Facebook Explorer

Facebook Explorer is a popular gadget that can be used to read new messages that are posted by friends at the Facebook website. It is furthermore possible to set or delete the current status of the user’s Facebook account from within the gadget. The gadget needs to be authorized before it can be used. This is done during setup where the gadget will display links to Facebook so that it can be authorized. A Facebook login is necessary for that authorization. [link]

My Outlook

A gadget that displays Outlook information including incoming appointments and tasks, a search box to find contacts, incoming mails with options to reply, forward, delete, open or save attachments and more. [link]

GMail Reader

The Gmail Reader gadget will check a configured Gmail account for new emails regularly. It will display a summary of the latest 20 received emails and notify the user with a sound alert if new emails have arrived in the Gmail account.

[link]

Twitter Explorer

The Twitter Explorer gadget will display the latest messages that the logged in Twitter user received with possibilities to reply immediately to those messages and to open links that have been posted in the messages. The gadget offers a search and filters to only display replies or mentions. [link]

Messenger Gadget

The Messenger Gadget displays Windows Live Messenger account information. It displays contact status information and allows the user to start chat session and update the status right from the Messenger gadget.

[link]

Pop3 Checker

A handy gadget for users who use Pop3 email accounts informing the logged in user about new emails that arrived in the email accounts. [link]

Skype Gadget

The Skype Gadget is a little informative gadget for the Skype voice over IP software. It displays the status of each contact in Skype with possibilities to immediately initiate a chat or call with the selected user. It is furthermore possible to dial any number in the gadget as well. [link]

And that’s it. These seven gadgets should come in handy for Windows 7 and Windows Vista users. Let us know in the comments if you use these or others in the supported operating systems. You can check out the Windows Live Gallery for thousands of additional gadgets for both Windows 7 and Vista.

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A new week recap will be published on each Monday from now on giving short but precise information about the posts (max of one per day) that have been published at Otakugadgets in the last seven days. On to the posts:

• Sony Vaio VGN-NW125J/T: HD, Thin and Light with a Low Battery Life – Sony is one of those companies that give a lot of attention to the appearance and the details of their laptops. Apple of course leads the industry in this (read Jobs is) but Sony is a good second in the design aspect. From their Vaio series of high-end laptops comes the well-designed and good looking Sony Vaio VGN-NW125J/T.
• 5 Recent Voice Controlled Gadgets That Are Totally Cool! – Voice control is not what it used to be at one point. Back in the days when it was first introduced as part of mobile phones and other gadgets, it was still in its nascent stages. At that point, it was nothing more than a gimmick. This I can say from first-hand experience with older Nokia phones. The accuracy was nowhere near usable and well, it was not something you would want to rely upon.
• Altec Lansing Expressionist Series Speakers: Double Barrel or Single Bass, Take Your Pick – A lot of people these days are making a permanent shift to laptops. There are various points as to why everyone is leaving their desktops but the main reason is the compactness and the portability. Laptops are fast becoming as powerful as desktops and hence it is easy to understand why people who wouldn’t make the switch earlier are doing it now. While laptops can match desktops spec to spec now, there’s usually one thing missing when people make the switch and that is audio.
• Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv4-1465dx: Runs longer and heavier – The Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv4-1465dx is another laptop that is focused on being a great 14-inch laptop for students. As you might already know, students demand specific things from their laptops and the recent run of student friendly laptops try to conform to those demands. This particular portable has the advantage of a really long battery life. It has a huge battery that is likely to last you all day and for real.
• Dell Studio S1440-022B: If you want budget and slim minus an optical drive, this is it – The Dell Studio S1440-022B is targeted at school students who are looking for a budget laptop. This new offering from Dell does something quite bold and does away with the optical drive altogether. As a result, the laptop becomes much slimmer and weighs less as well.
• RIM (Research In Motion) BlackBerry Curve 8520: A Cheaper Curve – The new BlackBerry Curve 8520 is the model that comes after the Curve 8900. It is a lot like the 8900 with some of the features missing. Physically the design of the Curve 8520 looks a lot like the Curve 8900 but the former has enough new features that set it apart.
• 8 Eco-Friendly ways of turning your gadgets green – I have recently been noticing a lot of new Eco-gadgets (or green gadgets if you will) in the market. A year or two back, these genuine eco-friendly products were barely practical let alone cool. But all that has changed. They are now looking pretty sleek and you can actually use them if you can get them. They aren’t always available and they are not available everywhere. If you do get them rest assured that that they are pretty cool and very practical.

