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What goes around comes around: Worried about corporate espionage, Samsung, one the biggest makers of cameraphones, is banning cameraphones from all its factories. So they’re basically banning phones from the same factories where they’re built. Read
If you’re wondering whether or not your Pocket PC qualifies for an upgrade to the new Pocket PC 2003 operating system, CEWindows.net has a handy char t that can help you figure it out. Read [Via LockerGnome]
Consumer-grade high-definition digital camcorders are starting to come out (the first, the GR-HD1 from JVC, hit the market recently), and Sony, Canon, JVC, and Sharp are jointly developing a common standard for the format that all manufacturers could use. I suppose this should help prevent the proliferation of lots of different, competing standards for consumer…
Possible vaporware alert: a new startup called Handheld Entertainment is promising to have a $100 personal video player out by the end of the year that will have a full-color screen and use Flash memory cards for storage instead of an internal hard drive. We’d like to say we’re convinced that there’s no way this…
With LCD televisions getting bigger, better, and cheaper every year, it looks like we’re on the cusp of a price war breaking out between LCD and plasma. Plasma currently dominantes the market for large, flat-panel televisions, but LCD is expected to win out in the long-term. Either way, you gotta love any kind of consumer…
Extensive roundup of DVD/CD-RW combination drives over at X-bit Labs that takes a close look at six of the more popular models that are out there. Read [Via DesignTechnica]
Not only will you be able to take your phone number with you when switch carriers, the FCC is forcing the carriers to let subscribers keep their same number even if they still owe money on their account. Why wasn’t the FCC this consumer-friendly when it relaxed restrictions on media ownership and consolidation last month?…
Article in the Guardian about the unexpected ways in which cameraphones are taking off with the public: What has become clear is that the phones are being used in a different way than intended. Instead of people sending pictures between phones, those who have bought a MMS-compatible phone are more likely to email images to…
First cameraphone from Siemens. The MC60 operates on GSM, and has a 4096 color screen, a dedicated key just for snapping photos, and an unusual, circular-shaped layout to the keypad. Should be out in Europe by September, the rest of the world sometime afterwards. Read [Thanks, Mike]
A new wireless RF remote control for the iPod called the RemoteRemote, which works via a receiver module plugged inbetween your headphones and the iPod. Currently works only with the new third-generation iPods. Read [Via MacMinute]
From Cingular, the first commercial EDGE cellular network. At the moment this high-speed 3G network is only available in Indianapolis, and isn’t all that fast (the top speed is 170kbps, which is nothing to sneeze at, but still not exactly blazingly fast), but it’s a start. Cingular says that customers should also be able to…
At the annual Flat Panel Display expo in Tokyo this week, Japanese electronics manufacturer ELDis, has been showing off a double-sided OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) display for cellphones and PDAs. Honestly, at this point we’d just be happy to see more regular, single-sided OLED displays hitting the market. Read [Via PhoneScoop]
From Sanyo, a prototype of a WiFi-compatible 1.5 megapixel digital camera. The DSC-SX560 doesn’t actually have 802.11b onboard, but rather has a slot for a CompactFlash WiFi card, and can automatically send images to a server over a wireless network rather than store them on a memory card. We’d been wondering how long it’d take…
Great article in today’s New York Times that looks at all of the new features of Microsoft’s recently debuted Pocket PC 2003 operating system and reviews several of the new handhelds that are running it, like HP’s h1945 and h5555 iPAQs, and Toshiba’s e755 (pictured at right). Read Amazon – Toshiba e755
The Register takes a first look at the MyDevice, one of MyOrigo’s motion-controlled cellphones, which lets you navigate by tilting and moving the phone in different directions: Dial up a page and MyDevice displays its top-left hand corner. Tilting the device to the right scrolls over to the top-right hand corner; tilt it in another…
Remember Microdrives? With Flash memory cards hitting 4 gigabytes, we’d all but forgotten about Microdrives (those incredibly small mechanical hard drives that fit into a CompactFlash card slot), which had maxed out at 1GB ages ago. While we wait for Hitachi’s 4GB Microdrive, which is supposed to surface sometime around the end of the year,…
Further depressing those of us subject to the continually disappointing offerings of the US cellphone market, NTT DoCoMo’s new cellphone, the Mova N505i, comes with a built-in dual speaker surround sound system, a scanner for “convenient reading and storage of URLs, mail addresses and telephone numbers appearing in magazines and other printed materials,” and, we…
Back when we were in high school, “bass-offs” — contests where teenagers with pumped up car stereo sound systems would compete to see whose car could reach the loudest volume — were a really big deal. And apparently they still are, but now they’re called dB (as in decibel) drag racing, at least according to…
Yamaha has created the world’s first fuel cell designed specifically to be used in a motorcycle, though there’s no word on how long it’ll be until a fuel cell motorcycle actually makes it to market. Read
Concerned about privacy and people secretly snapping photos in places where they shouldn’t be, the South Korean government is considering a law which would require cameraphones to emit a loud noise whenever a photo is taken. This is being dones ostensibly so that other people will know when a photo is being taken, but besides…