Otaku Gadgets

Saturday is the day when I treat you to the latest in Apple. Apple – the company that gave us the iPod, the iTunes Store and the iPhone. Not to mention a whole line of great computers the fondly call Macs. Did you know that Apple practically invented the portable computer line?

We have made a whole week without a tablet rumor. I guess we will hear less of the tablet around holiday times. Buyers should not be distracted during buying.

Get to the other side to get your piece of the Saturday Apple Pie.

Continue reading “Saturday Apple Pie: It’s The iPhone All Over And Steve’s The Best!” »

Here we go, our weekly Apple roundup. We have spent an entire week without having to hear about the tablet, except in passing of course. You cannot avoid that. But that does not mean a dry week at all. Apple stuff has been pouring in as usual, rumors and news alike. So get to the other side, and enjoy your piece of the pie.

Continue reading “Apple Pie Saturday: Mac Pros Gulftown Bound [Hexacore], New iMacs Next Week[?] And Jailbreak Déjà Vu” »

Voice control is not what it used to be at one point. Back in the days when it was first introduced as part of mobile phones and other gadgets, it was still in its nascent stages. At that point, it was nothing more than a gimmick. This I can say from first-hand experience with older Nokia phones. The accuracy was nowhere near usable and well, it was not something you would want to rely upon.

But in the last one or two years, we have a seen surge of devices that are either partially or fully controlled by voice. Some of these devices are quite recent and represent the cutting edge when it comes to implementing voice control. Of course, interactive voice activated telephone services have existed for quite some time now but there’s a difference here. In those systems you can employ large amounts of processing and storage power to make sure that the accuracy is optimum.

But when it comes to smaller gadgets that are mostly portable and handheld it is a different ball game altogether. As developers already know, it is extremely hard to cram so much in to one small device. Still, newer devices with sophisticated voice control are coming out and these are mostly speaker independent. That means the user can be anyone and the device will still respond.

As I was thinking about all this, I decided to see for myself what all gadgets have come out recently that use voice control. Read on for 5 cool gadgets that can be operated by voice.

Continue reading “5 Recent Voice Controlled Gadgets That Are Totally Cool!” »

I have recently been noticing a lot of new Eco-gadgets (or green gadgets if you will) in the market. A year or two back, these genuine eco-friendly products were barely practical let alone cool. But all that has changed. They are now looking pretty sleek and you can actually use them if you can get them. They aren’t always available and they are not available everywhere. If you do get them rest assured that that they are pretty cool and very practical.

Take the water-powered clock for instance (no catch) or the solar-powered Bluetooth speaker that works great for the outdoors. All of these gadgets are simply great for your all your hikers, campers or simply pool party people. Free yourself from wires, batteries and go green. Sounds like something you want in on? Read on my dear reader.

Continue reading “8 Eco-Friendly ways of turning your gadgets green” »

Apple has been in the news all this week as the ripples from the iPhone 3GS launch continues. Other than the latest security scare on the iPhone 3GS, there is also the little matter of new device from AppleInsider about the Apple tablet device that everyone’s been talking about. The much hoped device is apparently near completion and will arrive soon. Also noteworthy is an iPhone App that has surprised everyone by accumulating a total sales figure of over One Million US Dollars. Now there’s a figure to beat.

Continue reading “Tech News from this week: Its Apple all over!” »

If you have just come out from underneath a rock holding an iPhone 3G, there’s news for you – there’s a new iPhone on the block. It looks the same, feels the same (almost) and even has the audacity to be almost indistinguishable from the 3G. However, as the cleverly written title suggests – the ‘S’ in 3GS makes all the difference.

The new iPhone is all about speed. So much so that even the aesthetically spiritual people at Apple who don’t usually like to talk about technical things, have mentioned that it is faster because of some major tweaks under the hood. In fact, tweaking is the wrong word to use here. It is more like replacing the entire engine with another that is 50% more powerful. This is referring to the fact that the 3GS runs on a 600MHz chip, up from a 400Mhz one on the 3G. The RAM is actually double (256 v/s 128), so that 50% increase actually holds true only for the processor. The actual percentage is a bit too complicated for a liberal arts major to calculate here.

So how obvious is the speed boost? Does it justify buying a whole new phone and carrier contract? Well, let me answer those questions this way – if you like doing things with your iPhone – you will like doing them at twice the speed. Continue reading “The iPhone 3GS: The ‘S’ Makes All The Difference” »