My Gadgets Blog

Filed under: Gaming

Ha, seems our Japanese gaming overlords aren’t the only ones looking down the retail barrel at the limited edition gunmetal gray MGS4 PS3. Sony’s official Playstation.blog is reporting that the MGS4 Limited Edition PS3 Hardware Bundle will be available exclusively from Konami.com for $600. For that you get a 40GB gunmetal PS3, matching Dualshock 3 wireless controller, Metal Gear Online, an exclusive Blu-ray disc with 2-hours of additional content (making of documentary and look at Hideo Kojima’s production team) and of course the MGS4: Guns of the Patriots Limited Edition game. Pre-orders from the “very limited supply” begin on Monday the 19th. Best set your alarms.

[Via Playstation.Blog]

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

This little bundle of plain-vanilla familiarity is seemingly the first live picture of Palm’s upcoming Treo 800w for CDMA networks, known internally as the Zeppelin — you know, the obsolete airships that had a tendency to spontaneously combust. Specs on this one are starting to shore up, with Windows Mobile 6.1, EV-DO Rev. A, GPS, a 320 x 320 touchscreen (still novel by classic WinMo standards) and a typical Treo look and feel that doesn’t diverge terribly much from Palm’s tried, true, and well-worn formula. Sprint’s looking solid to pick it up come late July, but with those HTCs around the corner, just how much love at the register is this thing gonna get?

[Via PHONE Magazine]

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Filed under: Laptops

Okay, this is pretty much for the crazy keyboard aficionados out there, but the crew over at Laptop says there’s a distinct difference between the keyboards on the black and white Eee PC laptops. They compared the ‘boards on a white 701, black 4G Surf, and white 900, and while the two white Eees had identical keys, the black unit featured different switches with deeper keypresses and more tactile feedback, smaller spaces between the keys, and rougher plastic. (Of course, if you actually use any keyboard for long enough, the plastic eventually wears smooth, so that’s probably not an issue.) We doubt the difference is going to really sway anyone’s purchasing decision — the tiny Eee keyboard isn’t exactly ideal for hardcore typists, after all — but if you’re looking for a tiebreaker between the black and white 700s, well, now you have one that will bore the pants off people at parties.

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Chicago residents are no strangers to the city’s many CCTV cameras by this point — if anyone knows exactly how long to stop at Roosevelt and State to avoid the red-light cam there, you let us know, okay? — but it looks like this summer is going to bring a new twist to the city’s surveillance racket: automated camera monitoring. Video from the several thousand cameras in Chicago’s Operation Virtual Shield project currently comes into the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communication’s ops center, but starting this summer, it’ll also be watched by an IBM-developed autonomous system that can be programmed to watch for specific activities or objects, like certain cars or unattended backpacks. Since the video is stored on a 60TB storage array for 30 days, law enforcement can also do retroactive searches using the tech. That’s a huge step up from San Francisco’s useless CCTV system, sure, but we’ve never really believed any of this stuff is actually effective at deterring crime — hopefully we’ll be proven wrong. Check out the the full news vid at the read link.

[Via Boing Boing]

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Filed under: Laptops

It’s been a controversialdecision, but it looks like the OLPC XO has completed its transition from revolutionary education project to just another tinyWindowslaptop with a useless keyboard — albeit one with a pleasantly whimsical design. Yep, it’s official: Microsoft and OLPC just put out a joint press release saying that XP-loaded XOs will be available starting in August or September. Users will get all the regular functionality of XP, but Microsoft’s spent over a year developing specialized drivers for the XO’s various features like e-book mode, the writing pad, and camera. (We’re pretty certain that doesn’t include mesh networking, but WiFi is supported.) XP is too big for the built-in 1GB flash chip, so it’ll come preloaded on a 2GB SD card, leaving just about 1.5GB free total for apps and media. It seems like Microsoft is thrilled about this partnership, but it’s a not going to make NickNeg’s search for new vision at the top any easier. As for Sugar? You’ll still be able to get it, but we have a sinking feeling about its future. Demo video after the break.

Continue reading OLPC XO officially gets Windows XP, children of the world to be assimilated

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