Razer Edge gaming tablet starts at $1,000, pre-orders begin March 1

A favorite of ours from CES, the tablet hardcore gamers have been waiting for is almost here. Razer is taking pre-orders for the Edge and Edge Pro tablets on Friday, March 1 for an end-of-the-month delivery date. Unfortunately, pre-orders are only in America and Canada; those in Europe and Asia will have to sit tight for the Edges’ international release.

Unlike other tablets on the market, both Razer slates are full Windows 8 machines that are powered by Intel processors and Nvidia discrete graphics (they’re more powerful than most mainstream computers with integrated graphics), yet they’re mobile enough for gaming even when you’re not in front of your desktop. For gamers who don’t consider Angry Birds Star Wars to be a “real” game worth of playing on a mobile device, the Razer Edge and Edge Pro makes it possible for you to continue your world domination in Civilization IV, whether you’re at home or on the road.

Both the Edge and Edge Pro share the same 10.1-inch 1366 x 768 resolution touchscreen, but they have slightly different parts under the hood to suit different budgets. At $1,000, the Edge is slightly more affordable as it has an Intel i5 processor and a 64GB solid-state drive. For a larger capacifty internal storage and faster processor, you’ll need to drop at least $1,300 for the Edge Pro, which packs an Intel i7 processor, Nvidia GT 640M LE graphics, and a 128GB SSD. Alternatively, you can opt for the 256GB SSD for $1,450.

At CES 2013, Razer also introduced a bunch of accessories that can transform the tablet into other form factors. For $250, you can snap the tablet into a gamepad controller that adds physical control buttons to make it easier to play button-smashers (as pictured at the top of the page). Or, for $99, you can dock the slate into the home console dock, which frees up your hands so you can play with a game controller. Along with the tablet, you can pre-order the gamepad controller, home console dock, and extended battery accessories on March 1, but you’ll have to wait until Q3 to order the keyboard dock.

Being able to play all your PC games on a mobile device that you can take anywhere is really the holy grail for hardcore gamers, so we’re excited to see whether Razer’s Edge tablets will be more than just over-priced Windows 8 slates. We can’t wait to give these a try when they land in late March. Stay tuned for our full review.

When she is not tinkering with gadgets, Gloria is covering computing news for Digital Trends. She's a regular contributor to Tom's Hardware and Shaw Media, and has previously written for ZDNet and FastCompany.com. She also served as a judge for the 2013 CODiE Awards for the Best Mobile App for Consumers. In her off(line) hours, you will likely find her skating at a rink or watching a hockey game.

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Land of the freelancers, home of the brave: How to find your next freelance gig online

So you want to work on a new project or just want to make some extra money and you’re starting to think the freelancing life might be the one for you. Where to turn?

When you hop onto a popular site like oDesk, Freelance.com, Elance, and Guru, it’s overwhelming. It can seem like all the jobs pay $5 an hour or less, and there are 50 other people who’ve already bid on the job with more logged hours than you.

And the competition for junk jobs where the clients want lengthy articles in “perfect English” at a pay rate of $1 per story aren’t much better. So how do you avoid the programming jobs that want you to perfect a WordPress blog for a $10 flat rate?

The big clearinghouses for freelance writing and programming gigs feature thousands of jobs from around the world and also thousands of applicants. Rich Pearson, Chief Marketing Officer of Elance, says that 50 percent of their freelancers are full-time. However, many of those workers are based in countries where the cost of living is a lot lower.

All the primary sites offer promises of a payment guarantee – though the quality of escrow and payment dispute varies. Each service stresses the need for a full, typo-free profile with portfolio pieces and a full resume as the key to success. That sounds pretty simple, right?

Well, with over a million freelancers on each site, the competition can sometimes be brutal until you find a way to distinguish yourself on that stats-focused systems. A great resume and cover letter might get you the first job, but don’t hold your breath for a full time gig … at least, not a great one. 

There are other options, and also how you can put in the elbow grease to make the big guys work for you:

Elance 

Elance shares its average hourly rates for a plethora of specialties from French translation to C++ programming. Most are around $20 an hour or more, which certainly isn’t a bad starting place. There are tests with the service so you can show off your coding skills – and yes, that is certainly a time investment, but it could end up saving you wasted moments on a dead end gig. 

