If you have an ounce of sense and haven’t blown $1.5k on an Optimus Maximus keyboard, you can (eventually) satisfy your craving for bite-sized OLED buttons with the Optimus Pultius, a 15 key programmable OLED keyboard accessory and the latest promised offering from Art Lebedev. It’s functionally no different from the fullsize 113 OLED Maximus, using the same key hardware with the same configuration software and a USB port on the back. There’s no price announced yet, and the Pultius should be showing up by the end of this year.
It sort of seems like Art Lebedev is trying to milk their OLED keys for a little extra scratch, perhaps because the cost of the Optimus Maximus is so prohibitively high that I can’t imagine they’re flying off the shelves, despite the hype. But heck, what do I know… I do know that personally, if I want an OLED key fix, I’d just stick with the currently available and presumably cheaper Optimus Mini Three. Or better yet, some Siftables.
Plants are nice I guess, but as far as I’m concerned, they have two major problems: they’re demanding, and they’re useless. The Constant Garden is a plant I can appreciate, since (being made of rubber) it requires no maintenance, and as each stalk has a little speaker and an LED embedded in it, it performs a function and looks pretty. The designer, Vitorio Benedetti, imagined the Constant Garden to be a sort of desktop calendar thing… It syncs with your computer, and reminds you of appointments and stuff with “a coordinated audio visual approach.” The rest of the time, it can play “garden sounds,” whatever those are. What kinds of sounds do plants make, anyway? Irrespective of what the Constant Garden is supposed to do, I really like the organic look and feel, and it would bring a much needed something alive(ish) to any sterile work environment.
When I need more storage nowadays, I’m too cheap and/or lazy to bother with external drive enclosures. I just find a sexy, naked HD, plug her in, and go to town. Brando streamlines the connection process with this SATA drive dock, which is able to read any 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA HD you shove into its maw. It also reads all of the trendiest varieties of memory cards, and includes two USB ports to boot. Connect it to your computer with either a USB cable or an eSata cable, and you’ll have the only storage media reader you’ll ever need. Except for CDs and DVDs, that is. And IDE drives. And floppy disks. And holodisks. You’re getting close, Brando, but you’re not all the way there yet.
The SATA HDD Multi-Function Dock will run you just under $80, including shipping.
Somehow, creative types keep coming up with ways of improving one of the most basic components of any credibly tangled pile of electronics: the power strip. The Revolve power strip is a cylinder of independently rotating outlets, which can accommodate bulky power adapters. It can’t hold a candle to my all-time favorite cephlapodic power strip, but it’s still a reasonably innovative idea.
If you’d rather not wait for the whole rotating plug concept to make the improbable leap from render to product, Belkin has some products that do sort of the same thing (except less, um, ergonomically) that you can buy here.
3DConnexion has released a new version of its SpaceNavigator peripheral, which is a 6-DOF 3D navigation device that lets you control panning, rotation, tilting, and zoom with one hand, great for applications like CAD or Google Earth. The new model is designed for notebook use, and is smaller and lighter than the original without sacrificing any functionality. The thing is, though, that the SpaceNavigator depends to some extent on a heavy base to function properly. If the base is too light, it won’t keep steady when you’re yanking the thing around. The notebook version is only about half the weight of the full size version, which means you might have to be a little bit more gentle with it.
Somewhat paradoxically, the SpaceNavigator for notebooks costs $129, whereas the larger and heavier less portable but equally functional (and prettier) original SpaceNavigator only costs $59. I guess that’s because the notebook version includes a “travel case for effortless transport.” I love these things, but unless you’re carrying it everywhere, I’d save yourself some money and get the slightly bigger one.
You might remember that I wrote about Logitech’s MX Air last July, under the headline “Logitech’s MX Air Mouse Is Real, Spectacular.” I think spectacular might be an understatement now that I was finally able to wrangle myself a review unit to try out for a little while. The idea behind the MX Air is that you can use it as a normal wireless laser mouse, or you can pick it up and a gyroscopic sensor will kick in, letting you use it just as effectively in mid air. It’s hands down one of the sexiest peripherals I’ve ever had the pleasure of fondling, and unlike a lot of things that look this good, it’s intelligent and functional. But is it worth the $150 asking price? I think I can probably convince you… Read my full review, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Reading is such hard work without the internet at your disposal to cross reference anything that you don’t immediately understand. Until now, people had to read books while at the computer if they wanted to look stuff up, manually typing it in to Wikipedia or Google. It’s horrible, I know. The Dixau text scanner from Korean company Unichal makes is so that you only have to be next to the computer. It contains a little camera that is able to take pictures of text, recognize the characters, and then provide on-screen explanations via search engines.
The Dixau may seem totally superfluous (especially for $90), but what I think it’s designed for are Korean students who want to be able to translate words from English scientific texts on the fly. And with that in mind, it really could be useful even for native English speakers trying to decipher English scientific texts. I mean, I majored in geology, which is perhaps not the most technical of disciplines, and I still swear that half of those words were made up just to confuse people.
Although you can hold the Swiftpoint Slider like a pen, it’s primarily designed to work like a normal mouse, except on top of your keyboard: you put your thumb in the groove on the mouse, and you can mouse around without needing an additional surface for a mousepad, or having to deal with the limited area of a touchpad. Pinching the mouse with your finger allows access to the click buttons. If that doesn’t make sense, I completely understand, and there’s a video of how it works after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
As cool as the Optimus keyboard is, it’s still just a keyboard, with fixed keys that sit there, looking pretty and waiting to be pressed. The Siftables prototype (not concept, prototype) takes all the best parts of the Optimus keyboard (namely, the programmable OLED keys) and frees them into their own individual units. Each Siftable unit also contains short range infrared communicators, a 3-axis accelerometer, Bluetooth radio, flash memory, an integrated processor, a lithium polymer battery, some haptic hardware, and what look to be USB expansion ports. All that stuff in each Siftable. As you can see from the video, such complexity (especially when it comes to motion sensing and proximity communication) enables all sorts of interactive options. The sky is pretty much the limit with these things, and designers David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi already have “a number of collaborations in progress with researchers in academia and industry.”
Related Tags: OLED, Peripherals
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