Despite some of the shortcomings that it may have, the Apple iPad could prove to be a real game-changer for the industry. However, it won’t be the only one populating this newfound niche and it’s not the only one to be priced at under $500. Do you remember the JooJoo Tablet? Well, it’s hit the production line.

It started out its life as the CrunchPad, as heralded by TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington. He had a falling out with his partners (the legalities of the matter are still up in the air), so it re-emerged as the JooJoo Tablet by Fusion Garage. Whatever you want to call it, the JooJoo has some legs up on the Apple alternative.

Possibly in an effort to conserve battery life, the Apple iPad does not support Flash. The JooJoo Tablet does. Other notable features on this tablet are its 12.1-inch capacitive touchscreen, integrated ambient light sensor, and USB connectivity.

Check out the video below for a closer look at the Fusion Garage JooJoo Tablet. Pricing, much like that of the iPad, starts at $499.  They are taking pre-orders now.

InFocus today revealed a wireless solution that eliminates a wired connection between your Mac laptop and InFocus projector. Now set free from the tether of digital projectors, the InFocus DisplayLink Wireless system is a pair of small USB sticks which connect to InFocus’ DisplayLink-enabled projectors to share HD content on big screens from your MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air portables.

It’s been a year in the making for Macs, Windows OS notebooks have been able to utilize the DisplayLink technology since August 2009. Now with support for Apple, InFocus stands to take on the projection market where Macs are.

Until the DisplayLink stepped up, MacBook owners would have to use a mini-DisplayPort or mini-DVI to VGA adapter to connect to a VGA cable that connects to the projector for the video, and another cable for the audio. InFocus has changed all that via a single wireless link sent through the USB adapter.

Security has been considered, each pair of USB adapters are factory pre-paired and transmit over a 128 bit encrypted protocol. Quality is crisp and clear thanks to Ultra Wide Band chips made by Wisair. Video output can reach 2048×1152 and 720p video, depending on the projector model.

Expect to see the Mac OS versions available for purchase system at the end of March 2010.

InFocus DisplayLink Gallery

Samsung Electronics announced the availability of the special edition Samsung S2 Portable.  The S2 SE is a much improved external HDD with an increase of 500GB, and pre-loaded with ‘Michael Jackson’s THIS IS IT’ movie – coinciding with its February 22 release in Europe on DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

The Samsung S2 Portable also has USB On Board Technology and supports Auto Backup, Secret Zone, and SafetyKey, all user friendly Samsung software.

“We are excited to present this movie starring Michael Jackson, the greatest entertainer of all time, pre-loaded on the Samsung S2 Portable,” said H.S. Lee, Vice President, Storage Marketing, Samsung Electronics.

Samsung will announce any future plans to release the S2 Portable elsewhere after they see how the initial launch goes in Europe.

We had high hopes. While our wish for a January launch got dashed, we figured that the Motorola Milestone would hit the Telus lineup by mid-February. Now, it seems like the Android-touting smartphone has hit another delay. At least, that’s what a change on the Best Buy website is leading us to believe.

If you looked at the Best Buy website just a short while ago, you would have seen it mentioning a launch date for the Motorola Milestone of Febuary 18th. That’s the day that it was supposed to hit Telus. If you go to the Best Buy site now, you’ll see that any mention of February 18th has been removed. What does this mean?

You should always take these pre-order announcements on retail sites with a grain of salt, since the date was never formally announced by Telus, but this still leaves us wondering. Maybe Telus told Best Buy to remove that date for a reason.

Even though Best Buy has taken the date off its website, this does not necessitate that the Motorola Milestone will not launch with Telus on February 18th. Until we get a press release from Telus, we can’t say for sure.

When Steve Jobs took the stage and formally revealed the Apple iPad to the world, one of the first things that left people scratching their heads was the lack of an SD card slot. Then, he showed us that there was an accessory that addressed this need. As it turns out, you can have an SD card reader on the iPhone too.

It’s not an official Apple peripheral, but it serves exactly the same purpose. What you see here is the ZoomIt SD card reader for the iPhone and iPod touch. To work alongside the ZoomIt app, the little accessory attaches to the dock connector in the bottom, letting you transfer all kinds of files to and from the iPhone or iPod touch.

Perhaps the most obvious use of this is for loading pictures and videos, but you could just as easily use the ZoomIt solution for music, PowerPoint, PDF, and other other kinds of files that the iPhone OS will support. The iPhone didn’t have expandable memory before and, well, this basically adds that function.

The ZoomIt should be available for sale in April, but you can pre-order the $50 device starting right now. I’m thinking that it might work with the iPad too, if you prefer a non-Apple alternative to the official accessory.

Faster gaming, more resource intensive applications, longer battery life, and hopefully a bit cheaper on your pocket. That is basically what you can expect when Rambus’ Mobile XDR memory architecture is implemented into the next-generation of mobile devices.

The Mobile Memory Initiative was introduced last year, and today Mobile XDR has been unveiled promising a future of devices that exceed power and performance targets dramatically.

