The newest mobile operating system will be available with Samsungs next phone, the I7500 due to be released in June. It’s the first of the big three mobile phone manufacturers to utilise the new Android software for mobile gadgets. Android is open source which will allow anyone to develop applications for it and give access to a phones functionality such as making calls, using the camera and sending text messages.

The phone itself will boast the latest smartphone technology with a 3.2 inch AMOLED touch screen, Wi-Fi and HSDPA connectivity with speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps. It will contain internal storage of 8GB and can take external storage of up to 32GB giving plenty of room for those applications that can be downloaded from the Android Marketplace and your music and video collection. The phone will also contain a 5 Megapixel camera and will be only 11.9 mm thick.

As the Android operating system is a Google product there will be access to a whole suite of Google services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Talk, Google Calendar and YouTube. The integrated GPS receiver will allow the use of Google maps features such as Street View, Google Latitude and My Location.

The software looks to break into Apples market share providing similar services with regards to applications. Time will tell if the creators of the iPhone will need to start worrying.

There are plenty of 30 to 40 something’s that remember when games were games. Those blocky characters being controlled by your thumbs and all you could do was run or jump or just keep firing to destroy everything on the screen. The game play kept us going back for more so it is with a great wave of nostalgia that the Dingo A320 has been imported to the US and hopefully eventually to our shores.

The Dingo is a gaming gadget and aims to cover as many of the retro games as possible. It is capable of playing 8, 16, and 32 bit games from the NES, the SNES, the Nintendo Gameboy Advanced, Sega Genesis, SNK Neo-Geo consoles and the CAPCOM CPS1 and CPS2 arcade systems. You can see the game play on its 2.8 inch QVGA screen that has a 320 x 240 resolution or you can plug it into your TV for a full blown arcade experience.

The device has 4GB of storage for the games ROMS and to increase that just add a miniSDHC card to the available slot. It will even play some Flash based games. You can also store music and video files on the device because it will play a wide variety of those formats and if you have any eBooks this gadget will let you read them through its eBook reader. Other features are an FM tuner and a voice recorder.

Storage space for our gadgets is becoming larger as manufacturers see us storing more and more information in electronic form. For PCs the solution for this has been the traditional hard drives. And with the way they are constructed with moving parts they are prone to failure. Not only that, with the larger size holding more information, getting access to that information takes longer. Solid State Drives look to replace these drives with the company OZC recently launching their range of PCI-e cards.

This range of card is called a Z-card and to fit them you just plug them straight into the PCI-e slot in your machine. Performance wise the 250GB model has a read speed of 450MB/s and a write speed of 300MB/s. A 510MB/s read speed and 480MB/s write speed is boasted by the 500GB drive and the 1TB drive has a read speed of 500MB/s and write speed of 470MB/s.

The cards are set in a configuration of 256GB MLC NAND drives and have a built in 256MB cache to add to the speed. Unfortunately the cost is still too prohibitive for the average user with figures being quoted at over £2500 for the 1TB card. However as the prices come down these will become the norm and improve the performance of our PCs.

I recently saw a concept design of a Mac laptop called the triBook on the internet. Nothing unusual there until I tell you that it came with 3 screens. The main screen was complimented with 2 side screens that folded in towards the main screen. I thought what a great idea for extra screen space. That has to be the way laptop designs go in the future. Now Sharp is releasing a multi screen netbook gadget for the Japanese market. The difference with this is that the second screen is located where the track pad is.

The Mebius PC-NJ70A Netbook is a pretty standard Netbook as they go these days. A 10.1 inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 sits atop a base that contains a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB hard drive, Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, a memory card reader and 3 USB ports.

The track pad has been replaced with a 4 inch LCD screen with a resolution of 854 x 480. It acts as the track pad while showing videos and browsing files. In addition to this the screen can be used for inputting handwriting.

While this is an interesting step forward for netbooks and laptops, I’m praying the 3 screen triBook makes it to the manufacturing stage. It looks gorgeous as well as being practical.

What seems like an age ago, instant photos were the in thing with gadgets such as the Polaroid Instant Camera. As soon as you took the photo, out it would pop ready for your album or to give to someone as a memory of whatever occasion you were at. Now you have to wait to get back to a printer before you can print from your digital cameras or phones. Polaroid has brought back that ability with the PoGo Instant Photo printer.

