One of the most popular brands of gear in all of geekdom is Apple. Pretty much everything Steve and his fruity cohorts make turns out to be gold, other than Apple TV anyway. Among the most popular devices Apple offers is the iPhone with hoards of dedicated users. If you want to show off your fondness for the iPhone, Jailbreak Toys has the perfect fridge magnets for you.

The individual magnets look like the icons form the iPhone home screen and can be arranged to whatever design you want. Each of the magnets measures 7/8″ x 7/8″ and are made from some sort of epoxy. The outer cardboard packaging is 9.5″ x 5″.

It’s not clear is the iPhone looking frame in the picture above (which could be the cardboard outer packaging) is included or just for showing off the magnets on the website. The company points out that the magnets are not affiliated with Apple. I have to wonder if Apple will go after these guys to stop them from ripping off their icons. You can get your own set now for $12.99 with free shipping if you order three sets.

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In some urban areas where there are lots of cars and people the fastest way to get around is often a bike or walking. In more spread out rural areas riding a bike to work can mean a trek of many miles. A cool new bike concept with a carbon fiber frame and electric power has turned up that makes getting where you need to go cool and green.

According to the designer, the carbon fiber frame is conductive and would be used to conduct the electric power rather than wires. The concept has electric motors between the dual-rims in front and back of the bike.

The concept also uses regenerative braking to generate power for the battery that drives a counterturning axle rather than gears or chains like most bikes use. This concept is a bit farther along than some we have seen, the creator already has a prototype built and in testing. I wonder how the bike protects the rider from the power sent through the frame.

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4G mobile networks are coming and in a few limited areas 4G is already here with Clearwire and Sprint. Those two firms are the only companies who bet on WiMax for 4G in the US. Other wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon are going to use LTE for their 4G network tech. Verizon has announced that it will have its first 4G handset on the market by the middle of 2011.

According to the Wall Street Journal that is about six months ahead of the schedule Verizon had previously announced. The first handsets will use two chips to allow the device to operate on 4G and 3G networks. One big issue that many looking forward to 4G may not have considered is the cost of data on the faster networks.

The WSJ figures that 4G networks may be the end of unlimited data plans in America. Networks are expected to move to metered data usage to help recover the costs associated with building and installing the new networks around the country. Many consumers will not be happy to move to metered pricing.

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As close as I come to playing a musical instrument is the occasional round of Rock Band. If you are a guitarist looking for an easier way to record your songs and jam sessions, using your iPhone or iPod touch the Guitarbud device is just what you need.

The Guitarbud is a cable that lets you connect your guitar directly to your iPhone or iPod touch and offers a headphone jack as well for private listening. Once connected your guitar playing can be recorded using various iPhone or iPod applications.

Once you are done playing you can send your music off to friends via email. The cable is six feet long and doesn’t take up lots of space when you are on the road. The guitar plug is 1/4″ and the headphone and iPhone plugs are 1/8″. The cable requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later and works on second gen iPod touch players with OS 3.0 installed.

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I have been anxiously waiting for 3D home theater gear to hit the market in force. I’m not planning to upgrade any time soon, I figure in six months or so the equipment will be much better and cheaper as well. If you have your credit card in hand and want a 3D home theater right now Panasonic has announced that its 3D home theater is now available in select Best Buy Magnolia stores exclusively.

If your local Best Buy happens to be a Magnolia store carrying the Panasonic gear you can buy the full HD 3D Panasonic system today for $2,899.99. Two components make up the system with the most expensive piece being the 50-inch Panasonic VIERA VT20 3D plasma TV for $2,499.95.

The other component is the Panasonic BDT300 3D Blu-ray disc player costing $399.95. The TV includes one pair of 3D glasses and if you need extra active shutter glasses from Panasonic they will cost you $149.95 per set. The rub is that right now there is no 3D content for you to watch and probably won’t be until later this summer.

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Western Digital is one of the biggest names in storage. The company offers internal hard drives for consumer and enterprise computers along with a full line of external storage solutions for a myriad of uses like the My Passport Studio unveiled earlier this month. WD has now unveiled another new addition to its external line up called the My Passport AV.

The My Passport AV is designed to connect directly to Sony Handicam camcorders supporting the Direct Copy feature along with other devices like TVs and Blu-ray players that have USB ports. The external solution is specifically designed for streaming video content.

The My Passport AV is available right now in a 320GB version for $109.99. The drive will directly connect to the WD TV media player line, Direct Copy Sony camcorders, 2010 Sony Blu-ray players, the PS3, Xbox 360, and some JVC, Samsung, and Philips TVs.

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OCZ is a company that many of us are familiar with and the firm made its name in the enthusiast computer industry with some nice RAM. The company also offers a full line of other flash products like flash drives and SSDs such as the limited edition Vertex drive I talked about a few weeks back. OCZ has revealed one of the cheapest SSDs on the market with the first offering in its Onyx SSD series.

The first Onyx SSD has 32GB of MLC NAND for storage. That’s not enough space for most of us to use the SSD only, but the thing will make for a nice boot drive for an enthusiast machine. The best thing about the 32GB Onyx SSD is the price. The little SSD sells for under $100.

For that much money you get read performance of up to 125MB/s and write performance of up to 70MB/s. The SSD has 64MB of onboard cache and is rated for 1.5 million hours MTBF. The drive works for both desktop and notebook machines.

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Years ago, I worked for a company that had three servers running different applications that were all critical to the business. If one went down, they were out of business until the machine came back up. The scary part was that they were only backing up once a week and were using CDRs to make the backups. Dell has unveiled a new backup solution for businesses that is much more efficient than CDs or tape backups called the PowerVault DL2100.

The machine is powered by Symantec Backup Exec software in several different forms. The backup device comes in economy and performance versions. The Economy version uses a single Intel Xeon E5520 CPU while the performance version gets two of the same parts. The economy version runs 6GB of RAM with the performance version getting 24GB of RAM.

Storage space for both versions is up to four 500GB HDDs in RAID 5 configurations. Dell claims that the DL2100 is 50% cheaper to operate than a tape backup system. The DL2100 can also archive Windows file systems and Exchange environments. The DL2100 is available now with economy versions starting at $8,600 and performance versions starting at under $11,500.

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Data security is at the front of many minds in the business world. With the ease that data can be copied to and from portable devices today and the fact that these devices are easily lost or stolen means sensitive data has to be protected. Kanguru has a new flash drive that has achieved the FIPS 140-2 certification for data security called the Kanguru Defender Elite.

The flash drive is notable for also meeting HIPAA standard in the medical field and Sarbanes Oxley specifications. Kanguru designed the new Defender Elite flash drive to meet the stringent needs of the DoD after it lifted the ban on using flash drives for confidential and top secret documents in the military.

The flash drive protects data with 256-bit AES hardware encryption and offers remote management of the drive. The Elite limits the number of password attempts, has master password support, and can be IP or domain restricted. The drive has a tamper resistant design and integrated anti-virus and malware protection. Pricing and availability are unannounced.

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Lots of geeks and gadget hounds out there are counting the minutes until pre-orders for the iPad are being accepted. There are also many people out there that are looking forward to other tablets and smartbooks. One of the coolest concepts for a smartbook I have seen has turned up that was designed by In-oh Yoo and Sun-woong Oh.

The concept is cool in many respects. One of the cool features is an integrated stand that lets the user stand the screen of the tablet up so they can work more comfortably. You need a case to do that with the iPad.

The coolest feature though is the matching smartphone the concept uses that folds open to offer the QWERTY keyboard used with the tablet. The keyboard is wireless and when folded looks like your average mobile phone and can be used to make calls.

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