New Samsung Litmus And Diamond Mp3 Players

Everybody’s been releasing some new multimedia player or television in the last week you’d think there were some week long event on or something. Samsung, once beleved to have been giving up the mp3 player market, has announced the release of two new, good looking mp3 players the U4 Litmus and the Q1 Diamond mp3 players.

The U4 Litmus has apparently been designed with the timeless look of litmus paper and the way that the colours sort of blend. 2GB or 4GB capacity, 16 hours of playback on a standard charge, and advanced sound mechanics make it sound good as well as look pretty good (although, I’m still not so sure about the whole Litmus thing).

The Diamond is pretty much a step up, as you would imagine and as well as a design inspired by diamonds (probably) in black, white, or silver and models range up to a 16GB version. The 2.4 inch TFT LCD means that the Q1 Diamond from Samsung will also happily play 4 hours of MPEG4 or WMV movie files.

No specifics (that is, price or release date) have yet been announced by Samsung so keep your ear to the ground.

Enter At Your Own Risk

Occasionally we become a bit complacent over the design of certain everyday items but fortunately there’s always a designer willing to come along, break the mould, face unbearable obloquy and right the balance of the universe once again.

The doorbell could potentially be seen as one such item. Innovations like the obnoxious chime doorbell and the constantly lost portable doorbell have thankfully been replaced by the mundane and ordinary. Designer Li Jianye has different ideas and has created what can only be described as geekiest looking doorbell even dreamt up.

The Enter doorbell is shaped like the Enter key on a stadard computer keyboard – a satirical look at a digital age or a bit of fun for the technically addicted? You decide. One thing’s for sure, it’ll probably raise a smirk on all your visitors even maybe the Jehovah’s.

The chime should sound like an old tape deck computer when it was loading, and then you’d have no option of ignoring it the next rime it screeched. OK, so it’s not particularly practical, nor does it really break down any unseen barriers but hey, it’ll raise a smile before it gets nicked.

iRiver Announes Spinn And P20 Multimedia Devices

IFA 2008 has certainly been throwing up some cracking new products for us digital consumers. One such piece of gear is the iRiver P20. The P20 is, as you would expect, primarily a multimedia player enabling you to view images, listen to mp3, and watch video clips but it has a few little extras that are bound to keep you even more entertained.

The 4.1 inch screen is big enough for the flash based game for when you’ve had your fill of multimedia content but are still feeling a little bored. The built in microphone means you can sing along and record it, should you really wish while other features include an FM Tuner, TV out, multi card reader, and the choice of either an 80GB or 120GB hard drive for storing everything on.

While there’s no news on when the iRiver P20 will be available it’s believed that it will be available in the UK by the end of the year. It was quite a busy event for iRiver, also announcing that the SPINN mp4 player will be released in Europe including an AMOLED touch screen interface, up to an 8GB hard drive, and bluetooth 2.0 connectivity among other features.

Panasonic Vera Cast IPTV

We reported a while back on the proposed collaboration between Panasonic and Yahoo (Pahoo?) to create a flat screen TV that offered free Internet access and a few details have been confirmed at this week’s IFA event with pleasing sound waves being thrown around. Viera Cast IPTV works using an Ethernet connection so you don’t need to attach the television to your PC or any other magical box.

A scaled down brethren of the service is already up, running, and being sold in the US where owners can watch television or instead they can view their pictures and other media, check YouTube and numerous online accounts, and generally surf the web. The portal is said to be user friendly so anybody can use it but I’m not sure my Dad would take to it all that well in honesty (although I’m sure he’d love anything that gave him horse racing results without using text).

Due for release in Spring 2009 in the UK and is likely to feature on mid to high end Panasonic LCD and Plasma screen televisions. No longer a pipe dream, for sure, although that’s some considerable wait that probably has more to do with our shakey Internet connections than anything else.

LG DVS450H – An Unappealing Name For An Appealing DVD Player

DVDs and DVD players have long been cast from the realms of sexy inanimate objects and are more of a virtually necessary evil. The fact is that most designs were flawed because while TVs stood atop cabinets and were flanked or supported by rectangular box shaped devices, that same form was the only one that would ever really be accepted.

Well, technological objectophiles have reason to celebrate and it’s thanks to LG on this occasion, who have released what could certainly be considered a slinky little number in black. Unfortunately, while it looks good, LG failed to follow suit with the naming of the LG DVS450H – the LG Slinky or LG Sleek would have been much better.

Even more happily, it will work stood up or led down and, if you’re that sort, you can pin it to your wall like posters of Kelly Brook on ad adolescent’s bedroom wall. It has a single HDMI port and is now customary it will take boring, less than sexy DVDs and attempt to pimp them out in full HD style. It also has a USB port so you can connect a storage device or media player.

