Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Looking for a PMP that will be your eyes, ears, mouth, hair and forearms? Perhaps you should gently turn your attention to the JCHyun Udea Discovery — a device that treads that tremulous space between MP3 player, Tricorder, and utter waste of money. Still, it’s kind of packing a lot of heat for the asking price (179,000 KRW, or about $176) — with 32 dictionaries in 4 languages (Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese), a video player, audio player, handwriting recognition, and an interface that looks like Windows Mobile… but likely isn’t. You won’t see this in the US anytime soon, so find yourself a good importer.

[Via PMP Today]

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Aw yeah, those svelte Sony XBRs that were leaked back in mid-April have just been confirmed by Sony, and it’s going to be a long, sweaty summer waiting for the whole load to land this fall. Kicking things off is the XBR8 series, headed by the 55-inch KDL-55XBR8 and 46-inch KDL-46XBR8 models, which incorporate the outfit’s TRILUMINOS three-color LED backlight technology, 10-bit processing, BRAVIA Engine 2, Motionflow 120Hz and Advanced Contrast Enhancer PRO. The 70-inch KDL-70XBR7 and 40-inch KDL-40XBR7 headline the XBR7 lineup, while the XBR6 features sets range from 32- to 52-inches in size. All the gritty details are waiting below — if you feel like waiting ’til tomorrow for Sony’s glacially slow servers to load, that is.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Peripherals

Want your own multitouch control surface? Have a webcam, cardboard box, and photo frame? The folks at Hacknmod MacGyvered their own with just those materials. By simply pairing a fixed camera and controlled light surface, they were able to mimic what others have paid hundreds for, albeit in a decidedly less attractive package. Peep the somewhat uncomfortably porn-like vid after the break. Oh, and seriously, Hacknmod guys, what’s with the sexy techno and slow-mo insertion of the USB cable?

[Thanks Dan S]

Continue reading Multitouch surface made out of box, webcam, and glass

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Original post by Joshua Fruhlinger

Filed under: Displays

Hold on to your touch panels, folks, as Wacom has just made known its plans to reveal “a major innovation in capacitive touchscreen technology” at next month’s International Society for Information Display Exhibition. The tech, dubbed Reversing Ramped Field Capacitive (RRFC) touch, relies on “reversing ramped electro-static fields” to bring unprecedented precision and “drift-free performance” to touchscreen users. Reportedly, it can be integrated into dual-input applications with the firm’s EMR pen-input solution or can operate on its lonesome on devices that require just a finger touch interface. Of course, there’s way more pizazz to the whole thing than we can cover in this space, but feel free to don your nerd suit and hit the read link if you’re thirsty for more.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops

Another brain-shattering announcement that you’ve all been waiting for is here. Intel has officially dubbed the Silverthorn and Diamondville chips “Atom,” and the Menlow platform has become the “Centrino Atom.” We know, it’s hard to believe the day has come, but it’s finally happened. Obviously, the 45nm Atom chips, and Centrino Atom technology will be targeted for MIDs, UMPCs, and all manner of small, internet-centric devices. Undoubtedly an unending vista of total awesomeness awaits us now that they’ve got some fancy new names.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: CES, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Granted, we did just ask you how you’d tweak the VUDU, but we’re fairly certain none of you would recommend over doubling the price. Nevertheless, VUDU is apparently hoping that folks not quite ready to pull the trigger on its original set-top-box will be totally enthused about dropping a cool grand on the XL. Apparently, this one sports a fair bit more internal space (1TB to be exact) — enough to hold 500 SD movies. If you’re wondering if any films other than the Bourne trilogy will be available to take advantage of all this new space, VUDU is apparently aiming to unleash 70 of ‘em later this month. Oh, and those high-definition films will run you $5.99 (new titles) / $3.99 (”HD classics) to rent, but hey, what’s that after you’ve laid down $999 for the box itself?

Read -VUDU XL has 1TB of storage
Read - 70 new HD films coming to VUDU

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Regardless of your feelings regarding the VUDU set-top-box, it’s hard to knock its intrigue. From inception, we’ve been hooked on the concept, and while we’ve had our reservations about it, our hopes were bolstered after checking it out at CEDIA. After release, a number of reviewers found the device to be interesting, relatively useful and unfortunately hamstrung, but we still see quite a bit of promise in the box.

In its current form, there’s no denying that the limitations are stifling. Right out of the box, you’re stuck with a smallish internal hard drive that fills up quickly if you prefer your material in high-definition, and even if you look to external HDDs to catch the overflow, you’re still left with content that’s hardly portable. Sure, the port selection is up to snuff, the interface is beyond acceptable and the design is at least moderately sexy, but the inability to transfer content to discs along with the relatively high prices of downloadable media really put a damper on things. Couple that with the expansion of HD VOD and it’s easy to slip your $399 right back where it came from. Still, we’re curious to see how you all would tweak the VUDU to make it a more formidable competitor. Granted, we’ve all ideas that the majority of the changes will involve a massive overhaul of DRM in general, but don’t be scared to think outside of the proverbial box on this one.

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Original post by Darren Murph