Gadget With a View

Five years ago, Patrick Baudisch found that it was getting harder to dial the minuscule buttons on ever-smaller cell phones; he couldn’t see what he was tapping on the keypad while he was holding the phone. What he really needed, he decided, was fingers he could see through.

So Baudisch, a scientist at Microsoft Research who was studying human-computer interaction, started working on something more practical: LucidTouch, a digital technologymeant to give handheld devices the illusion of transparency. An unusual joint venture formalized in 2006 between Microsoft and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, LucidTouch is designed to allow the use of all 10 fingers, unlike the BlackBerry or Treo. 

Gaming Keyboard

Saitek launched the Cyborg Keyboard which is fully customisable, can backlight the gamingkeys in three different colors and brightness.

The red, green or amber backlights can be programmed to highlight the keys most often used in gaming - the WASD, cursor, ‘C‘ and Numpad keys.

It has a touch-sensitive control panel that allows the user to quickly convert the keyboard from normal mode to gaming mode by pressing the Cyborg button.

1GB Camcorder Pen

This quite discrete “secret agent pen” features a built-in 1GB flash memory and it is capable or recording almost 3 hours of video with audio.

Sitting in your shirt pocket, standing in the pen cup or lying on the desk no-one will ever notice as you secretly capture their every move. The built in flash stores the video until it is ready to be downloaded to a computer via USB, and with 1GB of memory you’ll get almost 3 hours of recording time.

Wonden Clamp USB Flash

There are a lot of USB flash drives designs in the market but this one it is kind of special: it is fashioned after a wooden clamp.

Like a normal clamp it attaches to clothes and so can be quite easy to carry around. It is also designed as a decoration for both men and women.

2GB Flash Drive Memory Spy Audio Digital Voice Sound Recorder

Now that’s certainly one of the longer names for any device in my history with Coolest Gadgets, why can’t we just call it a spy voice recorder? Oh yeah, perhaps that will not help it stand out from the rest of the crowd, that’s why. The next time you go to work and tote a USB flash drive, make sure it is this$19.99 model since it sports an advantage that your colleagues’ don’t – it has a built-in sound recorder. Yup, even if it is lying prone on a table, it is capable of capturing crystal clear audio across a 5-meter radius, storing all of the recordings onto its internal flash memory. All you need to do for that to happen is slide the switch and audio recording happens instantly and automatically. We find it rather strange that audio is recorded in WAV format instead of MP3, but good thing its 2GB of internal memory can hold up to 4.5 hours of non-stop recording. Since it doubles up as a USB flash drive as well, this one has something slightly different – an integrated 120mAH Li-battery that takes 1.5 hours to juice up. We would have liked to see something with more internal memory though to keep up with the Joneses.