Stephen Fung’s Gadgets of the Week

Here are a few things that have landed in my lair over the last few days…

EarClicks and Solar Chargers

First up is the Flamingo Music EarClick Headphones (left) by Cellpoint. These unique headphones actually “click” into your ears using a unique retention system for an almost weightless feel. Because they aren’t right inside your ears, you can still hear what’s going on around you. I actually really liked the way they fit and they can be totally customized with a large number of different sized ear pads (or rather, ear nubs) that it comes with. You can barely tell they are on and they won’t come out by accident. These things hit the streets at around $60.

On the right is the Devotec Industries Solar Charger. This device charges up almost any portable electronic device you have with its myriad of attachments. Its small size makes it easy to travel with and can charge up an average cell phone in about an hour. It does iPods and other rechargeable portable gizmos as well. However, it takes about 4 hrs to charge with a plug/USB, or 12 hrs if you leave it in the Sun. They do say it’s for emergency situations so I guess I can let them off the hook for that. It sells for around 19 English Pounds or around $40 US’ish so it really isn’t that pricey especially if it can bail you out in an emergency.

But wait! That’s not all!

More Hard Drives for Me!

I mentioned earlier that my friends at Seagate sent me four one terabyte SAS drive and four one terabyte SATA drives. Although I’m still waiting for cables to be able to hook up the SAS drives, I do like having terabytes of storage that I will never use up. I think Western Digital got jealous of the exposure and yesterday, I got a surprise…

Showing up in an unmarked box was two cool new products from the folks at Western Digital. They include the My Passport Elite 2.5 inch portable hard drive and the My Book Studio Edition II 2 TB Dual Drive RAID Storage system. The My Passport Elite is probably one of the sexier looking little portable drives that I’ve seen. Using one of their GreenPower notebook SATA drives in a 320 GB capacity, the unit requires only one USB cable to power it. It also features a cool capacity meter so you know when you’re running low on space. You can find them for around $199 US.

The My Book Studio II 2 TB Dual Drive RAID Storage System boasts two full size 3.5 inch SATA GreenPower drives and gives you the option to run them in RAID 0 for speed or RAID 1 for redundancy. The unit is fully user serviceable so if you want to throw two WD Velociraptors in there, you can most certainly do that. The unit is totally made for Mac users or Hackintosh users like me, but you can format it back to PC if you wish with the included utility. This bad boy supports Firewire 400/800, eSATA and USB 2.0 and goes for the Mac-Like price of $599 US.

Look for these product reviews coming up at Futurelooks!