IR extenders – which can be used to remotely-control A/V components tucked inside closed-up equipment racks or in other rooms – aren’t new, but Logitech probably have the brand-name recognition (and bricks-and-mortar shelf space) to soon dominate the market. The Logitech Harmony IR Extender System works with your existing remotes, and comes with a compact IR receiver and an IR blaster with various tethered mini-blasters.
Among the many benefits of working from home is that you don’t have to worry about nasty coworkers getting you sick with their cold and flu germs. Still, with any shared computer in the home or office, you run the chance of contaminating each other. The keyboard is one of those places in the home where germs lurk because most keyboards simply can’t stand up to sanitation.
Apple’s Magic Mouse is impressing us on the desktop, but what sort of evil spirits might be lurking inside? iFixit bravely donned protective eyewear and grabbed the nearest set of screwdrivers in order to strip the multitouch mouse down to its bare boards, in their latest Apple teardown.
While the new 27-inch iMacs may be Apple’s eye-catchers, especially in Apple Stores, it’s the company’s new Magic Mouse peripheral that will find its way to the most desks. By junking the trackball of the Mighty Mouse and replacing it with a touch-sensitive surface, Apple have not only catered for the demands of desktop users calling out for multitouch, but bypassed ongoing reliability frustrations of the mechanical ball. After the cut, our live Magic Mouse gallery together with some hands-on first impressions.
The Magic Mouse isn’t the only peripheral from Apple that’s had a makeover; the venerable Apple Remote, last seen looking vaguely tired in white plastic, has been dipped in aluminum for its latest incarnation. The Apple Remote still has dedicated play/pause and Menu keys, together with track-skip and volume controls, but now looks like a drawn-out, flattened iPod shuffle.
To use it with your iPod, iPhone or iMac, you’ll need a suitably equipped dock or a desktop that has an IR port. The Apple iPod Universal Dock will do the trick for the PMPs, priced at $49, while any iMac introduced from 2005 onwards should have the required receiver.
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Entirely unsurprisingly, the Apple Store has been taken down for the usual hurried "updates". While the same thing happened late last month with no noticeable changes, today we're expecting quite a few modifications what with the very recent speculation that Apple are planning to push out a new MacBook, iMac, Mac mini and even peripheral range.
Update: The store is back, and here's what you can buy.
Apple may be riding high on another successful financial quarter, but we still wouldn’t put it past them to announce a few new products this week in order to stick a spoke in the wheels of Windows 7’s launch. According to man-in-the-know John Gruber, it’s not a product trickle but a flood we should be expecting, with both new notebooks and desktops together with multitouch-compatible peripherals on the cards.
Update: The new range is now live – all the details here
Logitech have announced their latest QWERTY ‘board, the Logitech Gaming Keyboard G110, complete with custom key backlighting and an integrated USB soundcard for directly connecting a headset and microphone. The Gaming Keyboard G110 has both blue and red LEDs, which can also be mixed together for purple shades, as well as a cluster of gaming shortcuts and macro buttons.
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The ability to record phonecalls is pretty standard on cellphones these days, though it's arguably one of the less-commonly-used functions out there. So we're a little bemused by the Celltronix VR1 Recordable Bluetooth Headset; as well as supporting Bluetooth 2.1+EDR with multipoint for dual simultaneous connections, it can record up to 8 minutes of your conversation.
Apple’s Mighty Mouse replacement could accompany the rumored imminent iMac desktop computers, according to AppleInsider’s sources, with the current model’s mechanical trackball being replaced by touch-sensitive patches. The new mouse is also predicted to drop the white plastic stylings of recent models, and instead adopt a new, perhaps anodized aluminum finish to match the refreshed iMacs.
SlashGear Japan
