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We’ve heard a lot about Blu-ray in the past couple of years but is the technology any closer to making it into your home this Christmas? This time last year the high-defintion (HD) war was in full swing between Blu-ray and HD DVD but dedicated players [excluding the PS3] were not cheap. Now, a year on, Blu-ray stands alone and the path to HD immortality and becoming the ‘next DVD’ stands clear but are players cheap enough to tempt you to stick one in your stocking this Silly Season?Last year, dedicated Blu-ray players - apart from being few and far between in the UK - boasted wallet-crushing price tags ranging from £400-800. This time out, prices are a more reasonable £200 and [much] higher, but you can also get older Blu-ray spinners for around £150. So, will you be taking the Blu-ray plunge or holding out? Let us know.-Martin Lynch blu-ray movies christmas

Original post by nafiz

Last Christmas, Blu-ray players costs an obscene amount of money and, while they aren’t exactly cheap now, they are heading in the right direction and becoming affordable for most consumers. Sharp’s BD-HP21H has just hit the UK and despite the sticker price of £250, you can find this player online for a shade under £200. This is a Profile 1.1 player with 1080p support and 24 frames per second (fps) playback, meaning the movies run at the same speed they were filmed at and make motion-scenes much smoother and clearer. The machine also promises to upscale your DVDs to near-HD quality and the HDMI 1.3 jack offers support for Deep Color as well as advanced sound formats like Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Advanced.Blu-ray players can take an age to start up but the BD-HP21H has a Quick Start feature which means you’ll be up and running in 10 seconds. There’s no memory card slot but you can read JPEG photos from blank CDS. And for those worried about bills, the player promises low power consumption: 26W in operation and 0.5W in stand-by.-Martin Lynch blu-ray movies

Original post by nafiz

Last Christmas, Blu-ray players costs an obscene amount of money and, while they aren′t exactly cheap now, they are heading in the right direction and becoming affordable for most consumers. Sharp’s BD-HP21H has just hit the UK and despite the sticker price of £250, you can find this player online for a shade under £200. This is a Profile 1.1 player with 1080p support and 24 frames per second (fps) playback, meaning the movies run at the same speed they were filmed at and make motion-scenes much smoother and clearer. The machine also promises to upscale your DVDs to near-HD quality and the HDMI 1.3 jack offers support for Deep Color as well as advanced sound formats like Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Advanced.Blu-ray players can take an age to start up but the BD-HP21H has a Quick Start feature which means you′ll be up and running in 10 seconds. There’s no memory card slot but you can read JPEG photos from blank CDS. And for those worried about bills, the player promises low power consumption: 26W in operation and 0.5W in stand-by.-Martin Lynch blu-ray movies

Original post by nafiz

Emtec will be the latest company to try its hand at digital media storage and streaming following the launch of its S800 HDD Movie Cube. This Apple TV rival has a 500GB hard drive built-in along with an analogue/DVB tuner which allows it to act as a PVR by recording and saving your favourite programmes to the internal drive. Of course you can copy your own music, video and photos over and there’s wired and wireless network access available which presumably allows you to stream content stored on a home computer. The usual connections and format support are here, including HDMI and DivX, but aside from being able to convert DVD and video there doesn’t appear to be anything radically different here that you won’t find among rivals. Still, it may well be worth a look when it’s released in December, word on the street is Dixon’s will be selling it for £229.99. - Paul Lester [PocketLint] Emtec media streamer jukebox

Original post by nafiz

Most modern HDTVs come with two or three HDMI ports but these won′t last long if you start piling up the games consoles, media streamers and set top boxes. To get around this you can buy an HDMI switcher, which is usually a fairly meaty device with a remote control that you need to use to tell it which port to activate. Not so with the IXOS Studio XHE228 though, which is a dual-port switcher that changes automatically. It supports HDMI version 1.3a, full 1080p resolutions and the connectors are gold plated to help prevent loss of quality. There’s also signal enhancer built in that helps prevent loss of quality at up to 15 meters. The XHE228 is pretty compact so we can imagine this being tucked neatly behind your A/V equipment quietly going about its business. It’s available now for £49.99, more details from the official site below. - Paul Lester [IXOS] IXOS HDMI home cinema

Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Displays

Asus is ritzing up its LCD inventory with four new high-end displays this month — the VK266H and VW266H at 25.5 inches (beating out the manufacturer’s current top end) and the VK246H and VW246H at good ol′ 24 inches. They all feature the company’s new Splendid Video Intelligence Technology, run at at 1,920 x 1,200, and have a 20,000:1 contrast ratio, which is a significant improvement over the current Asus flagship’s 3,000:1, but the max brightness is a bit lower. Why two at each size, you ask? Actual specs are identical across the board, but the V𒘂H and the V𒗮H have built-in webcams, while the VW266H and VW246H don’t — unfortunately, pricing info is not yet available, so there’s no telling how much extra you’ll be paying to record cringe-worthy YouTube diaries.

[Via PCLaunches; thanks, Vinit]

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Original post by Samuel Axon

Filed under: Robots

Playskool’s Kota the Triceratops is a robot dinosaur that uses 11 sensors to respond to touch and sound by wiggling its horns, wagging its tail and turning its head. It also plays a few “adventure themed songs.” Best of all, it can’t stampede or impale anyone like the animatronic Triceratops in Jurassic Park, Kota can’t get up and move around. That won’t stop kids from adoring it though. Like Pleo before it, Kota’s cuteness overpowers all. Don’t believe us? Shipments have begun, so you can buy the cuddly robot and see for yourself. All you need is 300 bucks. Or you could just check out the video beyond the cut.

Continue reading Kota the Triceratops ships from the land before time to your home

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Original post by Samuel Axon

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Hasselblad’s doing a fine job of pimping its mildly fresh 50-megapixel H3DII-50 at Photokina 2008, but being that we’re hardly ever satisfied with the here and now, we’ve latched onto a few juicy tidbits flowing from the lips of CEO Christian Poulsen. Reportedly, the exec made clear at the show that a 60-megapixel version of the camera (H3DII-60) would be made available in April of 2009, and while it would demand a &pound4,000 ($7,393) premium over the &pound14,750 ($27,261) H3DII-50, that increase would pay for a sensor that provides 94% full-frame coverage. It’s okay, your D40 is still bombastic in its own right.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Cellphones

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/gadgets/T_Mobile_ˇ_first_hands_on_with_Googlephone’; Yep — there it is. We finally, finally got our mitts all over the very first Android device, the T-Mobile G1 — hanging out in the crowd, waiting for the official announce, naturally — and so far we like what we see. The phone is surprisingly thinner than we thought it would be, and it feels pretty solid in your hand (though they’ve opted for an almost all plastic device, no metal here). The keyboard seems usable and reasonably well thought-out, and the slider action is like butter, with a nice little swoop for good effect. But really, the pictures tell the whole story, so check out the gallery below!

Update: We’re adding another gallery as we speak. Here’s some initial observations: the browser is much choppier than the iPhone’s, there seem to be be two separate mail apps, one for Gmail and a separate IMAP app, and there seems to be no multitouch functionality. Check out the gallery below for a lot more views, and we’ll be updating this as necessary!

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Cellphones

Yep — there it is. We finally, finally got our mitts all over the very first Android device, the T-Mobile G1 — hanging out in the crowd, waiting for the official announce, naturally — and so far we like what we see. The phone is surprisingly thinner than we thought it would be, and it feels pretty solid in your hand (though they’ve opted for an almost all plastic device, no metal here). The keyboard seems usable and reasonably well thought-out, and the slider action is like butter, with a nice little swoop for good effect. But really, the pictures tell the whole story, so check out the gallery below! (Once it’s done uploading.)

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Remember Kerbango? In the early months of the decade, 3Com’s foray (via acquisition) into the then-nonexistent world of tabletop internet radios crashed and burned before it was ever even launched, a classic example of an arguably visionary product launching well, well ahead of its time. Over seven years have passed since the Kerbango Radio′s untimely death, but for whatever reason, the concept really hasn’t re-emerged on a grand scale. On the surface, it seems like a no-brainer: everyone has an alarm clock, many have bedside or kitchen radios, WiFi has since emerged as a ubiquitous cloud of high-speed data, and more people are listening to streamed audio than ever before — yet the market for these devices is still treated like a niche. What gives?

