iRiver Announes Spinn And P20 Multimedia Devices
August 31, 2008
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
August 31, 2008
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
August 31, 2008
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
August 31, 2008
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.
The Tiny Space Cube PC
August 29, 2008
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
August 29, 2008
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
August 29, 2008
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.
The Samsun X360 Ultra Portable Laptop
August 28, 2008
The Smsung X360 is a bizarrely named laptop that has absolutely nothing, as far as we’re aware, to do with the Microsoft games console. It does, however, weigh in marginally lighter than the MacBook Air while offering some reasonable features. Obviously the biggest selling point is that it’s light enough to… do whatever it is you do with such light laptops. At a mere 2.8 pounds it beats Apple’s 3 pound monster in the weight game.
Powered by a Centrino 2 ULV Processor, designed for such petite forms. Solid State Drives come in a selection of either 64GB or 128GB, while you can alternatively plump for the 120GB hard drive instead if you’re not yet won over by SSD.
Integrated graphics is good, while the exclusion of an optical drive is bad (although presumably that saves a considerable amount of weight). The 7-in-1 card reader, three USB ports, LAN, VGA, HDMI, and PCI Express Card slot ensure that there is adequate connectivity to make up for it in most instances. You can also connect using the obligatory bluetooth and WiFi connections and a built in 1.3 megapixel camera is included presumably to save weight on emails.
The Ziggurat Green Pyramid Development
August 28, 2008
The Dubai based Timelinks company has dreamed up a staggering idea for future, sustainable property development. If it were from any other company in the world you might doubt the efficacy of it actually being built but if Dubai has taught us anything, it’s that monumental projects like this really can and often do come to fruition.
Even with that in mind, it’s difficult to see the green pyramid becoming reality any time soon. Measuring 2.3km square Timelinks predicts that it would house 1 million people while only using 10% of the floor space normally require for that many city inhabitants. This is achieved because the city is essentially encapsulated within its own structure.
The pyramid city will use wind and solar power to provide all of its own power and the transport systems would allow vertical and horizontal transport negating the need for cars within the city confines.
The plans include biometric security systems to ensure complete peace of mind for residents but, as this is only a pipe dream (so to speak) there’s currently no word on what would be done with the ablutions and other such unthinkables. Still, it looks incredibly futuristic considering its design is based on one of the oldest types of structure in the world.
Microsoft Patents Page Navigation Buttons
August 28, 2008
It’s quite incredible what can be patented in modern technology and news that Microsoft has been granted a patent on Page Up and Page Down buttons is quite incredible. In fact, though, it follows something of a precedent that has been set and reaffirmed many times by Microsoft – the patenting of ideas that many argue and sometimes demonstrate to be based on another person’s or company’s idea.
Document navigation using measurements of entire pages is nothing new, and there’s evidence to suggest that Microsofts development was based on technology used 25 years ago. Similar arguments arose when they successfully patented double clicking mouse buttons and the mouse scroll wheel.
This is nearly Microsoft’s 10,000th successful US patent application so they’re clearly doing something right and are fervent supporters of the patenting application process. They’ve really picked up the pace recently, according to the ZDNet news site, having only reached their 1,000th patent in March of 2006 they have nearly managed ten times this figure now.
Presumably they won’t stop others from offering the same paginated style of navigation but they may opt to charge a fee for the use of the patent from other companies and manufacturers. Look out for the days when your Mac keyboard has the Windows Page Down and Windows Page Up buttons.
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