Gadgets & Gizmos October
Your Very Own Sputnik
While most people will never experience space flight, now at least your ashes can. Interorbital plans to start launching TubeSat Personal Satellites from their spaceport on the island of Tonga sometime later this year. For a mere RMB 50,000, you buy rights to a pop can-sized cylinder and load it with scientific equipment, video cameras or your earthly remains. Launched to a height of 310 kilometres above this mortal coil, it will burn up re-entering the atmosphere after spending several weeks touring the planet – a quick, bright flash against a starry sky.
Price: RMB 52,560. Web: www.interorbital.com
Think Different
Usually dismissing iPads as either uninteresting or ‘so last year’, hipsters can now be seen in public with the popular Apple product without fear of embarrassment – if they sheath it in this official Etch A Sketch case. The bright red facsimile of the old-school children’s toy is as whimsical as it is retro. It even has a little flippy kickstand for landscape mode. Many may glance at the case and think it’s sort of cute, but not a particularly good value; your hipper-than-thou peer will simply shake their head condescendingly and say you simply don’t understand.
Price: RMB 255. Web: www.thinkgeek.com
Good Vibrations
With this hand-sized bacillus, you can magically turn absolutely any object into a speaker! Using the science of vibrations, the Rock-It 2.0 portable speaker parses your digital beats into vibratory sequences, shooting it through a cord to what can only be termed as a jiggily-pad, which shakes the object you’ve stuck it to, creating music. Hollow items – drinking glasses, cardboard boxes – work best, but it also performs on things like tables, home appliances and felines. All that’s needed from you are two AA batteries and a headphone equipped audio device.
Price: RMB 320. Web: www.origaudio.com
The Need for Speed
This OCZ RevoDrive 960GB solid state drive with an incredible 1.5GB/s of bandwidth and 230,000 4KB random write IOPS is every computer nerd’s storage solution dream. Unfortunately with a current price tag of over three grand USD, it’s a tough trade off between purchasing one of these or 400 bags of Doritos. Hopefully Moore’s Law proves itself once again, and within a year or two the prices on blisteringly-fast drives such as this drop from the stratosphere to something much more affordable.
Price: RMB 20,425. Web: www.newegg.com
