Harman/Kardan, a relatively new player in the GPS market, has released a second navigation device offering a very competitive and affordable navigation system for those considering their first GPS.

In March we reported on the nuvi 200 as a very price conscious option for an in-car GPS system at $399 but the Harman/Kardan GPS-300 is beating that price by a full $100. The GPS-300 is basically the same model as the GPS-500 except they dropped the support for MPEG-4 video and in turn can house a smaller processor with a smaller cost.

The GPS-300 Guide+Play does feature a 4-inch touchscreen with 2GB of internal memory for maps and music files along with an SD card slot that supports up to an addition 4GB of memory. It comes with turn-by-turn voice directions, multiple routes for speed, distance or to avoid toll roads, route …

Nokia released news of three new mobile phones today, the priciest of which being the Nokia 8600 Luna with an expected asking price of a little over $900.

Features include connectivity via Quad-band GSM, a 2 megapixel camera and a single micro-USB port for transferring data and charging, but the real focus on this one is the physical materials and design.

The Nokia 8600 Luna is crafted from smoked glass and stainless steel to give it a solid and smooth feel and a dark glowing look, according to Nokia. It’s a slider-type design where the smoked glass covers the keypad which pulses light when calls come in. Sliding the glass cover down exposes the keypad.

If your not big on internal features but are swayed by the design and feel of your phone in your hand then you may want to …

Here’s a look at the latest design in smartphones from Samsung called the Samsung i620. The i620 is a slider style design which exposes a full QWERTY keyboard with slid up and makes for a very attractive looking style.

The designers still managed to keep this one with a thin a narrow profile despite the full keyboard. It’s overall dimensions are 113 × 59 x 11.8 mm which makes it only slightly larger than the Blackberry Pearl, (6mm taller and 9mm wider), but the i620 is actually a couple of mm thinner.

The phone appears to have some type of navigation wheel on the face with a few buttons probably for managing phone calls and quick navigation. Some other features that are expected when the Samsung i620 is officially released include a 2 megapixel camera, VGA camera on the face, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a …

Sony has now released a new version of its firmware for the Playstation Portable (ver. 3.50) that enables the Remote Play capabilities through a wireless internet connection from your PS3 sitting in the next room, the next town or the next country.

The Playstation 3 firmware was updated recently as well in order to support this feature and the PSP upgrade closes the loop to allow you to control your PS3 using your PSP. The Remote Play feature to me sounds a little better than it is. Remote Play almost implies that you can actually “play” your PS3 games on your Playstation Portable, when in fact you can’t. You can however play videos, music and view photos that are stored on your PS3 through your PSP, but that’s it, at least for now.

You can upgrade your PSP to the …

At the risk of having a wallet that rivals the likes of George Costanza’s, Brookstone has a version that holds a small digital picture frame inside so you can carry around multiple pictures of your loved ones, 21st century style.

The Digital Photo Wallet is pretty much like any other leather bi-fold wallet except that it has a spot for a digital picture frame which can hold up to 50 digital photos inside your wallet. The picture frame shows photos on a 1.4″ LCD screen and the whole thing can be taken out of its place in the wallet to view or to connect to your computer through a USB connection in order to transfer files.

There’s also an included internal battery that recharges through the USB cable so there isn’t the need to buy or replace batteries. As a great Father’s Day gadget this Digital …

A couple of weeks ago Microsoft started banning mod’d Xbox 360 game consoles from Xbox Live (just the consoles, not the user accounts). The modified consoles were able to play copies of games which Microsoft felt was not fair to everyone. Due to this Microsoft started detecting the game consoles when users would log on, and banning them from Xbox Live when found.

Now, in just a matter of days the hacker community has volleyed back to Microsoft with firmware called called iXtreme Firmware 1.0 which when installed will prevent Microsoft from detecting the modified game console and hence avoid any potential banning. I’m sure it’ll now just be just a matter of time until Microsoft retaliates. Game on!

Source: Xbox360FanBoy

Now that iTunes Plus has launched with their higher quality songs you’ll want to be able to share your music and videos on something other than you computer and a $15 set of speakers. SendStation, the same company that brought you the iPod Dock Extender, has just made that a little easier with the PocketDock AV iPod adapter.

The PocketDock AV consists of two parts. The first is a small dock that connects to any iPod that has a dock connector on it. The other is a set of 45″ cables that connect the dock to your home theater through S-video, composite video and right and left audio channels. There is also a USB adapter for charging your iPod through the PocketDock AV.

As a bonus the cable alone can connect your 15″ or 17″ PowerBook to …

USB flash drives come in all shapes and sized these days, and not even a lego brick can escape it.

A Australian company called Zip Zip has created a 1GB USB flash memory thumb drive out of small Lego bricks just to add a little fun to you data storage needs.

