Oh! Gizmo

By Luke Anderson

When I leave my house for any period of time I don’t generally worry about my place getting broken into, as I live in a pretty decent neighborhood. Since I have pets there’s usually someone stopping by to check them regularly, so I don’t usually give things a second thought. However, if I were the paranoid sort, I’d buy myself a Rovio in a heartbeat.

The Rovio is a WiFi-enabled spybot that can navigate your entire home with ease. There’s really not much more you can ask of a spybot. This little guy can patrol your house 24×7, and you can access its audio and video footage from anywhere in the world. Look for this guy to hit stores this fall for around $299.

[ RobotsRule ] VIA [ GeekAlerts ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If your city doesn’t have a reliable warchalking community, you’ll need to find another way to hunt down available wifi hotspots. And while there are plenty of pocket sized detectors already on the market, wearing this wifi sniffing watch from ThinkGeek won’t immediately brand you a nerd.

The steel case and retro-digital watch face are well styled, but the watch can also tell you the signal strength of a nearby hotspot on a scale of 0 to 8, as well as what type of wireless connection it is. It also has a daily alarm, a countdown timer, an electroluminescent backlight, a calendar and world time mode. While I’d probably upgrade the rubber watch band, the $29.99 price tag from ThinkGeek is pretty reasonable.

[ WiFi Detecting Watch ] VIA [ technabob ]

By Andrew Liszewski

If you’ve ever been disappointed by the range of your WiFi router, you’ll be glad to know you’re just an upgrade away from being able to broadcast your wiFi signal up to a quarter mile in all directions. The Extreme Range WiFi router operates with 30dBm of power, which is apparently the strongest radio signal of this type allowed by the FCC.

While it might only seem useful for people living in giant mansions or working in large offices, if you happen to live in a downtown setting imagine being able to go anywhere for a quarter mile while still being able to connect to your home network. Besides the ‘extreme range’ the router also supports WPA-Enterprise, WPA2 and WEP security as well as 802.11b and 802.11g.

It’s currently available from ThinkGeek for $284.99.

[ Extreme Range WiFi Router ] VIA [ Uber-Review ]

By Evan Ackerman

Back in 2006, Eye-Fi WiFi SD cards were little more than an awesome idea just begging for some commercial investment to get them into production. And now, they’re here. These brilliant 2gb SD cards contain fully independent wireless software and hardware that will automatically upload pictures to the photo sharing website of your choice (or even to your home computer) via any locally available wireless network. No actual modifications are made to your images during this process (unless you want them resized), and the whole thing is managed at the Eye-Fi website. So, just to clarify, all your digital camera has to be capable of is saving images to a standard SD card, and the Eye-Fi card will work for you. As you might expect, range is not great (well under 100 feet), but power requirements (although unspecified) are supposed to be minimal. As we suggested last year, this means that you may be able to use your SD card as a buffer of sorts, freeing up space on the card as images get offloaded via WiFi. I can’t immediately tell whether Eye-Fi moves or copies files (I suspect it’s the latter), in which case you’d need to somehow be able to figure out which of your pictures have already been transferred. The price for all this convenience? $100 (at least 5x more expensive than a regular 2gb SD), with the software and online services included. Available at most major electronics retailers.

[ Eye-Fi ] VIA [ Sci-Fi Tech ]

By Ryan Nill

Chumby is a tiny, tiny widget box! It is your little window to the Internet land, both adorable and vaguely useful. The device runs on open source software, lets you surf the Internet, run personalized widgets, check email and do other types of social networking (Blogs, Myspace, Facebook, eBay). It is also a clock. Chumby features a rather small 3.5 LCD screen, WiFi connectivity, 128MB RAM, speakers, 2 USB outlets and plug for headphones. It also has a mysterious squeeze sensor. No one knows what for.

Chumby, your portable portal to the web, has just started to ship its first generation. Running 200$, the verdict is still out if it’s going to be the next iPod or whatever. Although, I really do hope to see more of the “startled octopus” logo.

[ Chumby ] VIA [ Uber Gizmo ]