Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
TechTV roundup of affordable digital SLR cameras, like the 6.1-megapixel Canon EOS 10D, the 6.11-megapixel Nikon D100, and the 6.17-megapixel Fujifilm S2 Pro. Read
Samsung’s managed to pack a ton of features into their new Pocket PC Phone. The MITs M400 looks a lot like Samsung’s other Pocket PC Phone, the i700, and comes with a TV tuner, a two-way radio, a rotating built-in digital camera which can record video as well as take still photos, a 300MHz processor,…
Word that Nokia’s N-Gage handset, which was originally supposed to have been out this past February, is set to drop on October 7th with a retail price of $299. The N-Gage, which is basically a GSM/GPRS cellphone designed specifically for playing games, will have a high-resolution screen and built-in Bluetooth for head-to-head competition. Tony Hawk…
Imaging-Resource review of the new five-megapixel TVS digital camera from Contax, which has a titanium body and a 3x Zeiss optical zoom lens. The reviewer gives the TVS high marks, but thinks its retail price ($899), is way to high given the other five-megapixel cameras that are on the market these days. Read
The Dutch Consumer Association, or Consumentenbond, has suspended its boycott of Epson and it’s use of “deceptive smart chips,” and apologized for its call to action. Someone at the company convinced them that the chip, which are designed to make the printers inkjet cartridges stop working even if they still have ink in them, isn’t…
With the hard-drive capacities of personal video recorders swelling beyond 100 gigabytes, Matt Haughey of PVRblog (which is an excellent new blog, by the way) asks a good question: “How much space do I need in a new TiVo?” Say you had a 30-40 hour maximum Tivo and you watched maybe two hours of TV…
A new wireless digital audio system from Yamaha called MusicCast which consists of the MCX-1000, a digital audio server with an 80GB hard drive for storing MP3s, and the MCX-A10 (pictured at right), a digital audio client that can wirelessly stream music files off of the server. Unlike some of these other digital audio receivers,…
A tiny new clip-on webcam for videoconferencing from Creative. The Webcam NoteBook doesn’t look quite as nice as Apple’s new iSight cam, but it does have a pivoted base that tilts and rotates, as well as a decent resolution of 640×480. Read
It feels a bit late, since, you know, both of these handhelds have been out for over three months already, but the Seattle Times has a head-to-head comparison of the WiFi-enabled Tungsten C and the GSM/GPRS-laden Tungsten W. The Tungsten W gets points for ubiquity – you can check email on it from most urban…
Anyone else out there in the market for a new cellphone? We’re chained to Sprint, so unfortunately our options are rather limited (we’re waiting patiently for Samsung to bring out their i600 Smartphone), but we’d be curious to hear about what phones other people are planning to buy. What’s your next cellphone? Is there a…
The New York Times on all of the new personal video players which are cropping up these days, like the the AV320 from Archos (pictured at right), the VideoNow from Hasbro, and the Media2Go, and the proliferation of adapters for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance SP which allow it to play video files. Read Amazon –…
Texas Instruments will show off some prototypes of its new Wireless Any Network Digital Assistant, or WANDA, at the Computex 2003 trade show later this year. The WANDA is a reference design for a Pocket PC Phone with built-in Bluetooth, WiFi, and GSM/GPRS; TI doesn’t want to actually build them, so at Computex they’ll be…
Somehow we missed this: Not only is Panasonic coming out with combination DVD burner/digital video recorder with a 120GB hard drive, they’re also coming out with one with a storage capacity of 160GB, enough for 212 hours of video. Both the DMR-E100H (pictured at right) and the DMR-200H will also have SD memory card slots…
In case you missed any of them, some highlights from the past week in Gizmodo: New digital SLR from Nikon The ZVUE! Burger time Fuji’s printer for cameraphones The Quiet Car Pods Unite A $799 Tablet PC The Meowlingual Sony’s new Clie The RadioSHARK: turn your Mac into a TiVo for radio
Kensington isn’t the only manufacturer with a WiFi detector coming out; SMART ID has one of its own that should actually hit the market before Kensington’s does. The credit card-sized WFS-1 can sense the presence of both 802.11b and 802.11g networks, and has an operating range of 500 feet outdoors and 150 feet indoors. Hopefully…
Rich Brome solves the mystery of the nano-pants, writing in that: [B]asically, this stuff IS nanotechnology – it’s just really tiny, molecularly perfect particles of certain shapes that have impressive properties. That’s actually where most of the practical applications of nanotechnology are right now – new kinds of materials, not that “micromachines” sci-fi stuff. But…
Dockers is claiming that it’s new line of Go Khakis pants use “revolutionary nanotechnology” to stay stain-free. Since it’s unlikley that Dockers was putting tiny fabric-cleaning nanobots into their khakis, Popular Science decided to call their customer service line and figure out what the heck they meant by “nanotechnology.” PS: It says nanotechnology repels stains.…
Three airports – Singapore’s Changi, Amsterdam’s Schiphol, and New York’s JFK – are going to start a pilot program tagging luggage with radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips, which should make it easier to track and sort bags. The testing is expected to go on for five years. Guess you gotta make sure that the…
Palm’s Tungsten T2 hasn’t even been officially announced yet, and already some photos have surfaced what purports to be the Tungsten T3. The T3 is said to have a high-resolution 320×480 pixel screen, 64MB of RAM, built-in Bluetooth, and run on Palm OS 5.2.1. Read
Archaeologists are using a special remote-controlled undersea robot called Hercules to help them investigate an 1,500-year-old shipwreck buried in mud at the bottom of the Black Sea: The drone is the first craft ever designed specifically for deep-water archaeology, Ballard said. It’s controlled by a pilot in the Knorr, Ballard’s ship on the surface. But…