Gadgety News

Looking for a true all-in-one media thingy?

Say Allo to the Allio HDTV with built-in PC and Blu-ray player!

No more will you need to multi-task from laptop to tele and back again - this 42-inch 1080p TV has cojoined with a high spec PC that holds an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, a massive 1TB of storage and Windows Vista Premium.

It’s no surprise really that it is also packing plenty of connectivity including wireless networking.

You can still multi-task (of course) with this big TV as the split screen/picture-in-picture options are a go-go!

To ensure that all boxes are ticked there’s that Blu-ray player - surly making this the first high-def all-in-one to hit the market.

Silicon Mountain is offering up six flavours of the TV, starting at $1,599.99 for the 32-inch model, jumping to $2,799 for the big boy.

No news of a UK launch as yet but don’t question about future upgrades or “what happens if this bit breaks?”………….

Silicon Mountain via Engadget

Yo! Check it bruv.

Dis ere is my dawg; G-Dog yo!

Ahem………..

Sorry but for some reason this robo-mut makes me wanna spit gangsta style.

Perhaps it has something to do with this robo-mut being called G-Dog.

Japanese robot maker HPI will start selling this robotic dog, the above named later this month.

The mainly aluminium pooch-droid is powered by a 7.2V nickel metal hydride battery and features a total of nine servomotors. It measures 75×135×190mm and weighs 570g. Good doggy.

Users will be able to control the G-Dog wirelessly via a Playstation-like joypad. The robot is able to sit up and beg, crawl and roll over to its side.

You never know - this canny canine may even get the chance to mark its territory outside of Japan for a change.

CrunchGear

Yup, those know-it-alls at Wired are going to open their fourth annual store from November 21 until December 28 in New Yoik.

There will be more than 150 items including the latest electronics, toys and transportation, which can also be purchased online from November 20.

The Wired Store will also recognise four different charities, and is set to feature a brand new green section created by Adrian Grenier and Peter Glatzer of Reconcile Productions as well.

Is Christmas coming or something?

Wired

MP3 music downloads at seven big UK online stores are to be marked with this highly attractive, new and cutting-edge MP3 compatible sign. How cool is that? ~insert sarcasm where applicable~

It’s part of an initiative (to spend pointless money) led by the Entertainment Retailers Association to make consumers aware of the “advantages of the format and the fact that it can be used across multiple brands of music players and across PCs and Macs”.

7digital, Digitalstores, Tescodigital, Tunetribe, Play.com, HMV and Woolworths are all on board for the launch. The ERA digital chairman Russel Coultart said the move was to take the message to music fans “that they can legally buy downloads which are not locked to specific players or computers or mobile phones”.

7digital said consumers much prefer the MP3 format because it is so easy to use. If the MP3 logo is successful, it could be rolled out by the equivalent trade bodies internationally and Coultart also said it is in discussions with music retail organisations globally “to make ‘MP3 compatible’ an international standard”.

This is all very well but how long have MP3’s been with us? Surly it’s not far off from being old enough to smoke and drink? I would understand all this fuss if there hadn’t been a new version of this tech available – I’d call it MP4 or something

The other thing that confuses me about this ‘push’ is that MP3’s aren’t that great quality and now that even small players can manage 4gb why can’t we be upping the quality? Surly we should be pushing CD quality by now?

If it’s a problem about downloading – most people have access to broadband now (especially with all these mobile interweb dongles flying about the place – you don’t even need a BT line!).

Soon there will be a generation of music lovers that will expect that highly compressed low quality vibe – weren’t we dragged away from vinyl and promised a golden-age of high quality, high fidelity listening through a surround sound immersive environment at one point? Or did I dream it?

ERA credits MP3s with much of the growth of music downloads sales, which have risen 41% year-on-year to October this year, according to the Official UK Charts Company, and album sales are up 69% - Before anyone hails iTunes as the leader………….as far as I’m aware (and please correct me if I’m wrong) iTunes started by using MP3 but then quickly moved over to AAC……

~End Rant~

Asus, the name behind the popularity of Netbooks and no frills computing pioneers are set to put a stop to the smaller models.

If you’re after an Asus netbook with a screen smaller than 10-inches you’d better get your skates on!

The president of Asus has confirmed the company is intending to get rid of its older and smaller Eee PC models in favour of larger and more recent models such as the 1002HA model and S101. And it has no plans to unleash anymore netbooks with a display size of 10-inches or under.

The phasing out of the smaller models begins with the introduction of a $200 model for our American cousins.

My mind is still boggled as they created this niche and broke through - perhaps they’re quitting whilst they are ahead. Perhaps they can’t see longevity in this market.

