Blame it on poor usability or just not reading the frickin’ manual, but it turns out that 95 percent of all returned gadgets actually work despite what customers may say or think. That’s right — of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were truly broken. According to Accenture, 68 percent of all returns work but aren’t meeting customer expectations — or they are simply too confusing to use. The other 26 percent are returned due to straight-up buyer’s remorse (AKA significant other budgetary freak-outs). Accenture executive Terry Steger believes that the complexity of gadgets is to blame here, and not the fickle nature of American consumers who tend to give up on product setup within a few minutes. We believe this ia all actually due to the implicit nature of — ooh, look at that shiny thing over there!

Alienware’s AMD-powered Aurora ALX picked up CrossFireX support just as soon as it went live from ATI, but it has taken a few weeks for the technology to make its way over to the iconic Area-51. Said gaming rig is now available with ATI CrossFireX, meaning that you can take advantage of all four GPUs across a pair of Radeon HD 3870 X2s. Full release posted after the jump.

HEATING THINGS UP – CROSSFIREX NOW OFFERED ON THE ALIENWARE AREA-51

For the first time, users can choose between the industry’s two dominant multi-GPU solutions on the same platform

Miami – April 28, 2008 – Alienware – the leading manufacturer of desktop, notebook and entertainment systems – now offers ATI CrossFireX™ on the Area-51® desktop computer. Alienware recently retooled and re-launched the Area-51, its flagship system, with NVIDIA® Quad SLI® graphics.

With four GPUs across dual graphics cards, CrossFireX cranks out not only intense, lifelike graphics but also the raw processing power necessary to manipulate and navigate real-time 3D environments for a never-before-seen gaming experience.

“This is huge,” says Marc Diana, Product Marketing Manager for Alienware. “One of the biggest reasons our customers choose Alienware is unmatched graphics performance. Adding a CrossFireX option to the award-winning Area-51 reaffirms its status as the world’s best gaming desktop.”

It’s not the 3G iPhone, but Colorware’s Stealth iPhone trades in the silver trim and brushed metal back for an entirely matte black motif. It’s also extraordinarily expensive, weighing in at $675 and $775 to the stock model’s $399 and $499. Colorware does throw in a matte black iPhone dock and pair of earbuds, but even that probably doesn’t justify the increased cost. Then again, some people really love black. [Colorware]

The studios won’t like this device one bit. The MZK-NAS02SG1T network attached storage device from Planex. The $524 1TB Gigabit Ethernet block claims “universal access” for all your devices, courtesy of its DigiJuke browser, searching and tagging BitTorrent and YouTube content you want downloaded in the appropriate PSP and iPod (MPEG-4), Wii (FLV), or TV (MPEG-2) format for in-home or portable viewing.

The NAS will also stream audio and video to your iTunes laptops or desktops, DLNA TV, Xbox 360, or other compliant device in the home. A USB 2.0 jack offers one-touch dubbing of USB sticks while a second around back offers storage expansion. It ships with a pair of 3.5-inch 500GB drives, which you may want to swap out for higher capacity drives at a later date.

Apple made some updates to its line of popular iMacs today, including adding the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors. These new iMacs have starting prices of around $1,200.

The refreshed iMacs now include, according to Apple, faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors across the line, a 1066 MHz front-side bus and up to 4GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory. The 24-inch iMac also offers a 3.06 GHz Intel processor and the high-performance NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics as options.

Other features of the iMacs include built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n Wi-Fi networking, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, Gigabit Ethernet, a built-in iSight video camera, a total of five USB 2.0 ports (including two on the Apple Keyboard) and one FireWire 400 and one FireWire 800 port. The updated models are available now.

It might not immediately seem clear why someone would need a device that’s capable of copying data to 60 flash drives at once. But just think of all the promotional flash drives you’ve been given over the years that feature PR material or demo software and you’ll get the idea.

This particular model from Virtual Console features 60 ports with a maximum duplication speed of 5.6 MB per second per port. On average it can fill 60 512 MB flash drives in about 90 seconds, and it will probably take just as long to remove and attach 60 new flash drives once the copying process is complete. The duplicator itself connects to a PC via USB or ‘fast ethernet’ and also comes with the option of enabling AES 128bit encryption, though that feature is sold separately.

But the convenience of the Virtual Console 60 Port Duplicator doesn’t come cheap. The device actually has a pretty hefty price tag of $7,999.

Got a stack of NES carts at home that you’ve been dying to play while traveling? I didn’t think so. Given the capabilities of the PSP and even the DS, I’m kind of surprised anyone would even want a portable way to play old NES carts when they can be so easily emulated. But the FC Mobile portable system does just that. It looks like a slightly fat, overly curvaceous version of the Game Boy Micro, but that’s mostly because of the slot on the back designed to accommodate NES cartridges.

You can either play the games using the FC Mobile’s 2.4 inch LCD color screen, or use the included AV adapter cable to hook it up to a television and enjoy all that 8-bit goodness on your hi-def display. It’s powered by 3 AA batteries, comes in a red & white or silver & black color schemes and appears to only play North American NES games.

Unfortunately the only place to pick one up right now is on eBay, where they range in price from around $30 to $60.

