Phone catastrophe? No problem
Storing contact information in your cellphone makes great sense – until your phone is lost or stolen. To ease the pain, Advanced Wireless Solutions has created Backup-Pal, a portable accessory that lets you back up data on your phone with the push of a button. Information is shared between your phone and the device through an infrared, serial or USB connection. The device can also help you transfer contacts from an old phone to a new one. The battery-operated Backup-Pal will go on sale in April for about $40.
www.backup-pal.com
All your medical records – on a key chain
The MedicKey keeps your medical records within easy reach, even when you’re on the road. Here’s how: The MedicKey staff gathers your medical records from your health care providers and then loads the data, including legal documents such as a living will and power of attorney, onto a USB key chain with 64 to 128 megabytes of memory. To access the data, a doctor places the drive in a USB port on a PC and the information self-loads for easy viewing.
Normally priced at $190, the drive is available for $149 through March.
www.medickey.com
But can it alter the score of the AFC playoffs?
Don’t like what you see on instant replay? When recording onto a DVD-RAM disc, you can make editing changes directly from one of Panasonic’s new DVD camcorders.
Besides recording onto DVD-RAM discs, the new camcorders also work with DVD-Recordable (DVD-R) and DVD-Rewritable (DVD-RW) discs. The $500 model (VDR-D100) has a 30X optical zoom, a color viewfinder and a 2.5-inch color display, while the $600 model (VDR-D200) also includes a Secure Digital memory card slot and still-picture recording with a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. The line’s top model (VDR-D300) will go on sale in March for $1,000. It has three CCD image sensors, a 2.7-inch widescreen display for widescreen recording and a 3.1-megapixel still camera.
www.panasonic.com
A housekeeping crew for your computer
If your PC is always stalling, it may be time for a cleanup. One solution is Winferno’s Registry Power Cleaner. The program scans your computer for registry errors and displays its findings in a report that can be viewed in a basic, easy-to-read format or in a more detailed, technical format. You then decide which files should be cleaned and repaired. Should you change your mind, the program’s backtrack tool can undo unwanted cleanups or configurations. The title costs about $30.
www.winferno.com
