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”FCC Ready To Slam Comcast For P2P Filtering
It looks as though Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is ready to lay the hammer down on Comcast regarding their wanton BitTorrent blocking. As was evident in the recent net neutrality hearing, Martin is hellbent on protecting consumers by establishing rules for transparency within ISPs. In an interview with AP, Martin noted that "The commission has adopted a set of principles that protect consumers' access to the internet, and we found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles." He went on to say that they "arbitrarily" blocked internet access and failed to disclose this to customers. More »Nikon Coolpix P6000 Gets Leaked, Rumored to Deliver an Absurd 13.5 Megapixels
What looks to be the upcoming Nikon Coolpix P6000 has leaked, showing a picture of the high-end point-and-shoot as well as some of the specs and a purported release date of this August. Most notable is an absolutely-bananas 13.5-megapixel sensor, which should provide you with pictures large enough to print billboards from. The follow-up to the P5000, it's aimed at people who want better quality shots than your average point-and-shoot without the bulk of a DSLR. No word on pricing, but the P5000 debuted at $400, so place your estimates in that ballpark. [Nikon Rumors]LG Getting New KC910 As Flagship Phone With Killer Camera Features
There's apparently a new touchscreen handset from LG on the way, and early word is that it's slated to be the Korean phone maker's new flagship phone. So far known as the KC910, it appears to be more camera than phone, shooting at 8-megapixels with a real Xenon flash, face detection, image stabilization and a 480p camcorder function, which is worth noting. It also supposedly has an 800x480 resolution screen, which means it can show 16:9 movies with no cropping, all in a form factor a little over half an inch thick. If they can throw in a few other high-end features like Wi-Fi and a good browser then this handset could out-media the iPhone and be a real challenger, but we're holding our judgment till we've seen it in action. [Electronista, via DC Sources, via Ubergizmo]Sony Ericsson Cancels Paris and BeiBei Smartphones
Sony Ericsson's Paris, much coveted by S-E purists, has been canned, according to the Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog. The Paris, aka the P5i, has been filed under T (for trash) alongside its sister smartphone, the BeiBei, or the G702. Apparently it's to do with the less-than-enthusiastic reactions from some of the mobile phone bloggers, who weren't exactly gagging for it. There's also speculation that a lot of its features were already lagging behind those of its competitors—and this is before it had even hit the streets. I guess we'll never have Paris. [Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog via Mobile Mentalism]CyberLink Uses ATI Card To Transcode Four 1080p Video Files Simultaneously
The fashionable thing these days is to take the tremendous processing power of graphics cards and put them to use when you're not utilizing them to render games. CyberLink, for one, has come up with a pretty ingenous method to take an ATI or NVIDIA card (in their case, the demo was on an ATI Radeon 4850 512MB card) and convert four 1080p MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4. Simultaneously. As long as you've got a pretty fast video card, all you need is a copy of CyberLink PowerDirector 7 and you can be doing this too. We hope this is the kind of thing Apple's going to be putting into Snow Leopard. [TG Daily]"HD for Kids!" Coloring Book: Now You Really Have to Stay Inside the Lines
This great "HD for Kids!" coloring book by Non-Toxic Reviews teaches tykes all about the joys—and pitfalls—of High-Def TV through activities like tracing burn-in on a plasma screen and the borderline-autistic "draw 1,080 dots inside this HDTV". The book is too funny not to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but the lessons are real and helpful for people of all ages. I can definitely relate to the part that gets the young 'uns disappointed early in life when they realize they have four HDMI devices, but only one input to plug them into. Check out our favorite pages in the gallery, and get the full book for free by hitting the link. [Non-Toxic Reviews via BBG]
Samsung's P400 DLP Projector is Tiny for Portability, Sleek too
Samsung's new P400 Pocket Imager projector is designed mainly for businesspeople on the go, so it's pretty tiny. Inside, its DLP unit is a native 800 x 600 resolution and its LED lighting pushes out 150 lumens, resulting in a 30- to 40-inch display capability with 1000:1 contrast ratio. It takes the standard RGB, composite, S-video and audio inputs, and has two 1-watt speakers. Plus, though it's no pico-projector, it's just 5 x 3.7 x 2 inches in size and weighs 1.9 pounds, so it'll carry nicely in your laptop bag. And you know what? Just coz it's businessy doesn't mean it has to look ugly or utilitarian: so Samsung has actually made this thing look pretty good. Available now for $749, full press release below.