Ah, remember the positive and forward thinking of last year……….those long summer days….

What do you reckon?

Tech Digest

The N7010 is pretty much a full featured laptop with its 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo Processor, 16-inch 16:9 LCD, Blu-ray ROM drive and HDMI-out.

It also packs up to 4GB RAM, 256 MB ATI HD 3470 video card, SD card reader, 1.3 MP Camera, eSATA port, Bluetooth, 802.11N wi-fi and hard drives come as big as 320 GB.

Nice but nothing outstanding - so why have it on this wonderful blog?

Well - look at the pic a bit closer my friends…………go on - click the pic to make it easier for yourself!

The cool part about the Lifebook N7010 is the 4-inch, 480×272 pixel touchscreen integrated into the keyboard area.

It works as an application launcher, but according to Fujitsu’s Paul Moore, you can use it as a second (really teeny-small) screen, with the ability to drag whatever you want down to the second screen like any other external monitor.

Aside from the app launcher, its intended to be used as a CD/DVD control panel, or as a photo viewer.

This groovy feature is considered to be an industry first for laptops but it probably is worth noting that it isn’t connected in any way to Windows Vista Sideshow.

The N7010 will begin shipping on November 10 and will start at $1500 on the Fujitsu website.

Fujitsu

A mighty big claim that, Mr YoYoTech Fi7epower MLK1610 - You up for the task?

Challenging something like the official record for the World’s Fastest Desktop isn’t something to take lightly - you’re gonna need something a little special.

Let’s say: something like a new Intel chip…………

The Intel Core i7 to be precise - but not just any Core i7.

It happens to be packing the Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, with a 3.20GHz clock speed and 6.4 GT/s QuickPath - it costs a credit-crunch defying £1,000 all by itself.

Backing up the new chip is an Asus P6T motherboard, which boasts Intel’s latest X58 chipset. Then added to that you’ve got a staggering 9GB of high performance DDR3 RAM (that’s 2GB per channel and an extra 1GB thrown in for good measure). Then they throw in an 80GB Samsung SSD to make things run even faster whilst staying completely silent.

Gamers will be salivating and getting all unneccessary wondering what sort of gaming specs this brings to the table.

Well, to be honest, they’re pretty average.

The Fi7epower MLK1610 sports the latest and greatest Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card with 2GB of DDR5 memory. But only the one of them. BOoooooooooooooooooooooo! 

The Asus P6T motherboard supports AMD’s Crossfire - a means of hooking up a pair of graphics cards to work in unison - so there’s no real excuse as to why there’s only one graphics card on board.

Saying that though, YoYotech do offer quite a fair bit of options for customisation so you can decide exactly how you want it kitted out - ie, add another Graphics Card

So - is it as fast as it sounds?

Apparently It has blown the former world record holder out of the water, and in practical terms it can be expected to perform twice as fast as anything powered by Intel’s former top-of-the-range CPU.

YAY!

The downside, as you’d expecty is the £4,000 for the version described above.

So, fast and mindboggingly expensive.

But a world champ none-the-less

Tech Radar

If you are a thoughtful citizen such as I am you will have noticed the lack of rubbish receptacles in the lovely London.

This is mainly due to the scare of bombing terrorists leaving their deadly trash and destroying people and places.

Well, London will be the first city to test out new bomb-proof bins.

Not only will they take your fast-food cartons but they’ll also rock LCDs that stream travel info and news.

These were developed by British company Media Metrica and weigh one ton each.

Testing took place in the deserts of New Mexico for five years to ensure they are completely, totally indestructible, can absorb heat from explosives, prevent shrapnel spread, and extinguish “fireballs.”

Surly a Friday night around Barnsley would’ve tested them better and been cheaper

Via Engadget

A lot of emphasis has been put on getting the best pic from your google-box with high-definition but what about the audio people?

Well, French TV station - TNT is the world’s first to broadcast a Dolby Digital Plus track over a terrestrial signal.

The Dolby system is said to be just the thing for limited bandwidth applications like terrestrial broadcasts, as the original Dolby Digital bitstreams are maintained and can still be decoded.

Not sure when this will travel across the Channel though.

Marketwatch via CrunchGear

Happy birthday to this gadget blog. Happy birthday to this tech blog. Happy birthday dear Jay’s Gadget News.  Happy birthday to yooooooooooooooooou!

Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog! Blog!

Well, what started off as a test to see if there was room for another gadget and tech blog site a year ago has slowly gained enough of you lovely readers for me to carry on writing about things that have caught my eye and that you (hopefully) find interesting.