“Future mobile applications demand far higher performance and longer battery life than today’s mobile products can achieve,” said Sharon Holt, senior vice president of Licensing and Marketing at Rambus. “Mobile XDR memory provides the ideal solution for designers to offer leading-edge mobile content in a dramatically lower power and cost-effective manner. Uniquely, the Mobile XDR architecture delivers these benefits in SoC and DRAM devices that can be built with current manufacturing infrastructure reducing both risk and time-to-market.”

The Mobile XDR memory architecture is expected to achieve throughputs of over 17GB/s of memory bandwidth from a single Mobile XDR DRAM device while extending battery life by over 30 minutes. This means device designers will be able to develop resource intensive multimedia applications using stereoscopic 3D HD video. Even 3D gaming will be made possible on future smartphones, tablets, netbooks and other multimedia devices.

Full color scans are about 28 seconds and the black and white scans only takes 4 seconds.  Power is drawn from 2AA batteries. 

The price tag on this little scanner is $99.99, a bit much but quite convenient for its size.

With thousands of audio files in your iTunes library and growing, how do you access your massive archives of digital music without having to “sync” before hitting the road? Didiom has a solution.

Didiom is a New York based company who has released a service called Didiom Pro. They take your digital media from your home computer network and let you access it from your mobile phone. Much faster and simpler than syncing or copying files over to memory chips or USB.

The Pro suite includes a desktop software application which streams any of your audio files to your mobile phone connected to the internet via 3G or WiFi. In addition to streaming music, you are even able to download a track to have it on your phone for offline listening later on.

Confusingly enough, Didiom Pro is not available for the iPhone, regardless of its ability to access your iTunes library. iPhone users will have to hang tough until an official release date is known, the company expects it to be available this summer along with an Android release for the second half of 2010.

BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows devices get the jump start and can sign up for the service today for $0.99 per month or $9.99 a year for unlimited access to your library. This includes high-quality streaming, playlist streaming, and wireless downloads from a home computer to your mobile phone.

You can test it out for free to see if it’s something you would use, the trial includes streaming of five tracks in normal quality mode. “Not so long ago, it took awkward data cables, memory cards, and hours of synchronization time to have your entire iTunes library in the palm of your hands. Now, it takes just one simple app –– Didiom Pro.” said Ran Assaf, Didiom’s founder and CEO.

Didiom Pro Image Gallery

Plenty of release dates have been leaked on T-Mobile USA about new products that are set to be released over the next few months of 2010.   The release that is expected on March 10th is the Motorola Cliq XT, which previous reports have referred to as the Zeppelin.  This model will be an affordable 1.5 Android OS based smartphone featuring MotoBlur’s suite of social networking software.  The touchscreen has a 3.2-inch HVGA (320×240 pixels).

The following week, on the 17th, they are set to bring us the Nokia Nuron.  According to rumors the Nuron will be a Symbian S60 5th Edition version of the Nokia 5230.  Nuron users will get access to Nokia’s Ovi suite of online services, Nokia’s standard suite of productivity applications and its focus will be entertainment.  As with the Motorola Cliq XT the Nuron will also be a tablet style, with a 3.2-inch, 640×360 pixel touchscreen and slide-out keyboard.

Then finally on the 24th we get our hands on the much anticipated HTC HD2 Windows Mobile Entertainment Device.  According to the document; all the info that we already know about T-Mobiles HTC HD2 are true. There is a 1GHz processor, a 16 GB microSD memory card, a 4.3” WVGA display with multi-touch support, a 5MPx camera and will be running Windows Mobile 6.5.

All three support the T-Mobile 3G mobile broadband network, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi (the Nuron doesn’t have Wi-Fi).  Unfortunately no pricetag’s were mentioned for any of the devices.

The Protoscar LAMPO2 will be unveiled at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show beginning next month giving Europeans their own version of the sporty Tesla electric racer.

With 4 different charging modes: standard single-phase with an on board charger for typical overnight home-charge, a “control-pilot” equipped single-phase on board charger typical for public charging, a standard three-phase on board charger typical for charging at industrial plugs (fleet-owners) and an interface for DC fast charging, where up to 100 km of additional range can be charged within just 10 minutes, by an off-board system. Protoscar will compare these different systems in terms of usability and efficiency by demonstrations in real conditions. An added solar panel on the rear trunk will allow for trickle charging.

LAMPO2 has two electric motors (allowing it to operate as a four-wheel drive with variable torque between front and rear axle for optimal handling, safety and efficiency) with a total output of 300 kW (equivalent to 408 HP), 640 Nm (50% more than its predecessor) and over 30 kWh of Lithium-Ion battery capacity. LAMPO2 features real sports-car performances: 5 seconds to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h, 200 km/h of max. speed and a range over 200 km.

Weight, aerodynamics and the efficiency of individual components of the BRUSA drive train have been further optimized in order to reach a world-class energy consumption of less than 100Wh/km-ton under real conditions.

Protoscar LAMP2 Image Gallery