Pearson says that a third of freelancers get their jobs through invitations, not by applying directly to a post. This sounds great at first: Less time spent looking and more time getting paid!

But it also means having to work a lot of crappy projects to get your stats up so you appear in searches. “Once you have some success, you are shown to more [people hiring] due to our levels system – this is a proprietary way of ranking our freelancers, based on earnings, timely project completion, skill tests taken and activity. As you achieve a higher level, you are presented to more clients and ranked higher on our freelancer search platform,” Pearson says. Another pro tip: Pearson strongly recommends including all the keywords you’re capable of (SEO writing on top of Search Engine Marketing) in order to be searchable.

oDesk 

oDesk has a similar barrier to entry, requiring you to clock in some hours and receive some reviews first. Many clients hiring explicitly list needing at least one completed hour, and 100 hours isn’t uncommon. And their payment guarantee system doesn’t promise payment on fixed rate projects, the most common kind.

Guru 

With a strangely similar interface to oDesk, Guru does pretty much the same as Elance and oDesk on a slightly smaller scale. It has received positive comparisons about its dispute and ratings systems compared to the big guns.

Freelance.com 

Out of all the big companies, Freelancer.com is built on a model of cheap work for clients. It’s homepage proclaims: “Only pay freelancers once you are happy with their work” and “Projects start at $30 and the average job is under $200? which are nice to hear if you’re hiring, but not quite as encouraging if you’re looking for a job. 

FlexJobs 

A massive bin of jobs which can be loosely interpreted as “flexible” (telecommuting, part-time, freelance, etc.), this service requires a subscription—pretty steep at $14.95 a month—for access to its troves of positions (in a board range of fields) and the ability to create a profile which allow you to be found. Their jobs are almost always legitimate companies but often can be found elsewhere for free with a little work.

Freelance Switch 

Heavy on the programming and tech blogging realms, this is a job board that requires an account, costing you $7 per month to apply to positions.

ProBlogger 

An extensive, easy to navigate job board for writers with mostly quality jobs … and some not so appealing ones.

Contently 

Targeted at writers, this site offers a gated sign-up which means that the quality is high—both for jobs and concerning the competition. Still in beta-mode, this is one place where experienced writers can do really show their stuff (success stories include a Boston Globe stringer who turned Contently into a $50,000 a year full-time job with time to write a book) but there aren’t enough jobs for a newbie to push their way in.

“For entry- or mid-level freelance journalists, the best way to get noticed is to have great clips, stats, and logos next to your name. It’s tough for a newbie to break in, but all it takes is one clip at The Wall Street Journal for the WSJ logo to show up at the top of your portfolio,” says cofounder and Chief Creative Officer Shane Snow. However, job finding on the platform is in the hands of those doing the hiring – there’s no way to apply, you really just have to get noticed, so get those clips in. 

CrowdSpring

Taking crowd-sourcing to the design and branding realms, this is a great site if you’re looking to build a design portfolio … not so much if you want to make money. Designs are submitted to each proposal and while payment for the design winner is guaranteed (and sometimes the runners-up get prizes too), with more than 100 entries on average for each project, competition is stiff.

CollabFinder

Another source of more inspiration than a paycheck, this site is great if you’re looking to partner with someone on a project (mostly Internet startups). With success stories like Makers Row, a platform which allows designers to connect with American manufacturers that has gotten more than $75,000 in angel investing, there are plenty of great ideas floating around. However, the monetizing part is anything but guaranteed. 

Jenny writes about technology, food, travel, and culture. She lives in Brooklyn with a MacBook that is like a pet. She has written for The New Inquiry, Interview, Conde Nast Traveler, and Mashable.

