Sunday, May 22, 2011

5 Gadgets We’re Playing With This Week

Mashable recently kicked off its Gadget of the Day Series, supported by the Energizer Inductive Charger. Each week, we’ll review five gadgets that catch our interest. In case you missed them, here are the gadgets from our first week — read on for great reviews of Polaroid’s new camera, a WiebeTech hard drive enclosure, the updated Boxee Box firmware, Microsoft’s new touch mouse and the Wow-Keys keyboard.

Looking for even more gadget reviews? This roundup will appear every weekend during the series, and you can check out all of our gadget coverage on the Tech & Gadgets channel.

1. Polaroid 300

Polaroid brings back the nostalgia with the Polaroid 300 Classic Instant Camera. Anyone who loves the unpredictable and often beautiful results you get with the “toy camera” category of snappers, as well as lovers of all things vintage, Lomography fans and hipsters are bound to love this model. Film is costly, but we think the design and color options could help some folks catch the photography bug.

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Polaroid 300 Front View

The lens pops out of the body and doubles as the on/off button.

2. WiebeTech RTX220 QR

Photo and video junkies might rejoice at the sight of the new WiebeTech RTX220-QR, which uses a RAID implementation. It’s also good for small businesses that need to keep their data mirrored or quickly accessible. The RTX-220 QR is pricey, but it does the job and offers a robust solution for hard drives.

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Front View

WiebeTech RTX220-QR is built like a tank. It weighs 11.5 pounds with two drives, but it has a nice handle at the top that makes the system surprisingly portable.

3. Boxee Box

Boxee Box’s new firmware means it can finally support apps with commercial and subscription content, like Netflix. The Boxee Box is unique in the connected device space, because it can deliver content both from the web and from a home network — and the new Boxee web browser is one of the best implementations we’ve seen for surfing the web on the big screen. Plus, it doesn’t take up a lot of room.

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The Boxee Box

Looks can be deceiving. The unique shape of the device may look like most pieces of home theater equipment, but it's small, unobtrusive and can easily be hidden in a corner or behind a sofa or chair.

4. Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse

Looking for a snazzy new mouse? Anyone stepping up from a boring old mouse, and digital nomads who want the best looking kit might find solace in Microsoft’s Arc Touch Mouse. It features a touch strip, which allows you to flick and scroll, tap to page up and down and double tap to middle click. It takes some getting used to, but it’s sleek and it travels well.

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The Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse

Here, the mouse is shown with its wireless nano transmitter.

The curved design feels comfortable in the hand -- the silver bar is the touch strip which offers scrolling at the flick of a finger.

The design is pretty striking. The back end of the mouse boasts a soft-touch finish.

5. Wow-Keys Keyboard

The Wow-Keys keyboard is a regular keyboard with a slot for you to insert your iPhone 4. You can then run programs on your PC screen off your iPhone, and you can type on a regular keyboard to add data to your iPhone. It’s good for anyone who frequently inputs lots of text into an iPhone or iPod touch, and anyone who would like to use a touchpad with a desktop PC, controlling various apps using multitouch. But is it worth the price?

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iPhone as Touchpad