My first posts (ie not ones dragged over from my temporary test site) were posted this very day 12 months ago - I know, how Goth to choose Samhain/Halloween to start a blog

I would like to take this moment and space to thank all of you for coming here and making this place feel loved - whether you were here from the very start or have only just found this place.

If there are anythings that you would rather see more/less of now is your chance. Either email me or just leave a comment here and I’ll do my best to please - the new look was prompted by a comment a lo, it was done.

So, thanks once more and here’s hopefully to another year of gadget grooviness and tech tremendousness

Much gadgety love

Jay

Cast your minds back to September 12th where I wrote about the new Panasonic Lumix G1.

Well, I’ve spent a week with the clever four-thirds camera and have been pleasantly surprised.

I’m not a photographer; never claimed to be, and probably never will be classed as such - but I do enjoy taking snaps.

So, for me, a nice compact such as the Panasonic TZ-5 is a very great cam and does the job pretty damn well.

On opening the box of the G1 there were 2 lenses and a body - now this made me very scared indeed!

Chris, my bro, writes a blog about DSLRs and the dark art that is real photography so I generally leave the clever stuff to him.

But after popping over to Primrose Hill with about £700 worth of kit and an uncertainty of how to use any of it I was releived to find that the camera is really easy to use and that the optional zoom was fantastic!

The body was light and the whole kit (body and 2 lenses) hardly took up any space in my man-bag.

I could see that people with smaller hands, people travelling but want a “proper” camera and people like me that would like to try DSLR’s but put off by their complexity, size, weight and cost will love this.

The construction of the thing is top-notch.  It has a metal chassis and feels really top-end, as do the lenses.

A little mentioned point is the fact that the large screen flips out and can be twisted so that over-head shots at gigs/”Hail Mary” paparazzi shots can be taken or indeed help avoid the need to lay on the floor to take ground-level photos.

It of course has a full manual mode for those that know what they’re doing but also a lot of toys such as stability control, etc as well as the full iA auto.

Panasonic plan on releasing some more lenses as well as an adapter which will open up the choice no end.

For the more fashion conscious it will also come in 3 colours - Red, Blue and naturally black.

A bit of news - there will in the future be a HD model that will take HD video: Another World’s First. This has generally not been possible with “system cameras” as there is an auto-focus lens problem but the G1 HD (perhaps it’ll have a different name by then) will have a special lens.  You heard that here first

The Panasonic Lumix G1 will be released in the UK on November 1st

Ok, so this is a bit like, “my dad’s bigger than your dad” but for you mobile computing junkies the question of who has the best WiFi access is a serious matter.

Well, London continues to be the world capital of WiFi with an amazing 12,276 access points - this is according to the latest from the annual Wireless Security Survey conducted by RSA.

London beats New York City by roughly 3,000 whilst Paris rules the year-over-year increase category with a stupendous 543 percent gain over last year!

NYC did manage to capture the top spot in the much coveted ‘corporate encryption’ category, with about 97 percent of corporate access points now employing some type of encryption, while about 20 percent of London’s business access points remain totally, completely, embarrassingly, nakedly unprotected.

The last figure is all the more startling when married with what Richard Thomas said at the RSA Conference Europe 2008 on Wednesday.

He stated that there had been 277 data breaches reported since last November. Thirty of which were classed as ”serious incidents”, in both the public and private sectors and are still under investigation.

Hmmm………….

But YAY LONDON! 

Slashdot

The Sony Rolly has always been an enigma to me.

Ok, it’s cute - It’s probably one of the cutest small speakers around.

But.

It’s a portable, trundling, dancing speaker - but the sound isn’t great for £250.

It’s a music player able to stream via A2DP Bluetooth or play from its internal flash but there’s no place to shove your 3.5mm lead.

 Sony are now updating it - and it will be controlled by YOU!! MWAHAHAHAHH!!!

Ahem.  Next month, Japanese Rolly buyers will be able to get the new SEP-50BT version complete with Bluetooth controls thus allowing them to make Rolly dance and spin like a performing monkey-bot all directed via their mobile phones.

I can imagine the high jinks and thoroughly wicked japes to be had through controlling the egg-shaped dancing speaker under somones chair and then unleashing a choice cut from ‘Cannibal Corpse’ as the little mp3 player starts its own circle pit :) 

The new system will actually give you control of up to seven of the little blighters at the same time using a mobile phone or laptop.

I reckon it’s time for some synchronised dancing……….

Gizmodo

Another ‘Worlds First‘; this time The Exilim Keitai W63CA has bragging rights to rockin an 8.1 megapixel camera - in a phone!