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Darksiders, Red Faction, and the rest of THQ’s library up for sale in April

2013 kicked off not with an explosive bang in the video game industry, but a sucking implosion that resulted in one of game publishing’s heavyweights dissolving in spectacular fashion. The once mighty THQ was, after many attempts to stay open, forced to shut the whole thing down and liquidate its assets. Those assets were gobbled up in short order. Ubisoft walked away with the Obsidian-developed South Park: The Stick of Truth; Crytek held onto the Homefront license it was already working with; Koch Media snagged Volition Studios and its Saints Row series. The biggest pieces of the pie were split up and are now being worked into future plans. THQ was a big company, though, and many properties were left unclaimed, including series like cult hit Darksiders. That property and others go up for sale in April.

As reported by Kotaku, everything left in THQ’s once formidable war chest of intellectual properties will be sold to the highest bidders between April 1 and April 15. The line up includes the respected space simulator Homeworld, the open-world almost hit Red Faction, the racing series MX vs. ATV, and defunct studio Vigil Games’ Darksiders.

In addition to those will be two bundles of properties. The first includes Marvel Super Hero, Worms, and Supreme Commander, all of which could handily bulk up a mobile game publisher’s library. The other includes two staples of the PlayStation 2 era, Destroy All Humans! And Summoner as well as a selection of other properties not detailed in the announcement.

Who will buy what? Despite THQ’s cancelling future development of Red Faction and the MX series of racers in 2011, both series enjoyed decent sales. Red Faction: Guerilla sold around 1.6 million copies after releasing in 2008, although the 2011 followup, Red Faction: Armageddon sold poorly. 

Darksiders may find a good home as well. The entire series has sold around 2.4 million copies worldwide across two games. That doesn’t place it in league with comparable heavyweights like God of War III or The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, which sold 4.5 million and 3.6 million copies respectively as console exclusives, but still enough of a foundation to pursue future development on a budget. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance developer Platinum Games has even expressed interest in the series. Producer Atsushi Inaba said on Twitter that Platinum would like to buy Darksiders provided it’s cheap enough.

Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in The AV Club, Salon, Edge, and many others. He is patiently waiting for Namco to finish Klonoa 3.

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Will passwords ever go away?

Passwords: We all have them, and we all hate them. For decades, passwords have been the de facto standard of digital security, protecting our computers, e-mail, documents,social-networking accounts, and mobile devices. They also guard our money by protecting access to accounts with everyone from local utilities to online retailers and banks.

But passwords are also tremendously vulnerable. They’re indiscriminate, granting access to anyone, not just you. Passwords are also tough to manage, so we often keep them simple and re-use them. (Heck, we even forget them.) Advances in computing power mean cracking passwords by brute force gets easier all the time — and security breaches (like Twitter’s) enable attackers to do just that.

With these problems, passwords should be ripe for replacement by better technologies. What might those be, and will passwords ever go away?

Password are a shared secret: you establish your identity by revealing something you know — ideally, something only you know. It’s a form of single-factor authentication, and fails if the shared secret ever gets out (or can be guessed).

One way to improve security is using multiple tests. Multi-factor authentication can mean multiple passwords: attackers and would-be impersonators wouldn’t have to know just one shared secret, but two! (Or three, or four!)

However, multiple passwords suffer the same frailties as traditional passwords — we’re awash in passwords already, adding more won’t help. So multi-factor authentication methods usually rely on something you have or something you are in addition to something you know.

Something you have could be a card, a keyfob, a notebook, or a mobile phone. Something you are is almost always biometric information: your fingerprint, your voice, your face, or perhaps your iris. On their own, these are single-factor authentication: someone could steal your phone or card key, or even lift your fingerprints off a cup or door handle. (A few years ago MythBusters defeated a high-end fingerprint scanner with a photocopied thumbprint and some spit.)

However, combining something you have or something you are with a password can be formidable. An attacker in China might brute-force your email password — but can they also get your phone? Someone might steal your notebook, but will they also be able to crack your password? It’s possible, but usually only for determined attackers: everyday cybercriminals and identity thieves probably move on to easier targets.

Right now, Google’s two-step verification may be the best-known multi-factor authentication, requiring a password (something you know) and your phone (something you have). When a user logs in, Google sends a one-time verification code to the phone registered with the account via SMS. (Google Authenticator app can generate codes if you don’t have SMS service.) Users need both their password and the verification code to access their account.