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$4300 Kaleidescape 1080p DVD Streamer Reviewed (Still Not Real HD)
Sound & Vision gave a gushing review to the Kaleidescape 1080p player, a DVD upscaler that streams movies from a home server for the price of a nice used car. They especially liked the Gennum VXP video processor chip, which upscales DVD content to vividly sharp 1080p detail, with very accurate colors and high contrast. The Kaleidescape's updated ability to play content without importing it to the server first was also a big draw. But seriously, $4300? Come on. More »Google Tools Will Tell You If Your ISP Is Slowing Down Your Connection
And I was starting to feel unfulfilled by the stuff coming out of Google's labs. Its senior policy director, Richard Whitt, says that they're cooking up software that'll tell you if your ISP is screwing with or slowing down your connection because you're hogging too much bandwidth, and what exactly they're doing to it. (There's already some available, BTW, since Whitt didn't mention a release date.) But it's not necessarily because they believe willy nilly in net neutrality. More »HP EliteBook 6930p: One Badass Business Laptop
HP is announcing 10 business notebooks today, but there's only one that we care about: the flagship EliteBook 6930p, a ruggedized, super-encrypted, QuickLook 2-boosted, 4-and-a-half pounder. More »Rumor: Samsung BD-P2500 Blu-ray Player, First Sammy With BD-Live Capabilities
Some French message board has rumor of a new Samsung Blu-ray player called the BD-P2500. There have been countless before, but the hot thing about this is that its the first with the hardware to support full spec BD-Live from the Korean company. Update: Samsung has said that the previously announced BD-P1500 will come "BD-Live-ready," with a firmware upgrade required to take it to the full 2.0 spec. This rumored player would likely come with 2.0 action already built in. More »Apple Goes To War (This Time Not With Microsoft)
When Apple purchased chip manufacturer P.A. Semi, the Department of Defense was worried. Why? P.A. Semi manufactures chips for ten different military systems, and has $100 million in deals with the DoD over the next four years. And the DoD never expected Apple to keep supporting the sweet, deadly chips.
But they were wrong.
More »Samsung's High End 650 Series LCDs Reviewed (Verdict: Great)
CNet's reviewed Samsung's 52-inch 650 series LCD, the LN52A650. While there is a 750 series, it's worth noting that those sets get MPEG and MP3 playback from USB drives but have the same picture. So, for this generation of Samsung LCDs, this is as good as the picture gets. In summary, David Katzmaier loved the set. More »Samsung P960 Heralds the European Arrival of the Mobile TV Cellphone
While mobile TV cellphones are ten-a-penny in the Far East, the West is pretty much virgin territory for them. Samsung's P960, however, may have got the ball rolling, a mobile TV phone aimed at European consumers. A sleek gray slider, the P960 supports both European mobile TV standards, DVB-CBMS and OMA-BCAST, and its 2.6-inch QVGA TFT screen even lets you watch two channels at the same time. As to whether we're going to see a US-friendly version later on in the year—well, that's not clear yet, but since the menu behind the dude is in dollars, perhaps the Koreans are making their press budget go a little further. Press release is after the jump.More »
Top Gun 2008, the Movie (Without Cruise, Fortunately)
Not everything was about the stunning A-10 Warthog at last week's Top Gun 2008 competition, the largest R/C event in the world. 10,000 people watched the 120 invitation-only R/C airplanes competition—which included everything from from World War I Fokker fighters to WW2's Mustangs and Lightnings to Vietnam War's Phantoms, and plenty of civil aviation models. Gigantic gallery of this year's edition after the jump.More »







