MacBook Air since it was released in February 2008.

It loses the scroll ball found on the Mighty Mouse, but adds support for scrolling gestures. This mouse is also wireless, using Bluetooth, and has a four month battery life. This mouse is available for $69 in late October, and requires Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 or later.

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Apple announcement

Apple event and Apple announcement. Apple recently announced that customers have downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications in just one year from its revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world. The App Store is also growing at an incredible pace with more than 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers in the iPhone™ Developer Program.

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

The revolutionary App Store has more than 65,000 apps available to consumers in 77 countries, allowing developers to reach tens of millions of iPhone and iPod® touch users around the world.

The App Store works with both iPod touch and iPhone including the new iPhone 3GS, the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet. Apple has shipped over 40 million of these devices that run apps from the App Store.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh.

Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

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Cheap Dual-Screen eReaders

Asus, the computer manufacturer best known for its Eee PCs, is getting ready to enter the eReader market. According to an article in the Times Online this morning, Asus plans to launch two devices: a budget and a premium version. At least the premium version will most likely feature dual screens.
The article is extremely low on details, but judging from what we have seen about Asus' eReaders so far, the main drawback of these devices will be that they won't be based on e-ink screens, the technology that allows the current breed of eReaders to display such crisp letters. Instead, Asus will use conventional LCD screens.

The dual-screen display and the price seem to be the major draws that brought a lot of attention to this story this morning. The price, assuming this rumor is true, is obviously very good and the idea of having two screens is also attractive - though it might not be as practical as having a single, larger screen. In reality, though, it is hard to imagine that an eReader with an LCD screen will be able to conquer the market. Unlike e-ink screens, LCDs need a lot of energy. While you can read a few books on a Kindle without recharging, a dual-screen LCD eReader will need to be recharged far more often - unless Asus weighs it down with a large and heavy battery pack.

One advantage of using LCDs is that they basically turn the device into a small computer. According to the Times, Asus even plans to add a webcam and Wi-Fi to at least the high-end model, though the price of this device will most likely be considerably higher than $150.

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Toshiba brings the Blu-ray love to its laptops

It's not just the players that benefit from Blu-ray this IFA as Toshiba adds the P500 to the Satellite laptop range. The 18.4-inch machine has a 1920 x 1080p LCD display to appreciate the BD addition, as well as an HDMI REGZA link meaning that your remote control will be able to affect playback while you stay cosy on the couch. Best of all, the Super Drive will also burn Blu-rays and upgrade DVDs and any other video content to pseudo 1080p quality.

The machine runs on an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU with 4GB of DDR RAM and an HDD storage of up to 500GB. Being a true multimedia PC, there's also NVIDIA graphics support too. In the way of connectivity, there's three USB 2.0 ports plus an eSATA/USB too, 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a 5-in-1 Bridge Media port, Express Card slot and even FireWire. Should be enough to keep you going.

To round it off, there's integrated Harman Kardon speakers, a full backlit keyboard and a multi-touch track pad controller. It's available from late October. Prices and more pics when we get them.

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Panasonic Toughbook U1 Clinical Computer

The U1 UMPC (Ultra-Mini PC) is a full featured computer running Windows XP or Vista on the new Intel Atom processor, fully compatible with any PC application. Coupled with Toughbook's standard safety components, like withstanding a four foot drop onto concrete, the device may prove to be a winner among doctors and nurses working in hospital wards.

What makes the U1 especially suited for healthcare is a combination of the design considerations put into it. Because of the cooler, more efficient Intel Atom processor, the U1 doesn't have ventilation ports through which liquids can enter. The device is effectively sealed, and Panasonic claims that it can take a good splash and keep on ticking. (Just don't take it SCUBA diving with you. Its not fully water proof.)


Nursing staff and the IT department will also be happy to know that the U1 sports two separate battery slots, which lets the user hot-swap batteries without having to turn off the unit. A hospital can even buy multi-battery chargers to hang on the wall at the nurse's stations for round the clock operation. Somehow this feature seems like it was specifically designed with nurses in mind, who already have enough to think about without having to deal with complicated battery changes during busy hours.

The screen is 5.6 inches and is fully touch sensitive, which means it can be controlled with your finger, not just the stylus like so many tablets out there require. (The advantage becomes obvious once the stylus is accidentally left back at the desk.)

Optionally it can come with a bar code scanner, which can be utilized for device or medication tracking, and a built-in webcam, which we envision can be employed in a futuristic communication system between clinicians in a hospital ward.

Not to say that this is a good general replacement for a real laptop, as it has only 1GB RAM and tops out at 32 GB for a solid state disk drive, but its nice to have all the data and tomographic images of the patient wirelessly accessible at the bedside.

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