Of course, this only applies to Google accounts: it’s no help for Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, Amazon, banks, or other places we maintain passwords. The same issue impacts other multi-factor security systems: an RSA SecurID token might let you connect to a corporate VPN, but it doesn’t protect anything else. Today there are over 100 proprietary authentication systems, by some industry estimates, and they don’t work with each other.

One way forward might be an open system. Last week, the Fast Identity Online Alliance (FIDO) formally launched after more than two years in development — and it has some big names behind it, including PayPal and Lenovo. FIDO hopes to create a system for either single- and multi-factor authentication that anyone can use supporting fingerprint readers, facial recognition, tokens, or new technologies that come along. Moreover, FIDO-enabled authentication doesn’t exchange passwords (or fingerprints!), but non-reusable tokens.

“Within FIDO, security and privacy are preserved, because the user information never leaves home,” wrote Sebastien Taveau of Validity Sensors, on behalf of FIDO. “The FIDO-enabled authenticator or device verifies the user identity locally then communicates back to the Relying Party, such as PayPal, that the user is presenting one of a family of approved technologies capable of verifying identity.”

FIDO-compliant products are at least a year off: the protocol and compliance specs aren’t finished, and then devices and services need to get on board. However, FIDO believes the open technology will gain momentum and spread to consumer services — including Android, iOS, and Windows.

“As demand increases for FIDO-compliant authenticators, more products will appear,” wrote Lenovo’s Clain Anderson, on behalf of FIDO. “Though we would expect enterprise markets to drive initial demand, their rate of adoption will drive price and availability for consumer markets to buy into FIDO.”

Multi-factor systems provide better security than passwords — but can also create hassles. A lost or broken phone set up for Google’s two-step verification can lead to a days-long account recovery process. With FIDO, a lost or damaged device will mean jumping through hoops to get another device authorized.

“I think passwords are always going to be part of things,” said Rich Mogull, CEO and analyst at Securosis. “Once you get to multiple factors things get much more complex for consumers. Are people really going to walk around with a dozen keyfobs or being only able to log in to accounts from one phone?”

Fixing these hassles can create opportunities for foul play. After all, Wired editor Matt Honan’s digital presence wasn’t famously gutted last year because someone cracked his passwords: instead, his attackers exploited loopholes in password reset regimes. Multi-factor authentication methods may limit back doors, but when they can’t be used users will always need ways to regain access — so there will always be mechanisms outside a user’s control that could be exploited.

“These things work fine in isolation, but it’s very hard to scale them to consumers,” said Mogull. “I havent seen anything that can truly get past the technology and human behavior obstacles.”

Multi-factor security can also be abused. I don’t use Google’s two-step verification, but for months I’ve been receiving verification codes for random Google accounts. I don’t know why, and Google has been no help.

Banks and credit card companies have a lot to lose from compromised accounts, so in addition to a form of two-factor authentication (asking security questions if they don’t recognize your device) they analyze transactions, flagging unusual activity and suspending accounts if they suspect fraud. Online services can use similar approaches — and Google has been moving in this direction.

“Every time you sign in to Google [..] our system performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made,” Google security engineer Mike Hearn wrote in the company blog. “If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason — maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in — we ask some simple questions about your account.”

These techniques usually require tracking users’ activity — that information has to be stored and may be vulnerable. But risk analysis more commonly locks people out of accounts via false positives: any credit card user who’s account has been suspended when travelling or making an unusual purchase knows the feeling.

As millions of people embrace online services and cloud platforms, passwords are about the only thing protecting our online lives. They can be augmented by additional security strategies — and systems like FIDO could embrace multiple solutions — but passwords won’t be going away anytime soon.

And, fundamentally, our digital lives are only as secure as the companies to whom we entrust them — and last year a study found one in four Americans was notified that their information had been compromised by a data breach. If high-profile failures at Sony, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Amazon, Dropbox, Bank of America, and many (many!) others teach us anything, it’s that passwords aren’t the only weak link in the chain.