Let us know if you have any tips or requests. We would love to hear them.

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This all occurred to me when I recently bought my Palm Pre. After buying the device and returning to the car, I expected to use the same car charger I used for my previous Blackberry Curve to charge my new device. But when I opened the USB 2.0 jack I found out I was out of luck. So on my way to South Carolina I had to stop by a Sprint store and shell out nearly $30 for a charger. Why couldn’t Blackberry, Palm, Apple and Samsung agree to use the same type of charger?

That might have been one case, but it’s not the first, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets frustrated when they have to buy a million and one variations of the same cable to do the same damn thing. I’m not saying we have to compromise performance, but just like all (well almost all) cell phone manufacturers have agreed to use either miniSD or microSD in their devices, it’s the same thing that should be done to stuff like headphone jacks chargers and better yet accessories.

I have no idea what Google and HTC were thinking when they didn’t equip a standard 3.5mm jack on the G1. Or why do we need to have ‘Apple Certified’ accessories for our iPhone’s. Yes I know the answer, its just a way for these companies to make more money even after they sell a device, because since Apple and Sony have certified accessories for their iPod and PSP line (respectively), you’ll notice that they will void your warranty if they can prove you used an accessory that was not approved by them And of course the certified accessories are more expensive cause the manufacturers are going to transfer their licensing fees to the consumer.

Thankfully there has been progress especially with Bluetooth, FireWire, CF card, eSATA and of course the indispensable Universal Serial Bus. I’m sure it’s going to take a while before I’m able to transfer my Palm Pre battery to my Motorola Q or worse notebook, or use the same charger I have plugged into my notebook for charging my cellphone, but at least some progress is here. Will ya speed it up though?

What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below.

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We figured that a gadget and hardware website would fit perfectly in our portfolio, as we love to write about things that we love and are passionate about. Hah, that sounds a little bit stupid. Still, if you want to keep the motivation to write for a website after a month or year you need to be passionate about the niche. Or, you need to be one of those professional writers who can write about everything without problems.

Otaku Gadgets is on the other hand an experiment as we never operated a blog where the contributions were mostly coming from writers that we hired. We made sure to hire professional writers who are also passionate about the things that they write about.

The design of the site and pretty much everything is temporary for now. We have the intention to change to a custom design in the future but this will be fine for now. I would be very happy if you would pay a visit to the site. You can subscribe to the RSS feed if you like and I encourage you to voice your opinion on the site. Is there something that you love, like, do not like, hate? Keep in mind that it is a work in progress.

It is funny how some things turn out. I met Everton back in 2005 when we created our first websites and we have become good friends over time. It is very likely that this is not the our last project.

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One of those options is the Ubuntu-derrivative gOS Gadgets. This operating system is dancing around the edges of something really quite special. What this flavor of Linux offers that is different than others is a set of “Gadgets” to place on the desktop that are interactive and, in some cases, work in conjunction with the users GMail account to display such tools as their Google Calendar on their desktop.

But how does it fare? The idea alone sounds outstanding. Does it deliver? Let’s take a look.

Installation

The installation of gOS Gadgets was simple. Download the ISO from the gOS site, burn the ISO,  Boot up the Live CD, click the Install icon, and wait until the installation completes. Don’t go too far during the installation or you’ll miss the process. The gOS installation is very fast. One interesting note is that, upon completion of the install, I didn’t have to reboot.

Post Install

I installed gOS Gadgets on a laptop that is known for being a pain to configure wireless network on. The laptop is a Zonbook from Zonbu (a company that started out with a great idea that didn’t seem to gain any traction.) I was fairly surprised when wireless network came up with little to no problem.

Once wireless was up and running I could run updates and start playing around.

