hardware

Nintendo just announced their successor to the revolutionary Wii, to be called the Wii U, at this year's E3 conference in Los Angeles. We've only gotten snippets and tidbits of information, but we do know that the--as in the original Wii--the most important part of the Wii U will be the controller. This time, it's a giant, tablet-like, touchscreened beast that packs an accelerometer, camera, gyroscope, and a full array of Wii buttons.

Building a home studio is now as simple as plugging in a few USB cords. The newest audio gear interacts directly with your computer, eliminating complicated setups and even a couple of pieces of hardware.

Click here to browse through the music gear.

The rapid pace of innovation and the relentless pressure of Moore’s Law means new and better gadgets are always coming to market, but it also means whatever you just bought for several hundred (or thousand) dollars will likely be obsolete in a matter of months (see: the iPhone through the iPhone 4). But a new kind of shape-shifting chip--if it can be tamed and perfected--could change all that, allowing device hardware to be reconfigured when updated designs become available.

Today, Google fully demonstrated the next version of Android, version 3.0--also known as Honeycomb--to the press, finally showing off the completely redesigned interface, the new app strategy, and the first tablet to use Honeycomb: the Motorola Xoom. This is the first tablet to really offer a challenge to Apple's iPad, and one of our favorite gadgets from this year's CES, so it's really exciting to see both hardware and software in action.

The Arduino platform is doing something amazing: bringing hardware development to the masses. It's a sweet little system, with a built-in hardware programmer, simplified programming language, and lively user base that offers plenty of sample code and assistance in the online forums. While this fully assembled solution is a good way to get your feet wet, there are a lot of good reasons to just buy an off-the-shelf processor, make your own circuit board and write in a low level language like C. It can be cheaper, quicker and easier to debug. Here, check out some of the projects I've made and how I pay for my hobby, as well as my hardware setup.

Have you ever found yourself wishing that your Eee PC had a better trackpad, or maybe even a joystick? Well, the Atmel AVR USB key might be your answer.

This little gimmick has been in graphics design studios for years: a clever way to bring a wayward menu bar back from a dual monitor setup without plugging in a second monitor. Essentially, by shorting pins 1 (red video signal out) and 6 (red ground), and 3 (blue video signal out) and 8 (blue ground) on a 15-pin VGA adapter, you can mislead the PC into -- erroneously -- detecting the presence of a second monitor. Then it's just a matter of dragging the menu bar back onto the correct display.

When Seagate originally developed the ST1 hard drive family of devices in 2004, they were remarkable little critters. Measuring just a bit larger than a conventional Compact Flash media card, the ST1 was a full-fledged 3600 rpm platter spinnin’ hard drive. Armed with a large 2MB cache buffer and an average seek time of 16 ms, the ST1 was stoked with Seagate’s RunOn (the heads are forced to stay on track) and G-Force Protection (the heads are removed from the platter during power down) technologies. Yet, the ST1 sported a Type II Compact Flash interface.

Including a built-in SD card reader in the ASUS Eee PC was just one of many smart decisions that went into the lovable little portable (are you listening Apple?). Without a large hard disk, memory cards are crucial for any Eee user wanting to store large media collections, keep tons of applications, or boot multiple operating systems, allowing for a virtually unlimited data storage system without any external add-ons.

As we showed you in our May 2008 issue, Asus's Eee PC has quickly become a favorite of hardware hackers around the web. Here, we offer the first installment of our Eee PC School series. Check back in the coming weeks for more tiny ultraportable tweaking.—Eds.

What good is that portable PC if you can’t type anywhere and anytime? With its ultra-compact keyboard, even touch typing pros will be hard-pressed to avoid frequent mistakes on when the lights go out. To say it’s a frustrating exercise in futility to locate the miniature F3 key in the dark is an understatement. Oops, you just lost WiFi contact by accidentally hitting F2.

If you want a super-light laptop, you have to pay for it, and you have to use Windows. Thats been the (frustrating) conventional wisdom—at least until late last year, when the Taiwanese company Asus rolled out the Eee PC (pronounced as though it were a single long e), a two-pound, seven-inch laptop starting at a mere $300. The tradeoff: It comes with just two to eight gigabytes of flash memory instead of a conventional, larger hard drive, and a simplified Linux operating system that essentially is usable only for e-mail, Web browsing and typing.