The Logitech LAN-WH450N/GR wireless router is designed for 450 Mbps speeds

Gadget Lab Notes is an eclectic roundup of gadget news briefs and intriguing products that catch our eye.

Is That a Mini Wind Turbine? Nope, It’s a Logitech Wireless Router
Logitech’s LAN-WH450N/GR wireless router definitely wins the title of “most uniquely designed router” in my book (at least for the moment). The turbine or fan looking contraption at the top does not in fact have anything to do with wind; it’s a tri-tenna that is supposed to help the router access speeds up to 450 Mbps, with compatible devices. Other than that, it’s basically your average wireless router. It’ll be available in Japan in mid-April.

Logitech Introduces 5 GHz 450 Mbps Wireless Router in Japan [Akihabara News via Oh Gizmo]

GFI Labs Admits Responsibility for False Positive Samsung Keylogger Incident
Samsung notebooks have not shipped with the Starlogger keylogger program installed and active. GFI Labs, an anti-spyware developer, confirmed in a blog post that their VIPRE software used a rare and very aggressive anti-spyware method that wrongly flagged the Slovenian language directionr, C:\WINDOWS\SL as Starlogger. That directory is the same one that Starlogger actually uses.

Samsung Laptops Do Not Have Keylogger [GFI Labs Blog via Crunchgear]

Google Cracking Down on “Willy-Nilly” Software Customization
Google is stepping in and beginning to regulate the user experience of Android devices more closel, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. They haven’t changed the game, but they have begun enforcing some Android distribution agreement rules so Google has the “final say” with regards to the way carriers and manufacturers adjust their code. This should help prevent fragmentation and assure a positive experience for the user.

Do Not Anger the Alpha Android [Businessweek via Android Guys]

NO Sign Puts Your Vice On Display
Trying to cut back? Slide your vice of choice—a bottle of whiskey, your iPod, a candy bar—under the elastic strap of the NO Sign and give yourself a constant reminder that it’s not allowed. I’m more of the “out of sight, out of mind” opinion, but perhaps for some, this could be a constant reminder that you have successfully abstained from that off-limits thing. Or you really need to.

NO Sign [Animica USA via Book of Joe]

Samsung Transparent Display Concept Becoming a Reality
Samsung has begun mass-producing transparent black-and-white and color LCDs, which have previously been shown off in prototype form. Calling it a “world’s first”, the 1,680 x 1,050 resolution 22-inch displays feature a 500:1 contrast ratio and use 90% less power than regular backlit LCD panels. The black-and-white models are over 20% see-through, while the color ones have a slightly lower 15% transparency. Transparent displays have “endless possibilities” for advertising, so we can look forward to seeing these guys plastered in malls and billboards in the future.

Samsung Electronics Becomes the World’s First in Mass Production of the Transparent LCD Panel [Samsung via Crunchgear]

So Microsoft doesn’t like anticompetitive behavior, huh? Since when? Brad Smith, General Counsel for the Redmond rabblerousers, has posted a lengthy blog post outlining Microsoft’s concerns with “a pattern of actions that Google has taken to entrench its dominance” in online search and ads, which he claims is detrimental to European consumers. Funnily enough, half the post is about Google’s legal issues in the US, but we’ll set that aside for now. What this boils down to is that Microsoft is finally taking the gloves off — Google accused it of pushing other companies to do its dirty work — and is now adding its name to the list of objectors to Mountain View’s stranglehold on search in Europe. The European Commission is already taking a regulatory looksee at Google’s tactics, so this isn’t sparking off a new investigation, but it does add the glamor of two big names locking legal horns yet again. Hit the source link for Brad’s exposition of Google’s villainous wrongdoings.

Microsoft lodges antitrust complaint against Google with European Commission, ignores irony originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 03:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The TOUGH TG-810 is the first camera crushproof up to 100kg

Gadget Lab Notes is an eclectic roundup of gadget news briefs and intriguing products that catch our eye.

