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* Image: Stan Musilek * __Party in Your Pants __
If you're going to waltz right into a party and commandeer the stereo, at least have the decency to put on a good show. Pull this piece out of your hipster holster, jack it into the hi-fi with a 3.5-mm plug, and get the joint jumping. The Pacemaker is a fully functional DJ system — complete with a touch-sensitive crossfader, color TFT screen, and four club-worthy digital effects. Any two songs from its built-in 120-gig hard drive or a USB-connected computer can be cued up into dual audio channels that can be mixed to create the next great triumph of copyright infringement.
Pacemaker: $700, www.pacemaker.net
Photo: Stan MusilekText Appeal
Your typical laser printer looks like something out of Logan's Run — and not a cool something like Farrah Fawcett. We're talking about those beige boxes that passed as cars of the future. Samsung's out to change that with a swank printer designed to be flaunted instead of hidden in a dusty corner. The glossy ML-1630 looks like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it's considerably less bulky. Engineers slimmed down the machine by spreading out its printing engine — the components that spray the toner and melt it onto the paper — over a large area. The resulting rectangular sculpture is only 4.8 inches tall. With its glowing blue, touch-sensitive controls, it begs to be shown off — perhaps as a pedestal for that Millennium Falcon replica.
ML-1630: $199, www.samsung.com
Photo: Stan MusilekBook Mobile
Sony's first Reader was a technological high five, proof that e-ink was paper's first viable silicon surrogate. But it had one teensy problem: It was a total drag to use, with a cumbersome joystick and the page-turning button located on the left side of its case — where, for readers in the West, the spine of the book would be. Not intuitive. The second iteration, thinner than a CD jewel case, makes up for the sins of its father with a simple four-way navigation button and a right-side page flipper. Along the way, Sony made some other notable improvements: It tripled the onboard memory to 192 megs, enough to hold 160 books (you can add more storage with an SD card or a Memory Stick). The company also swapped in a display that refreshes 40percent faster, and instead of requiring an annoying proprietary program to load the thing with books, the new reader is a USB mass-storage device, so you just drag and drop anything you want to read onto it — even text files or PDFs. Gimme five, Sony.
Reader Digital Book: $299, www.sonystyle.com
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