Posted on: Tuesday, June 4, 2002

Tech Toys

New products to delight the techie / Compiled by Gannett News Service

Online tutoring

ESylvan, an electronic sibling of the Sylvan Learning Center, has started an online tutoring service for children in third through ninth grades.

To make it easier for student and teacher to talk, students using the service are equipped with a $150 starter kit that includes a drawing tablet, a digital pencil and a hands-free headset, all of which can be hooked up to a Windows PC with at least a 56K modem.

Student and teacher then can write messages on the computer screen or talk through the headphones.

The initial assessment fee, which includes online tests in reading or math, costs $135. Online tutoring with a certified instructor cost on average about $38 an hour.
• www.esylvan.com

Stylish camcorder

If you like to coordinate your fashion with your high-tech gear, Sharp has two Viewcam digital camcorders worth checking out.

The VL-NZ100U comes in silver while the VL-NZ1O5U is available in black chrome. Both weigh just one pound, are about the size of a paperback book and sport a 3-inch color liquid crystal display (LCD), a 10x optical zoom and a 300x digital zoom. They can be connected to home computers via two interfaces. The IEEE-1394 (FireWire) connector is used to transfer video, while the Universal Serial Bus (USB) port exchanges still photographs. Both cameras also come with 8-megabyte SmartMedia cards that can record still images and short videos in the MPEG format. Longer videos also can be made on miniDV tapes.

Each camcorder costs just under $700.
• www.sharpusa.com

Affordable laptops

Fujitsu touts its new LifeBook A Series as an affordable line of notebooks that can do the work of desktops.

Each notebook measures 12.6 inches wide-by-10.2 inches deep by 1.4 inches high, weighs 5.9 pounds and comes with a 14.1-inch active-matrix color screen that supports resolutions up to 1,024-by-768 pixels.

For $1,549, you can get a model with a 1-gigahertz (GHz) Intel mobile Pentium III processor, 128 megabytes of memory, a 20-gigabyte (GB) hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, an external floppy disk drive, a 56K modem and Ethernet networking.

The $1,699 model adds a 30 GB hard drive, 256 megabytes of memory and a combination DVD/CD-Rewritable (CD-RW) drive. A $1,799 model adds a larger 40 GB hard drive and built-in 802.11 wireless networking.
• www.fujitsu.com

Free to roam

If you're planning to buy an extra controller for the GameCube console, you might want to hold off until June 10.

That's when Nintendo will release the WaveBird, a wireless controller that can operate up to 20 feet from the console. WaveBird comes with a receiver that plugs into one of the controller sockets on the GameCube, and it works on any of 16 user-selectable frequencies.

The $34.95 controller runs on two AA batteries, which Nintendo says provide about 100 hours of play.

According to the company's Web site, "The RF (radio frequency) standard enables the wireless connection to stand true — even under the covers or behind a wall. With 16 different channel frequencies to choose from, four WaveBird controllers can easily hook up to a single machine, enabling a totally cordless multiplayer experience."
• www.nintendo.com

Store 5,000 tunes

A new generation of digital music players can store hundreds of your favorite vinyl albums and audio CDs in a compact device that's small enough to carry in a pocket or clip to a belt.

Take the new Rio Riot from SONICBlue which includes a 20-gigabyte hard drive that can store the equivalent of 400 audio CDs, or about 5,000 individual songs.

The $400 device is the largest hard-drive digital audio player on the market, with about twice the storage space of Apple's newest iPod. But it also requires about twice the bulk of Apple's player.

One of the best features of the Riot is the sound quality. Songs played from the Riot sound better than the same tunes played from a desktop PC or other portable devices. The unit is equipped with a digital equalizer for tweaking the sound, and it even has an FM tuner.
• www.riohome.com