Very Exclusive Gadgets & Gizmos

USB 3.0 is coming here and Brando has the goods. Starting with the perennial favourite, the SATA hard drive dock. This USB 3.0 SATA HDD Docking Station lets you hot-swap between multiple drives easily, and allows you transfer data at 5, 3 or 1.5 Gbs as well as the old USB 2.0/1.1 way. It can mount either 3.5″ or 2.5″ hard drives and supports drives up to 2TB in size. Only Windows XP/Vista/7 compatible and needs AC. US$58 from Brando.

The Philco PC redesigned by SchultzeWORKS. It was inspired by the 1950’s Philco Predicta, a design classic, as well as an eclectic mixture of modern minimalism, the steampunk movement, and antiques. As lead designer Dave Schultze explains, “The result is a design aesthetic that blends multiple elements of the familiar, but with some surprisingly fresh styling that just so happens to house a state-of-the-art Windows 7 PC.”

It has many fantastic designs, including a typewriter keyboard and a mirror like LCD screen...

The remarkable thing about this K2 Wristop Computer is not the fact that it combines a digital compass, altimeter, barometer, weather station, thermometer and digital timepiece in an acre of luscious black plastic. No. It’s the fact that the price of £12.40 (including free windshield mounting kit) makes something of a mockery of the new Suunto Elementum Terra which costs around the same as a small car for a similar specification.

The thing I love most about the marketing image for this KeyScan KS810 Color Scanner Keyboard is the fact that someone thought it was really really important to include the words ‘magazine not included’ on the page. I want you to close your eyes, lean back and digest with delight the thought of that conversation. I get goosebumps. $99.99.

This SATA HDD HDMI TV Player gives you a media PC in a box, just plug in a video-stocked SATA drive, it accepts 2.5″ or 3.5″ drives formatted with NTFS or FAT16/32. It outputs RCA AV, Component or 576p/1080i HDMI as well as 5.1 audio, so you’re bound to see and hear something you like. It will play MPEG1-4 including DivX/XviD, all the usual audio suspects and jpeg files. You can also play off SD/MMC or via USB and has the obligatory remote control. US$69.99

# Support AV/YPbPr/HDMI
# Support 5.1 Sound
# Using SD/MMC Card
# Support USB Host (External device like USB Flash Drive)

Now this is a good idea. Since optical media has pretty much failed to keep pace with our data storage needs, ditch the optical drives and replace them with a Triple 3.5″ SATA/SAS Hard Drive Dock.

The dock takes up two slots on a desktop PC and has room for three 3.5″ SATA or Serial Attached SCSI drives, each in a lockable enclosure and the bay comes with an integrated, silent 6cm fan. You could probably turn this into an instant RAID array too I’d imagine. US$149 from Brando.

The QOOQ (pronounced kook) is a kitchen computer that’s actually designed to withstand the rigours of being used in a kitchen. It’s a very stylish looking piece of kit that is part recipe book, part cooking show and part Filofax.

QNAP has just announced that they will be introducing yet another family member to the Turbo NAS line with the new TS-110 desktop NAS server that targets home and SOHO users. The TS-110 will boast a solitary 3.5″ SATA hard drive that is capable of holding up to 2TB of storage space. In terms of processing power, the QNAP TS-110 will come with a Marvell 800MHz processor that ought to provide more than enough muscle for your NAS needs, coupled with 256MB DDRII memory that ought to be sufficient enough for solid performance without taking up too much juice from the local power grid.

Acer has jumped aboard the nettop revolution Stateside with a brand new AspireRevo R3610-U9012, where this extremely compact nettop has a volume of all but one liter. At that size, it is extremely tiny despite managing to cram in enough parts that help it deliver a decent performance in terms of an entertainment center for the whole family. Measuring roughly the size of a book, the AspireRevo R3610 ought to be an easy fit in just about any home, even if it is a super small apartment that you normally find in Tokyo.

TK-TCT005BK from Elecom has a touchscreen with numeric keyboard. Just push the “Num” button on the top corner to get this function going on.

The TK-TCT005BK can also recognize certain gestures, like an iPhone. For example, if you want to zoom in and out, you just place your two fingers together and spread them out or in.