Sega Homestar Extra Planetarium

You may not know this (at least, I didn’t until I read Gizmodo) but Sega produces quite an extensive range of home ceiling planetarium displays. They enable you to lye back and look at the stars without fending off killer moths that are at least the size of small bats and wait for the inevitable cloud covering to disperse to a reasonable level. And just ask Patrick Moore about the levels of light pollution created by street lighting and he’ll tell you the best way to resolve the problem is with an air rifle and a good solicitor.

OK, so the Sega Homestar Extra may not provide quite the same authentic experience as freezing in the back garden led in dog poo but it looks pretty impressive all the same. The latest in the Sega line is more pricey than its earlier counterparts and geared towards educational institutions rather than the average home user.

The illumination is so bright that you don’t even need to turn the lights off completely to enjoy the effects of between 45,000 and 120,000 stars being beamed onto your ceiling. Shooting stars can be set to appear in random places and at random intervals of time too and the set is due for release in December with a price tag of about £450.

The G’zOne Durable Phone – US Only, Unfortunately

Not sure whether this will ever make it beyond Verizon’s US range, although it’s fairly doubtful, but that’s a shame because the G’zOne is an ultra durable and rugged mobile phone that offers pretty much everything even nuclear fallout protection (well, maybe, but who’d actually know whether it withstood the fallout or not?). In all fairness, while there are worse looking handsets out there, this one does smack a little of rugged rather than stylish.

However, the G’zOne not only offers splash proof, damage proof, and shock proof protection to military standards but it also only costs the equivalent of about £65 and even with the two year contract this represents really good value for money for a phone that would probably only struggle in a fight against daily use from a child (let’s be honest, kid’s could break tanks open in a matter of minutes if they weren’t supposed to).

Obviously it hasn’t been through the rigours of a Gadget Show style testing yet, that we’re aware of, so it could turn out to be a load of old rubbish but for its supposed durability and pretty impressive price we hope it finds its way over here in some guise or another.

The Kensington Vo2000 Bluetooth VoIP Phone

Internet telephony has become more widely used thanks to advances in its technology. Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP as it’s more often referred, provides us with the opportunity to make voice calls to other VoIP users using an Internet telephone and can prove especially useful for the mobile users around the world. Part of the reason for this is the potentially lower charges when compared to using your mobile phone.

The Kensington Vo2000 Bluetooth Internet phone is one of the latest in Internet phone designs and is particularly innovative because it not only connects to your laptop using a bluetooth connection but it fits into the PCMCIA slot on the side of your computer. When you remove the phone you are then able to flip the bottom of it open so that it closely resembles a standard mobile phone.

While VoIP has yet to truly emerge as a genuine option for all telephone conversations, it is becoming increasingly popular; more and more companies are offering VoIP services and a greater number of Internet telephones are being created and designed by companies like Kensington but currently the Vo2000 takes the award for the most innovative and enables you to do something useful with the PCMCIA slot if you don’t already use it.

USB Train Tickets

SNCF, the French passenger train company, is trialling a system whereby passengers need not go through that whole troublesome rigmarole of buying and collecting tickets from the station or on the train. Instead, they will be given a USB card which, when connected to their PC, enables them to pay in advance for their tickets and then present the USB card to the driver.

In all honesty, and knowing how likely I would be to forget the damn thing, I suspect the system may have some obvious questions raised by the more forgetful of us. For those travelling as a one off or rare thing it may well work but the more journeys we make with it the more likely I suspect that we’ll become to lose it.

Who pays for replacements? Can you even get replacements? What if you get on a high speed train with no stops for 100 miles, and then realise you’ve forgotten it and you brought no spare cash or a credit card? Why do these stupid questions that nobody else really cares about always come to me?

The system is still in the trial stage and presumably any potential loss problems would hopefully be covered throughout the development and finalisation stages.

iPlayer For The Nokia N96

The popularity and widespread availability of iPlayer looks likely to continue its onward march with news that the new Nokia N series flagship phone the N96 will include the BBC iPlayer, which enables viewers to watch BBC shows and has also started series storage so you can watch more than just shows from the last week.

Some of the handsets will include the new iPlayer application on purchase while others will demand that you download it from the BBC site and, unfortunately, charges are likely to be pretty high because you will need to use your data package price plan as a means to download the player. Nevertheless, there’s no doubting just how popular iPlayer has become and for genuinely good reason too.

Owners will be able to either stream shows while online or download them for watching at a later date. Nokia has boasted that the move is in line with the Nokia N96 bidding to become the most popular audio and video playback capable mobile phone and if it proves even half as popular and generally well received as the N95 did then it’s almost certain to become a competitor in the high end phone market.