This design makes me wonder if you could stack these bricks together, and something that would be really cool is if by stacking them you could expand the memory. But for now I think they are just regular Lego bricks with a flash drive built in.

The Lego USB flash drive comes in six colors of yellow, blue, red, white, black and green and retails for just under $49 ($59 AUD).

ZipZip via Giz

The Discovery Channel store advertises this special blue light as a natural remedy to help you go to sleep at night. The Twilight blue light therapy sleep system exposes your body to the soothing powers of blue light in order to re-calibrate a persons Circadian rhythm, that is if you truly want your rhythm re-calibrated.

Turn on the Twilight Mini blue light about 30 to 60 minutes before you hit the sack and the translucent lens will deliver to you the right amount of UV-free light for a total of up to 10,000 hours from one bulb. The Twilight blue light promises to help you fall asleep faster and sleep more soundly once you do, all for the un-cheap price of $89.95.

Discovery via Red Ferret

The Chinese company Hanwang recently showed of this odd looking mouse at CHITEC 2007 in Beijing. The device works like a standard mouse complete with right and left buttons and a centered click-wheel, but the center has been carved out to make some room for a small tablet in the center. The name is equally odd – the ‘T&MOUSE’.

It appears that the center tablet pad can be used with a type of stylus to draw lines, but I can’t imagine someone could create too elaborate of drawings with the restricted area, much less a signature or anything. I’ll bet you could draw some wicked circles, though. Even the area around it looks a little cumbersome to use since it’s sunken down into the mouse. I draw poorly enough the way it is and I don’t think I need any help from …

Road warriors seem to often encounter a similar problem with their mobile computing devices. Laptops are too big to carry around everywhere and use in small spaces, and PDA’s are too small to really be able to modify documents or type an email of any significant size, even with a QWERTY keyboard. Today Palm announced a solution intended to fill this gap between the handheld device and a notebook computer with the Palm Foleo Mobile Companion.

The Palm Foleo is smaller than most notebook computers with a 10 inch screen and weighing just 2.5 pounds. The main purpose of the device is to synchronize with your handheld mobile device and allow a full keyboard and larger screen to view and edit documents, write emails and surf the internet. It connects via Blutooth or WiFi to your mobile device and estimates a battery life of about …

Here’s a chair you might find worth adding to your home media room layout. The Inada W.1 Massage Chair, claims its manufacturer, is the world’s first massage chair which synchs music and sound from a home entertainment system with massage.

The chair, which has a built-in amplifier as well as speakers integrated into the head rest, connects to your home entertainment system. It takes the music and sound playing from that system and tries to time the massage to the bass range, while also doing tapping and back vibration for the treble range and leg vibration. It comes complete with up and down buttons to adjust the bass and treble levels and is designed to provide you “deeper mental relaxation.” I’m not sure about that last part though – can you imagine trying to relax as an action scene from a movie like Miami Vice …

Here’s another release that just made it within its announced time constraints, launching on the last of the month. RIM and AT&T have announced the official release of the BlackBerry Curve, available through AT&T starting tomorrow, May 31st for a price of $199 with a two year contract and a mail in rebate, of course.

The BlackBerry Curve is the latest, smallest and lightest BlackBerry smart phone with a full QWERTY keyboard that RIM has produced. In fact, AT&T (through a predecessor company) was the first carrier to introduce a BlackBerry wireless solution back in ’99 and is now the first with the Curve. The features available in this phone combined with the price is almost enough to make a guy want to switch carriers.

Press Release

It looks like Apple did get the EMI catalog out by the end of the month, but barely. Today Apple launched iTunes Plus along with the iTunes 7.2 version release, which is now offering DRM-free music downloads.

For now the songs that are available without the DRM restrictions or only from EMI’s catalog (excluding the Beatles, but including Paul McCartney), but hopefully more labels will follow suit in the near future. The songs cost slightly more without the DRM at a price of $1.29 each, and any existing songs that you previously purchased for $.99 can be upgraded for $.30 if they are from EMI. Songs purchased for this higher price have no restrictions on what MP3 player, the number of MP3 players or the number of computers that the song can be transferred to. Once you buy it, just …

Developers, graphic designers and just about anyone that needs to frequently Alt-Tab between windows could stand to use a second monitor connected to their PC or notebook. Unfortunately not all computers have the extra connection, especially notebooks. Or maybe you just don’t want to mess with another video card on your desktop PC.

Either way I-O Data has a solution aptly called the USB-RGB. This dongle allows you to connect a second monitor to you computer through your USB port, ending the single-monitor constraint you’ve been living with for so long.

The USB-RGB dongle runs about $87 (10,600 yen) which isn’t a cheap solution, but it will get you there.

via AkihabaraNews