I love starting the week with a super Gear Deal and this is a Super Gear Deal! BUT, and this is important, this deal is good for today only. OCZ’s Agility 3 2.5″ 90GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive is normally $150. With this deal you can get it for $99.99. Plus, it will ship for free and there is no tax in most states.

If you have never seen the speed that comes with a solid state drive this is a great way to get started. And while 90GB isn’t a huge amount of storage capacity, with cloud storage increasingly cheap there’s never been a better time to swap out a traditional… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Today’s Gear Deal brings us Clickfree’s 2TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive (model no. CA3D20-6C). Normally $169.99, our Gear Sponsor found a discount coupon that drops the price all the way down to just $129.99 and it will even ship for free. Details and ordering information can be found here on the Deal Page.

Gear Deal: Clickfree 2TB C6 USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive via LogicBUY

ioSafe is known for keeping your data SAFE. How safe? Well, first we took the initiative to burn and water-soak a drive, and the data was still recoverable. Then, starting with CES 2010, ioSafe decided to show everyone that their drives are capable of withstanding burning, soaking, dropping, and crushing. In 2011, we upped the ante again and took shots (yes, using a gun) at an ioSafe drive, and the data saved on the ioSafe drive came out unscathed. Well, we wondered what they would do next and, at CES 2012,  we found out.

Honestly, what we saw shocked us …… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

The Q-i-sound Bluetooth speakers from Qmadix leave the square, boring speakers that are so common in the dust. Available in black or white, they have an unusual shape that is sure to grab attention. Each speaker has its own rechargeable lithium polymer battery that charges in 3 ½ hours and gives up to eight hours of playtime. Standby time is up to 10 days. As the company puts it

Ultra portable speakers offer music lovers a great listening experience, as well as microphones for clear phone communication

It is also worth nothing that, once paired the speakers can be separated by up to 15 feet. A… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

We told you about Seagate’s new Thunderbolt adapters last week. Yes, we are finally seeing products come to market that take advantage of the speed increases offered by Thunderbolt. But how fast IS Thunderbolt? Sure you can see lab testing but that doesn’t necessarily tell you about using it at home or work. We shot a video of moving 2.5GB of data from a MacBook air to an external drive using both USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt. This is a normal use-scenario for something like this so the speeds you see here are what you might expect if you get one of the adapters.

See for yourself…

Want to know more?… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

We had a chance to sit down with Seagate earlier this week, and we liked what we saw.

We were glad to see an update to the GoFlex Satellite we had reviewed some months ago, we saw a product that is not yet shipping (but we WANT NOW), and we took some time to see the speed boost that Seagate’s Momentus XT Hybrid Hard drive offers as compared to a traditional spinning platter. Here’s a look.… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

 I have a confession to make. I love to take things apart. Back when I was a kid I had a super-sweet Milton Bradley Star Bird toy, an early electronic noisemaker with revving engines and laser blasts. In the course of kid play, something inside broke loose and rattled around, driving me nuts. Spaceships off to do ground assault ought not to have a broken piece giving away their stealth attack so I, being young and adventuresome, decided to put my Star Bird in space dock (Dad’s table vice grip) and haul out a trusty Sears Philips screwdriver and effect repairs. I was successful, and so launched my interest in taking gizmos apart. More recently, with… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I practically live on my MacBook Pro. All of my Gear Diary posts are done using it, most all of my internet browsing and I even use it full time at work instead of my supplied Windows machine. Some would say I love this computer since it is with me everywhere I go. There is one problem with the MacBook Pro. The speaker is terrible! It is too small and provides thin, weak audio quality. The machine is so beautiful, it is a shame that the audio quality is so poor. I have tried several options to improve the audio, all of which are not exactly mobile. As luck would have it, the folks… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

We start the week with a Gear Deal on a 15.6″ Dell XPS 15 Core i5-2430M 2.4GHz laptop. This deal has the laptop come bundled with a Canon ELPH 100 HS Digital Camera, Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10. The base configuration of this XPS 15 laptop includes 6GB RAM, a 750GB 7200RPM Hard Drive, 1GB GeForce GT 525M graphics, a DVD burner, Wireless-N connectivity, JBL 2.1 Speakers with Waves Maxx Audio 3, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS and more. The bundle would normally sell for $1,157.99 but after all the savings our Gear Sponsor found are applied the final price is just $799.99. Details and ordering information can be found here.

