Sun
1. HP Photosmart A440 camera and Printer Dock series, printer is $130; package including printer and digital camera, $200 to $250 depending on camera model, available in April.
One thing that digital cameras offer is immediacy, but that’s often restricted to showing people their photos on the screen of the camera or passing on files in e-mail. But with a portable printer like that from HP you can not only take your camera to a party or outing, but you can also simultaneously print off 4×6 photos to hand out to guests for what HP says is a cost as low as 24 cents per print.
LG Kompressor vacuum cleaner, about $450 in Europe, not yet available in Canada.
There’s nothing like a vacuum cleaner that does something a little differently to get our hearts all aflutter. What the Kompressor does is (aw, you guessed) compress the dirt it takes in into little blocks so that they can be thrown away easily in the garbage. Sure, it’s not robotic and it won’t operate on its own but, heck (and we just have to repeat this) it compresses the dirt into little blocks. How neat is that?
2. Samsung MH80 hybrid hard drive, coming soon to a laptop near you.
If you’re looking for a way to get your laptop to boot faster or to resume working more quickly then the newly announced MH80 series of hard drives — in 80, 120 and 160 gigabyte capacities with 128 or 256 megabytes of flash memory — could be the answer. As well, the new drive also means, says Samsung, increased battery life and greater reliability, simply because the drive’s platter will be idle 99 per cent of the time, eliminating the need for the hard drive to spin constantly whenever the laptop is operating on battery power.
3. Weiser SmartKey Locks, various prices.
A lost key can be a worry, especially if it’s used to open the front door of your house. But now Weiser (www.weiserlock.ca) has come up with a solution to this by offering a new set of locks that allows you (if you have another copy of your key) to rekey the locks in seconds without having to call in a locksmith. As well, the locks are designed to eliminate the problem of “lock bumping” (we’re not going to describe it here because, hey, we’re responsible), a break-in technique now so well known on the Internet that sneaky kid down the street probably can do it.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007