Nikon's geotagging GP-1 dongle now available

When we asked how you'd change Nikon's 720p-recording D90 DSLR, many of you globe-trotting photogs let out wistful sighs, gazed at the brightest star, and wished with all your might for automatic geotagging of photos. Like some trickster genie, Nikon is granting your wishes, but we're not sure the GP-1 GPS add-on is exactly what you had in mind. It slots into the hot-shoe on most cameras (clipping onto the strap for a few) and uses an unwieldy looking cable to connect to the body of your D200, D3, D700, D90, D300, or D3X. We can't say that we're particularly fond of the device's means of indicating status, either: red blinky light = no satellites; green blinky = three satellites; green solid = four satellites or more. C'mon Nikon, for $240 you couldn't integrate that cable into a hand strap and put more than two LEDs up in there?

[Via Gadget Lab]

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Bel Canto's USB Link 24/96 converts USB audio to S/PDIF

Wait just a second there, vaquero. We know you're invigorated, but you should probably attempt to digest the price tag here before blowing a gasket in excitement. Bel Canto -- not known for trickling out low-end gear -- has just introduced the $495 USB Link 24/96, which presumably does an impeccable job at converting high quality USB audio (up to 24-bits and 96kHz) to S/PDIF via a single 75-ohm BNC cable. The unit works natively in both Windows and OS X, comes bundled with a Stereovox XV2 BNC / BNC S/PDIF cable (with RCA adapter) and gets all the juice it needs from your powered USB socket. Now, if only five unclaimed bills weren't so difficult to obtain...

engadget.com

Emotiv's Epoc mind-controlled device delayed till next year

Not so long ago, in the cold, frosty month of February, we heard about mysterious headgear (an update of Project Epoc) that, if worn, could be used to do stuff like play insanely simple video games (emphasis on insanely). We also heard that this USB unicorn of the gaming universe would be ready by "Christmas" -- whatever that is. Well, according to Big Download, who spoke with a PR rep from Emotiv, the device has been delayed until "sometime" in 2009. The reason for the delay? The company wants to "make sure" the device works "as planned." Glad to hear it -- since we weren't interested in it as a fashion statement alone.

engadget.com

Meizu M8 reviewed, worth the wait?

Can you believe it? It's been over two years since we first got wind of what would become Meizu's high-end iPhone clone, the M8. Okay, we admit to being somewhat dubious at first, and won't be entirely won over until we get one to play with, but just a few days away from its Chinese release the handset seems to live up to its promises according to IT168's full review. Other than a few faults, including an "ear-piercing" integrated speaker and issues running third-party Windows CE applications, things sound surprisingly good. The 480 x 720 3.4-inch screen received high marks, performance was rated as very speedy, and the integrated 3 megapixel camera looks to be able to take great looking pics -- assuming you turn a few lights on. It does sound like a solid device, but is it a proper iPhone competitor? In China, where the iPhone still isn't officially available, we wonder if it isn't the iPhone that's the underdog now (cue raised eyebrow).

engadget.com

VideoMan Rig Turns You Into the Most Annoying Guy Around Instantly

In theory, the VideoMan suit is designed to allow you to create public protest art on the go. In practice, it'll get you beat up and robbed of all the fancy gear you have strapped to your back.

The rig consists of a video camera, projector, large portable battery pack, power inverters, amplifiers and other noise generators. It looks supremely annoying to wear and even more annoying to be subjected to. I don't know, but something about this thing rubs me the wrong way. Like, who says what you have to say is so important that you have the right to annoy everyone around you with what I can only assume are mediocre art videos with vague, uninformed politics behind them? Stick to message boards, please. [Fernando Llanos via Make]

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Atheros lets open source devs in on the WiFi party

In a move that will undoubtedly increase its street cred among technophiles and tinkerers alike, Atheros announced that it's releasing the specs to allow open source drivers for its ATH5K and ATH9K chip families. The move comes after Atheros first released some open source drivers for newer 802.11n chipsets and now the company is finally opening up its HAL (hardware abstraction layer) to developers, even using Linux as the reference public code base. No word on when any of this stuff will be released, but rest assured, we'll be on the lookout for more info -- we're sure the hackers out there are champing at the bit.

engadget.com

Xbox 360 Outsells PS3 3:1 on Black Friday

Each passing holiday season has become a critical, missed chance for Sony to catch up with the Xbox 360, and it's starting to become silly to say "maybe next year."

