Oh! Gizmo

By Chris Scott Barr

Have you ever needed to recharge your phone, or other USB gadget and wish that you could just use the USB ports on your laptop to do the trick? Sure, if you happen to be using the laptop at the time, you can plug it in, no problem. But what if you don’t want to mess with powering it on, simply to get a little juice for your phone? Well one enterprising modder decided to come up with his own solution. It’s not quite as simple as plugging into an available USB port, but it gets the job done.

This guy decided to take out the battery from his MSI Wind netbook and install a USB port directly onto it. The port is no good for data (obviously), but it allows his to plug in his iPhone and get a couple of charges off it. The best part is that he can still use the battery as normal with his netbook. Unfortunately he does have to remove the battery pack to charge his phone, which can be a bit of an inconvenience. Still very cool. This is definitely something we need to see on more laptops. I recall Toshiba having a few notebooks that charged gadgets while asleep, but I’d really like to see this sort of thing become a standard feature.

[ Prusadjs ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

By Chris Scott Barr

Anyone here remember switching over from USB 1.1 to 2.0? The difference in speed was like going from dial-up to T1. Well we’re finally approaching that kind of change again with USB 3.0. We’ve been hearing about this new standard for years, but until now there hasn’t been a single device that supports it. Well someone had to come first, and that someone is ASUS.

If you’ve ever wondered which came first, the port or the peripheral, the answer is apparently the port. Asus has been working on their new P6X58 Premium motherboard, which will feature a pair of USB 3.0 ports. You’ll also have support for the latest i7 CPUs, six DDR3 slots and three PCI-Express 2.0 slots. No word on when it’ll be hitting the market, or how much of a premium it’ll fetch for the USB 3.0.

[ Xfastest ] VIA [ UberReview ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Cables are so 1920! But for some reason we’ve yet to been able to completely rid ourselves of those tangled burdens. Thankfully there’s devices like the new HDAiR from Altona Technologies that are helping us cut those cords one by one. It’s a wireless USB display adapter that lets you connect a USB-equipped PC or laptop to a Hi-def display or projector via HDMI or VGA. The HDAiR has a usable range of about 30 feet (it doesn’t require a line of site) and over that distance you can push an image with a resolution of 720P or 1440×1200. $199 available now on the Altona website.

[ Altona HDAiR ]

By Evan Ackerman

A NAS (network attached storage) drive is quite a handy thing to have on your home network. You can stuff it back behind your router (assuming it’s not a part of your router, that is) and forget about it, except that it’ll always be available to any computer on your network… It’s an easy way to add flexible storage for things like media that multiple people want to share. Or, it should be an easy way, but it often turns out to be expensive and troublesome.

This little box from Hitachi is called SimpleNet, and it’s able to turn any external USB drive into a NAS drive. From the look of things, you plug your router into one and a USB drive into the other, and that’s it. $80 might be a tad steep for this convenience, but there’s a lot of possibilities with this little device, and it gives you the flexibility to hot swap as many USB drives as you like. I haven’t run the numbers on this, but my guess is that you’ll probably save money (and headaches) if you get SimpleNet and some regular dirt cheap external USB drives, as opposed to a couple external drives designed with integrated ethernet ports. Yes, you’re going to take a speed hit with the 10/100 ethernet port (plus the USB) on the SimpleNet, but I bet it’ll work great for backups and light media access.

The Hitachi SimpleNet USB NAS adapter should be available now(ish) in retail stores.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Ubergizmo ]

By Evan Ackerman

What with all of the, uh, legally purchased music and movies and games that I download buy, I fill up my hard drives once a year or so. Rather than buying a bunch of external drives, I just buy new bare drives, and swap ‘em out. There are any number of mildly convenient ways (like this, for example) to access a bare drive after you’ve eviscerated it out of your computer, but none of them are as convenient as just having a USB interface on the drive itself.

Now, this particular drive (a 1.8″ drive designed for mobile hardware) doesn’t have any interface besides the native USB, and this is obviously not acceptable for laptop or desktop use. But I don’t see why adding a a standard USB option to most internal drives wouldn’t be possible, and it would make accessing old data much, much easier as well as more robust. Plus, it’s likely that USB as an interface standard is going to be around way longer than PATA/IDE or SATA. This may not matter much right now, but it will in the future, by which time nobody will remember what all of those little tiny pins are supposed to plug into and you’ll just have to forget about recovering your (now vintage) porn stash.

VIA [ Engadget ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I guess if you’re shelling out hundreds of dollars for a pair of brand-name sunglasses it doesn’t hurt when they do something more than make you look like a tool. Calvin Klein’s new USB shades for example (available in October, just in time for the Summer to be long gone!) feature a detachable arm that reveals a 4GB flash drive. I guess it’s a handy way to carry a flash drive, particularly since you’ll be less likely to lose it because it cost you $199. The downside though? Forget about doing any file transfers or backups in the sun since you’ll have to take the glasses off before you can access the flash drive. No thank-you!

[ Men.Style.Com - ck Calvin Klein USB Sunglasses ] VIA [ Gizmag ]

By Evan Ackerman

This little USB accessory from Buffalo has got to be the easiest way to throw an impromptu LAN party anywhere you want without having to resort to something as annoying and under performing as an ad-hoc wireless network. The three port router is powered entirely by one USB port, and means you and two of your friends can get together and frag each other (or exchange massive amounts of porn) at speeds of up to 100 Mbps. It’s nothing particularly fancy, but it works, it’s portable, and it’s cheap, too: it’ll go on sale later this month for about $25.

VIA [ Akihabara News ]

By Andrew Liszewski

I’m sure the website for this USB-powered chainsaw known as the i.Saw is a parody, or some attempt to trick those gadget blogs who’ll post anything, but it’s convincing enough to warrant at least a mention. So there, I’ve mentioned it. $59.95 available for pre-order now with an estimated ship date of September.

Now who’s clever enough to figure out what this is really about?

[ i.Saw ] VIA [ Wired Gadget Lab ]

By Evan Ackerman

There are any number of potentially useful and/or incredibly stupid light-up USB accessories that owe their glowyness to various flavorings of LEDs. That’s cool, I’m down with that, I like the futuristic look as much as the next geek. But retro is rapidly becoming the new futuristic, and this USB light fits the bill neatly with a light bulb that is, in fact, a light bulb. You know, the old school vacuum + filament + heat + inefficiency + if it breaks you have to clean up really carefully or you’ll get shards of glass in your feet kind. Numerous disadvantages aside, the one redeeming factor if incandescent bulbs is present in this USB powered version… Namely, the ability to cast a warm and pleasing glow, which (I imagine) provides a nice counterpoint to the inevitably harsh and unyielding photons that are being pumped out by whatever device this little lamp is plugged into.

For about $14, you get the lamp plus two spare bulbs, one of them frosted (if you’re into that kind of thing). Each bulb should last about 300 hours, giving you decades (well, 0.01 decade) of pleasing illumination, and a replacement set of three is only about $6. It all can be yours, from where else but Japan.

[ JTT (Translated) ] VIA [ New Launches ]