Hi-tech Frontier

Cube 2.1 Wireless Speakers The total number of sound enthusiasts is increasing everyday all over the world and speaker manufacturers are always trying to offer something unique and powerful to attain their customer base. Professional Sound Reproduction is a 2.1 sound system featuring two wireless 360º speakers and a sub-woofer that can be positioned anywhere to enhance the surround sound perception. CUBE 2.1 includes a powerful dock where MP3 players, TV or a computer can be connected with a USB interface. Easy transportation of this speaker is a remarkable feature which allows a user to carry it with its simple four step foldable handles.

The Wii Riser Aerobic Step Adds Height To Balance Board For those that are attempting to get the perfect bod from the Wii Fit, here’s an attachment to raise the Wii Fit Balance Board. It goes underneath your Balance Board for when you’re doing aerobic steps. It raises up the Balance Board a whopping four inches to make it a bit more challenging. They claim that particular height is the same size as the average height of a stepper you’d find at a real live gym. I have a couple of issues with this item, first of all I’m skeptical as to how well this would actually support the Balance Board. With that in mind, the price tag is far too high on this one. It will cost you $39.99 for this flimsy attachment.

AngelWing : Acoustic Informer for Blind Pedestrians People, who are disabled from vision, need an aid to foresee the roads and anything else that is lying in front. The AngelWing is one system that is designed specially for the blinds so that they can sense whatever is occurring within a particular range. The system consists of a set of Bluetooth device which includes a transmitter, earphone and sensor. The entire system is compact and hence extremely useful. The sensor looks like a white and red regular stick but it is much more efficient than the regular ones. The Bluetooth device is a tiny tool to be attached to the ears.

Dell Studio 15 Multimedia Laptop details With the sales of laptops down significantly you might think that computer makers like Dell would holding off on introducing new notebooks. Dell is still coming up with new gear for those with the money to buy and the latest new notebook is the Studio 15. As the name implies the Studio 15 has a 15.6-inch LCD supporting 720p and full 1080p resolution. The machine can be optioned with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 discrete graphics card with 256MB of 512MB of RAM.

Putt Up Or Shut Up Rug Kit Turns Your Living Room Into A Miniature Golf Course Ok, forget what I said the other day about the virtues of practicing your putting on a real green. That was before I learned about the Putt Up or Shut Up Rug Kit that uses a combination of different carpet types to create a miniature golf course in your living room. Each rug is composed of 8 modular tiles that can be combined to create different putting challenges ranging from a par 3 configuration up to a par 5. A 3-foot by 6-foot tile area will set you back just $139.99, and if you’re like me and blow tens of thousands of dollars on mini golf every year, having this installed wall-to-wall is a far more economical solution.

YI Zipper Earphones I know they’re just a concept design, which I usually try to avoid like the plague, but I’m really hoping that someone makes these a reality. Instead of mashing your earbuds into a ball of tangled cable when you’re done using them, the YI Zipper earphones (designed by Ji Woong) feature a… wait for it… zipper design that you can… yep you guessed it… zip up, keeping them considerably tidier when crammed in your pocket. And as an added bonus, the zipper pull also features volume and hold controls, though I’m not going to hold my breath for that to happen.

ASUS business-minded P30A laptop now gets official We already knew that ASUS's P30 laptop (or P30A, as it's now apparently known) would come equipped with Intel's latest and greatest anti-theft technology, but ASUS has only just now gotten fully official with the laptop itself, and dished out all the rest of the specs that at least some folks have no doubt been waiting for. This being a full-on ultraportable, you won't exactly get a ton of power, but you can expect a snazzy LED-backlit 13.3-inch display (1366x768 resolution), along with a low-voltage 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor, up to 4GB of RAM, your choice of 250GB or 320GB hard drives (in either 5,400 or 7,200 rpm variations), a DVD drive, HDMI out, a 4-cell battery, and even some built-in 3G -- all in a package that weighs in at just over three pounds. Still no official word on a price, but it looks like you should be able to pick one up any day now -- or you could just wait for a similarly thin-and-light and slight...

Acer Aspire 3935 review roundup: sleek and affordable, but lacking gaming cred If you're in the market for a new laptop / netbook, you might want to add Acer's just-released Aspire 3935-6504 to the list of potentials. The early reviews are in, and it looks like Acer's got an aggressively-priced winner on its hands. Laptop Magazine calls it "one heck of a bargain," noting particularly its sleek and sturdy design, backup and power saver buttons, full-sized keyboard, and the appealing $900 price tag. PC Magazine went so far as to give it the Editor's Choice award for budget laptops, lauding also its eco-friendly credentials and impressive battery life (4 hours and 50 minutes, by its metric). Both sites bemoaned, however, the lack of HDMI and eSATA ports and its inability to run games as well as competitors like the Dell Studio XPS 13 or HP Pavilion dv3z. Providing a less enthusiastic tone is Computer Shopper , who seems to take more of an issue with its gaming de...

Leica M8 Special Edition White for $9,000 Sure, that white leather and chrome looks good now, but how's it going to look after a few months of handling? Is a beige Leica M8 with muck and ass accents really worth ¥882,000 (about $9,000)? Rangefinder fans will undoubtedly say yes when this goes on sale in Japan in June.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 superzoomer reviewed Sure, it's got that funky flip-out display, in-camera panorama stitching, HD video recording and a host of other fancy features for its $500 pricepoint, but does Sony's new Cyber-shot DSC-HX1 give DSLRs a run for their money? Digital Photography Review doesn't seem to think so. The camera has a lot in common with Canon's similarly-positioned SX1 IS, and even bests it in some departments with that 10 fps continuos shooting mode, but the actual image quality just isn't in the same ballpark as a barely more expensive DSLR, and DP Review figures that if you don't need the 20x zoom or other more gimmicky features, most folks would probably be better served by saving their pennies for the real deal.

