Your Geekness

The wait is over and Apple’s highly anticipated tablet has finally been unveiled. The iPad was  revealed by Steve Jobs at a press conference in San Francisco. It is literally the missing link  between a smartphone and a laptop, and looks basically like an oversized iPhone. Its 9.7 inch  touchscreen is a beautiful thing to behold, as with all Apple products, and its diminutive size  of half an inch thick and weighing 1.5 pounds makes it a very attractive prospect indeed.

The Apple iPad acts as a web browser, e-book reader, games device, photo album, video viewer  and much more. The iPad may well be the ‘Kindle Killer’ that industry insiders have been  expecting from Apple for some time now. The unit is to go on sale in March at a price of $499  in the US, and other territories will soon find out when it will arrive in their stores and for  how much.

The basic model of the new Apple iPad has Wi-Fi and 16gb of storage, and offers ten hours of  use per battery charge. Not bad at all for something so graphics intensive! For 3G wireless,  there’s an additional $130 to pay, and models with higher storage are again more expensive.

Price aside, it is an amazing piece of equipment that it will be interesting to watch the  success of. Is the world actually in need of a device that is in-between the compact size of a  smartphone and the working dimensions of a laptop? I don’t know, but I certainly want one  already.

The Apple iPad features the same accelerometer and touchscreen capabilities as the iPhone and  the iPod Touch, but it sees the realm of touchscreen usability taken to the next level. As  ever, Apple have offered something spectacular, and which a great many people will want to try  out. Thanks to its sleek design, straightforward and intuitive UI (always a beautiful aspect of  Apple’s products) and the capabilities that it offers, I for one think that the company will  have another hit on their hands with the iPad.

We’re seeing 2010 as a new start, and one of the big things we’ve all agreed on is that we have too much stuff around that we don’t use, including a big stack of vinyl. Thus the subject of a USB turntable came up, and our problems were solved. These things are great for people who ant to be able to archive their records for whatever purpose. Our reason was that we wanted to keep the music we’d loved while the records were still playable, and then eBay the vinyl so someone else could enjoy it all. It’s worked out well, as we found the things really easy to use and very reliable.

USB turntables have been around a while, and are superb ideas for serious music lovers everywhere. Thanks to their ease of use and tthe range of models from the budget variety up to hugely expensive professional editions, everyone can get in on act. Aside from installing some drivers, they’re pretty damn simple to set up, and the results you can get from transferring vinyl recordings to MP3 files are really quite impressive. If you’ve got a collection of vinyl you want to keep on enjoying long after the records themselves have either been thrown away or have deteriorated, then looking for one of the best USB turntables is the thing for you. We’re sold.

So here we are in 2010, and all set for another year of geekery, fun, games, collectibles, movies, TV and flaming each other into oblivion on boards (isn’t that kinda what the internet is for?). So what stuff are we most looking forward to this year?

Movies we can’t wait to get our eyes around include Iron Man 2, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Expendables, Kick Ass, The A-Team, Toy Story 3, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (hey, we all need date movies sometimes), Predators, Cop Out, Jonah Hex and a bunch of others.

What about games? The big games for 2010 look set to be titles like Darksiders, Bayonetta and Army of Two: The 40th Day. There’s a huge number of games coming out this year, and it looks to be a good year ahead for the industry, and while hardware sales are slowing, games sales are improving all the time.

There are gadgets, toys, comics and more to come too, and we’ll be bringing you rants on as many of them as possible. Here’s to 2010.

Hey, 1 1 10 was the perfect geek New Year- a binary day!