Gadgets

Axiotron, the California company who promised us a Mac-based tablet way back in January, is finally about to ship its ModBook this January. The information comes, as often happens, from a reseller. Other World Computing contacted blogger JK with an order update, telling him that the ModBook will begin shipping on January 8th.

Surprise — little electronic pen thingies may not be the future of text input. As evidence, note that Logitech has just agreed to sell the division behind its io2 Digital Writing System to Destiny Wireless, a U.K. digital pen and paper specialist.

The io2 is an oversized ink pen with a tiny camera that captures your writing and can later convert it into digital characters, as long as you write on special gridded paper. Reviewers were generally less than enthusiastic about the spotty accuracy of the OCR system involved.

A Bostonian is suing HP and Staples for colluding to inflate the price of printer ink. According to the suit, filed by Ranjit Nedi, Staples took a $100 million hint from HP not to stock cheap generic competition to its $8,000-a-gallon juice.

Everyone knows that printer ink is a swindle: they sell you the printer cheaply (or not so cheaply for higher-end prosumer models), then sell the colors — unremarkable commodities, let us not forget —
at prices that would make a perfumer blush.

As the inks are commodities, however, they have to take measures to stop you simply refilling the cartridges. Circumnavigating even trivial technological locks potentially runs foul of the Digital
Millenium Copyright Act, and printers are also designed to deliberately and unecessarily waste ink.

Fujitsu’s 12.1" LOOX R ultraportable notebook, coming in the new year, weighs 2.8 pounds and has an LED-backlit 1280×800 display, up to 4GB of RAM,a dual-layer DVD-RW drive, gigabit ethernet, 802.11n WiFi, and SDHC and PC Card slots. Engadget hopes that it’ll be the first to pack Penryn CPUs, but my money is on it being a smaller version of the 13.3" model we’ve already got in for testing at Gadget Lab.

See the display? Look at the bezel. It is nice to have ultra-thin bezels.

Fujitsu’s 12.1-inch LOOX R: world’s first Penryn ultra-portable? [Engadget]

Besides half-baked product smackdowns, it’s also the time of year for predictions, and analysts at investment firm Piper Jaffray have some fine ones for Apple. In the early days of 2008, they forecast, Cupertino will:

The Wired Gadget Lab Podcast is sponsored by Kensington.

In Today’s Gadget Lab podcast, Dylan Tweney, Daniel Dumas and Jose Fermoso discuss sub-$500 child-friendly laptops (including the XO from the One Laptop Per Child initiative), and end up placing the Eee PC vs. the Wii in a tough battle for the top children’s gift this Christmas, leading Dylan to a definitive decision regarding his own daughter’s present.

Having rocked the low end of the laptop market with the Eee, Asustek is aiming for a slightly more chic neighborhood with its latest model. The Eco Book is encased in strips of lovely and environmentally correct bamboo, which grows quickly with minimal intervention. (And has natural antimicrobial properties, a nice plus for an object that spends a lot of time riding your crotch.)

The Eco Book is in the prototype stage now — Asustek has to do more testing to make sure bamboo is durable and heat-tolerant enough to cut it as notebook material.

Bamboo PC is eco-friendly and looks nice, too [Reuters]

Fitzsu, supplier of luxury gifts (read: expensive tat) has done an about-face (ahem) with the Contura ring. This most personal of personal jewelry features your face. Send Fitzsu a profile photo of you (or anyone else) and they’ll pack it off to their secret German labs. Four weeks later, you receive a ring featuring your own mug.

The catch? It’s a luxury item, silly, so you’ll pay $625 for the basic stainless steel version, up to a ring-tightening $5,730 for the brassy looking yellow gold model. The Contura also comes in silver, titanium and platinum (price on application).

A Toshiba representative told a customer that removing pre-installed trial crap from his computer amounted to "breaking" it, frustrating his attempts to get service when the notebook he’d bought started failing.

From the laptop owner, quoted by The Consumerist:

"I quote verbatim (because I asked him to repeat the line to me multiple times) accused me of "breaking my computer by attempting to uninstall bloatware." I said, "do you even know what bloatware is," and he said
"yes, and it may be your fault that your computer is broken because you tried to uninstall it."

I’ve never had trouble with Toshiba, myself, and I think the guy got unlucky with an incompetent tech.

The Zune 2.0 update abolished the 3-plays-or-3-days limit on shared music received over WiFi. You still only get to listen to squirted tracks three times, but the absurd three day time limit has been lifted. Zune Scene has discovered a way around this restriction, too.

Apparently, the workaround is as simple as changing the genre of the tracks to “Podcast”, which stops the Zune adding DRM to otherwise plain and open MP3 files.