The Strike's rod controller adds new depth to videogame fishin' Like bass fishin'? Sure, we all do, but we're not always lucky enough to be able to get out to the lake whenever we want. Enter the fishin' videogame, a genre that by all rights should be tediously awful, but yet has proven to be amazingly popular (why, even Link is into it). The latest and greatest looks to be The Strike from Griffin International, and part of what makes it special is a motion-sensing rod attachment that works a lot like a longer Wiimote with a reel for hauling in your big catch. It has rumble and force-feedback so you can feel the strikes and, while it seems less than instantly responsive on G4TV's video embedded below, looks set to offer the most immersive virtual fishing experience yet. Game and rod on the Xbox 360 will cost $69.99 (it'll hit Wii and PC too), but sadly you're going to have to wait until the end of 2009 to get your feet wet in this one.

ASUS EeeBox PC B208 If we're to believe a pre-sales agent's response to a query about the availability of the EeeBox PC B208, then ASUS' little HD nettop with dual-core Atom 330 processor, ATI Radeon HD 4530 graphics, and HDMI-out should pop for retail in June -- for the UK anyway. A box that looks to be the ideal low-cost ($500ish), quiet (26dB), home theater PC riding your in-house 802.11n WiFi or gigabit Ethernet network. With Acer's Ion-powered AspireRevo hitting the UK in May, ASUS had better hope for a June launch at the latest.

X-mini Happy arrives for quasi-spherical MP3 playback There's just something slightly alien to the X-Mini, and this latest "Happy" model does little to assuage our unfounded fears of it. What's new this time around is MP3 playback, thanks to an SD card slot. Size and shape-wise it's almost identical to its X-Mini II predecessor. Happy can handle about 6 hours of playback, or 11 hours of speaker work, on a charge, and the USB cable not only charges the ball but also allows the unit to work as a slightly-less-difficult-to-misplace SD card reader. You can also still daisy chain Happy speakers like with the X-Mini II. Happy is currently in prototype stage, and should hit the market sometime around Q3.

LG env3 pictured from the posterior We've seen it from the front, sure, but everybody knows the real action is around back with these things. Okay, fine, it's not -- but still, this is a phone that Verizon's going to expect to sell like hotcakes, and to do that, it's going to have to look good from every angle. The env2 is arguably one of the cooler looking devices in Verizon's lineup, and we're not so sure that this particular view is doing its successor any justice -- though the good news is that it'll apparently have a 3 megapixel cam with flash and some of that hot "Intelligent Shot" technology (whatever that is). We still need to see a whole lot more of this phone before we pass judgment, but hey, LG, just a word of warning: the pressure's on.

LG Versa game pad module now on sale If you've been getting bored of your Versa's QWERTY module, boy, have we got some splendid news for you: as promised, the snap-on game pad is now available. It slides along the back of the phone's body for storage (unlike the QWERTY, which requires that polarizingly-designed brown pleather wallet) and features an 8-way directional pad, four dedicated SNES-style gaming buttons, and the envy of absolutely everyone you've ever known. Grab it now for $29.99 -- you wouldn't want to be that one chump Versa owner who doesn't buy it, would you?

Aliph Jawbone Prime Bluetooth headset It's been almost a year since Aliph last graced the Bluetooth headset world with its presence, and now it's back with the Jawbone Prime to reclaim the throne. The Jawbone Prime is only a minor update -- on the surface, anyways -- to its predecessor, and in fact the only visible change is a slightly different surface pattern and a minor indentation to denote one of the headset's two invisible buttons. Other than the quite welcome addition of Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR (multipoint connections, easy pairing), almost all the improvements under the hood have to do with the algorithm tweaks of NoiseAssassin 2.0 to improve noise reduction. It's really too bad the original isn't firmware-upgradable (we asked). The Prime will be replacing existing Jawbones at retail for the same old $130 pricetag, and comes in Blah Blah Black, Coffee Talk and Going Platinum, while an "EARCANDY" edition is available in Frankly SCARLET, 'YELLO!, Drop...

Verizon rolls out Samsung Trance The rumored Trance just hit the wires, offering pretty much everything we'd expected from the leaks: touch-sensitive navigation, ICEpower audio guts courtesy of Bang & Olufsen, 1GB of internal memory with microSD expansion up to 16GB, all the Bluetooth profiles you'll ever want, AGPS, and a 1.3 megapixel camera. With a 220 x 176 display, you can imagine this one doesn't run very much at the register -- and indeed, Big Red's blowing them out for $49.99 on contract after $50 rebate in your choice of Piano Black or Electric Red. Look for it to hit stores on Friday.

Nokia 6216 Classic packs NFC for contactless payments It's 2009 and we're still waiting for the Near Field Communication revolution. However, due to tough economic times and a lack of consumer devices, planned commercial NFC rollouts will likely be pushed into 2010. Still, we can add one more device to the NFC tally -- the Nokia 6216 Classic. The 6216 is Nokia's first handset with an embedded NFC chipset that communicates with NFC applications stored on the SIM. That little trick keeps the carriers happy while allowing consumers to keep their credit card info and contact-less ticketing and payment applications on the SIM for easy mobility between NFC devices. A good thing too, since this middling 3G candy bar with camera, FM radio, and microSD slot will be of limited appeal to most.