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After getting in touch with out feminine side we decided to bring to your attention the Hello Kitty Action DJ Speaker. Yes my friends this cute as a button mini speaker plugs into your iPod and jigs away like the [kitty] that got the cream.

The ever more entrepreneurial Hello Kitty is positioned in a DJ booth with decks on top of a giant (for Kitty) speaker. On the tech side, the speaker is Mono and not stereo and will use whatever mp3 player or other device it’s plugged into for it’s sound quality.

As speakers go, the Hello Kitty Action DJ Speaker is pretty wack and not in the same class as the En Vogue USB Speaker but then again when it comes to cuteness, Hello Kitty wins hands down…if you’re into that sort of thing….

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I love retro gadgets that combine the old and new school and this MP3 Boombox speaker does just that. GadgetHeat was but a twinkle in my eye when I watched Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing but the image of Radio Raheem carrying around his boombox like a life-support machine was forever embedded in my mind (however, the price of a Sountina NSA-PF1 speaker is closer making you need a life support machine when you see the price tag than any other speaker we’ve reviewed so far).

With the onset of MP3’s and the demise of cassettes (and the dishing out of ASBOS ^^) boomboxes have been a thing of the distant 80’s for a while now. Play.com looks set to change all that with the release of their MP3 Boombox this August. There is also the Spirit of St. Louis boombox which we came accross a while back.

The design of the boombox is deliciously retro (all over-sized-knobs and big square cassette player buttons) but unfortunately it’s all filler and no thriller as the only usable parts are the jack to connect your MP3 device and the speakers themselves which are hidden behind a black grid.

You can pick up an MP3 Boombox for around £8.99 ($17 USD at time of writing) this August from Play.com.

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Creative just can’t stop releasing media players and hot on the heels of the recent Creative Zen X-Fi, have just launched the Creative Zen Mozaic, a snazzily designed portable media player (yes the spelling of Mozaic is how Creative have spelled it, not just my spell-checker playing up). Although the Mozaic PMP allows video playback, the 1.8inch screen suggests that this media player is more music and MP3 than video oriented.
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Creative have used a, shall we say ‘different’ looking design for the Mozaic, hence it’s name and it looks like their design team decided to go out on a limb with this one. The design is a blended mosaic pattern for the keypad and the Zen Mozaic also comes in a range of different colours (pink being GadgetHeat’s favourite of course).
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Feature wise the Creative Zen Mozaic boasts a battery tipped to last 30 hours on a single charge, the pre-requisite FM radio, voice recorder and an inbuilt speaker when you decided to share your musical taste with others whether they like it or not.
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Expected to cost from £50 for the 2GB version, £60 for the 4GB, £80 for 8GB and a yet unknown price for the 16GB Creative Zen Mozaic media player due to be released later this summer.

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Fillias fog was more in touch with the 21st century than we thought. Despite taking a full 80 days to circumvent the globe, the man kept in touch with his peeps via Bluetooth and email. To much of a stretch to swallow? Yeah we thought so to until we had a glimpse at this little gadget.

The Cobalt by Adam Huffman is a very stylish little gadget and we are unsure if it is only a concept at this stage but if it goes into production it will be a genuine collectors item. It has an OLED touch screen that permits easy navigation of its functions by just using your thumb.

The home screen displays the time, your email inbox and any text messages you have received. You can also customize the screen to your satisfaction to display an almost completely analogue screen to a completely digital one and everything in-between.

Looks wise the Cobalt is definitely striking and with Bluetooth connectivity and voice-recognition software installed, the Cobalt is going to be a winner with the gadget savvy whenever it becomes available.

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Iriver have been quiet for a while but are back with their new L-Player. This is a miniscule DAP with a 2” LCD, SRS WOW. You can play your MP3’s, WMA, OGG and ASF audio files as well as MPEG-4, WMV, XVID video (although on a 2″ screen you won’t be seeing much but that never stopped the iPod Nano…).