Olympus TOUGH TG-810 Claims to be the First 100kg Crushproof Camera
Accidentally step on the Olympus TOUGH TG-810? Not a problem, as long as you weigh less than 100kg (about 220lbs). The 14 MP TG-810 is shockproof, waterproof up to 10m, and freezeproof up to -10 C. It features a 3-D shooting mode, 720p HD recording, underwater scene modes, and a variety of other modes and filters to enhance stills and video.

Tough TG-810 [Olympus via TechRadar]

Thermaltake Level 10 Super Gaming Modular Case, an Epic Home For Your Gaming Rig
For $280, you can get the Thermaltake Level 10 Super Gaming Modular Case, whose design was inspired by the work of BMW Group Designworks. The case will prevent overheating through the use of 4 cooling fans and optional water cooling, and sports a hinged side panel, 6 USB ports (two USB 3.0, four USB 2.0) and a variety of other ports. It’s got 5 hot-swappable hard drive bays and also features improved cable management for hiding extra cords at the back.

Thermaltake Level 10 Super Gaming Modular Case [Thermaltake USA via Uncrate]

GoPro Battery BacPac Ensures Over 5 Hours of Video Recording Adventures
GoPro, purveyor of wearable, mountable HD cameras, has outed the BacPac, a clip for the HD Hero camera that provides over 5 hours of recording capability. That’s right, for $49.99, you can keep snowboarding, skateboarding, backflipping, or doing whatever other extreme activity you want to document with first person video, for over 5 hours.

Battery BacPac [GoPro via Crunchgear]

Grown-Up Battleship: You May Pass Out Before You Finish the Game
Honestly, I’m surprised this wasn’t created sooner: a Battleship Drinking Game, with shotglasses perched on each “ship”. So now cries of “You sunk my battleship!” are accompanied by a chug of your favorite poison.

Battleship Drinking Game [Core77]

Bing’s Global Searches Outnumber Yahoo’s For the First Time
In February, Bing searches accounted for 4.37% of the global market, while Yahoo held only 3.93% of the global search market. Neither search engines are making Google sweat though—the search engine giant maintained 89.94% of the global search market. In the US, the proportions played out a bit differently: Google leads with 79.63%, followed by Yahoo and Bing with 9.74% and 9.03%, respectively.

Global Stats [Statcounter via Slashgear]

Floor Plan Light Switch Makes it Easy to Light the Right Room
If you’ve ever fumbled around with a light panel of 3 plus switches as you enter a dark house, you know it can be a pain to try to illuminate the right area. The Floor Plan Light switch would display a glowing layout of the floor; just press the room you want to light, and voila! Hopefully it could also scale to a single room that has multiple light areas, like kitchens and bathrooms often do.

Floor Plan Light Switch [Yanko Design]

Angry Birds, the insanely popular multi-platform game, is introducing a new payment system to some Android customers for purchasing in-game content.

Angry Birds game players will be able to use their real cash money to pay for virtual goods existing only within the game’s ecosystem. It’s like buying a shovel for your plot on Farmville with your Mastercard.

The title? “Bad Piggy Bank.”

Yes, it has a stupid name. And yes, it’s only for Android/Angry Birds customers on the Elisa mobile carrier network in Finland. But it’s more significant than you might think.

Now, users won’t have to whip out the plastic every time they want to buy that shovel. Instead of typing in your 16-digit number when you want to purchase an item, you select content you want to purchase in the game, and select the Bad Piggy Bank icon (above), according to Rovio’s blog post. The charges are made via your phone’s SMS text messaging system, and the cost will appear in your phone bill.

The introduction of in-app payments are a step towards solving a big problem in dealing with virtual economies — how to get players to pay real dollars for non-real items. With in-app payments, developers reduce what is called the “friction” within app ecosystem purchases. That is, it’s much easier to fork over your cash when all it takes is a single click. And developer studios like Rovio want to make it as easy as possible on its customer base.