Nintendo DS 2.0 Due Next Year?

There’s some mumblings on the Internet that Nintendo are to release the DS 2 at the start of next year and that it will feature dual touch screens, rather than a single touch screen and another display, enhanced wide screen displays, and undoubtedly a whole host of other additions, upgrades, and improvements. Nintendo, as is the way with such console related matters, has stated that it’s nothing but rumour but they all say that don’t they?

The DS remains one of the most popular games units and this popularity doesn’t exactly look set to wane in the near future but Nintendo has stated that there won’t be any major announcements about any new or improved hardware until next year which would make it a virtual impossibility to cause any kind of a stir for a brand spanking, next gen handheld device.

The chances are that the new DS may be an upgraded 1.5 type version that would hinder developers because they would still have to created games that were completely compatible with the current gen system. Whatever the truth may be, it fails to be any kind of a surprise when Nintendo do something surprising (if you see what I mean).

Sennheiser MM-200

Sennheiser is a pretty big name in the world of audio and in particular in creating high quality headphones and ear buds. They’ve also been turning their attention to the mobile phone users of the world, largely because we are becoming increasingly likely to listen to music using the mobile phone. The latest product from their mobile centric device range is the MM-200.

The Bluetooth headset offers a very good quality of headphones that on their own would cost you more than £50 but the headset is also A2DP bluetooth support, easy switching between audio and mobile phone, and built in microphone. The headset is even compatible with your PS3 for game chatting.

Due to be released later in the year the Sennheiser MM-200 headset will cost about £100 which is a very reasonable price tag considering what you actually receive for your money. High quality earbud headphones, of course, won’t improve the quality of crap audio but if you’ve got a decent mp3 mobile phone and a crap set of headphones then you could really be missing out on better quality.

Give 1 Get 1 OLPC Hitting Amazon

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is hoping to take on a whole new head of steam by making its laptops available via Amazon as part of the G1G1, or Give 1 Get !, scheme. This scheme enables consumers to buy a laptop for themselves having donated one and while the scheme has been attempted previously it was less than successful due largely to the inexperience of OLPC.

The scheme has hit some problems since its release with supply and production problems causing major setbacks to the operation. The scheme is, as you might have guessed if you were as as cynical as us, only open to US based consumers who by donating approx £210 get a laptop for themselves and one is donated to somebody that requires it.

The aim of the One Laptop Per Child program is to ensure that children in developing and third world countries all have access to their own laptop to assist in education and learning. The XO laptop is the result of this initiative and the principle is a superb one. However, the program has hit issues along the way and as such it is yet to prove as popular as many had hoped. Using Amazon may well help gain the program more exposure.

Mercenaries 2 Release Stunt

Video game release have become synonymous with the causing of ridiculous outcry and they’re not afraid to throw in a stunt to make sure that the game and the release are berated by politicians and locals alike. The latest game release to face the fury, as it were, was Mercenaries 2, with publishers EA being labelled as being reckless and totally irresponsible.

Actors decked a petrol station with jeeps and oil barrels and then proceeded to offer everybody that came to the station £40 of free petrol. As I’m sure was the point, traffic came to a complete standstill in the region. Mercenaries 2: World in Flames has already been released on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 and it undoubtedly got some good coverage with one delighted driver stating he would definitely be buying the game.

The Mercenaries 2 game has already had some publicity coverage with an ongoing TV campaign showing off its basic ideas. In the game, players control a band of mercenaries attempting to control as much of the local oil as possible as it’s the main source of income.

The Sony Ebook Reader

The Sony eBook Reader is one gadget that we’ve actually been waiting some time for because it combines innovation with literature and good looks – sweet. The future of reading and literature, according to Sony, lies in the digital age and the Sony eBook Reader uses e-ink technology to bypass the many differences and problems that are associated with reading from a monitor or display rather than straight from paper.

While you still don’t get the smell of a book or the same kind of tactile feel, there is no disputing that benefits exist. For a start off you can order your books online (when the content partner website is finally up and running) and it comes with 100 novels already installed. Unfortunately, of course, these are novels that are in the public domain and therefore free of copyright restrictions because they’re so old.

Another negative aspect to an otherwise great product is that the digital versions of your favourite literature are oddly going to cost the same as a paper version of it. We obviously have no problem with the author receiving their share of the revenues but we deeply suspect that it won’t be the wordsmiths of the world that benefit from that odd pricing plan.

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