Category Archives: Gadgets

Wired this morning picked the 10 most significant gadgets of 2010. I like that they called them “significant,” and I like the list through that lens. They’re not just the coolest or most popular gadgets, but the gadgets that represent some huge (and soon to be market-wide) technological advances.

The Canon Powershot S95 isn’t the strictly-speaking best camera released in 2010, but it might be the most important – it put a gigantic sensor into a tiny camera, giving compact-camera lovers a way to take D-SLR-quality photos (and at $400, it’s cheaper than any D-SLR you can find).

Similarly, the MacBook Air is important not because it’s the best-working laptop on the market, but because it represents the shifting laptop landscape – ultra-portable, no optical drive, forever-lasting battery, and just powerful enough to do what you need it to do. People don’t buy the most powerful laptop anymore, they buy the one that works for them. And for most people, the Air works perfectly.

None of the other nine items are nearly as significant as the Berkley Bionics eLEGS, though, which are going to allow people to walk who never thought they’d be able to again. (They’re already doing so, actually, and the effects are amazing – the above picture, from Wired, is about as happy a picture I think I’ve ever seen.)

It’s a good list, and reading it points to much of what we’re going to see dominate the market in 2011 and beyond.

On Phandroid, Byron G hits on some of the best ways to take care of your battery (while getting the longest life out of it at the same time). The solution is different from what you might think:

If you are someone who can top off your phone on a regular basis, do it. Plug it in when you’re at home. Plug it in when you’re at your desk. As explained by Battery University, “Several partial discharges with frequent recharges are better for lithium-ion than one deep one. Recharging a partially charged lithium-ion does not cause harm because there is no memory.”

Beyond that, the best advice I can offer is to stop paying such close attention to your battery gauge and to just use your phone. Charge it whenever you can, and then stop obsessing over the exact numbers.

Lots of other interesting info in this post as well, especially the bit about “bump charging,” a good way to both get longer battery life and shorter longevity for the battery itself. But the quoted bit is key: charging your battery at home, then at work, then wherever else you can charge it, isn’t bad at all for your battery. In fact, it might be better for it than the kill-charge-kill cycle most of us are trained to do.

As a New Yorker, I’m fascinated by the city’s plans to revamp everything broken with its transportation system, from the subway map to the taxi cab.

Fast Company’s been tracking the same Taxi of Tomorrow competition I wrote about over at Wired, and FC’s got the scoop on the finalists. There are three, from Ford, Nissan and Karsan – the company that wins will get an exclusive (and probably lucrative) contract to build the new taxis, replacing the Crown Victoria that is currently ubiquitous on the NYC streets.

But my favorite comes from Cuba:

Perhaps NYC might consider the coco taxi, a three-wheeled, egg-shaped fiber glass vehicle that can be found scurrying around Cuba. The taxis feature noisy 75cc two-stroke petrol engines–but surely NYC could tweak the engines to be quieter and more efficient.

Those are totally street legal.

Wired’s full of good information and buying advice if you’re looking to buy a camera this holiday season:

Strictly recreational — If you’re just keen on taking snapshots of your pals to post on Facebook and or your Tumblr blog but you want better photo quality than those crappy pix you snapped with your cell phone, a basic semi-compact, point-and-shoot camera is probably good enough for you.

Freaky-styley — If you like to hit the town and want to capture paparazzi-like photos of all the celebs you rub elbows with at the club even if they’re just your friends, a slim and sexy style camera may be the right model to slide in your back pocket.

On the road — If you’re a budding travel photographer but don’t want a big, bulky and expensive digital SLR to stuff in your pack, a high-end compact camera with built-in lens with a wide focal range 28-200mm is ideal is probably worth your hard earned cash.

Play like a pro — If you’ve graduated from small, all-in-one cameras and want to start learning what it’s like to shoot like a pro, a digital SLR and an interchangeable lens or two or three or more lenses is what you should be aiming for.

I ended this (annoyingly slow-loading) slideshow absolutely drooling with gadget lust. 50 inventions, everything from an iPad app to a jetpack.

But for my money, nothing’s as cool as the Terrafugia Transition:

True, with its wings retracted like football goalposts, the Transition, whose 100-horsepower engine gets it 35 m.p.g. on terra firma, isn’t going to be a match for an Italian sports car. But extend the vehicle’s gull wings — and you are requested to do this at an airport — and the rear-propeller-powered Transition can fly two passengers about 500 miles at a cruising speed of 105 m.p.h. After you land, you will not be heading to the rental counter.

It’s about to get all Chitty Chitty Bang Bang up in here.

Steven Levy, in Wired:

We can read books on our phones, laptops, and tablets. So why would we throw in a dedicated e-reader like the Kindle when packing our already cramped carry-on bags? As you might expect, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is happy to supply an answer: angry birds.

Let him explain. “The number one app for the iPad when I checked a couple of days ago was called Angry Birds—a game where you throw birds at pigs and they blow up,” Bezos says. “The number one thing on the Kindle is Stieg Larsson. It’s a different audience. We’re designing for people who want to read.”

I’ve been debating whether to buy a Kindle or not for a few weeks now, and this article makes a compelling point for actually owning both. The iPad lets you read, but it’s really designed to do so many other things. Games, email, and the like are all fantastic, and reading is good.

The Kindle, on the other hand, is designed with every nook and cranny devoted to making you read more. The battery lasts forever, it’s super light, it’s cheap, Angry Birds wouldn’t be fun at all – all these things make it compelling to someone who reads to read. The iPad’s for anyone and anything, the Kindle’s for reading.

From the same article:

If a successful reading device is one that “falls away” and lets the author take center stage, then it doesn’t necessarily need to be a single-purpose gadget. At least not for short bursts. I’ve found that a tablet or even a smartphone can present the pages clearly and easily enough for a narrative to consume me. Amazon tacitly acknowledges this by providing Kindle apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android in addition to PCs and Macs. Better yet, each of these syncs with the others, so they always know how far into a book you are.

But longer, deeper plunges into literature—what the critic Victor Nell calls “ludic reading”—are a different matter. After 20 minutes or so, the 1.6-pound iPad starts to feel pretty heavy. (The new Kindle is 8.7 ounces; Gravity’s Rainbow, about 2 pounds.) The backlit screen tires your eyes and is lousy in sunlight. As for smartphones, have you ever tried to hold one in a reading position for two hours? And then there are the distractions: It’s tougher to concentrate when email, box scores, and addictive games are a click away. Why struggle through a difficult passage of prose when you can play with … angry birds?

Crap. There’s another $139 out of my bank account.