ConsumerIT - For Europe's High Volume PC Retailers, Distributors & Builders

Quiet for sometime after its debut at CES 2010,  now Notion Ink says it will manufacture their Adam tablet starting November.

The manufacturer blames NVidia Tegra 250 chip problems for the delay in launching the 10" Android touchscreen device.

The Adam will be the first carrying the power-saving Pixel Qi's half-E-ink, half-LCD touchscreen technology. The display switches between full colour LCD (for indoor use) or low-power reflective mode  (gets brighter the more direct sunlight falls on it, similar to the E-ink display in Amazon's Kindle).

The Adam includes a rotating 3MP camera, MicroSD card slot, 3x USB ports, a HDMI port  and WiFi/GPS support. Notion Ink will also supply software through their Genesis app store.

Go Notion Ink

Hitachi's latest hard drive families, Travelstar 5K750 and 7K750 feature the highest capacities in a 9.5mm 2-disk design. The 375GB/platter, 5400/7200 RPM, 2.5" drives come in 750, 640 and 500GB capacities.

The drives are Hitachi's first to feature Advanced Format technology. Advance Format increases HDD sector size from 512 to 4K bytes.

Travelstar 5K750 drives come with 5400 RPM speeds and an 8MB buffer, as well as featuring low power consumptions with 1.4W during read/write operations.

Travelstar 7K750 drives are 7200 RPM, with a 16MB buffer. Hitachi says the 1.8W consumption is the lowest power specification in its class. This drive family is also self-encrypting and features Hitachi's BDE, designed to TCG Opal specification.

The drives feature Thermal Fly-height Control (TFC) and TrueTrack Technology for tracking accuracies in high vibration environments.

Go Hitachi Travelstar

Acer's C20 pico-projector is easy to carry around - it's the size of a smartphone.

The projector connects to either laptop, mobile phone or camcorder via USB or HDMI, and has an integrated SDHC card reader.

Projection sizes vary from 5" up to 66", with 2000:1 contrast ratio and WVGA resolution in 16:9 format. The device combines DLP and RGB LED technologies, which Acer says offer a lamp lifetime of up to 20000 hours.

Speakers are also built in the projector.

Go Acer C20

Why should humans have all the fun? Mattel's Puppy Tweets lets dogs tweet their owners.  Dogs wear a collar-attached device that interprets the dog's physical activity and sends an appropriate tweet (from of a choice of 500 dog-favoured activities).

Dog tweets range from "Chasing everything that moves is a full-time job!" if the dog is very active to "Your comforter does what its name says it does" if it's sleeping.

The device runs on wi-fi and the USB receiver needs to be plugged in a switched-on computer.

Mattel says the tag won't work on small dogs or cats, so Chihuahuas and Siamese are off the grid for now.

Think of the further possibilities as they extend range. Cow tweets for farmers:  "I am grazing,"  "Giving milk now," and "Adding to global emissions, sorry..."

Go Mattel Puppy Tweets