Gear Deal… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Aren’t scanners supposed to be these big, clunky things that require a bunch of software to install, lot’s of room on your desktop, and bright lights, whirring noised, and grinding sounds that alarm the crap out of you when all’s you want to do is scan a lousy sheet of paper?  Isn’t that the way it’s all supposed to be.

Apparent doesn’t think so; they have this wee tiny scanner that does all that with no muss, no fuss, and on pretty much any platform you can think of.  With engineers working on nanotubes for building materials, and nanobots being designed for everything from medicine to tech, it’s the age of the small, and… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

If you are into voice recognition, then you need to have a good microphone. It’s a basic fact of life. Yes, you can use the built-in microphone on the MacBook Air (for example), and you’ll probably get good results. But if you want great results you’ll need something that’s going to help filter out the background noise; that means a good headset. Among the issues with such headsets? The best of them have boom microphones that make you look like a Bell telephone operator. Sure, this is all about getting the work done and dictating your text but what if there were a way to not look quite as dorky? That’s what Andrea’s new headphones make… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

I think touch screens are a beautiful thing.  I have wondered for years and years why touch screens weren’t used more widely, and am very happy to see that you can now find them friggin’ everywhere.  But of course, that has some down sides, one of which is:  the durn things gets really, really dirty.  Some manufacturers have worked hard (and with a decent degree of success, I might add) on making the situation better, but the bottom line is that I still need to carry around a screen wipey thing in my pocket all the time.

And Kimtech is well aware of that need, which is why they want you to know about their dry… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

ioSafe is at it again and this time they are looking to outdo themselves. (At least, we sure hope they are!) To recap our experiences with data-storage dynamos ioSafe…

At CES 2010 ioSafe fried, soaked, dropped and crushed one of their rugged hard drives. As you can see, it was awesome.

At CES 2011 ioSafe sought to outdo themselves when they took their new portable drive for a drag behind a car and then let us all take turns shooting it with a shotgun. Check it out here!

Now we’ve been invited to the next demo, the “ioSafe Cage of Death Demolition 2012″. Here’s what we know.

This year we’re not going to bore you with forefoot propane fireballs, 10 contractors, 12 gauge shotguns or fully automatic M-16s – oh no, that’s so last year. We are flattered that other companies have followed our lead and now come to CES to show off their rugged(ish) stuff with dishwashers and paint ball guns – loaded with real paintballs! Meh!!

Our demos are a little more extreme than that and come with a moneyback guarantee if you’re not 100% satisfied. This is an entirely new demo with new products. We aim to please.

We pressed ioSafe’s Brett Callow for more details but he wasn’t talking. No way! No how! But this is what he would tell us:  ”If you have a weak heart, a fragile personality or an aversion to extremely high voltages – don’t come to the demo.”

Oh we’ll be there. On THAT you can be sure.… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

For me, one of the tricky things when buying a new device these days is, how do I protect it?  Honestly, I love the size and feel of my iPhone when it’s “naked”, but there are a couple of problems with it:  it’s durn slippery and prone to be dropped, and it’s unprotected.  But I don’t like bulky cases, either (unless we’re talking Vaja; then we’re in a whole different discussion).  What to do?

Some folks find that putting thin films or simply screen protectors on their precious gear is the way to go.  Crimson offers a number of options in this regard, including their new offerings: anti-glare protectors for the MacBook Air (11″ and 13″)… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Ah life… so many things to worry about these days. Nuclear proliferation, the economy, global warming (errr climate change), earthquakes, how Duke Basketball will do this year and now this… laptop sterility.

Yes, in addition to worrying about whether or not your cellphone is giving you a brain tumor you now need to worry about what your laptop is doing to your reproductive system. Why? Because “recent reporting suggests that radiation emitted from Wi-Fi enabled laptop computers may be harmful to your reproductive system” and this apparently holds true for men and women. That’s where Digital Innovations’ LapGuard comes in.