Initial Reaction

Almost Default Desktop

My first thought of gOS Gadgets was that it was fairly slick for a young distribution (gOS itself isn’t young, but Gadgets is).  Although some of the gadgets were useless (a growing flower that you had to take care of???), some of the gadgets (like the Google Calendar, the Battery monitor, and the Weather Report) were nice additions.

But overall my initial impression was it seemed an awful lot like the Dashboard feature of OS X (which of course was nothing more than a rip off of now-defunct Superkaramba. I also was a bit disappointed that gOS is no longer based on E17 (but that is nothing more than personal taste.)

In the image above you can see a gOS Gadgets desktop that has had only a few minor tweaks. I removed some of the useless gadgets (I left the flower so you could at least get a glimpse), I added a second panel at the bottom of the screen, and shrunk the size of the top panel. Now the desktop is nearly up to my unfortunate standards.

One aspect of gOS Gadgets that really shocked me was how easy it was to change the resolution of the screen. from the main menu you can go to the System Preferences submenu, click on the Preferences submenu, and click Screen Resolution to open up a tool that will change your resolution without having to log out of X. You can test different resolutions with ease. I cycled through every resolution to test to see if X would konk out – it didn’t. Big thumbs up!

For a while I was frustrated because I couldn’t figure out how to add gadgets. But after playing with gOS Gadgets for a while I finally figured out how to add gadgets. To do this you right click the Gadgets icon on the panel. This needs to be much more user-friendly. A menu entry would help this cause quite a bit.

Final Thoughts

The gOS Gadgets release is fun. Who is it for? This is the operating system marketed for the “google generation”. Who is the google generation? Anyone who has trouble pulling themselves from facebook, youtube, twitter, etc. Texters, tweeters, and general hipsters will find gOS Gadgets a thrill to use.

I will probably leave this OS on my old “beater laptop” to see how far I can take it. If you have any curitiosity about where the OS is heading, give gOS a look. It’s not ideal but it’s certainly fun. And since it is based on Ubuntu 8.04, you know it’s reliable.

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Since this is Ghacks, there’s a pretty good chance that your ‘must-have’ is tech-related. If it is, why not share your wish with the rest of us? Maybe you want a new souped-up computer for your gaming needs, or that fancy new mobile phone. How about the latest portable media player?

Another point of interest is whether you envision yourself owning the desired gadget soon. If not, what’s stopping you? Is it the lack of finance, logistical difficulties (like the product not being available where you live) etc. Or is it that you simply can’t justify buying the gadget because you already have a similar one in perfectly good condition.

I’ll start the ball rolling on this one. One thing I really want to have is a good portable media player. I was supposed to get one this Christmas but things haven’t worked out as planned since the person who was bringing it has been unable to do so. Now, I’m starting to have second thoughts.

What about you? What’s on your wishlist for the holidays? Let me know.

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The prices for the watches start by roughly 8900 Yen which is about 80 US Dollars to more than 99000 Yen which would be more than 900 US Dollars. Most watches on the other hand are sold for $80-160 which is quite reasonable in my opinion.

It definitely takes some time to get accustomed to this new way of reading the time especially if you purchase one of the crazy blinking models that do not resemble a watch at all. Take a look at a few models to get a feeling for what they have on offer:

I guess people would have a hard time figuring out the exact time on any of the above watches.Would you get one of those?

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The video below is a demonstration by Director of Envisioning Ian Sands who explains various features and the technique behind the Microsoft Touchwall product. The software used to run the show is called Plex running on the Vista plattform. The other equipment was a plexiglass screen, a rear projector, an infrared camera and three infrared lasers.

The user can interact with the content on the screen in an organic fashion, unlimited zooming, watching videos, flipping through pictures and a lot more. The potential is amazing. The Touchwall does look incredible in my opinion and it is a shame that Microsoft has no plans on marketing the product.

Crunchgear has a lot of additional footage about the product on their website.

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But everyone has to make the decision on his own and I know that several of my friends are actually using the Windows Vista sidebar. The following is a list of gadgets for the Windows Vista sidebar that could find some fans among you.

All links lead directly to the download page at Windows Live that contains a download link, description, rating and user comments. One question that I would like to ask if you, if you use Windows Vista, also use the Vista sidebar and if you do which gadgets have been added to it. Lets start with a few new gadgets for Windows Vista.

