The best of the day from Shiny Media...

WiMAX can handle high definition television. In a trial, anyway. [HDTV UK]
Buying accessories for something that doesn't exist yet? More fool you. [iPhonic]
£170 Wiis outselling £425 PS3s in the UK. I, for one, am gobsmacked. [WiiWii]
Dead Rising 2! All over the 360! When it comes out of development, anyway. [XBOXER]

The best of the day from Shiny Media...

Fancy England's cheapest Blu-ray player? Currys have got your back. [HDTV UK]
Make your very own iPhone! The screen on the cardboard version has got to be tougher than the screen on the iPod. [iPhonic]
'Home' is not Second Life. Nor is Second Life home. [PSPSPS]
Kill many strangers! In beta! Halo 3 multiplayer from 16 May. [XBOXER]

The best of the day from Shiny Media...

* £399.99 PS3 bundles available online. [PSPSPS]
* The iPhone for Dummies, from Amazon. [iPhonic]
* Do you Wiffiti? [Techscape]
* Multi-player Gears of War. [XBOXER]

It’s been a strange old year so far, weather-wise. In the last few weeks, we’ve zig-zagged from snow to rain to blazing sunshine. Either the Weather God’s having a laugh, or it’s the planet’s way of telling humanity we’re on our last warning, environment-wise. Your choice.

Anyway, if this year sees a repeat of last summer’s heatwave, you won’t want to be chained to your office desk. And why should you be? Surely modern technology offers a way to get yourself down the park to lounge in the sun, yet STILL keep up with those all-important emails and PowerPoint presentations?

And lo, there is. Sony’s VAIO SZ4 Series series is a lightweight laptop with a battery life that’ll ensure you flake out before it does on a sunny day. Better still, it comes with an HSDPA/3G card, plus a 30-day free trial of T-Mobile’s Web’n’Walk service, giving you broadband speeds in the open air, without a wire in sight.

SONY VAIO SZ4 Series

POST SPONSORED BY SONY

There are so many new TV technologies designed to make image quality, motion rendering and colour reproduction look better that it’s almost impossible to keep up with who’s doing what and what name they're giving it. Sony’s latest wheeze is Motion Flow, which is available in this latest Bravia D3000. The technology is designed to remove the judder that you get when you’re watching fast moving scenes on a flat panel TV. This is especially a problem with movies shot on film, since they’re recorded in 24 frames per second and therefore have lots of little gaps that a TV struggles to deal with.

Thanks to those impressive ads, the Bravia TV range is possibly Sony’s strongest brand at the moment (WALKMAN still means cassettes to most of us). Which probably explains why the range has just been extended to include one of the company’s projectors. The AW15 projector is the first to use the Bravia brand, and is designed to appeal to consumers. It runs very quietly (20db is what we’ve been quoted) and it can produce a picture that goes up to a 200-inch screen size. It supports the 24p (24 frames/sec) film speed, so it will work with the Blu-Ray players and although there’s no pricing as yet, it’s supposed to be reasonably affordable (the Sony guys said somewhere in the region of €1500).

Read on for more, and a video of it in action.

I’m over in Rhodes at the Sony press event at the moment. It’s a bit strange to say the least – hundreds and hundreds of journalists from all over Europe, sitting in a series of workshops during which time they get brief glimpses of some gadgets. It makes a very welcome change from the usual press event which involves being herded round a large hall being told lots of product numbers and specs, but It’s proving a bit difficult to actually get hold of samples so that I can shoot you some videos. One product I’m very keen to get my hands on is the Sony Cyber-Shot T100, and hopefully I’ve have a chance before the trip is over. In the mean time, I can tell you that it looks mighty perty. It’s got 8.1 megapixels, Carl Zeiss lens, 5x optical zoom and a 3-inch LCD screen. So far, so normal, but it also comes with Full High Definition 1080 output for displaying photos on your HD TV. It comes with face recognition technology (a first for this range) and it’s got the same image processor that the Sony Alpha SLR camera uses – all in a 22mm wide body.

The Cyber-shot T100 will be available throughout Europe from the beginning of March 2007. Pricing TBC. [Katie Lee]

Sony will probably never forgive me for describing their new GIGA JUKE as an iPod Hi-Fi, but since HDD means basically nothing to normal folk, it seemed like the easiest way to explain what it is. Two models have been announced Sony NAS-50HDE, also known as the GIGA JUKE HDD System and the NAC-HD1E GIGA JUKE HDD. or GIGA JUKE HDD Deck. The System model can store up to 40,000 tracks on its 80GB hard drive, while the Deck, which is as a standalone system to connect to your current hi-fi has a 250GB hard disk drive capable of storing up to 375 hours of music.

Both can rip CDs straight onto the player and you can transfer tracks directly to your music player, mobile phone and PSP. Apparently, players other than the WALKMAN are also supported, but you will need a WALKMAN phone if you want to transfer tracks onto your mobile.