Gateway has decided that it will halt the sales of computers through its web site, and will concentrate instead on selling PCs via third party stores and other online retailers. This is the direct opposite of what Dell is doing at the moment, with most of its sales happening through online orders, while their foray into brick and mortar stores have been less than encouraging to say the least. Never mind about Dell – we’ll look at Gateway for the moment. Gateway will be cutting direct online sales to consumers so that costs can be further reduced and its business model can be aligned with parent company Acer. I suppose this comes as no surprise, as it is always better to remove an ailing part of the business instead of hoping that one day, a spectacular turnaround will happen.

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The Sansa Fuze from SanDisk, is a cool little MP3/4 player along the same vein as the iPod Nano. We’ve recently been sent one to play with so here are our thoughts and findings (or a review so to speak).

Aesthetically the Fuze is a cute little player.The physical UI consists of a rotating front dial which also acts as the 4 navigation buttons with the center button for selection. The display crisp with a resolution of 220 x 176, large enough for watching the odd music video but you wouldn’t want to watch a feature length film on it. Sound quality was good (though as with just about any MP3 player the supplied headphones aren’t the greatest). What most impressed me about the Fuze are the extra features that you don’t find on other (note iPod) players, including:

• Built in microphone
• FM radio
• microSD Slot, a really cheap way to expand the capacity
• Easy to transfer files (drag and drop) without the need of propriety software

Though there are a few downsides:

• Propriety USB connection, it obviously comes the cable but a standard mini USB connection would be much more convenient especially for charging
• You bookmark videos but not audio books

The Fuze comes in 2, 4 and 8GB versions with prices starting from ~$70 at Amazon.

If you fancy winning our review unit be sure to check out our next coolest gadget of the week (don’t want to miss it, sign up for our free daily email digest).

Google could end up bitten in the back by their ex-engineers as a group of them have founded a new search engine which is touted to cover three times as many Web pages compared to the monster known as Google. Man, and to think that we just celebrated the milestone of Google having indexed a trillion pages – it will be amazing to see how this start-up manages three trillion. The new company is known as Cuil Inc., will be launching it’s search engine today and hopes to deliver much better results compared to other major search engines. How does it do so? The answer lies in searching across more Web pages and studying them more accurately, leaving Yahoo! and Microsoft something to ponder upon. Perhaps they should now start talking to each other again about a merger if they are to survive the coming onslaught.

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Fashionably Geek has brought a new take on what evolution is about – at least from the Lego perspective. This t-shirt shows how a piece of Lego “goo” matures into a full fledged Lego man, complete with the famous yellow face and pincer-like hands that we’ve all come to know and love. It will retail for $19.95 each, and makes a statement to everyone that you’re in love with Lego bricks.

Product Page via Nerd Approved

Nintendo Wii owners have long suffered from the lack of a huge storage solution as there are more games that they’d like to keep on the console than what Nintendo originally thought gamers would need. Humans are a hoarding lot after all, so it makes sense for Nintendo to forsee a new development with a new sense of urgency that will expand upon the current paltry 512MB of internal flash memory found in the Wii. Traditionally, downloaded games and extra Wii content can be transferred to SD memory cards for posterity, but I’d much sooner have a hard drive in my Wii for storage purposes since deleting and re-downloading content is a big hassle in this day and age. If you’re a Wii owner and should a new model surface with a built-in hard drive, would you purchase a new one?

Source: PC World

Google has announced a new milestone – the search-centric company has now indexed a trillion pages, and this number won’t stop there as they are growing at a steady rate of several billion pages per day. According to Google, they do not index every individual page out of the trillion figure, since “many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content.” This makes sense since many pages consist of duplicate URLs, while others contain multiple pages with similar content. This is in stark contrast to Google’s first index that had a mere 26 million pages, with the company hitting the one billion mark back at the turn of the millennium. I would say that blogs have played a major role in hitting the one trillion mark. Well, what’s next after a trillion?

Source: Techtree

Sprinkler IQ from New York is one company that goes all out to help you save water, and by doing so, it also helps you save the environment as well. The company deals with the development of smart irrigation systems, and is now offering homeowners, property managers, building owners and landscape contractors a way to save anywhere from 30% to 70% on their landscape watering bills with a newly developed patent pending technology. The Sprinkler IQ won’t be so high tech as to require a computer or a permanent Internet connection before you start to save precious drops of life giving water, and even better news in this day and age where the economic crunch is hitting everyone hard is the missing monthly subscription fees for this service, despite the fact that the user will start to save money and water right from day one.

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Hasbro decided that enough’s enough, and will take up the mantle to sue creators of Scrabulous, a knock-off of their hugely popular word game, Scrabble. It seems as though the online game has infringed on the Scrabble North-American rights which falls under the wings of Hasbro after acquiring the assets of bankrupt company Coleco. In addition, since Scrabulous is available on Facebook, Hasbro has also pleasantly informed the social networking site to block the Scrabulous online game that has a pretty impressive following, attracting up to 500,000 users per day. I find this to be a rather disconcerting piece of news since Scrabulous is not new, having been around since 2006. This could be due to the fact that Hasbro is trying to push its way around after being snubbed by Facebook users who preferred Scrabulous despite the fact that an Electronic Arts and Hasbro collaboration have yielded an official online Scrabble game.

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