Images via Shutterstock/Maksim Kabakou & Shutterstock/Dave Clark Digital Photo

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member of the Digital Trends staff who's played on hit records and had code running in space. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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Id Software co-founder Tom Hall talks about life, death, and the rebirth of Commander Keen

In 2013, id Software’s games endure. Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D, two decades away from their reign in the 1990s, still inform how video games get made. Those games would never have existed were it not for id’s first technological breakthrough, Commander Keen. Today it’s easy to make a great 2D platformer like Super Mario Bros. in Flash or HTML 5, but getting a PC game to support scrolling backgrounds back in 1990 wasn’t nearly as easy. Designer Tom Hall’s baby was a monumental achievement in its time.

Hall’s name may not adorn as many headlines as fellow id founders like John Romero and John Carmack, or even later id employees like American McGee, but he was instrumental in the development of some of the most important and influential video games of all time. Despite leaving id over creative differences, there may not be a Doom today without Hall. He also directed Wolfenstein 3D, which makes him one of the godfathers of the first-person shooter genre. But despite that, Hall’s first love was Commander Keen. 

I wonder how many great ideas get lost because people are playing Angry Birds in the john!

Now it’s back. Sort of. Hall has been away from the video game industry for a long while now, but he’s spent much of the past twelve months trying to break back in with a number of Kickstarter-backed projects. The first was the RPG Shaker, which fell $750,000 shy of its $1 million funding goal (The Secret Spaceship Club Kickstarter page can be seen here). Now, Hall is trying to fund a Keen spiritual-successor, Secret Spaceship Club, and the Little Big Planet-style game creation tools that go with it, World of Wander. But with 3 days and over $350,000 to go, it looks like the package of Worlds of Wander and Secret Spaceship Club may also miss the mark on Kickstarter.

Digital Trends spoke with Hall this week about returning to his roots, the challenges of crowdfunding, the future of video games, and how recovering from illness can change the creative process.

What inspired you to make Secret Spaceship Club and the Worlds of Wander project? Why return to the style of Commander Keen in 2013?

I love that style of game, and there’s a community hankering for that style. Worlds of Wander isn’t locked down to a style, other than platforming. “World Themes” will mean it can look like whatever style you wish. But I wanted to get back to the fun, quirky little sci-fi platformer, and [id Software-owner] ZeniMax was not willing to talk about selling the IP. So Secret Spaceship Club was born.

After seeing fan games pop up that worked hard to change the original graphics, and doing an overview of current tools, it seemed to me there was a need for a game creator that simplified the process down completely, but with an advanced mode once you got your feet wet. It’s time to empower people to create and share games, as easy as they can share MP3s or digital photos.

With just days left, the Worlds of Wander Kickstarter is more than $350,000 shy of its goal. What will happen to the project if it doesn’t hit the goal?

If it doesn’t fund, we’ll keep doing it as a back-burner project. But we really believe in this concept.

It’s been a year since the Kickstarter boom of resurrecting late-’80s, early-’90s game properties started with Wasteland 2, Double Fine Adventure, and others blowing up. How has crowdfunding changed the game industry? Will crowdfunding stick around?

I think it is cresting a bit, but it will stick around. A few high profile projects will get funded, and lots of little ones. It’s a great concept!

What are the inherent challenges in using public investment to make a game?

People want to see your project done before you get the money to fund doing it! And it’s a full-time job answering folks and so on. Also, conveying exactly what you see the final project looking like without having it yet!

How is your creative process different today compared to when you were working with Ion Storm fifteen years ago? Compared to working with id twenty years ago?

…Once I knew I was in the hospital and wasn’t going to die, it was fascinating.

Ideas come to me in the same way. I had the fortune to be able to talk to Terry Gilliam at a movie festival event, and his was the same too. You have the initial concept, and then things appear that stick onto it to define it more and more, and one important one clicks in and BOOM: You have it. And millions of this-just-makes-sense ideas flow from it, and the game design document flows out of it. Most of my big ideas come to me in the shower and the bathroom. I wonder how many great ideas get lost because people are playing Angry Birds in the john!

