Gadget Master

Time again for a Gadget of the Week, and some aspirational browsing of cutting edge consumer electronics.

As always, let's get a few eye-catching-but-rather-frivolous non-contenders out of the way...

Want to make your cool, latest iPhone look like a mobile brick from the Eighties? Check out the iPhone Brick Case (right).Yours for $26.

Or how about a DIY Guitar Pick Punch ("turn almost anything into a guitar pick - with one simple punch"). Or a genuine hand-crafted Steam Punk flash drive?

Okay, getting more serious now, slightly. Check out this special Travel mouse pad, to wrap up "a little mouse burrito". Or how about the earphone luxury of a Bowers & Wilkins C5? According to Engadget:

The 'buds come equipped with an iDevice compatible inline remote / mic to get a handle on phone calls or swap though playlists, and have a few unique features to boot. To ensure a proper fit on-the-move, you'll find Secure Loops that can be adjusted to hug the inner cartilage of your ear, along with added heft (Tungsten Weighting) near the inner-ear side for a tight seal.

Not missing the Porsche Design (and LaCie) external hard drives - the USB 3.0-powered P'9220 and P'9230, which have capacities of 1TB and 2TB, and will cost $119.99 and $159.99, respectively (see left).

And there's the toughbook specialists, Panasonic, and their tough tablet, the Core i5-powered H2 (right). Engadget, again, writes:

The latest generation leaps forward to a 1.7GHz Core i5-2557M ULV processor with Intel's vPro technology, along with USB 2.0 and serial sockets, and space for either a second USB port or an Ethernet jack. At the entry-level (!) price of $3,449, you'll get a 10-inch (XGA), 6,000-nit display, 4GB of RAM, a removable 320GBGB 7200RPM shock-mounted hard drive, WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 radios, and twin swappable batteries that promise up to six and a half hours of runtime.

Getting to the heavyweights, check out the latest LG displays for glasses-free 3D. Slashgear writes:

LG has outed its latest 3D monitor, the LG Cinema 3D DX2000, and like Toshiba's recent Qosmio F750 3D notebook it uses eye-tracking to offer glasses-free 3D images and video no matter from what angle you're looking at the screen. A webcam integrated into the bezel of the monitor tracks the viewer's eye position and then adjusts the parallax-barrier 3D display to suit, whether they're looking from the side, above or below.

Only on sale in Korea, at the mo, tho.

Just missing out on the title GOTW is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Not as touch as the Panasonic tablet, maybe, but it runs on an Nvidia Tegra 2 chip, has a 3 megapixel rear and 2 megapixel front camera, and supports 1080p HD video and Flash playback.

Samsung writes:

The latest addition to Samsung's Galaxy Tab range features a 10.1 inch crystal clear WXGA TFT LCD screen, weighs only 565 grams and is the world's thinnest mobile tablet of its screen size measuring just 8.6 millimetres.

Okay then, cue imaginary drum roll. Gadget of the Week, of this week is...(as always, the blog post title gives it away, rather)... the latest performance ultraportable in the Sony VAIO Z Series (left).

Weighing in at 1.2kg, it uses the same latest Intel Thunderbolt connection technology, and this Light Peak docking supports "solid graphics performance with an external video card" says Slashgear, via a Sony Power Media Dock VGP-PRZ20C/VGP-PRZ20A.

It goes on to say:

The new 13.1-inch 1600 x 900 notebook runs up to a Core i7-2620M 2.7GHz processor paired with up to 8GB of DDR3 memory and up to a 256GB SSD, while the Sony Power Media Dock VGP-PRZ20C/VGP-PRZ20A packs an AMD Radeon HD 6650M graphics card with 1GB of dedicated memory, a choice of DVD or Blu-ray drives, and support for a further two simultaneous monitors.

That means, including the notebook's own display and its HDMI output, up to four screens can be active at any one time, turning the VAIO Z Series into a performance desktop workstation.

Battery life is stated to be around seven hours, by the way. And yes, I would like one.