I’m really enjoying this trend of lightweight, easy-to-fly RC planes and helicopters. Not only can they be enjoyed indoors where you don’t have to deal with the wind, but they can easily survive those inevitable crashes that happen every few minutes. The latest addition to the fleet is this RC ‘Jump Jet’ which can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but also fly around the room like a plane. Think of it as a slightly cheaper, quieter and easier to fly version of the Harrier Jump Jet.

Like with most of the indoor RC aircraft available today, the Jump Jet itself uses a small rechargeable battery to keep it as light as possible, while the remote itself runs off 3 AAA batteries. I’ve included a video of the craft taking off and flying after the jump, and to be perfectly honest it really just looks like a 4-bladed helicopter that’s been adorned with small wings and a tail to make it look like a plane. There’s no control surfaces that I can see, and this thing would have to be moving pretty quickly through the air to generate any kind of lift with those wings. However, that doesn’t make it look any less fun.

You can find it at Drinkstuff.com for about $140.

I was lucky enough to spend a few hours talking to the developers of TagSum.com. They were gracious enough to let me take a sneak peek at what they are working on for their users. So, lets dive right in then.

Above we have the main News page. At first glance I noticed the larger story images and a few other cosmetic changes, but upon further inspection a few other elements begin to stand out. Lets take a look at a few. (notice how they made me block out the logo? I can’t say why that is, but needless to say, there are a few other changes on the way that even I can’t divulge.)

First up we see a new vote button. The old button was as basic as it gets. Vote for something if you like it, ignore it if you don’t. Well they tell me that after months of running the site, having a way to vote stories down is also necessary. So here we have the new button. Clean, easy to understand, and the thumbs up and thumbs down highlights in red or green so you can scan a page quickly and tell not only which stories you have voted on, but how you voted. Nice touches guys!

The next change I noticed is the much needed addition of RSS feeds. When asked they admitted that it should have been there from the start, but time constraints were such that it couldn’t happen.

A big visual change that can’t be ignored is the absence of their trendy tag cloud. It has instead been replaced by a sleeker looking box where the tags are shown with a standard icon background instead of the plain text found in a usual cloud. Brian Lovett from the team tells me that the decision was made to go this route for a few reasons.

First, people don’t care about your standard tag clouds. The differing size of the words shows popularity, but in the end isn’t something an end user is very concerned with. They want to get to the popular tags as quickly and easily as possible. We chose the background we did to make tags a standout site wide. You see that icon, you know it’s a tag. We don’t have static categories like most social media sites, so tags play a huge role in navigation and classification.”

Furthermore, the dev team made the tags more useful by adding a drop down box when a tag is clicked. You can now quickly search for news, photos, or videos containing the tag, you can also add it to your favorite tags. Wonder what they have planned with that? Interesting…

From here we talked about the story pages themselves which were quite drastically changed:

The big standouts here are the new buttons across the bottom for “Related Stories”, something called “More Sources”, and the addition of a button to “Submit a Follow-Up Story”. Lets take a look at each one and see what they have for us.

First up we have the “Submit a Follow-Up”

With this feature they have given us the ability to submit related stories. This gives the site a way to track a news story from start to finish as new information is released or updated. I find this incredibly useful, in fact I think this is one of the smartest things they could have done. It really pushes the usefulness of the site as a whole to a new level. When viewing a story you can click on the “Related Stories” tab where you are presented with an easy to follow higherarchy with links to each connected story. Great addition guys!

The new interface helps you determine if a new submission is a followup or a duplicate as well by searching the current submissions for close matches. YOu can then decide if this story is the same one or an actual follow up of some sort. This will help cut back on duplicate stories which no one wants.

This leaves us with the new Home page. They left this one intentionally vague. I felt like I was presenting top secret documents when I was compiling the images. They approved each screenshot before I was allowed to publish them here, and this last image shows that. They kept asking me to block out certain elements of the image at least 3 or 4 times leaving me with the following:

Again, they made me paint over the logo. I wonder why they keep using the word Blend? Hmmm, guess we will find out. So what is it we are viewing here? It’s a full drag and drop custom portal that each user can customize to deliver the content that is important to them. This in all honesty is going to launch this site into orbit as far as I am concerned. It’s something I always thought would add value to the site, but I didn’t know if it was something they were actually working on. My guess here is that the “add to favorite tags” button we discussed earlier may play a role on this page.

So there you have it. Exclusive screen shots from an up coming site that is really making a big push toward revolutionizing social media for the masses. We wish you guys the best of luck and look forward to the new site. Special thanks again to both Micke Christensen and Brian Lovett for giving us the opportunity to check everything out.

[TagSum.com]

I’m still surprised that people actually turn to eBay for selling big-ticket items like this. I can understand there’s the opportunity to make a tidy profit from a rare or in-demand item, but I just don’t see a frantic bidding war happening on something like this full motion flight simulator.

This simulator can simulate either airplane or helicopter flight. The controls are set up for helicopters, but are easily used as airplane controls. The screen is situated 3 to 4 feet in front of the occupants and gives a great sense of being in the action. The simulator uses microsoft flight sim and combat flight software. There are two other units that are also for sale and can be hooked together for simulated aerial dogfights. The airplanes are WWII aircraft and the helicopters are the Apache, Comanche, Little Bird and Huey in the combat program and the flight sim program offers a variety of airplanes or helicopters.

While there’s nothing stopping you from picking one up for your den or rec-room, I think with a starting bid of $100,000 these units are better suited for an arcade where you can actually make some of that money back over time.

Ebay Auction