What's happening at some of our other top blogs this weekend?

Games Digest: Slimline PS2 for less than £70?, Sony Japan launches PSP Tv service, Zodiac exits stage left

Shiny Shiny (Gadgets for Girls): Chocolate Fountain - Willy Wonka Stylee, Trendy 'Hearwear' Hearing Aids, Furgles - Cutest CD Holders in existence

Bayraider (eBay Blog): Justin Timberlake's Shirt, A Bit Of A Headcase, Paper Plane For Sale

HippyShopper (Green Living): New Eco-tailer on the block, What to do with your old bike, St Peter's Organic Ale comes top of the hops

Seems a good time to be an industry analyst; just about any piece of unsubstantiated conjecture will happily get reporters (like me) stirred up. Here's another in a long line of analyses which promises that the mysterious and highly anticipated Motorola iTunes phone will make its debut at the V festival this summer. The fact that a representative of Virgin mobile, sponsors of the event,said "there is no confirmation of when this phone will be launched" and that "it is not being launched at the V festival" is of little consequence.

Seems strange really: since the DVD swiftly assimilated every kind of movie and as the MP3 rapidly becomes the adopted music medium, almost every kind of distributable entertainment medium is turning digital. Why then do cinemas still insist on the old analogue movie reels? This is presumably the very same question the Digital Cinema Initiatives have been asking for some time and now, at last, have reached an agreement that will see an accepted digital film standard to be introduced and may mark the end for reels in the near future. Though many big Hollywood names welcome the move there is still some doubt as to who is going to front the bill for all the new tech that will be needed, specifically the digital projectors that are expected to cost between $50,000 and $100,000 a piece, not to mention the servers. Distribution will at least be made a lot cheaper as theatres will simply download the latest film when it is released though I assume they won't be using P2P technology to speed up the downloads...

via Wired News

Summer holidays are sadly upon us, leaving the streets teeming with the nation's young. It's bad enough trying to dodge them out in the open, so I can only imagine the horrors of being shut inside a slowly moving vehicle with them en route to some child-friendly holiday location. Parents everywhere will be praising Vieta for kindly developing a Freeview box that works in the car. Digital TV on the move should mean you get less interference and fewer signal woes. The TDT500C is a black box that you can hook up to any LCD in-car monitor. It will also integrate with existing car stereo, games consoles and DVD players. Pretty much everything you need to ensure that you don't have to speak to your children at all during any journey. At £399.99, it's expensive - but what price tranquility?

Vieta

Fujifilm doesn't actually have an [edit: Entry Level] digital SLR camera in its Finepix range, but it does cater for those who want something that's smarter than the average point and click, without the scary price tag that comes with D-SLRs. Two of the latest cameras out from Fujifilm fit into what it calls the SLR-Style range. The smallest of the two is the FinePix S5600 Zoom, the third version of the mini SLR-style cameras, which comes with a 10X optical zoom and a 5-megapixel Super CCD HR sensor. It's also got Fujifilm's Anti-Blur Mode, which helps to minimise the effects of both photographer and subject movement, and a choice of ISO sensitivity settings from ISO 64 up to ISO 1600. The lens is fixed, so you won't be able to change it, but it does come with an optical viewfinder so you can pretend to be proper rather than using the LCD preview.

The FinePix S9500 is a far more powerful version, nudging more closely up to digital SLR territory.

Ripe technology news handpicked for added freshness from the fertile land of the free. 

M-Audio mîcroTrack 2496 officially confirmed (DAPReview): The ultimate MP3 recording device and probably comes with the ultimate price tag. 

Color iPod Mini in October (?) (Gizmodo): A pretty silly question as it is based on quite sweeping assumptions and 'industry analyses', but who knows?

The Amazing Amanda doll, frankly, scares us (Engadget): You and me both. Sweet dreams kids... 

New Motorola Linux Phones: A910, A728 and A732 (I4U): More Motorola goodies emerge in the aftermath of MOTONOW.

RCA RS2052 Digital Music Studio converts your CDs to portables without a computer (Engadget): Enough said really.

