Want your stolen gear back? Don’t call some gung-ho superhero who’s as likely to blow up your small grocery store as he is to catch those perps, call GadgetTrak instead. The tiny startup company has grown since we last heard of it back in 2007, and is now operating a $25 per year tracking service that has delivered a statistically significant 95 percent success rate on reuniting gadgets with their owners. Available for Mac OS and Windows laptops, as well as mobile phones (BlackBerrys, WinMo, and iPhone) and even removable USB storage, the software’s intelligent enough to remotely activate your webcam and ping the incriminating info back directly to you — no data is sent to GadgetTrak. Check out some current news coverage of the software and its implementation in local schools after the break.

Continue reading GadgetTrak retrieves 95 percent of stolen laptops, puts RoboCop to shame (video)

GadgetTrak retrieves 95 percent of stolen laptops, puts RoboCop to shame (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We know it’s a really busy week, but we wanted to take a moment and remind all of you that there’s still time left to nominate your favorite gadgets of last year for the 2009 Engadget Awards!

For your voting (and nominating) pleasure, we present the sixth annual Engadget Awards! The premise is simple: 2009 may have slipped through our fingers, but all the memories of gadgets-past are still with us (some in a more favorable light than others). Here’s your chance to sound off on what you loved in 2009, and tell us what you’re psyched about for 2010.

This year we’ve got 24 categories up for grabs, with 48 total awards to be decided. All finalists for Engadget Awards are reader-nominated, and the editors of Engadget will then select the best of those nominations (usually somewhere between 4-6 devices or technologies) as finalists.

There are two awards per category, Reader’s Choice (voted on by you!), and Editors’ Choice (selected by us). The vote will take place in a few weeks once the nominees are picked, and winners will be announced shortly thereafter.

You can find all the info and nominees on a landing page we’ve built this year which should make it easier to get all your selections in (and vote once we’ve picked the finalists). Just click right here.

You’ve got until 11:59PM ET on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 to get your entries in. Now, go nominate, or use the handy list after the break!

Continue reading Reminder: nominate your favorite gadgets in the 2009 Engadget Awards!

Filed under: Announcements

Reminder: nominate your favorite gadgets in the 2009 Engadget Awards! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

One of the challenges for companies trying to build across the “three screens” of the TV, Personal computer and cell phone is adapting their distinctive technologies to those platforms. Apple showed strong early momentum on the Mac with its widget architecture, but is falling behind some rivals in bringing glanceable utility to other platforms.

Introduced with Mac OS X Tiger, Dashboard widgets (or “gadgets” as Google and Microsoft call them) are small, simple applets intended to convey swift bits of information or provide a swift change of settings. Veteran Mac users recognized them as the reincarnation of desk accessories, which provided functions such as an alarm clock and note pad when the Mac could run only one program at a time. Apple aggregates thousands of widgets on a special web page, and Leopard brought a new feature called Web Clips to provide an simple way for consumers to create their own widgets from part of a Web page in addition to the more traditional Dashcode development tool.

Dashboard earned its own button on the Mac keyboard. It drew some criticism due to its modal nature, but its ability to swiftly display or hide a screenful of widgets without having to mess with window arrangements made it more convenient than the gadget implementation in Windows Vista and even Windows 7, which has freed gadgets from the Sidebar and now displays them on the desktop — a throwback to the Active Desktop feature of Windows 95.

Continue reading Switched On: Apple wanes in the widget wars

Filed under: Software

Switched On: Apple wanes in the widget wars originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know, when you’re the editor-in-chief of a site like Engadget, you tend to accumulate a lot of stuff. Companies send you all kinds of interesting promotional materials, gadgets, swag, etc. It’s great. Sometimes, though, you just let it pile up in your living room for years and years, then, when a new editor-in-chief takes over, you send all that stuff to him in about ten big boxes. Luckily, we’ve got a way of dealing with this other than just throwing it in storage — we’re giving a ton of it away. That’s right, you could be one of the lucky readers to win a massive stash of gear recently jettisoned toward New York by Mr. Ryan Block. Here’s what’s up for grabs in this round:

Ooma VOIP box, Aliph Jawbone, Sansa e260 4GB PMP, Ramos RM550 1GB PMP, Enermax Caesar Aluminum Keyboard, SageTV Hauppauge Media Extender, Wowwee Butterfly, Microsoft Notebook Optical Mouse 3000, Microsoft Lifecam VX-5000, PSP A/V cable, Nikon 1GB flash drive, Trendset USB WiFi card, and more!

