Latitude E6420 PLUS E-View Laptop Stand/Dock save over $650   Question: When is a laptop not a laptop? Answer: When it ships with a Dell E-View Laptop Stand Yes, today’s NGD Deal brings us the Dell Latitude E6420 laptop AND the E-View Laptop Stand that conveniently turns it into a desktop. Here’s what Dell has to say about the E6420- The redesigned, 14″ Latitude E6420 laptop is built for the new mobile business class with the durability, productivity, security and easy manageability you’ve come to expect from the Latitude E-Family. Featuring 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processors. Durable and lightweight with hard-wearing Tri-Metal™ casing, a powder-coated base and optional reinforced, outdoor-viewable touch screen. Backlit keyboard Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Looking for a good book on a particular subject? There’s always trolling Amazon and checking out their suggestions, or browsing Borders Barnes and Noble, but now there’s a new way to add to your library: MindTheBook. Basically, you ask a question, like, “How to make money on the internet?” and other people suggest titles. Those titles can be voted as helpful or not, and below the book listing is a link to Amazon (and a link to the Kindle version where available). It’s a neat idea, though it needs a strong userbase and lots of participation to really succeed. I’d also like to see integration to more eBookstores than just Amazon, though obviously if you find a book… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

In what has to be one of the best pieces of product placement, Avion Tequila had a key role in the last season of HBO’s Entourage and has made a few cameo appearances during this year’s final season of the hit show. Thing is, according to CNBC they didn’t pay a penny for it. Tequila sales overall have been on the rise in recent years and Avion has joined with the likes of Patron and Cabo Wabo as a tequila you’ll want to order this way: You: “I’ll have a margarita. Hold the salt. Hold the lime. Hold the Triple Sec.” Bartender: “But sir, that’s just Tequila neat.” You… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Photos by the Author While the flagship QX from Infiniti arriving in new form and function was news in and of itself, what really excited me was the possibility of its beefier powertrain rolling over to the shared platform of the Titan pickup. I have seen the new spec sheet for the 2012 Titan and my bubble burst – more of the same old, same old I am afraid. The large rigs in the Nissan/Infiniti stable all shared the same basic architecture that supports the same V-8 engine pushing the rear or all four wheels on a frame-based skeleton so it would figure that if the luxury division was now supplying 400 ponies under the hood… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Three requests I encountered this summer: Scenario 1: Parents make a big purchase, and need to specifically instruct their children not to talk about it on Facebook. Scenario 2: A baby is born, and the new parents ask that no one posts pictures of the baby before they do. Scenario 3: A very private couple gets married, and guests are instructed not to tag or add photos on Facebook. What’s the theme here? If you guessed Facebook, you win! In each of these scenarios, it had to be explicitly stated that being present at someone else’s event, or tangentially related to big news, didn’t give participants the right to share all the details. The frightening… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

The iPad is not yet 1.5 years old, and Android tablets are approaching their first anniversary. But while one product is mature and selling well, the other is still struggling to find success, and with some good reasons – the fragmentation that plagues Android smartphones is worse on tablete; app compatibility restrictions are often nonsensical; and the core design choices made are often counter-intuitive. Marco Arment, the creator of InstaPaper and Marco.org has put together an amusing look at how the sales of all Android tablets compare to sales of some obscure video game console ‘failures’. HP hasn’t released any sales figures for the TouchPad yet. I wonder if it will outsell the Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Internet memes have been around since the ‘Dancing Baby’ and before, and tend to follow a typical cycle – they get started, get a hold with the tech-oriented folks of a certain community, then often grab a larger following. Occasionally they become fully mainstream, but that is fairly rare. One such curiosity is ‘Nyan Cat’, which got started in April of this year, and has only spread since then. Here is a bit about it from Know Your Meme: About Nyan Cat, also known as Pop Tart Cat, is an 8-bit animation depicting a cat with the body of a cherry pop tart flying through outer space. While such absurd themes like flying Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Yesterday we told you all about how you can enter to win an iPad 2 thanks to Vonage and their new Time to Call app. There’s still time to win, but we are one day closer to selecting the winner on the 18th. So jump over to this post, read the rules and get entering. And… Good luck!… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Welcome back to the GearGames weekly video game release feature here at Gear Diary! We have now just passed the rock bottom doldrums of the summer release drought, meaning that things are starting to pick up a bit before the big start of the Fall release season kicked off next wee. There are a few decent releases such as Breath of Fire IV, Age of Empires Online, Bastion, From Dust, Hacker Evolution Duality, and El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. And while there isn’t really anything else big getting released, there are a few other releases this week – read on to find out! Continue reading on Gear Diary …

