Gadgety News

Samsung is bringing sexy to Blu-ray!

Check out this latest BD-Live Blu-ray deck and tell me that design isn’t top of Sammy’s list!

This is a wall-mountable 1.5-inch thin spinner and is named the BD-P4600.

In it’s designer clothes it’ll also graft - it can stream both Netflix and Pandora.

It’ll even handle Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD HR/MA decoding and audio bitstream output.

Available the first half of 2009 but no price news as yet.

There’s been plenty of chat about thin tele’s and most make me feel uninspired to write even the briefest of remarks on this site.

But at least this one has made me sit up and put pen-to-paper….well, finger to keyboard at any rate.

This new gogglebox from Sony is (at the moment) the thinnest LCD HDTV.

Measuring at a size 0 model-like 9.9mm thick the KDL-40ZX1 nearly halves the depth of Hitachi’s former champ (likely to be hitting the lemon-juice and two-fingers down the throat diet) and comes within a fag-papers width of Pioneer’s Kuro concept (9mm).

Into this remarkable frame it squeezes such nice things as LED backlighting, a 3,000:1 contrast ratio, 120Hz MotionFlow tech, x.v.Color and BRAVIA Engine 2 image processing (this is pretty much like having the actors perform in your living room behind a 40-inch picture frame).

Only one HDMI in is directly on the screen itself.

All of the other HDMI, USB, etc component inputs are relegated to a base station.

All this skinny lovliness can be yours for a found-underneath-your-sofa 490,000 yen ($4,474) and will be at your local Japanese (if you live in Japan) tv vendor on November 10th.

AV Watch

Lenovo has now officially unveiled the much talked about MacBook Air baiting ThinkPad X300 notebook PC. 

Lenovo claim it to be the thinnest and lightest full-function notebook in its class. 

“Compared to major vendors offering 13-inch widescreen notebook PCs: Sony, Dell, Apple, Asus and Fujitsu Siemens.  Full featured defined as including technologies such as built-in DVD burner, selection of USB ports, Ethernet connection, replaceable battery and more”.

The ultra-thin, ultraportable has a 13.3-inch WXGA+ display, measures less than 1.85cm at its thinnest point and has a starting weight of 1.33kg.

The ThinkPad X300 combines a “number of leading technologies” such as solid-state drive storage, a LED backlit display, ultra-long battery life (up to 10 hours) and enhanced wireless connectivity.

There’s an optional built-in 7mm DVD burner on some models.   Also included are stereo speakers, a digital microphone, an integrated camera and an integrated fingerprint reader.

It should be able to withstand a life on the road thanks to its ”roll-cage” durability and the 1.8-inch 64GB SSD that provides more than twice the performance of a regular 2.5-inch hard drive - and with no moving parts - four times greater shock resistance than hard disk drives.

The notebook also comes with the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processor technology, up to 4GB memory and Lenovo’s ThinkVantage Technologies.

Available immediately, the ThinkPad X300 notebook price starts from £1700.

Although thin - the newly appointed “Thinnest Laptop” is not quite thin enough.  Call me pedantic but the Pedion…………

“Developed by Mitsubishi and Hewlett-Packard back in 1997 … The Pedion measured 18.4 millimeters thick, which comes out to 0.7244 inch thick. Although the Air gets to 0.16 inch at the thinnest point, the Air is 0.76 inch thick at the beefiest portion, making it minutely thicker.”

So, there!!  That is THE thinnest laptop - unless you know otherwise…………..