At ION, it was creating a project for a huge team, so that means a lot of delegating. At id, it was a lot quicker. We needed an idea, I came up with one quick and we’d go forward. The first time we looked around for a matching theme was Wolfenstein 3D.

The first fifteen years of your career were spent working on cutting edge technology. The definition of cutting edge technology in video games is different now; it’s no longer about better graphics and AI, but better services and creative tools. What makes Worlds of Wander cutting edge?

The large amount of work we are doing to make it easy and “automagic” to make data. It should be as fun to edit as it is to play.

Your games have always been primarily for single players, but people seem to think that the purely solo game is going extinct. What is the future of the single-player game?

I, in no way, think the single player game will go extinct. It is true that FPS games need a multiplayer mode, but for other genres, there’s still tons of room for single-player only.

Why do people still play platformers? Why does the genre endure?

I think it’s the genre most akin to playing with toys. It allows vast exploration and achievement, and gives people a character to escape into [it] for a little while. Also 2D platforming creates limits while letting you spend your time on ideas to make the game novel. You aren’t concerned as much about the game engine and high technology as you are about ideas.

Commander Keen was the first quality, smooth-scrolling platform game on the PC, and to a group of its fans, it meant a lot. I have people ping me almost every day with kind comments. To some folks, it made their childhood, when they didn’t have anywhere else to escape. Those letters are heartwarming and mean the world to me. If it has no other legacy, that’s plenty.

There’s an active community of Keen modders, too. So whether the young folks bond with Keen, there’s a generation that remembers him, I think.

What happened with Shaker? Are you and Brenda Brathwaite planning to revisit the project at some point?

Last we talked about it, Brenda was going to make that a paper game. An RPG is so expensive to make, it was a stretch to try a Kickstarter for it.

I understand that you had a stroke in 2010. How did your illness and recovery change you as an artist?

Well, once I knew I was in the hospital and wasn’t going to die, it was fascinating. I had a lower left pontine stroke, so it affected muscles on the right side of my body. Seeing them re-connect or re-learn was fascinating. A few days after the stroke, suddenly it was “OH! That’s how you use a spoon!” I rehabbed three times as hard as whatever they told me to do. 

It taught me to do things now. I couldn’t get Keen back, so Secret Spaceship Club had to happen. I got the camera I always wanted. I am looking at the projects I want to finish and things I want to do more actively. And every birthday is awesome. I get one more!

What will video games look like in 2023?

Ten years from now, we may be moving to a data-centric world instead of a device-centric world. You own stuff, but it’s not local unless you want it to be. It will be too soon to beam images directly into the brain, but it won’t be far off. Phones may be more like the badges in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Games will be on cool bendable screens as thin as paper. All devices will have your data, your media, and your games. That’s why I want to get a head start on that idea with Worlds of Wander.

If you could make any video game, free of the constraints of technology, what would it be? Anything you can imagine.

I want to make all sorts of games, but one closer to the spirit of your question I would make is an MMO mapped to the real world. Your house is yours. People can make their own scenarios in public areas. You can visit anywhere that isn’t government-banned. You can participate in other cultures, see how good or bad it is in other cities. Re-spec your race and class and gender to see what that is like. You could experience what it’s like to live in a palace, or try to survive in a third-world country. And then time-shift to other eras and do the same. I figure that would only cost a half a billion to make well. Any takers?

Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in The AV Club, Salon, Edge, and many others. He is patiently waiting for Namco to finish Klonoa 3.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 goes offline on Nintendo Wii U

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 on Nintendo Wii U, touted by Nintendo as a major selling point for the console back in September, has had a rough go of it since coming out in November. Estimated sales of the game are around 160,000 copies, or around 72 times fewer copies than on Xbox 360. With staggeringly low sales, it’s no surprise that very few people have bothered to play Black Ops 2 online using the Wii U. One week after the game’s release, when servers should have seen peak traffic, fewer than 1,000 people were playing the game. As of this writing, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Wii U players couldn’t play online if they tried.

On Call of Duty: Black Ops 2’s status page for monitoring service stability, the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC editions of the game are all listed as “Defcon 5,” meaning every online service and mode is active and accessible.