It's funny how, even with today's plethora of diversely themed channels, you can never find anything remotely interesting to watch because you've either missed it entirely or its only on in the middle of the night. Since the launch of TiVo there has been a dream of having programmes on demand, whatever you want, whenever you want and it is only a matter of time until it happens. Wowing critics this week was Ascot based company, Promise TV's take on the concept: a VCR sized box that records and indexes an entire weeks worth of telly from every UK channel. Not one episode of Neighbours or split-second of Big Brother will be missed by this mega DVR which has 3.2 terabytes of capacity and is built from PC components. The system will face some future competition, including the download services that are beginning to emerge, but Promise TV is hoping to unveil its product as early as next month which may give it the edge over alternatives. We'll keep you posted as more details emerge.

via CNet

At last, an end to the confines of 512MB and 1 GB cards. Practically off the back of the announcement of the successful manufacture of 2GB SD cards comes word of an even more impressive 4GB breakthrough. This is surely great news for the MP3 and PMP industry as now there is becoming less and less need to rely on the bulkier mîcro HDs, especially as Pretec has even upped the transfer speed to 20MBps. Sadly this futuristic vision of portably memory, although being available to buy, will relieve you of $699 so it's probably best to just hang on until they get the mass production up and running.

via TrustedReviews

Sharp seems to have been a little quiet on the LCD front this year, but the lure of the approaching HDTV era has put that to rights as it seeks to offer two new series of smart HD Ready LCD tellys for people now wanting to examine the benefits of having gigantic home theatre screen. Sharp's Aquos range of LCDs, which has the P50 as its flagship, now has two new series to broaden the range. The GD7 forms part of the titanium style range and comes in 32" and 37" sizes. Unlike previous titanium models, Sharp has sensibly integrated a digital tuner into the unit which will save you a few quid at least. The GA6 is similar in style to the GD7 and will be available in 26", 32" and 37" but comes without the integrated digital receiver.

A major step towards commercial space travel has been heralded this week as Richard Branson announced a deal launching The Spaceship Company.  This is a joint deal with aviation expert, Burt Rutan who famously won the Ansari X prize last year by building the first private craft to vacate the earth's atmosphere and netting him a cool £5.6m. Branson has put in an order for 5 SpaceShipTwo craft that will realise the dreams of some 28,000 lunatics who want to blow £115,000 on a two hour scrape with death and five minutes of weightlessness. I hear the view is nice though. Virgin Galactic hopes to have the enterprise up and running in about two years time ferrying up to 7 passengers on each trip.

via The Scotsman

Another personal audio player that seems to be on the receiving end of plenty of praise at the moment is the iriver U10. iriver is obviously pretty keen on the design as it intends to roll out a whole range of U10s including both flash memory based and hard disk based models. Available shortly are the one (£179.99) and two (£199.99) gigabyte and 512MB (£159.99) versions. They will be followed by an eight gigabyte hard disk version, which is only marginally larger than the existing models, later in the year.

At CES the company will then take the wraps of 20 possibly a 40 Gigabyte device, which will obviously be slightly larger. The reason the device is attracting so much attention is that it not only plays JPEGs and MPEG4 files as well as audio ones, but also includes a touch screen 2.2inch colour display which user gently tap to choose tracks/change the volume etc. Other features include an FM tuner, a built in mîcrophone and an alarm.

Judging by the photo one of the hottest mP3 jukeboxes this year is likely to be the Ministry of Sound Audio MOSMP080, or The Edge as it more likely to be known. It's has so far top-end 20 Gigabyte hard disk based jukebox, which is finished in black and sports a two inch colour screen on its fascia which is capable of displaying JPEG images. The device will play back MP3 and WMA files, including WMAs downloaded from online music stores, and is due later the year retailing for £200. Don't get too excited though as at the recent Ministry launch the company only had a mock up.

Ministry also has plenty of other new players on the cards including a five Gigabyte hard disk jukebox, the £179.99 MOSMPO55, a pair of flash memory players in the MOSMP056 and MOSMP056X (£79.99 and £99.99) and two sets of headphones with integrated MP3 players.

Edinburgh: the city that each August throws itself to the mercy of millions of tourists, artists, actors, comedians, musicians, street performers and beer tents to provide the largest festival known to man, lasting the whole month. Two years ago, not content with merely being the international focal point for all the traditional visual and acoustic arts, Edinburgh decided to stake its claim on the videogames industry. Since then, the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival (EIEF) has grown exponentially and this year is promising five days of game screenings on top of cutting-edge industry conferences, competitions and prizes aplenty.

