Author: Andy Merrett
HTC Touch HD: mobile Internet and entertainment handset coming this Winter
HTC has announced its latest handset, the Touch HD, which boasts a 3.8-inch wide touchscreen display, five megapixel camera, expandable memory, and TouchFLO 3D user interface.
Big handsets with large screen real estate have grown in popularity since the likes of the iPhone and Viewty, and this is surely HTC’s most convincing competition yet.
This 3G phone can utilise HSDPA at up to 7.2Mbps where available, plus Wi-Fi. The HTC TouchFLO 3D interface sits on top of Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. There’s 512MB of internal Flash memory and 288MB of RAM, plus microSD/SDHC memory card expansion…
Tangent intros UNO portable mono FM radio
With the world seemingly in stereo and beyond, you might wonder at the introduction of a monaural portable radio, but if you think about it, stereo is fairly useless on a small unit, and far more important is quality of sound.
Enter Tangent’s appropriately-named UNO portable radio, offering FM and AM radio in a curved wooden cabinet with five watt amplifier and three-inch speaker…
Wadja wants to save mobile users money by offering free text messages
New research by the social network and communication web site Wadja suggests that UK prepay mobile phone users are, collectively, spending over £66m each week on the cost of text messages.
The SMS is very popular in the UK, with 1.4 billion messages sent each week – more than in any other European country. Around half of these are sent from non-contract phones…
Teen suicide over LHC Apocalypse fears; let's rename the beast
Sadly, an 16-year-old Indian girl took the fears of an all-encompassing black hole being formed by the Large Hadron Collider, and took her life instead of carrying on as normal as the rest of us have.
On the scheme of things, if there was even the remotest possibility of being annihilated by a lethal black hole sucking, I’d rather die that way than fairly unpleasantly by drinking pesticide. I guess the girl believed that suicide is painless.
In related news, the Royal Society of Chemistry has launched a competition to find a new, more meaningful, name for the LHC. Dr Richard Pike said that it “fails to reflect the drama of its mission, or the inspiration it should be conveying to the wider public….
ViewSonic launches VX62 Series of LCD monitors
ViewSonic has announced its newest line of LCD monitors, the VX62 Series.
The 22-inch model offers a 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio and super clear panel, for much improved black levels and colour quality. It has a 1,680 x 1,050 native resolution (16:10 aspect ratio), 300 nits brightness, and a decent 2ms response time.
The 19-inch model offers a more modest 6,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, other specs remain the same…
Moreeco: New eco-conscious shopping site launches
Online shopping sites are hardly original, but at least moreeco.com offers something for the environmentally-conscious consumer.
It offers a range of products from smaller, independent green retailers, and allows the consumer to collect points to redeem against gifts. For every 10 points earned, moreeco will offset one kilogram of CO2 via Climate Care…
Sony announces latest high definition projector: BRAVIA VPL-VW80
Sony has announced its latest high definition projector, the BRAVIA VPL-VW80.
Just like the VPL-VW40 launched earlier this year, it uses Sony’s proprietary SXRD (Silicon X-tal Reflective Display) technology — a variant of LCoS — to produce its full 1080p image.
Built-in Sony technologies include the BRAVIA ENGINE 2 (the previous model used version one) which handles colour reproduction, Motionflow which adds intermediate frames to the original video source, creating smoother movement, Dark Frame Insertion which optionally adds darkened frames to heighten contrast and remove judder, Real Colour Processing which allows precise tweaking of the colour space, and Iris 2 which dynamically adjusts the lens aperture based on the scene…
Microsoft launches two new LifeCam webcams
Microsoft has announced two new webcams: the LifeCam Show and LifeCam VX-5500.
The LifeCam Show is a thin, mirrored webcam that attaches easily to a notebook or desktop PC via clip, or can be positioned on an 11-inch tall desk stand.
It offers two megapixel video recording and eight megapixel stills camera, plus built-in noise-cancelling microphone with echo-cancellation.
The lower-spec LifeCam VX-5500 comes with switchable coloured faceplates — red, white, or blue. It captures 640×480 video and 1.3 megapixel stills, and also the same style microphone as the Show…
Vodafone radio ad banned, it zips through T&Cs too fast
The Advertising Standards Agency has been busy vetting technology ads recently. No sooner has it finished rapping Apple for misleading iPhone ads, or Virgin Media for sending bullet-hole mail through people’s letterboxes, then it’s on Vodafone’s case for blurting out the terms and conditions too quickly on a recent radio ad.
A whale-eared listener complained to the watchdog because the words were so fast that it was hard to hear the message. To be honest, I’m of the opinion that there are always several reams worth of finely printed contractual legalese attached to any product, and am happy for the cursory nod any radio advertiser gives to them to be over with as possible…
InFocus debuts affordable X9 720p DLP projector
InFocus has announced its latest projector, the X9, offering high definition projection at a distinctly budget price.
Thanks to the fact that it’s a 720p projector, rather than offering 1080p high definition, it comes in at a lower price point. There’s no skimping on quality, though, as it uses Texas Instruments’ DLP technology with BrilliantColor, and offers a 2,500:1 contrast ratio, 1,800 lumens brightness, and HDMI with DeepColor support…