Sony Announces ZX1 – World’s Thinnest TV

It seems that every piece of home entertainment kit released is a world’s first, world’s most, or world’s least something or other and Sony’s newly announced ZX1 is following that trend by boasting the label of world’s thinnest TV monitor. The size zero beauty measures in at an impressively thin 9.9mm (that’s right, less than 10mm) and it has a couple of features to boot.

The TV is illuminated using LCD around its edges. In order to achieve the waif like appearance of Kate Moss much of the technical wizardry is housed in a separate box, which then connects to the monitor. Happily, the box connects wirelessly so you can secrete it about any fairly local region, should you so desire.

All the wires from your other devices will connect to the media box (that’s the extra bit, you can’t see) so there’s no god awful tangle behind the TV collecting dust and plotting to overthrow mankind. A total of four HDMI sockets (three on the bonus box and one on the back of the TV) and because the remote works via radio frequency rather than infrared it won’t need to be in direct or even indirect sight of the box.

Pyramat PC Gaming Chair

If you’re in the market for a gaming chair but you like to put a bit of distance between you and the cold laminate floor and the dog’s wagging tail, then the Pyramat PC Gaming Chair offers an exceptional solution. 40 watts of thumping bass, 2 x 8 watt speakers, comfortable design, and full wireless features make it the perfect accompaniment to an all night WoW session.

The 4” subwoofer delivers some serious deep sound and is concealed in the back of the Pyramat PC Gaming Chair. You won’t just hear the rumble, or feel it, it’ll probably make you need the toiler. The two full range 8 watt speakers are ideally placed at the very top of the back of the chair and deliver a complete surround sound.

Rechargeable batteries and a wireless data connection mean you’re free to wheel and you don’t have to be plugged in when you’re playing. To ensure that you can really immerse yourself in a game or just sit back and relax while you watch the in-game video or a film of your choosing, the Pyramat PC Gaming Chair is made of ultra comfortable foam padding and enables the gamer to alter various essential seating positions.

The Tiny Space Cube PC

The Space Cube is the rather apt name for the almost microscopic PC designed to be taken into space. The cube (had you guessed its shape?) measures just 2 inches cubed, sits snugly in the palm of the hand, and really buries the Macbook Air and apparently mobile computing devices. As you might have also guessed, though, it’s not exactly up to a Second Life session even when you do use a monitor with it.

£1,500 will buy you one, should your heart desire it, and in exchange for that princely sum you will receive a 300MHz processor, 16mb of flash memory, and a 1GB CompactFlash Card. Red Hat Linux is the obvious operating system of choice taking up less room than the calculator program that comes as part of Windows (probably).

The Space Wire port is really the only area of any particular note featuring as it does adapters so that Japanese, US, and European users can plug their devices into it or hook it up to their own network. Allegedly the computer will have various sensors and other modular accessories attached to enable it to perform vital functions while in space.

The JVC NX-BD3 Blu Ray Player

JVC is launching its own Blu Ray player, as announced at this week’s IFA event and it has a couple of excellent features that could help herald a new era in blu ray players (sorely lacking apart form a couple of alternatives). Rather than being a Blu Ray player it would be more than reasonable to tag it as being a blu ray home cinema system including 2.1 surround speakers as it does.

In fact, JVC is so confident that this is a unique type of product that they believe it warrants the tag of being the world’s first genuine blu ray home cinema system. Obviously it also features HD resolution, it is after all a blu ray player. It also has deep colour and x.v. Colour to enhance images even further.

Bonus View and LAN connectivity stand to make the JVC NX-BD3 one of the more feature filled of all Blu Ray options. Considering its competition it’s not that unreasonably priced at £800 and if that is a little heavy on the pounds then take heart that as long as manufacturers are bringing out new models things can only continue to get better.

Firefox 4 Will Be 20 Times Quicker Apparently

Mozilla’s Firefox browser has already made converts of a lot of former Internet Explorer users and the recent release of the third generation of browser broke world records and everything. Because these things never stay still for long, Firefox 4 is already on the drawing board and the biggest brag so far is that it could provide browsing up to 20 times faster than Internet Explorer.

The speed increase will be achieved because the process of opening pages is set to be greatly optimised using an optimisation engine. In short, code like Javascript is broken down into various stages and the process of requesting and opening that data is basically memorised by the browser so that it can perform the same task from memory next time rather than having to perform the usual array of procedures.

While the complete working version with this improvement won’t be released until Firefox 4 is fully developed a lightweight, diet version of the optimisation engine is included in the forthcoming Firefox 3.1 update – while it certainly won’t offer you browsing at twenty times greater speeds than usual it should have a marked difference on your use.

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