Intel Device To Convert Pages To Spoken Text Reaches Market

Intel Corp announced that sales are beginning today for the Intel Reader, a $1,500 paperback book-size handheld device that scans printed text and then reads it aloud to the user. The device turns book pages into digital text and MP3s of the text being read in a digitized voice. According to Intel, 55 million people in the U.S. alone have severe vision problems, dyslexia or other learning disabilities , which make reading printed words difficult or impossible.  Ben Foss, Director of Acces...

Motorola Droid Goes On Sale Today

If you've been anywhere near a TV or tech blog in the last month, you know that Motorola's Droid is the company's newest smart phone, and the latest contender in the struggle to compete with the iPhone.  Built with the active involvement and oversight of Google, the phone runs the latest version of Google's Android operating system.  Its got a touch screen, a slide-out keyboard, a cool mouse-type thumb controller and can run any app on Android's 3,000 strong (and growing) app store. The p...

Haipagia Announces Encrypted E-Reader

Haipagia of Japan has just released a fairly standard looking (6-inch display, 800 x 600 resolution) e-reader called Hyper Gear.  This guy is similar to most other e-readers, except for one major difference - this package offers sophisticated encryption for documents under the hood that will DRM your files and password protect them. Could this be what's necessary to see massive adoption of e-readers in the enterprise?  It's certainly a step in the right direction.  Look for Blackberry-style c...

Garmin Ecoroutes ESP Adds Cool Gauges To Your Ride

  Garmin, the maker of GPS car navigation systems has just added a very cool accessory for its Nuvi line of dashboard mounted nav screens. The Ecoroutes ESP is a bluetooth-enabled connector that fits into the OBD-II diagnostics port in your car and transmits all kinds of geeky car data to the Garmin screen on your dashboard. Result?  Cool gauges for coolant temp, intake air temp, RPM, intake main temp, throttle position.  (This last one is probably not very useful, but is guaranteed to...

New Viewsonic VMP70 Media Player beats WD TV in Price and Features

  We love Western Digital's WD TV "direct connect" media player.  The simplicity of a tiny (two cigarette case size) box packed with every imaginable video codec, with USB connections for connecting an external hard drive and HDMI, component and S-video outs to connect to your tv,  all controllable from a cool little remote via a nifty menu system  - and ALL for around $100, is just super cool. Today, life got a little cooler.  Enter Viewsonic's VMP70 1080p media player.  What do we get...

Cowon iAudio 9 and iAudio E2 Media Players Released in US

    Cowon is releasing two of its slim media players on the US market.  The iAudio9 will be available with 8GB and 16GB versions.  It supports most media formats (MP3, FLAC, Ogg, WAV, APE, WME, XviD, and WMV videos), as well as has a composite video out. The 8GB version is $129, the 16GB is $169. The miniscule iAudio E2 is also available. This iPod shuffle competitor doesn't have video out, but has excellent sound, including 8 JetEffect audio enhancement presets (BBE, BBE VIVA, BB...

World’s First: A USB 3.0 RAIDDrive

San Jose based Super Talent Technology has just announced a new USB 3.0 RAIDDrive called SuperSpeed, which supports transfer speeds up to ten times faster than previous USB 2.0 drives. the drive can reach up to 320MB/second transfer speeds.  It requires a separate UAS Protocol driver with a USB 3.0 port to attain these speeds, however.  When plugged into a USB 2.0 port, speeds will resemble USB 2.0 devices. According to the companies press release:  The USB 3.0 RAIDDrive uses patented "mult...