It stands at 12cm x 7.2cm x 2.32cm giving it a similar size to a regular digital camera. It will receive the pictures from a digital camera using PictBridge and from your phone it can use Bluetooth so there is no need to carry bundles of cables around with you.

The gadget itself uses special heat sensitive paper and the internal technology will print a photo within 60 seconds so you won’t have to wait long to see that embarrassing moment captured on a physical medium. It has a capacity to hold 10 sheets of paper and when the internal rechargeable battery has been fully charged, it will be capable of 20 prints before the next charge is needed.

It comes with a 9v charger and if you want to connect it to a computer you can via its USB port.

For years we have had to suffer the long boot times of our gadgets and PCs. Sitting around for a couple of minutes while we wait for the machine to start up or going to make a cup of coffee instead of waiting patiently by the PC. Recently software has been used to bring the boot time down to seconds rather than minutes, but this, in the case of Phoenix Technologies lightweight operating system called Hyperspace, just takes you to a bare bones system with access to things like the internet and e-mail. For more applications you need to boot into a full operating system.

For decades materials science researchers have been looking for a more physical approach in the form of ferroelectric transistors. Ferroelectric materials give high efficiency and low power electronic memory and merging these with the silicon based circuits used in modern gadgets would give an instant on capability with low power use and higher speed.

In 1995 glue was used to attach different ferroelectric materials to semiconductors, but the glue caused many problems. Since then the ferroelectric transistors that have been created provide a limited data retention time of up to a couple of days instead of the 10 year requirement. But that is set to change with the transistors now being made without the glue layer. However it seems there is still a way to go before it will be seen in our gadgets.

My kids are at that age where I have to host their parties. Having a bunch of 5 and 6 year olds running around the house or a hired room can be trying at the best of times. Hiring a kid’s performer will keep them entertained for an hour or so until its time for them to eat. That seems to be the norm for kid’s parties. But there is a gadget that all parties should have that will make that occasion stand out. It’s a Candy Floss Maker.

Do you remember the times at the fair where you would stand in wonder while watching the man turn you a candy floss stick that ended up looking like an afro gone wild and pink? Well that could be you with one of these contraptions. Imagine the looks on the kids faces while you stand there twirling the stick in the candy floss container catching the sugary threads.

All you need to do is add granulated sugar and switch it on. The central head spins and as the sugar heats up it is sent through the heads perforations in liquid form and cooling into sugary threads. To make different colour candy floss just add the food colouring of your choice.

Over the years I have collected a host of screwdrivers, spanners, hammers and the like and they are all thrown into one large toolbox. So what happens when I want one of those tools? That’s right, I spend half of the day looking for the right tool for the job I’m doing. I’ve tried the multi tool gadgets, but they just don’t seem man enough for the jobs like putting up curtain rails or shelving. There is one that I have found that may change the view of multi tools for us all.

The Kelvin 23 is a sturdy multi tool that looks as strong as an ox. It contains 16 individual screwdriver bits that are interchangeable and are held in its socket by a magnet so there is no chance of loosing one down any inaccessible gaps anywhere. It also contains a hammer, a tape measure, a spirit level and a LED torch for those dark corners.

For those hard to release screws this gadget has a function that none of the other multi tools have and that’s the ability to lock itself at a 90 degree angle giving you the strength to create more torque to loosen that stubborn screw. It also comes with a bit extender for those screws that are just out of reach.

If you are in the market for some more tools then this would be very useful.

What could be better than sitting down in the garden in the sun eating fresh homemade ice cream? There are plenty of gadgets around to help you achieve this, but I don’t think there are any that give you more fun than the Ice Cream Ball.

This is a polycarbonate ball that is 20cm in diameter and you load the ingredients into its metal mixing chamber, close the door and then roll it around for about 20 minutes to get delicious ice cream. As well as the ingredients, ice and rock salt need to be in the ball. This is loaded into a separate area and so never comes into contact with your ingredients.

This is where the Second Law of Thermodynamics comes in, which has the effect of melting the ice as it draws the heat from your ingredients and in so doing will gradually freeze your ingredients. Without the rock salt this will be a slow process and eventually even out the temperature which will be just above freezing. To get the final temperature to below -3 degrees that is needed to turn your ingredients into ice cream the added rock salt creates a mixture that has a lower freezing point than water. This has the effect of drawing more heat from your ingredients and so dropping the temperature to around -10 degrees turning your mixture into ice cream.

So roll a ball and create ice cream for all.