Outlook Info displays several information about Microsoft Outlook including the number of unread emails, to-dos and a link to the calendar.

The Media Player gadget for the Vista sidebar offers control elements and drag and drop functionality. Looks ok if you are using Media Player as your main software player.

The Magic Folder helps you categorize files by moving them automatically into the right folder if you drop them onto the gadget. This means that picture files will for instance be automatically moved to the pictures folder.

Dictionary Gadget returns a word definition if the user enters a word or phrase in the text box.

CT Control is one of those gadgets that display system information but also some additional features like quick access to shutdown, log off buttons and a timer.

Screen Snaper is a gadget that provides functions to take screenshots.

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I think it would be best to describe what I want to do with it and what it should definitely support hardware and software wise. Some of you are most likely PDA experts and it would be wonderful if you could point me into the right direction with some suggestions and probably brands that I should take a closer look at.

I basically need the PDA when I’m on the road to check E-Mails, write notes and use it for accounting purposes which means that it should at least support some kind of Excel / accounting software with import and export options. What I really want is a PDA with a way to quickly add text to it. I hate for instance writing SMS on mobile phones because of the layout – most likely because of my clumsy fingers.

It should support WLAN as well and a battery that lasts for more than a few hours. What I do not need is a phone, mp3 player, video player, game capability, fancy designs, mobile navigation, radio and the like.

I really do not care about operating system, a bigger screen would be nice but is not a must, it should at least support some kind of flash memory cards that I can use to store files on. Last but not least I do not want to pay more than €400 for it which equals around $600.

My own research which only took a look at the features but not at the usability lead me to the PDAs HP iPAQ 200 and HP iPAQ 100. Do you have experience with those two devices or know of other PDAs that would be a good choice for my needs ?

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To get into more detail: The paper keyboard consists of three layers of paper. Conducting paths are printed on the top and bottom paper while the middle paper separates the other two. The middle paper has holes that connect the two other papers when a key is pressed which basically has the effect that the signal is send to the computer.

The paper keyboards use the Open Source software Autohotkey to define and change the keyboard shortcuts. This means you do not purchase a normal keyboard which you can use to type but a specialized keyboard.

Autohotkey is however not the only possibility to use the paper keyboard. Using an USB Adapter would be another solution, softwares that have the support build in and self created scripts that interpretate the keys presses two other possibilities.

This means that the paper keyboards should be plattform independent.

Read More:

Flippress (German)

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While browsing the Windows Live Gallery website I noticed that the best rated gadgets hat only a rating of 3 stars out of 5 possilbe which is a little bit strange to say the least. I’m using the Ebay sidebar tool, the Gmail gadget, the run gadget and the app launcher all the time while I use the battery monitor only if I’m using the notebook on the road.

1. Ebay Sidebar Tool – May display information about current sales, the watchlist and items that you bid on. Includes a quick search as well. Works with all localized eBay websites.
2. App Launcher – Add icons to the app launcher box which can be used to start software that is installed on your computer. Similar to a quick launch function.
3. Battery Monitor – Vista is running on my Toshiba notebook and it is nice that I can use the Battery Monitor to keep an eye on the battery level of my notebook. Pretty useful.
4. Run – Launch applications,open folders or open urls by typing their names in the run box.
5. Binsearch Sidebar – Binsearch is a great site that spiders Usenet posts on their site and makes those posts searchable. Now you can search using the sidebar gadget instead of going to the site first.
6. Gmail Reader – notifies you when you have new mail in your inbox. Can also display a summary of the 20 latest messages.

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Looks incredible does not it ? Well the look of this flat screen monitor setup is not the only incredible thing, the price is incredible as well: $7,499. The primary monitor has a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 and the five 20.1” flat screens one of 1600×1200. The number of total active pixels from this monitor setup is almost 8 million ! It seems that the only input is a dual link dvi-d connection in the central flat screen monitor.

If you would have the money for flat screen monitors like this would you purchase it or would you invest the money elsewhere ?

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I think it really looks great and might be the next step in tv entertainment in the coming years. Not sure if you can call it transparent tv or something else because it is not really a transparent tv but a projector.

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