Britons still prefer to watch television live – on their TVs

As our "second" screens get smaller while our TV screens get larger, it seems that the old adage that "bigger is better" just might hold true. Some new research has shown that despite the growth in watching television via a PC, tablet or smartphone, 90 per cent of viewers still regularly use the TV to…

CES 2010: Final Thoughts

The Consumer Electronics show, the behemoth of tech, the Valhalla of gadgetry, has come and gone for yet another year. But this time, rather than arriving with a bang, it slinked into sight with something more like a whimper. CES…

Virgin Media to bring TiVo back to the UK

Not a great deal has been offered by Virgin as to how the arrangement will work, however company CEO said "Our fibre-optic network combined with TiVo's capabilities will allow us to offer consumers the most significantly advanced and compelling TV service available in the UK."

In the US TiVo boasts a few features that aren't available in the UK on any DVR, such as the ability to search for shows by actors and the option of accessing music services like Rhapsody though a TV set. It'll be interesting to see how many of them make it to the UK box.

Inauguration 2.0 – Presidents' speeches broken down into tag clouds

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You can tell it’s the 21st Century. The good folks over at ReadWriteWeb have broken down the full text of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech yesterday into a tag cloud using Wordle.net. The results are interesting – “nation” and “new” come out on top. Click for embiggening.

Just for fun, they’ve also analysed the speeches of Bush in 2005, Clinton in 1999, Reagan in 1981 and Lincoln in 1861 and 1865. You can see the clouds after the jump, but it’s quite interesting to see how much Bush relied on the word ‘freedom’ Reagan on ‘government’ and Lincoln on ‘constitution’ first, and then ‘war’.

CES 2009: Vuzix Wrap 920AVs

At CES 2009, Dan got his hands (or eyes?) on Vuzix’s Wrap 920AVs that I was getting excited about here. They’re every bit as awesome as promised, apparently, but Dan also managed to wheedle out a price from them – they’re looking at $399 (£274), and a ‘summertime’ release (for the US, presumably).

Vuzix

Related posts: Next-gen Vuzix VR glasses will be unveiled at CES | Vuzix Wrap 920AV audiovisual goggles – the full, actually quite awesome, details

CES 2009: Sony reveals its 3" OLED-screened WALKMAN X music and media player

This beauty is the new Sony WALKMAN X range – featuring a 3″ OLED touch screen to make videos look marginally better than they have ever looked before. Although they won’t look very good when you’ve had your fingers all over the screen for six months.

The X1050 and X1060 both feature digital noise cancelling technology, FM tuners, the 3″ 432×240 screen and come with 16 or 32GB of storage space. Here’s a big photo of it, as it’s rather pretty. That’s not my music. That’s someone else’s music.

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The WALKMAN X is even packed with a wi-fi chip and custom BBC iPlayer tool…

Vuzix Wrap 920AV audiovisual goggles – the full, actually quite awesome, details

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We’ve just been given the full details on the Vuzix 920AVs that I posted about on Friday, and gosh, they look more exciting than I had anticipated. Remember how I said that they seemed to be the non-interactive version? They’re not – there’s an option to fit them with a “6-Degree of Freedom tracking sensor and/or Stereo Camera Pair”.

That means that you can mix images from in front of you with virtual content. Imagine looking down a street, and seeing little markers come up from famous buildings saying what they are, or the ultimate Sat-Nav system which can tell which way you’re looking and show you which way to go with a line on the road.

The Mintpass Mintpad internet, notepad, writing, watching, digital camera, media THING

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The global gadget development arms race to see who can fit the most stuff into the smallest, whitest box has taken a dramatic turn today, thanks to this clever little everything-in-one miniature… digital… wi-fi… thing.

You can write on it, browse the internet on it, listen to music on it, take photos on it, watch films on it and, most importantly of all, get it out of your very smallest pocket and impress people with it by showing them all of the above. It all happens on a fairly minuscule 2.86″ touch screen, mind…