Gadgets

This has to be just about the coolest watch ever made. What does it do? What doesn’t it do? Seriously: The Swap Rebel, as it is named, takes pretty much every gadget you own and crams it into this tiny, inch-wide wristwatch.

Phone? Check. Camera? Check. 1.46-inch touch-screen? Check. The list goes on, with Bluetooth connectivity (so you don’t actually have to talk into your wrist), an MP3-player, a USB-port for transfer to-and-from the 128MB memory and 2GB microSD-card (expandable to 16GB), plus a range of candy-colored shells.

When Amazon launched Kindle for the Web earlier this year, we all cried “what?!” The service let you preview small snippets of Kindle ebooks in your browser, and that was about it. It kind of proved itself as a way to promote books on other sites, thanks to embedding features, but it remained a curiosity.

Now Amazon has announced an update, bringing the full Kindle experience to the browser, and also to Google’s new Chrome Web Store, meaning any notebook running Google’s Chrome OS.

Looxcie, the ear-mounted, sci-fi styled video-camera now works with your iPhone. The Bluetooth camera is like a Tivo for your real life. When running, it is constantly filming. When something happens that you might want to keep, you hit a button and the last 30 seconds of video are dumped into your iPhone.

The only problem is the quality, a rather poor 480×320 at just 15fps. This is no Canon 5D MkII. But that’s hardly the point. The idea is that you don’t have to sit back and observe.

For the last few weeks, I have been living with the Supertooth Disco, a Bluetooth speaker seemingly named after a singles night at a dentists’ convention. It’s a battery-powered stereo-speaker with a hefty subwoofer inside and, while it will never make its way onto an audiophiles shopping list, it’s a pretty impressive box for its size.

First, the specs. The speaker weighs in at 1,140-grams, or 2.5-pounds, and has two eight-watt drivers.

Lensbaby’s new bag is like an oversized egg-box for your precious light-bending optics. The long padded stick has movable sections inside to hold up to four lenses, and there is a mesh section for small accessories, an external zippered pocket for other extras, and the ends themselves open with flaps for quick access to an oft-used lens. Finally, you can attach a shoulder-strap and stack multiple bags using interlocking Velcro straps.

For just $40, Lensbaby owners will probably snap this up. I have a few of the focus-distorting lenses and they tend to rattle around in a bigger bag, and it seems like overkill to actually lug a proper camera-bag just to carry these and a camera body.

One of the features pulled from the iOS 4.2 update at the last minute was the ability to print to any printer connected to your Mac (more correctly, the functionality was not added in OS X 10.6.5). Printopia, from Ecamm, solves this, without any messy hacks, and it adds more besides.

You can still print from an iPad to a purpose-made AirPrint printer, but who wants to buy a printer these days? Nope, better to repurpose the piece of junk you already have (and lets face it, nobody has ever designed a good printer).

The first NOOKcolor demo units hit Barnes & Noble stores today, while customers who didn’t need to see one in person will get their preordered tablets this week.

“NOOKcolor is the device for people who love to read everything,” said Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch. “Beyond being the most full featured reading product on the market, it also offers the versatility of a tablet, enabling wireless web browsing and streaming music.”

Demo units will also be coming to Best Buy, Walmart and Books-A-Million stores beginning this week.

Do you need a tough, waterproof, almost indestructible SD card? Then go ahead and buy any SD card you find in the store. I have dropped them, stepped on them and run them through a cycle in the washing machine, and all my cards still work fine.

If, however, you want to add a sliver of weight and a shiny metallic finish to your flash-storage, consider the RAW STEEL range from Hoodman, a steel-clad tough-guy whose caps-locked name seems to simultaneously yell and beat its doubtlessly very hairy chest.

The glass iPhone 4 is more likely to slip out of your hand, eat the ground and break than other phones, according to a report.

A study by third-party warranty company SquareTrade tracked 50,000 different phones over one year to analyze their accident rates (that is, how often customers reported drops or spills), as well as their non-accident malfunction rates (i.e., how likely the phones are to fail on their own).

Those tiny, bare, case-less SSD drives in Apple’s new MacBook Airs? They’re made by Toshiba, and now they’re available to save space inside any computer, not just Apple’s.

For proof that the hotness of a product name is in inverse proportion to its good looks and desirability, take a look at the picture above while considering the over-the-top moniker Toshiba has chosen for this dorky strip of chips: the Blade X-gale.