Gadgets

Pentax’s humdrum Optio S1 has the good fortune to be announced on a day when no other cameras are on the news radar. It is also very pocketable, very cute looking, and has one cool little feature that makes it worth a look.

The specs: 14 megapixels, a 2.7 inch LCD, a 5x zoom (28-140mm equivalent), video capture at 720p, blink-detection and sensor-shift stabilization.

The cuteness: It comes in a few colors (including a rather hideous turquoise), but the real cuteness is in its simple styling.

Apple has been unusually indiscreet about what it plans to unveil this week: the next iPad.

In invitations e-mailed to press last week, Apple attached an image of a calendar page peeled back to reveal the corner of an iPad. We get the picture.

But what about the next iPad, and what else can we realistically expect from the March 2 event? Here’s a quick rundown of what Apple is likely to introduce Wednesday.

The trouble with using your iPhone as a bike computer is that it is vulnerable to rain, salty road spray and even the occasional unexpected drop onto the asphalt. What you need is a waterproof and shock-resistant mount so your phone survives long enough to call an ambulance when you fall off yourself.

That mount is the iBike Dash. It’s a case and computer in one, and like many bike accessories, it has a price that bears almost no relation to what you get.

Art Lebedev’s Flashkus is a disposable cardboard USB thumb-drive. Or rather, it is four conjoined thumb-drives, perforated for easy separation.

This is a nice, simple product from Lebedev, normally known for high-end, high-concept and high-priced items like the Optimus keyboard with an LCD screen on each key.

BARCELONA — Tablets are what we wanted to see at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and tablets are what we’ve got. They all have their gimmicks, and LG’s Optimus Pad has 3-D. It also has a new screen size of 8.9 inches.

First, the 3-D. The Optimus has a pair of cameras in the back for shooting stereoscopic 1080p video. This footage can be played back later on a big TV (the Optimus has an HDMI-out port) or piped direct to a big screen as you shoot (as you see in the picture above).

This $400 knob proves that the SLR really is the movie camera for today’s indie filmmakers. It’s called the Okii Systems USB Follow Focus, and it does what it says, allowing you to control the focus of a Canon SLR via USB. Think of it as focus-by-wire for your SLR.

Canon’s cameras can be controlled by hooking them up to computers,
too, but the Okii knob is arguably more practical on-set, especially as one big point of using an SLR to shoot video is its small size.

IPad stands are useful right up until you’re not using them to stand-up your iPad. Then they become desktop pariahs, turning from tabletop-tidies to plastic clutter in seconds. Unless, that is, the stand is the BlueLounge Nest.

This little box is handy whether or not it is loaded with an iPad. As a stand, it works two ways. One is a lot like the perspex blocks Apple uses to show off the iPad in store: you just drop the tablet on top and it is held at a nice typing angle.

These photographs, leaked by the iFix Your i iPhone 4 repair service, purportedly show a new LCD panel for the iPad 2. The surprises are almost on-existent: The size and resolution are the same (gleaned from parts numbers) 9.7-inches and 1024 x 768 pixels, and the unit is both lighter and 1mm thinner than the current screen.

The bezel, too, has been shrunken slightly, but that will likely just allow for a change in the shape of the case edges or just more space inside, rather than a smaller bezel on the finished iPad – one of the problems with the Samsung Galaxy Tab is the small bezel, which forces you to cover the screen with a thumb just to get a comfy grip.

You hate paper, but you hate scanners even more. After all, a bill, invoice or business card can at least be stuffed in a box, out of sight, and remain lost until you brave the dust years later as you desperately try to find that one essential receipt. Scanners, on the other hand, take up desk space and work at a speed that makes a fax machine look like a DSLR.

Or do they? Fujitsu’s ScanSnap S1100 is a mere strip of a scanner, small enough that you could Velcro it to the top of your iMac’s screen and forget about it until you get yet another envelope full of crap through the mail.

Just in case you thought I get a little too mean when writing about certain products, here’s an email from the people at Waterfield Designs regarding a writeup of their keyboard carrying case. You may remember that it caused “tears of pity and sorrow to moisten my normally parched, cracked ducts.”

Since the keyboard case signaled the end of civilization, I thought you’d enjoy this new case too. (End of the planet as we know it?)

And what is this mystery new case, the accessory that will extinguish all life, not just human, from this abused sphere we call home? It’s the SuperDrive Sleeve, a pouch that makes the keyboard case (and its good friend, the trackpad cover) seem positively useful.