According to Microsoft reported retailer data, the Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 3:1 in the US on Black Friday. Needless to say, aside from sales on that particular day, it's probably an indicator of complete 2008 holiday sales for these two competitors.

Of course, the notably absent data was regarding the Nintendo Wii's sales on Black Friday. But our guess is that if Microsoft toppled that giant, even for a day, they would have mentioned it (at the top of their lungs from the tallest mountain they could find). [Kotaku]

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MacBook Air Rev. B mini-review

We've spent a bit of quality time with the new MacBook Air, and while there's little on the surface to denote a change, Apple did quite a bit under the hood to turn this into a serious laptop -- of sorts. Full disclosure: we (meaning a certain Paul Miller, specifically) have been using a Rev. A MacBook Air for the better part of a year as a primary machine, to very much frustration, so we had some pretty big bones to pick with whatever revision Apple might toss into our laps. Luckily, our fears were unfounded; read on for all the gory, romantic details.

[Images courtesy of Sam]

Caveats
So, before you get the wrong idea, you might want to read the MacBook Air review we did the first time around: almost all those caveats still stand. There's still one measly USB port, no FireWire, no Ethernet, a non-standard display plug (mini-DisplayPort instead of the equally obscure micro-DVI) a non-replaceable battery, an external-only disc drive with some odd power requirements and no internal 3G option or ExpressCard slot -- this is still a far cry from your standard, "full featured" laptop. Still, there's something about the MacBook Air, especially as a daily machine, that really shines through -- it's just so dang thin and light that you end up taking it everywhere and using it anywhere, and its shape is perfectly suited for slipping into a messenger bag almost unnoticed. It's the sort of portability that lends itself to lounging around the house, or boosting Starbucks cred, and it's a testament to that form factor that we've put up with the incredibly sluggish and fickle Rev. A for so long.

What's changed is that the frustratingly, mind-numbingly slow internals have been almost entirely chucked, to be replaced by a real grown-up processor, great NVIDIA integrated graphics, faster memory and a faster system bus for a dramatic speed boost -- Apple calls it 4x faster, and we can't really argue with that.

The dark ages...
We could comb over specs all we want, but what's really telling is usage scenarios. The primary problem with the original Air is that when put under strain -- especially video card-related strain -- it'd overheat to a point that it would shut down or at least severely throttle its weakling processor cores. At the start this led to completely-unacceptable stop-start freezing as the computer choked under even mild strain, but after a few firmware updates Apple got things down to just kind-of-unnacceptable -- though never managed to do as good a job of throttling and undervolting the processor as a certain 3rd party utility.

In daily use this usually meant that by your third or fourth YouTube video you were getting stuttered playback, and a bit more strain would result in slowdowns system-wide. Hulu or iTunes TV shows could rarely keep things going strong for more than five minutes, 3D games (even World of Warcraft dialed way back in quality) were out of the question and even significantly glitchy. Things would get exponentially worse if you were using the laptop away from a cold, hard surface, and instead plugged up the vents by using it on your -- gasp -- lap. Plugging into an external monitor was a particularly effective recipe for slowing the machine down to the point of unsuitability, and a day with the Air was a constant struggle to keep the right balance of tasks and locale to keep the temperature under crisis levels.

A coming dawn...
With Rev. B? Not so much. In fact, we've only managed to get the computer to stutter once, doing some particularly hefty HD flash video, after running on our lap (and destroying our reproductive chances) for the past hour or two. This also opens the laptop up to new possibilities like light iMovie editing -- out of the question with the original -- decent Garage Band multitracking, or a quick jaunt across Azeroth. Boot times are incredibly snappy (we're testing the SSD version, don't hate us), and the computer is generally a joy to use.