Interested? Here are the rules:

• Leave a comment below. Any comment will do, but a description of what percentage you plan to keep versus what you’ll have to sell off, or any fond memory of a Ryan Block post is good too.
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. If you enter this giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we’ve robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 Says, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you’ve to be mad.
• Winner will be chosen randomly. That winner will get a large amount of gadget related goods. Packages represent a brief history of Ryan Block’s tenure as editor-in-chief. Approximate value is incalculable (but no more than $600).
• Entries can be submitted until Friday, August 29th, 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Storage

The editor-in-chief giveaway: Win Ryan Block’s gadgets originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The verdict is still out on whether what we’ve been seeing is indeed some precursor to Android 2.0 “Donut,” or (more likely) some elaborate HTC skin designed bring HTC’s Android home screen experience up to par with its extensive Windows Mobile reskinning. Either way, things are shaping up quite nicely for the HTC Hero, with another leaked build showing widget functionality galore, including weather widgets that actually show the weather. Interestingly, this isn’t a complete replacement for the existing home screen, since in the add widget dialogue you can pick an HTC Gadget, a Google Gadget, or other regular things like Shortcuts, and most everything seems to cohabitate well in the example video. With the rate these leaks are coming, we’re guessing we’ll be hearing more about the HTC Hero before too long, and if not we’ve always got the nouveau cocktail jazz electro crossover stylings of Air to keep us calm. Video is after the break.

[Via Android Guys]

Continue reading New video of HTC Hero’s Android build offers Frenchy vision of widget utopia

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

New video of HTC Hero’s Android build offers Frenchy vision of widget utopia originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Might 2009 10:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, it’s important to know Candidate A’s position on the environment or how Candidate B plans to handle our international affairs, but when it comes to the issue of character, we’ll recommend that there’s no single attribute more telling than a presidential hopeful’s electronic devices of choice. For instance, an Xbox-lover might engage the country even more deeply in the gears of war, while a Roomba owner would likely work to ensure the cleanliness of our national roads and parks. So what, then, does the AP’s poll of the 2008 presidential candidates’ favorite gadgets state about this current crop of potential world leaders? Unfortunately, that they’re a pretty boring bunch: six of the nine respondents could only manage to come up with run-of-mill iPods and BlackBerries (and couldn’t anyone at least give us some model names to work with — we can’t live without knowing if Hillary likes the 3G nano to the 2G). Only Republicans Giuliani, Huckabee, and McCain strayed from the pack here, even though America’s Mayor seems a tiny behind the times with his “CD player,” and Senator McCain certainly won’t be getting much work done with one hand on his cherished Television remote. Anyway, all of this has got us wondering: what do you think that some of today’s popular gadgets might indicate about their owner’s character?

[Thanks, Mike T.]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Presidential candidates finally address important issue: their gadgets originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looking for an exciting new way to earn money flexing that 20th century brain of yours? Try inventing gadgets! Americans spend more the $100 million a year on these useless, dangerous or just plain idiotic devices, which can often be found in 5 and 10 cent stores. Or something like that. The folks at Modern Mechanix unearthed this interesting advertorial from 1935, which hopes to inspire folks to design and patent their own “gadgets,” little widgets that the magazine defines as “something that we would like to own, if it doesn’t cost too much, yet something that we can do without if we absolutely must.” We’ve been trying to look around the Engadget HQ and decide what we could live without, but decided that was just silly — next thing you know it, stupid magazines from the past will be trying to tell us we don’t need our Nabaztag reading us news in the morning, or LED umbrellas to know what the weather’s like outside. Clearly preposterous.

[Thanks, Charles S]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

You too can make millions in the exciting world of gadgets! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thrown together by well-traveled ODM Inventec, i-mate’s new Momento series of digital picture frames break some important ground. First of all, they do WiFi — a seemingly obvious feature for this category of devices that’s inexplicably missing from a majority of the mainstream models currently in the marketplace. Next up, the Momento is among the very first commercially available devices to support Microsoft’s SideShow concept for secondary displays that should (theoretically, anyway) untether all manner of information from the PCs on which it typically resides. In that respect, the Momento is very much a first-generation device — but as a picture frame, we came into the hands-on anticipating a certain level of refinement, now that they’ve had a few years to ripen on the vine. Does the unit deliver on its promise as a highly connected, Vista-compatible accessory? Does it deliver as a plain ol’ frame, for that matter? We took the $200 Momento 70 — the smaller of the two, clocking in at 7 inches of diagonal real estate — for a test drive to get some answers.

Continue reading Hands-on with the i-mate Momento 70

Filed under: Household

Hands-on with the i-mate Momento 70 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hate to be the one that has to tell you this, but swilling your drinks with those lame ass plastic straws is officially passe. From now on it’s celery straws or nothing for us, thanks to Florida’s Duda Farm Fresh Foods and their l33t bioengineering skilz. Those farming crazies have managed to design stalks of celery that grow in a tube form, allowing for edible straws in your Bloody Mary or a peanut butter surprise inside this tubular wonder. Is there no limit to human ingenuity?

[Via Boing Boing]

Filed under: Household

Duda Farm develops “celery straws,” crazy straws bend their necks in shame originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Jan 2007 10:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve got more odd creations
and far out gadgets from our leisurely Saturday and
Sunday at the Maker Faire. If you liked round one, check out round two to see more from the Faire and find out
about this robot made from scrounged and garage sale parts. See you next year, Maker Faire!

Continue reading Maker Faire (Part 2)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Maker Faire (Part 2) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Apr 2006 12:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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