Gadgets On Today – Monday, April 13th

Lots of calls to the Today Show switch board this morning, if you missed the segment or want more info on the gagdets, please see below:

1)Tom Tom GO 730
The GPS enabled satellite navigation systems we use in our cars have made getting from A to B easier for many. But with so many customers already owning a GPS, the manufacturers are now building new features into their systems to make them easier to use.

Two features that are both included in the Tom Tom GO 730 are:
Voice address input – Using this feature you just say the address you are going to and the unit will bring up the options it thinks you want to go to.
Advanced lane guidance – When you are following the directions from the GPS it is so easy to become disorientated with where on the road you are meant to position your car to follow the next direction. With Lane guidance you are told what lane on the road so you can calmly keep moving with the traffic!

Tom Tom Go 730 RRP is $550

2)Pulse Smart Pen
For students, office workers, in fact anyone that writes notes, the Pulse Smart Pen is the must have gadget. Fusing a writing pad with a space age pen, the smart pen can

The Pulse Smart Pen is a smart pen that not only records digital notes but actually captures audio at the same time. Tap on your notes and you can replay exactly what was heard – so you’ll never miss a word again.

All the captured material is time-line based, so turning back to any page in your notes and tapping the pen on a word sends you leaping back in time – restarting your audio at the precise moment your wrote that word.

Use the Livescribe Desktop application to send your written notes to your computer and watch as MyScript for Livescribe translates your notes to a word doc.

RRP $330 for the 2Gig and $250 for the 1 Gig
Available at Office Works

3)Walkman X Series
Sony, once the global leaders in portable music players has pumped all available technology into their newest digital music player, and it is a rockin little unit.

The Walkman X series in my opinion has three cool features:

OLED technology in the screen. For a device that is mostly used outside, using OLED will mean even in bright sunlight you still can see what is on the screen (well, at least a lot better than a typical lcd).
Digital noise cancelling built into the unit. So, buy the walkman and then plug any of your favourite headphones in and get the benefits of noise cancelling for the best possible sound experience.
Micro Charging. How often have you wanted to go for a run, but your music player battery has been flat! Sony are building micro charging into many of their new devices so you can charge it for 5 minutes, and get then get one hour of use. If you want it to last longer, charge it for four hours for a couple of days use. It sounds like it just makes sense doesn’t it, but power management is not something that has been done well by many of music player manufacturers.

RRP – $799 for the 32 gig model and $649 for the 16 gig model

4)Chumby – your newest digital friend
We ran out of time on the segment to talk about the Chumby, but here are the details if you are interested in having a look.

I love my clock radio, and my latest one even charges my wife’s iPod. But it’s still limited to radio, time, alarm and digital music. If you want something more than that then Chumby is worth a look. It’s a personal media device that works by hooking into your home wireless interest connection.

The Chumby Australia website sums it up pretty well –
www.chumby.com

“Chumby takes your favorite parts of the Internet and delivers them to you in a friendly, always-on, always-fresh format. It’s a window into your Internet life that lives outside your desktop, so content like weather, news, celebrity gossip, podcasts, music, and more has a place to play away from your world of documents and spreadsheets. Just plug in your chumby, connect to your wireless network, and use your computer to create a lineup of favorites from over 1,000 widgets in more than 30 categories, with new ones arriving all the time. Then let your chumby do its thing—streaming everything you like, from sports scores to stock tips, from video clips to interactive games, from photos to trivia. ”

In practice it’s like have the best entertainment and news from the internet, within arms reach, always and anytime you want it. Chumby RRP is $199 and can be purchased from Internode their Australian distributor – chumby.on.net