The latest Japanese super-phone squeezes 480 x 800 pixels into a 3.1-inch OLED display.

It also finds room to shoe-horn in features such as a wide-angle lens, 9-point auto focus, face detection, anti-shake, and a YouTube video mode that records VGA video at 30fps to microSD.

All this in a flip-fone measuring a mere 110 x 50 x 17.4 ~ 22-mm!!!

It launches in early November but no news on whether it is going to be available anywhere other than Japan as yet.

The Mir:ror tag is a little misleading as it’s not reflective (as far as I can see) and you’ll need to connect it via USB to a puter so hanging it on your hallway wall maybe a little tricky.

Instead of checking yourself out before you leave home you’ll be waving your various possessions over its USB-connected sensor.

Why? Well by the magic of small RFID stickers, enhanced-reality style info will be displayed on your computer.

What?

Put simply: Wave your brolly handle over it and get a weather forecast, your TV remote to get tele listings and so on.

An oddly cool concept yeah?

It’s made by Violet who are also to blame for bringing us the animated internet “buddy” bunny Nabaztag.

The RFID bit is in the little ‘Ztamps’ you stick to your gear, and the magic all happens through Violet’s new website.

The mir:ror can recognise quite a few things straight off however with dedicated stamps, but through the site you can configure more of your stuff to work with it.

$70 buys you the sensor, a skin for the sensor “puck”, 2 nanotagz rabbits (those little Nabaztaglets) and 3 ztamps.

You can buy more RFID stickers for the rest of your portable gear.

I’m strangely tempted

Dynamism via Technabob

Fancy yourself a butler/maid/skivvy but can’t afford the wages?

Well, a one off payment of around $10,00 could score you the “Home Assistant Robot”.

The housproud bot is the product of joint research between Toyota and the University of Tokyo.  It stands 5-foot tall on its practical wheels and weighs in at 286lb.

The HAR uses five cameras and six lasers to map and navigate round your home and has fairly free movement - the neck alone can be moved in three directions while the arms move seven!

The helpful HAR can open and close doors, tidy up rooms, mop floors, do your laundry and put away dishes - all this without a marriage certificate :P  ~ducks out of the way of flying frying pans~

What impresses me is that mechanical home-help is clever enough to move furniture out of the way to clean floors and such and then place it back in its original position when the chore is done.

I’m not exactly sure how the robot learns from its mistakes but the programming seems to operate on simple “Magic Eye”-type principals distinguishing what’s different about a room from its original room image and correcting the differences accordingly.

You can get between 30 to 60 minutes of graft per charge and can be expected to arrive at homes in the next decade.

So, save a grand a year…………..

Asahi via CrunchGear

In my run of Halloween gadgety loveliness I’ve kinda ignored the more creative of you.

Well, why not treat yourself to the Dremel Pumpkin Carving Kit from Firebox?

So, instead of carving your hands whilst trying to get that grin suitably scary and the eyes level this kit is dead easy to use:

1. Hollow out your pumpkin
2. Download the stencils from this link
3. Stick one to your seasonal vegetables
4. Start hacking away at the skin
5. Carve with the pumpkin carver attachment

Then a totally cool piece of vegatitive art is yours

I am still lovin my 3Gesus iPhone.

But, it still aint quite the perfect machine - not yet.

Fullsix has launched a site dedicated to the more vociferous moaning-mini’s out there called “Please Fix the iPhone.”

The site gets owners to vote on the most pressing issues that’s ‘bugging’ them and their iPhones - hopefully Jobs and friends will get to work on them faster.

There’s even a version of the site specifically made for the Apple handest’s browser, so that you can complain about your iPhone via your iPhone.

Here’s the link: Please Fix the iPhone via Josh Spear via Gizmodo

Like some scary sequel - Bill Gates returns

~insert onimous soundtrack using mainly flat 2s~

bgC3 is Billy Gates’ new venture and it has a federal trademark as a think-tank, covering:

• Scientific and technological services.
• Industrial analysis and research.
• Design and development of computer hardware and software.

The HQ is a small office near BG’s home and is said to be full of high tech toys including a Microsoft Surface used as a guest book.

Thing is - what does the C3 bit of the name mean?

What is he planning?

Should we be scared?

Is it gonna cost us money?

TechFlash via Valleywag

Word on the interweblogsphere is that the Mac Mini will not be shipped to stores from today!

There is no word as to when or if the tiny mac box will ever ship again.

The Mac Mini was designed to be the cheapest Mac but, unfortunately, the Mini sold very poorly and word is that it’s either going to be refreshed or become redundant.

More word as I get it……