Currently available in four colors - chocolate (read: brown), pink, black and white. You can also pick it up in a 2GB, 4GB and 8GB sizes.

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We all know the when it comes to (legal) MP3 downloads iTunes is still king but Napster refuses to lie down and is launching a digital Music Store to rival the Apple giant. What gives Napster, the nerve to do this? We find out…

Well for a start the service they offer will be free from copy protection and DRM (the technology that prevents tunes downloaded from iTunes being on played on anything other than iPod technology). Secondly, the Napster venture has 6 million songs at launch making it the biggest on-line MP3 store in the world (look over your shoulder iTunes….).

Napster is being tipped for success because music industry execs want to see a reduction in the power of iTunes which is dominating the market and some say stifling it as well. The Napster service will also be fully compatible with iTunes and be able to synch to a users existing library. Pricing is 99 cents per song and $9.99 per album which is pretty standard as legal MP3’s goes.

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As far gadget innovation goes, Apple are seen as ahead of the pack and not afraid to be different when it comes to design. Well SONY have decided to jump on the bandwagon and bring out the SONY Rolly to US markets. Already available in out territories worldwide, the SONY Rolly is a portable MP3/ Music player. It is definitely different to look at and when you see it moving, you can see that SONY really wanted to show their moves on the dance floor.

This is billed as a portable ‘music entertainment player’ by SONY in other words, a multi-format MP3 player. This is all set to be a cult classic with SONY Rolly forums discussing how best to program your Rolly to do the moves you want and showcasing choreography.

Each Rolly unit comes preloaded with three songs and combined coreography for each song so that when played, the Rolly’s arms and shoulders start moving to the beat as it gets down. It also gets funky colour wise with upto 700 colour combinations as the music plays.

From the Press release:

Made for producing superb audio quality, Rolly features 180-degree,
horizontally opposed stereo speakers. As a result, listeners can enjoy high
quality sound from nearly anywhere in the room.

    Sound reverberates from the surface the device is placed on, whether on
a desk or on the floor. With a digital amp for high sound quality and
speakers with neodymium magnets, powerful audio performance is delivered
from the compact unit.

    Rolly Brings Music to Life

    With built-in robotic technologies, the device is designed to move its
small arms, shoulders and wheels-six moving parts-to the beat of the music.
With about 700 colors in its repertoire, lighting adds to the impact of the
motion.

The SONY Rolly Retails for about $400

Zarva Zippo MP3 Player

Remember Zippo lighters? Those portable mini flame throwers which if used right, ahem, could singe the eyebrows off your classmate…

Well Zippos are back (if they ever went away) and this time the PC Crowd have nothing to worry about because they’re not making new lighters for us to use whilst we smoke ourselves to death, they’ve come back in the form of MP3 Players.

That’s right you can now bang your (MP3 and WMA) tunes out on this nifty little MP3 Player for $27 (almost as cheap as the original lighter!). The Zarva Zippo MP320 MP3 player is a pocket-sized gadget and its miniature screen means you’ll have no luck with getting videos on there but at the price and the size (1GB), you can get a fair amount of MP3’s and it also comes with USB and inbuilt Microphone.

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Looks like Nokia can’t stop innovating new phones and it’s latest babies the Nokia 5320 and Nokia 5220 are no different. The Handsets only requires the sweet sound of your voice to select a track and begin playback. If you whisper ‘ice Ice baby’ the handset will blast the classic poetic lines of that hip hop legend Vanilla Ice. The dedicated audio chip also means that the sounds will not be the usualy tinny crap that that you hear from 17 year olds on the back of buses up and down the country playing the mobile mp3’s for everyone to hear.

The ’say & play’ feature will work for any of the tracks you loaded onto the Nokia 5320 / 5220 and with 8gb of space, that’s about 2000 tracks at your disposal. This is where it gets tricky, out of 100 tracks asked for, the handset will get it right about 80% of the time. The other 20% it will question your dialect and ask you to enounciate (cheeky b*stard). Read the full story