Continue reading Squeezebox Boom review

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Original post by Chris Ziegler

Filed under: Cellphones, Peripherals

At first glance, the Zivio Boom seems like a novel approach to the Bluetooth headset problem, but as we experienced, it’s actually a little less pleasure and a touch more pain. The design and packaging of the product are highly stylized and sufficiently handsome to be sure, but once you get down to the meat, this peripheral leaves quite a bit to be desired. In our tests, not only was the sound quality of the earpiece far below the standards you’d expect from a product in this price range ($129.95), but the general design of the Boom is lacking in many regards. Firstly, the ear-clip is held onto the device by a magnet — and not a very powerful one at that — which renders the component largely useless. The headset does an okay job of staying on with the varying size bud attachments, but it still felt a bit heavy without hanging it off of something. All of that might be surmountable were it not for the abysmal sound quality we experienced. The thin, telescoping microphone seemed like it would do a better job at picking up audio than a standard Bluetooth headset, but it didn’t hold up next to Jawbone’s offerings, and the fragility of the metal makes it seem like we′re only a day or two away from cashing in the warranty. The reception quality wasn’t any better — we literally had to ask a friend of ours if they were speaking through a towel. Both on the receiving and transmitting ends, we found the Boom to be a disappointment. There’s no question that this is a good looking device — just not one that we can really recommend.

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

We′ll tell you that when we first got a chance to handle Apple’s latest generation of the iPod touch on Tuesday, our gadget-nerd alarms went clanging like there was a really, really bad fire somewhere. The improvements the company has made in design aren’t remarkable, but they are entirely welcome. The new housing is smooth, incredibly thin, and feels like a solid metal brick in your hands. The built-in speaker is a nice addition, as are those volume controls (finally!) — the screen is incredibly bright (on par with the iPhone 3G), though it also looks like it got the 3G’s new color temperature. On the software side, 2.1 is definitely feeling smoother and slicker than previous versions, the Nike+ inclusion is huge if you’re a runner, and the implementation is well integrated — overall, we’re leaning towards a thumbs-up on those bug fixes too. Unfortunately, we couldn’t seem to get the Genius function working on the device (anyone else having this issue?), though that may be more of a server-side conflict than something funky with the player, as we were getting errors in iTunes when trying to flip the switch. We’ll be blowing this out with a full review, but for now you can enjoy the succulent pics in the gallery below!

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

We had a chance to paw this beauty on Tuesday at the Apple event, but finally getting home and spending some quality time with the device has given us a far deeper impression of just what the folks in Cupertino have done. So far our impressions are favorable: physically, the nano redesign is a move in the right direction for the company, leaving that awkward previous generation nano on the cutting room floor, and falling much more in line with Apple’s current design language. The player feels solid and compact — maybe a bit too tiny for our big paws — though build quality is on par with the 1st generation iPhone. You can tell a lot of careful rethinking went into this, and there’s not an edge out of place. We’re going to be doing a full review of the device and its new software, but for now feast your eyes on the gallery below.

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Sony Ericsson today announced the release of the 𑠙 handset. The slider phone features a 2.4-inch screen, 3G connectivity, and a full HTML browser.

The new phone also offers a 3.2 megapixel camera, video capabilities, Wi-Fi, a 1GB memory card, and a built-in FM radio. For navigation purposes, the G705 combines GPS with Google Maps for Mobile and Wayfinder navigation.

Sony Ericsson also announced the G705u, the company’s first UMA-enable phone, offering GSM/Wi-Fi dual capabilities–just don′t look for that one in the Sates, the UMA version of the phone is an exclusive to Orange wireless.

The company used the announcement of the new handset to discuss a new partnership with Google as well, which will integrate YouTube downloading and uploading into the 𑠙 and future handsets.

Original post by Brian Heater