Since we're crazy enough to rarely use Ethernet, physical media or multiple USB peripherals, our two biggest remaining drawbacks are the fixed battery and the lack of internal 3G. With a shrinking chip and plenty of hollow aluminum, we're sure Apple could squeeze in some 3G if it tried, and it'd save us from using up that single USB plug so frequently with a horrifically awkward dongle affair. The battery is perhaps more serious. We'd say the average battery life with mild use -- about three hours, very much on par with the previous version -- is plenty acceptable, but for a laptop that so encourages portability, the inability to replace the battery means you can never be more than three hours away from an outlet, less if you want cellular internet. Lenovo, Voodoo and just about everyone else has figured this out, Apple needs to step up on both fronts if it really wants to get taken seriously by true road warriors, instead of some namby pamby bloggers (Paul Miller) looking to save their backs as they make the daily ten yard trek to the coffee shop -- or to the couch, if the weather's no good.

Wrap-up
Overall, we'd say we highly recommend the MacBook Air to that particular sort of person who can deal with all the remaining caveats, but we really wish Apple had gotten some of this overheating stuff under control the first time around -- and that the firmware updates and compassionate Genius Bar shoulder shrugs wouldn't halt just because there's a new, trouble-free revision making the rounds.

engadget.com

Laptop Cooler Features Slot-Loading Hard Drive Dock

One look at this conglomeration and you pretty much know it's from Brando. Their latest clunky tech masterpiece is officially named a USB Notebook Cooling Pad + 3-Port Hub + 2.5" HDD.

At its core, the system is a dual-fan USB-powered laptop cooler with extra USB ports. Enter Brando, and this simple device gets injected with a rear-loaded 2.5" SATA hard drive dock to add extra storage. It's hard to believe that the average laptop USB port can power two fans, a SATA drive and three additional USB devices, but it looks like there's AC power to back up the system (the product description was a bit light on this point).

The USB Notebook Cooling Pad + 3-Port Hub + 2.5" HDD is available now for $33. Live it up. [Brando]

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AMD Phenom II CPU roadmap foreshadows potent Spring

Not that AMD's being overly secretive about its forthcoming Phenom II processor, but it hasn't exactly been forthcoming with model names / estimated ship dates, either. And that folks, is why we look to leaks. A recent writeup over on Chinese site HKEPC details the impending chip family by listing over a dozen new CPUs (including two Phenom II X3s and seven Phenom II X4s) that are destined to be announced between CES and June 2009. Not surprisingly, some of the model names aren't -- shall we way, completely original -- with the 3GHz Phenom II X4 940 and 2.8GHz Phenom II X4 920 sharing eerily similar naming schemes with Intel's fresh Core i7. Of course, we're not sticklers for silly things like that -- we just want to see a few slabs of silicon get out the door on time. Is that really too much to ask, AMD?

[Via CNET]

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New 400GB Optical Disc Readable in Blu-Ray Players, Pioneer Says

If true, I love this: According to Pioneer, this 16-layer 400GB optical disc can be read in any normal Blu-ray player. And it's only the beginning, because they have planned 1TB for 2013.

The technology of the super multi-layer read-only disc is based on Blu-ray Disc (BD) with a breakthrough in material of reflective layers, according to Pioneer High Fidelity Taiwan. The specifications of the pick-up head (PUH) of the disc is the same as those for the PUH of blank BD discs, and therefore the Pioneer discs can be read on BD players.

How is this possible, you ask? I don't know for sure. In theory, it may be compatible, since they both use 405 nanometer heads, but then again, the track pitch is different (10 and 14 nanometer in the Pioneer super-disc versus 25 nanometer in a Blu-ray disc). But Pioneer seems pretty adamant about it in their statement. Maybe existing Blu-ray players would only need a firmware update? We will have to wait and see when it's released during the next year. [Digitimes]

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