Feisty Singapore startup EDS Lab is showing off their WiDRIVE in a small booth tucked deep in the bowels of CeBIT. The WiDRIVE is an 802.11b/g WiFi drive enclosure for 1.8 and 2.5-inch drives. There are other wireless disk solutions available, but WiDRIVE claims theirs is the only portable solution (yeah, it has a rechargeable battery rated for 2-hours of continuous op) which provides direct access to disk from your laptop. In other words, if you’re running XP then it looks just like a regular ol’ disk drive — hell, you can even boot your OS from it…or so says EDS Lab. We got a demo of the product running video off the WiDRIVE which er, worked. However, it lurched noticeably at times albeit in a convention center hall flooded with about 80 different WiFi networks. So that means it won’t work in the Engadget mansion but it should work in your largely interference free living room without a hitch. Should. Still, they have a few months to work out the kinks since the WiDRIVE won’t be turned-out proper until July for about $95 — Europe first, and still you gotta pony up for the disk, son.

It’s all packed in — no external antenna protruding from these enclosures.

 Available in white or black as these things generally go

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From Engadget

 

We know this company’s named iQRIO and all, but jeez, love the M1 or M2 much, guys? Their CamP3 seems like a pretty obvious knock of Sony’s unique — if unusual — digital camera, except it adds MP3 playback and uses SD instead, though we think it’d be much funnier if they actually licensed MemoryStick and used that. It was a prime candidate for our Keepin’ It Real Fake series, but it fell short by not actually being called the M3 or the Sorny M1 or something of the like. Sorry guys, better luck next time. Now you just get a regular mocking Engadget post.

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Far be it from us to dispute anyone’s claims to the world’s first of this or that, but we’re not quite sure what Japan’s SEL and TDK are getting at here. They’re claiming to have co-developed the first bendable radio, an RFID chip built on a bendable plastic substrate using thin-film transistors. No external battery is needed, making this device great for business cards or other bendy situations. The problem is that Philips just did about the exact same thing last month, making this valiant effort — by our calculations at least — not, um, first. Sorry guys, better luck next time.

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From Engadget

After an on-again, off-again review process that finally culminated with full State Department approval last year, the US government has finally issued its first passports containing RFID chips. The embedded chips in the new passports — which are being issued to a group of diplomats as part of a pilot program — contain the same information that’s in the printed document, including a photo of the passport holder. Government officials have said that the use of the RFID chip allows passports to be scanned and cross-referenced with security databases more easily, while privacy advocates have argued they’ll make it easier for identity thieves and terrorists to extract information — especially after a security firm successfully demonstrated that they were able to crack the encryption used on prototype Dutch RFID passports. Despite such concerns, the new passports are scheduled to be rolled out nationally in October.

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Is there a reason for Sharp to boast that its DC2J1DZ115 is the world’s smallest WiFi module? After all, unlike the world’s smallest MP3 player, this isn’t a product consumers can actually buy. However, smaller WiFi modules mean smaller, cheaper (we hope), lower-power WiFi devices, so as far as we’re concerned, the smaller the better. Now let’s get these modules into cameras, phones, PDAs and DAPs ASAP!

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E-Ten looks to be following-up their G500 with another GPS device dubbed the Pathfinder, now on display at CeBIT. This PMP sports Windows CE 5.0 and features a 3.5-inch, 320 x 240 LCD touchscreen, 400MHz Samsung 2440 processor, Bluetooth 2.0, 64MB RAM and 128MB flash with MiniSD expansion, an MP3 and (unspecified) video player and even DMB television and DAB radio support for kicks. No word on pricing or availability but considering that DMB is pretty much limited commercially to South Korea and soon, Germany.

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From Engadget

While most of the protests about the spread of RFID technology have been related to privacy and related issues, here’s a new issue to worry about: viruses. Dutch researchers implanted a virus in an RFID chip, and then used it to demonstrate that an infected chip could potentially spread a virus to a database server as it’s being scanned. In theory, this could lead to compromised data in everything from supermarket product inventories to terrorist watchlists, resulting in mispriced ice cream and global chaos. We anticipate that security experts will respond quickly and install safeguards to protect databases — except in the supermarket, where they’re expected to allow tampering so that they can continue getting cheap ice cream.

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