The Sony BRAVIA LCD TV W4000 series (catchy name isn’t it), which has just been released in Korea, has more features than you can shake a stick at. Starting with the usual bits and pieces: it has 1080p full HD and uses the BRAVIA Engine 2 which, in their words, “provides the next generation in picture quality”, this basically boils down to enhanced depth, richness and clarity, or in other words, an awesome picture quality.
iMovie…. mmm… now where have I heard a name like that before? Anyway that aside, the RAmos iMovie T8 has the best screen-to-frame ratio in any MP4 player. As you can see from the picture the 4.3 inch touch screen takes up most of the face. Read on to see the video.
Philips has launched its digital audio & video player ‘GoGear (model:SA5245)’. Apart from looking very nice, its most noticeable feature is FullSound, a digital audio algorithm patented by Philips that refines audio output. FullSound apparently brings out the best of their audio system and delivers more life to the music by performing millions of operations before the sound hits your ears. It would seem that as hardware becomes faster companies are using it to full advatage to manipulate the sound into ritcher tones or make the sound appear to come from different directions as with Creative’s ZEN X-Fi.
If like me you have too many wires in your life and you are looking to reducing them before you have a nasty accident you could splash out on the Bluetooth-enabled model (SA5245BT). Both the GoGear models have a 2.8inch QVGA LCD screen and up to five hours video playtime.
All in all a very nice number and not a bad price either. You can find one of these at Amazon for $122.39
or £47.99
[Source: Philips]
Orb is familiar to us for its music, video and TV-streaming abilities, it can even turn your Wii into a media center (article on its way), but now the folks at Orb have moved on to the iPhone and iPod touch with a new application called OrbLive. Everything you could do before can now be done on your iPod touch or iPhone, including streaming live television.
Orb works by indexing the media on your PC and publishing it to a web site which you can then login to from any device that can access the internet. OrbLive goes one step further, rather than having to go to a web page you actually get access to all the media from an application installed on your iPhone or iPod touch. This means you have a nicer interface to search and view your media on and the whole feel and look fits better with your device. One downside is to install OrbLive you will need a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch, but if you don’t want to do that you can still use Orb’s original tried and tested method and just go to the website.
The sweet point is you can get any media to your device, movie, music, picture or live TV without having to worry about the limited size of you devices hard drive space. Now we have overcome one of the great hurdles with mobile devices, namely hard drive space, we just need to solve battery life, anyone know a web site you can stream power from…?
[Source: OrbLive]
Posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 8:15 am by Dan Phipps
Filed under
Audio,
Coming Soon,
Gadgets,
Manufacturer,
Music Streamer,
PMP,
Portable Music,
Technology,
Wi-Fi
I can’t wait to try out the Creative ZEN X-Fi, a series of portable media players with all the usual features but it is the built in Wi-Fi and sound manipulation features which have sparked the biggest interest. The Wi-fi in particular will open up the way into the future of potable media player. Read on to find out more.
You may remember our article on Sanyo’s new waterproof HD TV which enabled you to watch TV in a down poor if you so wished. Well now you can also listen to music while singing in the rain.
We all know that Google likes to have its fingers in all the pies, well they are now sticking their hands into an area of the home entertainment market coveted by Microsoft and Apple. Google really are taking no survivors; it would seem their company motto isn’t only “Don’t be evil” but also “World domination is a must”.
The Google Media Server can connect a PC to any device that supports Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), a set of computer network protocols that enable devices to share data across a home network. The server uses the Desktop Search to locate media files on the PC and on the Web. So basically all you need is a windows PC running Google Desktop and a UPnP-enabled device (e.g. video-game consoles PlayStation 3 from Sony and Xbox 360 from Microsoft, as well as Hewlett-Packard’s MediaSmart high-definition televisions). Once you have those you can then:
- Access videos, music, and photos stored on your PC
- View online picture albums
- Play your favorite YouTube videos as well as other online videos
I can hear Microsoft quaking in their boots (whether that is from fear or anger I can’t tell).
[Source:Google Blog]
Japanese researchers have been hard at work fiddling with discs and they have come up with a way to multiply the capacity of a CD or DVD by 9 fold. The researchers have managed this magnificent feat by reshaping the pits on the media surface, which are normally flat, into ‘v’ shapes.
Unfortunately you won’t be using discs based on this method any time soon as it renders them incompatible with current players, and worse still, the process cannot be applied to Blu-ray discs. This particular piece of research is unlikely to amount to much, at least for consumers.
[Source: Engadget]
Mitsubishi has announced a new range of TVs that sound seriously cool. Called the Mitsubishi LaserVue, the new HDTVs use laser to project the image onto the back of the screen. The resultant picture is apparently much better at rendering blacks and whites than either LCD or plasma, and can project twice the number of colours than either technology can, too.
The result is an image that is much sharper and much more colourful than standard HDTVs, and much bigger too, as laser TV is able to scale to much bigger formats than existing technology. The new LaserTech TVs announced by Mitsubishi come in huge 65″ and 73″ variants, and for those annying green types out there, use only half the power of traditional TVs.
The downside? Size: they’re over ten inches deep, taking us back to the days of the old analogue CRT tellys. So your TV will look huge in all dimensions, which isn’t necessarily what you want, but at least you’ll be able to say your TV is laser-powered. Actually, that might have sounded cool back in the ’80s, but it seems a bit naff now!
The new Mitsubishi laser TVs will be released this Autumn, giving you plenty of time to save the several thousands of pounds that these things will undoubtedly cost.
[Source: The Gadget Show]
JVC have launched a new range of HD TVs featuring what must be the world’s least requested add-on - an iPod dock! The gloriously named LT-32P679, LT-42P789, LT-47P789 and LT-52P789 LCD TVs (who said HD TVs were just commodities?!) all come with an iPod dock built into their base, which lets you plug your iPod into it.
Why would you want to do this? Well, not to watch video, that’s for sure, as the HDTVs only let you listen to the music on your iPods. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but a TV is not actually designed as an audio device, but focuses on instead on video. Why would you want to play your iPod’s tunes through your TV?
The HDTVs at least let you control your iPod via the remote, and the iPod’s menu is then displayed on the TV. But given the sound quality of most tellys, surely it’d be better either to listen to your iPod from your, er, iPod, or else invest in a decent hi-fi with an iPod dock? Call me cynical, but this smacks to me of gimmick!
[Source: I4U.com]