The Wii U edition, however, is currently at “Defcon 2,” meaning “online services have degraded” and some players may have “difficulty accessing online games.” Some press outlets like Joystiq are reportedly unable to connect to an online game at all.

Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in The AV Club, Salon, Edge, and many others. He is patiently waiting for Namco to finish Klonoa 3.

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Dell’s Project Ophelia Android-powered ‘PC’ fits in your pocket

Tired of lugging your laptop around with you to and from the office? Sick of dealing with the hassle of having to remove your laptop at airport security when you already have so many other things to remove (shoes, belts, jackets, toiletries!)?

According to CNET, Dell is working on a new creation dubbed Project Ophelia: a USB-sized, Android-powered HDMI port that plugs into any computer monitor or television (provided it’s equipped with an HDMI plug, of course). The device lets users access locally-stored files, plus it allows for remote access to other desktops and the Google Play store, including apps, movies, and television shows.

Of course, if you’re connecting to a television rather than a computer, you’ll need to be sure to have a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse handy – which, for travelers, are much lighter to tout around than a full-sized laptop. Plus, you don’t have to empty these from your bags when going through airport security.

The plug can store up to 8GB of internal storage, but this can easily be expanded by using the device’s microSD slot. However, if you don’t want to rely on just the internal storage, you can use PocketCloud to connect to your home computer and access all of your files without over-burdening the internal storage of the plug. You can even upload from and download to your home computer. Oh, and did we mention that despite running on Android, you’ll even be able to use this on an iOS device.

Project Ophelia will be powered by Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean and runs on a 1.6GHz dual-core Cortex A9 processor. The best part? Besides being able to throw your “computer” into your pocket, it will cost you less than $100.

Spending a childhood engrossed in such technologically inspiring television shows like Voltron, Small Wonder, and Power Rangers, it's really no surprise that all things digital would continue to inspire Josh to the point that he would one day make a living writing about the things he loves. After graduating from SUNY Purchase in 2006 with a degree in journalism/anthropology, he spent years working as an editor for Travel + Leisure. Josh doesn't look forward to a Cylon takeover, but he does eagerly await the day he can become half cyborg.

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Ford and GENIVI Alliance could be a major tech triumph for the Blue Oval

Ford continues to push the envelope when it comes to in-car technology as the first American automaker to allow the GENIVI Alliance access to its AppLink code.

AppLink, which operates with Ford’s SYNC in-vehicle communication system, enables drivers to take control of compatible smartphone and tablet apps through dashboard buttons or voice commands.

GENIVI is a non-profit industry alliance committed to driving the adoption of in-vehicle infotainment open source development platforms.  

Under the partnership, Ford will give GENIVI developers access to all of the code and documentation required to implement the AppLink software into the vehicle audio system that allows for two-way communications with Google Android and Apple iOS devices.

“Ford wants to see app developers succeed in their new work with the auto industry,” said Doug VanDagens, global director of Connected Services at Ford.  “Contributing the AppLink software to GENIVI demonstrates our commitment to be developer-focused which supports our driver for consumer-focused innovation.”

The GENIVI partnership follows Ford’s announcement of the industry’s first open mobile app development program at the 2013 International CES this past January.

But Ford’s push to stay at the forefront of in-car technology has not come without some risk.  The automaker has come under fire a few times for SYNC with concerns that operating the technology is too distracting for drivers, forcing Ford to make a number of improvements to the system.

Still, SYNC has still been a major selling point for the automaker in luring in new customers. 

Last November, Ford celebrated the 5-millionth vehicle sold with SYNC since the carmaker and Microsoft first started collaborating for the groundbreaking technology in 2005.  And the partnership with the GENIVI Alliance gives the automaker an additional development resource to help pull in the next wave of consumers.

Marcus Amick has been writing about the world of cars for more than ten years and has covered everything from new automobiles to celebrity wheels. The longtime Detroiter, who now splits his time between Los Angeles and the “Motor City,” has penned works for a number of national publications including Automotive News, Rides magazine and Automobile magazine. Amick also works as a freelance consultant providing insight on automotive and related lifestyle trends.

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