One of the first high-end leather cases I had the opportunity to review for the original iPad was the Sena Folio. It was made from gorgeous leather, was beautifully crafted and actually looked better as it “wore in”. Sena offers two different Folio cases for the iPad 2 in addition to the Florence that we have reviewed recently. One of the Folio offerings, the Sena Folio Classic, maintains the same style as the original but adds the magnetic sleep/awake functionality. The additional design goes by the simple name “Folio”. It offers three different positions thanks to two built-in stands but lacks the magnetic sleep/awake functionality. Here’s a closer look… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

  UPDATE: The Contest is now closed. We will announce the winner shortly.   We told you about Vonage’s massive iPad 2 giveaway in a post entitled “Vonage Kicks off Massive ‘Time to Call’ Promotion by Giving Away 75 iPad 2s on 75 Sites!” We then reviewed the new Vonage Time to Call iOS app and… We were impressed. Now the time has come to… give one of those iPad 2s away!! So we want to know… Is it your time to win?? Yes, we are one of three sites that, starting today, is giving away an iPad 2. (One from each site.) This round starts right now (August… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Anyone with kids of their own knows that there are certain traits that seem to be genetically passed – even things like mannerisms and other stuff you would normally think that was part of the ‘environment’ side of development. However, some stuff such as talents at certain tasks seems more clearly passed down from one parent or other. Until now we just assumed it to be true that certain skills were inherited, but now a report from Johns Hopkins shows supporting evidence for a theory that math skills are genetically predisposed. Here is a snip: Led by Melissa Libertus, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Continue reading on Gear Diary …

  As reported on Macrumors.com, Hagens Berman, a Seattle-based law firm that specializes in  class-action suits involving antitrust and intellectual property, has filed a class action lawsuit against Apple and 5 other Publishers of eBooks alleging collusion of Apple and the 5 other named defendants to defeat Amazon’s attempt to sell eBooks at discount prices.  Here is an excerpt from the Hagens Berman website: According to the suit, publishers believed that Amazon’s wildly popular Kindle e-reader device and the company’s discounted pricing for e-books would increase the adoption of e-books, and feared Amazon’s discounted pricing structure would permanently set consumer expectations for lower prices, even for other e-reader devices. The firm believes that Continue reading on Gear Diary …

We are in the full swing of summer, and in addition to great weekly sales, all of the sites are having massive ongoing sales. In capturing just the best of the ongoing sales, I have pretty much totally abandoned my rule of no more than 50 deals from all sites … there is just way too much great stuff out there at insane prices!! However, I am sticking with the >50% savings rule, and you will see that I have greatly pared down the list this week to try to focus on only the very best deals. I am continuing my ‘top 5 weekend deals’ section where I grab my favorite 5 deals… Continue reading on Gear Diary …

Headphones… We’ve check out a bunch. Some have impressed us. Some… Not so much. So when a new pair of headphones come on the market we want to check them out. And when they come from a company we know we are even more interest. That’s the case here with the new offerings from Able Planet. Judie introduced Able Planet to Gear Diary readers in this post way back in 2008. Mike looked at pair of their gaming headphones in this post. And Judie checked out a pair of their headphones with active noise cancellation here. I met with the company at CES 2010 and was impressed by their approach. Now… Continue reading on Gear Diary …