Smart Baby Monitor

When you call yourself smart, you better live up to it. So what does the Smart Baby Monitor by Withings have that lets it strut around calling all other baby monitors morons?

For starters, you can monitor it from your iphone, so you can keep an eye on baby from absolutely anywhere. That’s pretty smart. It also allows the traditional iPhone pinch-zooming if you want to go in for a closer look at what baby’s got up his nose.

It plays soothing music through a built-in speaker, and allows you to talk to your baby through your iPhone. Very smart. Plus it has a night light with remotely adjustable brightness and color. And it keeps an eye on temperature and humidity in your baby’s room. Okay, are we feeling the “smart” yet? This thing couldn’t be any smarter if it did advanced vector calculus.

$250-$500, Gadgets

By Doug Sinclair on January 30th, 2012

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$380 BUY

Barnes & Noble Nook WiFi

The original Nook only had a small touch-strip on the bottom to view covers and access various device settings,while the eInk part was strictly for reading. This time, Barnes & Noble has changed things around with the new Nook WiFi – touch edition.

Gone is the bottom strip, now replaced with an entirely touch-based eInk screen. The device also sheds a lot of the bulk that came in the last version, now coming in at 6.5 by five inches, which happens to be smaller than the Kindle 3 (thanks to the lack of a hardware keyboard).

The display uses infrared technology to make it touch-enabled and since this is different than the touch tech found in most smartphones, you can wear gloves or use a stylus to interact with it. The interface has also been completlely revamped to be more like the Nook Color and the new page refresh function means you won’t get flashed with a blank screen before a new page is displayed. It’s a lot smoother.

Onboard the Nook are 2GB of space – upgradable to 32GB via an SD card slot, social functions like book lending and recommendations, and an onscreen keyboard for searching for books or looking up words in the built-in dictionary.

Barnes & Noble seems to have really stepped up its game in response to the Kindle 3, providing a lightweight and powerful alternative to what is, in most minds, the defacto standard eBook reader. As the technology gets better (and cheaper), pretty soon everyone on the morning train ride will be burying their nose

$100-$250, Books & Magazines, Gadgets

By Harry Marks on June 10th, 2011

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$139 BUY

Mophie Juice Pack Air for iPhone 4

Keeping your shiny new iPhone 4 powered throughout the day, while also retaining its sexy form factor can be difficult. The myriad of cases available with built-in battery packs add too much bulk.

Mophie, the leader in battery-embedded cases, have released their new Juice Pack Air for the iPhone 4 and put as much emphasis on style as they do battery power.

Featuring a two-tone, metallic design, the Juice Pack Air slips over the iPhone 4 and provides up to six additional hours of 3G talk time, five hours of 3G Web browsing and nine hours of WiFi Web browsing.

If you work away from a power cord all day and need to have your iPhone ready at all times, you might want to invest $80 for the added security of what essentially amounts to an extra battery.

$50-$100, Gadgets

By Harry Marks on December 3rd, 2010

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$80 BUY

Livescribe Echo Smartpen

Remember that meeting you had with your team a few months ago about that huge client project? You have a bunch of notes scribbled down, but when you try to think back to what was said, you can’t remember anything. The biggest problem with going back to notes after long periods of time is a lack of context.

Livescribe has found a way to put context back into note taking with the Echo Smartpen. The Echo, in conjunction with special Livescribe notebooks, captures surrounding audio to accompany any notes written down during a meeting or lecture. The notes are captured using a built-in high-speed infrared camera, so the recorded audio can be synced up with the handwritten notes. When you go back to your scribblings a week, or even a month later, just tap a note and hear the accompanying audio. Boom – instant context.

The Livescribe Echo is available in 4GB and 8GB capacities, offering 400 hours or 800 hours of audio storage respectively.

$100-$250, Gadgets

By Harry Marks on August 23rd, 2010

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$170-$200 BUY

Amazon Kindle 3

Amazon revolutionized the e-reader with its original Kindle device, and now it takes another much-needed step forward with the Kindle 3. With wider support for fonts, including Caecilia, Sans-Serif, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters as well as Greek and Latin scripts, and a choice between Wi-Fi and 3G versions, it’s getting harder to justify those huge stacks of books cluttering up your home library.

The Wi-Fi version brings longer battery life, and runs on the low end of the $139-189 price range. 3G, however, makes up for the larger price tag by offering the convenience of constant connectivity. Both weigh in at a lighter weight of 8.5 ounces and deliver 4GB of storage space, twice that of its predecessor. Voice command options sweeten the deal, so you no longer have to use your fingers when the time comes to turn a page.

iPad it isn’t, but for a device specifically designed to enhance the reading experience of your favorite novels, you could do a lot worse than placing this on your list of must-buy gadgets.

$100-$250, Gadgets

By Aric Mitchell on July 29th, 2010

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$139-$189 BUY