Five more technological sacrifices to the altar of the blogging, presented by our American buddies.

iOps "Jock" - the miniature DAP that does WMV (DAPReview): So how small do these have to get before we acknowledge that the screen simply isn't visible?

Motorola ROKR Band of Music Phones (I4U): Not the iPod phone yet, but other musical offerings look interesting.

iRiver U10... 8GB through 1-inch hard drive? (DAPReview): Indications that's the smart U10 might get the memory boost it deserves.

Tamagotchi Returns Strong (Gizmodo): Aaaaargh, they're back! Can't we get a moment's peace?

Door-a-way retractable oven door (Engadget): I'm really not sure why this is useful.

Helicopters, hah! With their pathetic two sets of blades. What you need is hulking four-bladed behemoth that can lurk in air like some kind of giant mechanical wasp and the remote controlled X-UFO from Firebox seems to meet those requirements. It can be operated from up to one hundred meters away via the rechargeable remote and it sports powerful coloured LEDs that makes it look even more extraterrestrial when flying at night (which surely can't be safe). Why not try taking one along to a festival and pursuing mushroom crazed hippies with your spinning, flashing alien monstrosity. The X-UFO costs £199.95 and is available now from here.

It had to be aimed at youths with a name like Amp'd, who apparently shun the unnecessary use of vowels, choosing instead to indulge in the much more extr'm' inverted comma.  Amp'd Mobile has now revealed its first phone, called the Jet (not the J't then?) from Kyocera. It turns out to be a decent looking slider-phone, which, in my opinion have been underrated in the past, that features MP3 and Video playback from TransFlash memory. It is nice to see some new thinking in the mobile market but I think it will be a long time before these reach this side of the pond. There's no details on prices or launch dates yet, but check the Amp'd website if you want to experience one of the most demanding Flash animations ever implemented for commercial use.

 Amp'd via Wireless Watch Japan

Sick of colleagues sneaking up to your desk whilst you're at the coffee machine and slipping obscenities into those project reports? Fear not, because now simple gadget can help render your workstation inoperable to your more mischievous co-workers by locking the screen whenever you move more than 2 meters away. This USB mouse comes with a little receiver that you carry about your person which detects your distance from the machine. Sadly it's only compatible with Windows and use of such a system is probably fraught with danger because God only knows what happens if you lose the receiver. Then again, equipping an entire office with them and then mixing the receivers about could yield some hilarity...

via Akihabara News

Forget unmarked Ford Transits, mîcroscopic listening devices and orbiting satellite arrays; someday nearly every detail of your social and working life could be tracked by your mobile. Believe it or not , your mobile holds not just the details of your whereabouts but a sophisticated map of you social behaviour that is extensive enough to allow for reasonably accurate predictions of your intended actions. Creepy. The MIT media lab, which has previously brought us such gems as the Bluetooth Squirrel, has now turned its eye on monitoring the activity of the students, building up over 350,000 hours of data on the movements of the test subjects.

LG's latest offering demonstrates what us Brits can probably expect in about three years time. The SB120 has just been unveiled in Korea, and is boasting DMB (Digital Media Broadcasting), which, for the uninitiated, will someday allow you to catch TV shows whilst enduring public transport and board meetings. Plus it even has a handy little stand to prop it up so you can sit in the office quite obviously watching telly at your desk innocently claiming that it's just you mobile.  

Could it soon be time to bin your Blackberry? In a surprise move Motorola has extended its ultra skinny RAZR range into the corporate zone with the debut of Q, a Windows Mobile powered smartphone. The thinnest handset to feature a QWERTY keyboard, the mobile mimics the design of the BlackBerry with the keyboard underneath the (320 x 240 pixels, 65K TFT) screen, but it is obviously significantly slimmer. Moto has kept the feature count high too including a 1.3 mega pixel camera, Bluetooth, MP3, AAC, WMA and WAV audio file playback and video capture. The device is also Motorola's first to run on mîcrosoft Windows Mobile 5.0 and so includes Outlook, Pocket Explorer and compatibility with Word and Excel.