Creative seems to be making an attempt to offer the best value on a portable media player, with a few recent price cuts they are now offering the 4GB Zen for just $99 and the 8GB Zen for $149.

In the recent past we also saw the 32GB Zen drop to $299 and the 1GB Zen Stone going for as little as $30 bucks.

Product [Creative] Via [Engadget]

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This week, Verizon is giving away one of these gorgeous pink blackberry Pearl 8130 smartphones to one of our email subscribers. If you’re not subscribed, sign up here.

Read more about the pink Pearl.

Take a peek at some of our past easy-on-the-eyes emails:

Popgadget Drop: Giveaway - Belkin Rockstar ipod Hub
Popgadget Drop: Giveaway - The Amazing Logitech Air Mouse
Popgadget Drop: Zamzar file conversion now bigger and better

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iTurbo ipod Charger

You can have this for ?19.99

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With all the dire reports about identity theft, it seems like pure idiocy not to have a paper shredder (I’d put mine right by my mailbox and ask the mailman to feed all the junk mail from credit companies directly into it). But, seriously, how do you manage the flow? There’s just so much, every single day. It never lets up. How many hours per month would you have to spend shredding mail if you really heeded all the advice about protecting your personal information when it seems to be free-floating everywhere?

The hand-held paper shredder by Ziszor may not be big or fast enough to handle the mountain of mail with sensitive information that we pile up every month, but I have to say, it would give me some satisfaction to feed the more outrageous mail I get through this little device. The Ziszor, which operates on 4 AA batteries, has 28 blades within, and can hanle 5 layers of paper at one time. Now priced at $39.95 (down from the regular price of $49.95).

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We love Rock Band here, but as with any new hardware, being an early adopter has its ups and downs. In particular, the first guitars that shipped with Rock Band had a common issue where the strum button would stop working correctly:

• Kotaku: Rock Band Guitar Controllers Failing

Although this problem has been known since November 2007, our Rock Band game purchased in January quickly developed the problem: you could strum up, but not down. Since I only strum downward, this put a serious crimp in my already amateurish playing.

Fortunately, Electronic Arts has a convenient warranty page that promised to quickly set me up with a new guitar:

• Rock Band Warranty page

The warranty process took five minutes and a credit card number, which theoretically won’t be charged if you return the defective guitar. Unfortunately, I started this process on January 20th, and I’m still not happy with the result:

• I was immediately sent a UPS tracking number, but they never dropped off the guitar for shipping.
• A month later, they charged my card $125 because I never returned the old guitar. (I couldn’t, since they were supposed to send me the new one first.)
• After dealing with form-letter responses from their online support people for a month, I finally called EA. They were very helpful, apologized, and started the whole process over. This time the guitar was actually shipped, and I received it a few days later.

So now we have a new working guitar (finally!) but EA still owes us a $125 credit. I’ll have to spend some more time on the phone straightening this out.

Got a Rock Band guitar with a strum problem? Here’s my advice:

• Try to return it to the store where you purchased it. EA discourages this, but a good retailer should exchange it.
• Call EA on the phone rather than using their online service. They’re more likely to get it right. The number is 1 (650) 628-1001.
• You may want to consider fixing it yourself—this will probably void your warranty, and it seems like a waste of time to fix something that EA should replace, but I’m wishing I’d done it myself at this point.
• If you use EA’s warranty service, keep a close eye on your credit card.

I love Rock Band—it’s probably my favorite video game of all time—but when I pay $160 for a video game, I expect better customer service. Here’s hoping EA gets their act together in time for me to buy the sequel.

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As hardware prices fall and military tech trickles down into the civilian world, hi-tech weapons will inevitably fall into the wrong hands. According to Noel Sharkey, a robotics professor at the University of Sheffield, killer robots could soon be used by extremist militant and terrorist groups. He estimates that an autonomous, GPS guided flying drone could be built for as little as $500.

But technology is morally agnostic. Even weapons designed to kill can be used for good. So should we worry? Anecdotal evidence says that criminals escalate their use of technology to match or outdo that used by the law enforcers: gun crime is higher where the police carry guns, for example.

On the other hand, law agencies are playing a continual game of catchup, as seen in the absurd hoops that air travelers have to jump through just to get on a plane. In order to succeed, the defenders have to cover all possibilities, all the time. The bad guys have to break security only once. So, while killer robots might possibly be the next shoe bomb, they will probably be used only once before the villains jump ahead to the next thing. Meanwhile, us hackers will have a whole bunch of cheap new toys to play with.

Killer robots pose latest militant threat: expert [Reuters]

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Raidon Technology Inc have introduced 3 new external storage devices named STARAY-S which are compatible with a range of 2.5″ SATA drives. The hard drive enclosures have encryption built in which does not allow access to data on the drives unless an authorised encryption key is used. This key can be entered via software password, fingerprint or a keypad depending on which enclosure you choose. The enclosures use hardware based DES (Data Encryption Standard) which keeps the processing power needed on the enclosure rather then on your laptop and thus, keeping performance levels the same for you as well as holding the data safe when not in use.

The STARAY enclosures allow you to also partition the data in to secure and unsecured space making some of your data invisible to other users unless they know your encryption key or are authorised users by swiping their finger print on the biometric sensor.

The need for encrypted data is essential these days and people expect their data to be safe when in the hands of others. By adding encryption to an external device it helps keep their data safe while in your hands.

No pricing information is available yet, but these enclosures from Raidon will be on display at CeBIT 2008 which will be running in early March.

Source - TechMessenger
and 7Gadgets

Guest post by Matthew of GadgetVenue

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While face detection has become a common feature in modern digital cameras, Sony took one step ahead and developed the first camera with smile detection, the DSC-T300, and proudly announced it today.

The main attraction of this camera is certainly Sony’s new smile detection technology. So how does this new feature work? When the camera is set to smile detection mode, a user can select one out of the three preset smile detection levels (i.e. smile, grin, and great grin). After the shutter button is pressed, the camera will detect the target’s face and shoot the photo automatically once the chosen smile level is reached. Sounds cool to me, with this great feature I’ll never miss the smiles while shooting photos

Besides the smile detection feature, Sony also implemented the newly developed iSCN “random scene recognition” feature. iSCN’s main goal is to minimize exposure failure in five modes: night scene portrait, night scene, night scene with tripod, backlit portrait and backlit.

Sony DSC-T300, which comes in three color options: gray, red and black, features 5x optical zoom with 10.1 mega-pixel resolution, 3.5” LCD, ±2.0EV with 1/3 increment, ISO range from 80 to 3200, and 15 MB internal memory with a 128 MB Memory Stick Duo included. This new model will be available from March 7th onwards

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Apple claims that their new batteries which come with the new line of MacBook and MacBook Pro has been improved to provide a longer operating time before a trip to the nearby power outlet is required. According to Apple, the extension in battery life stands at 30 minutes to 45 minutes more than the previous generation when running the same Wireless Web test - with the help of LED backlighting, you get an hour’s advantage of operating time. I guess this would mean having more time to do your work when traveling while the guy next to you in economy class cusses about his lack of battery life on a rival notebook.

»read more from "Apple Claims Improvement In Battery Life"

Priced at $1249, Dell’s XPS 630 is powered by an Intel Core 2 Quad/Extreme processor, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, AGEIA PhysX accelerator, 1TB HDD, and NVIDIA SLI single/dual Graphic options. The latest gaming desktop from Dell also offers six USB 2.0 ports, an optional 19-in-1 media card reader, gigabit Ethernet, audio in / out, FireWire and even PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors. This machine is built specially for hardcore gamers.
[Source]

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