Until as recently as last Wednesday, Android users were bound to certain payment methods like Google Checkout, a service with a history plagued by user complaints. Direct carrier billing — which bills your mobile service provider for the app purchases you make — has been available since 2009, but only to T-Mobile customers using Android devices. A second carrier, AT&T, was added as recently as December.

Needless to say, payment options for Android OS devices have moved sluggishly forward over the past two years.

“This is one of the bigger issues that all the developers have with Android,” said Rovio CEO Mikael Hed in a previous interview with Wired.com. “It doesn’t have iTunes.”

Like Hed says, Apple hasn’t faced the payment issues in the same way. Each and every customer accessing the iOS App store is required to have an iTunes account, which is linked to an existing credit card account. With the Android Market, not all users even have Google Checkout.

That type of non-straightforward payment system seems to have led to a culture of freeloading on Google’s ecosystem.

“Nobody pays on Android,” says Rovio’s Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka.

Google wants to change that. Last week’s rollout of the Android Market web store brought users the chance to download apps from their desktop browser and “push” the apps to their Android mobile devices, easing the browse-ability of Android’s app catalog while hopefully increasing app sales.

Trying to lure in more Android app developers as well, app vendors are now able to specify the cost of each app in multiple currency amounts, saving users the time they spent doing the math on currency conversion themselves.

As mentioned before, Angry Birds is only allowing in-app payments for those on the Elisa mobile carrier network in Finland, but Google expects in-app payments to be available to all Android users before the end of spring. With that sort of time frame and the biggest app across all platforms already featuring the method of payment, we’ll have to wait and see if Android users start to pony up more dough.

Brian X. Chen contributed to this report.

Photo: Bad Piggy Bank/Rovio

See Also:

• How Angry Birds Is Becoming the Next Super Mario
• Angry Birds
• IPhone
• The Physics of Angry Birds
• iPhone Review: Angry Birds Make Great Projectiles
• Real-Life Angry Birds Adds Human Interaction to Your Addiction …
• Google Launches Android Market Web Store, Improves Payment System …
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Google Removes Flash App From Android Market

The Motorola Xoom’s release is close, very close. How do we know that? Well, Moto has just handed one to Chad Ochocinco — one of the NFL’s most recklessly loquacious players — and you don’t do that with an unfinished product. For his part, Chad’s finding the Honeycomb tablet to be “pretty awesome” and regretfully informs Motorola that it “won’t be getting this back.” Tracking Chad’s tweets reveals that he’s just landed in Dallas, site of this year’s Super Bowl, where he’s received the Android-driven hardware. Something tells us neither he nor Motorola’s tablet will spend the next week hiding in the shadows — look for a lot more screen time for both in the buildup to the big game (and Moto’s big halftime ad). One last note? Chad’s image above was taken using an iPhone 4. Guess he’s holding out for the Atrix 4G.

[Thanks, Zizo]

Motorola Xoom lands in Chad Ochocinco’s safe hands, is ‘pretty awesome’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Feb 2011 03:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Voice is already a pretty popular service and now Google has snapped up a California-based start-up, SayNow, for an undisclosed sum. SayNow’s platform offers voice messaging between individuals or groups and the company already offers access to its services via Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Android and the iPhone. The company claims to have over 15 million users on its apps and services, such as SayNow Phone, SayNow Broadcast, Big Call and Chit Chat. It isn’t clear what Google is planning to do with the platform at the moment, but it’s expected that it will eventually be integrated into Google Voice.

Google acquires start-up SayNow for its social voice platform, By Ubergizmo, 26 Jan 2011. Top Stories : EVO Shift Review, iPhone 4 Review,

According to the WSJ, Google is in talks with publishing houses for a “digital newsstand” Android app, for selling daily mobile newspapers and magazine subscriptions through. But what about Amazon’s Android Kindle app, which already does that? More »

It’s not official but that image above sure as hell looks like an official AT&T training document. AT&T already announced that it would carry the Samsung Galaxy Tab but has been coy with details about launch date, pricing, and custom apps. Now, if the screengrab above can be believed, we know that it’ll hit AT&T shops on November 21st for a “HQ recommended” price of $649.99 without contract and featuring the same data plans (250MB for $14.99 per month or 2GB for $25 per month) AT&T offers alongside its $629 16GB WiFi + 3G iPad offering. Right, that’s 20 bucks and change more for half the display and $50 more than the base price of Verizon’s Galaxy Tab offering. Of course, AT&T will preinstall the Nook eReader and the AT&T Account Manager app for on-device activation and monthly credit refills. Not sure that’s worth the premium though. Hold tight to see how this plays out as we should see an official pricing and launch date announcement any day now.

[Thanks, tipster]

Galaxy Tab hitting AT&T on November 21st for a $649 premium? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 03:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Instant on a PC browser has always been a clever idea in search of a use case. With the new mobile beta for Android and iOS, the search giant has found its first.

“Wouldn’t it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just a moment to find the information you need?” writes Google engineer Steve Kanefsky.

Indeed. With fast hands and a full QWERTY keyboard, the time between typing “Google Instant” and “Google Ins” is minimal. On a non-PC keyboard like a phone, e-reader or remote control, it’s considerable.

To activate the beta, you need to be running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or iOS. Then go to google.com in your mobile browser and tap the Google Instant “Turn on” link beneath the search box.

The only trouble with Google Instant on mobile devices is the net connection. Google Instant works by making server calls with each stroke. To even make it work in a mobile browser, google had to create a new AJAX and HTML5 implementation to dynamically update the page with new results.

On a good Wi-Fi network, that’s no big deal. On 3G, it’s not a major problem. On (gasp) EDGE, it can actually make search much, much slower.

“With Google Instant on mobile, we’re pushing the limits of mobile browsers and wireless networks,” Kanefsky writes. “Since the quality of any wireless connection can fluctuate, we’ve made it easy to enable or disable Google Instant without ever leaving the page. Just tap the ‘Turn on’ or ‘Turn off’ link.”

See Also:

• How Google Instant Could Reinvent Channel Flipping
• Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar
• Google Debuts 'Instant' Search (Updated)
• What's In A Search, If You Don't Hit the Search Button …
• Google Adds Gesture Search to Android Phones
• Google Beefs Up Voice Search, Mobile Sync

For a quick download on the top tech stories of the week, check out the latest Gadget Lab podcast — just 12 minutes long this week, yet packed with everything you need to know.

In this week’s podcast, we give you a hands-on look at the BlackBerry Torch that was introduced last week. We finally got our hands on one, posted our review of the Torch, and show you how it looks in the podcast video.

Also this week, Motorola announced its new Droid 2, which looks a lot like the old Droid. We’ve got one of these, too, and we show off its main differences in the video.

In other Android news, Google announced enhancements to Android Voice Search, so you can now use it to compose e-mail messages, text messages, search for music and more.

Special guest Ryan Singel, from Wired.com’s Epicenter and Threat Level blogs, joins us to explain the biggest tech story of the week: How Google turned into a carrier-humping net neutrality surrender monkey.

And finally, we take a quick look at the $80 Looftlighter. I was excited to test this out because the publicist said it was a “flamethrower.” In fact, it’s more like an outsized curling iron. We haven’t tested it for its intended purpose yet (starting charcoal grills and fireplace fires) but we do apply it to a business card in the studio, with disappointing results.

If anyone wants to send me a real flamethrower to test out, I’d be eager to hear from you.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our smiling faces, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds.

Or listen to it here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #85

See Also:

• Gadget Lab Podcast: BlackBerry Torch, Universal Chargers, and More
• Wired Gadget Lab Podcast: 3-D Phones, iPhone Flaws and More
• Gadget Lab Podcast: Dell's New Tablet, Sluggish iPhone Uploads and More
• Gadget Lab Podcast: The Death of Kin and Other Wireless Drama
• Gadget Lab Podcast: Droid X, iPhone 4, Android 2.2
• Gadget Lab Podcast Returns: E3 Gadgets, Dolby 7.1 and More

Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.