Well HTC hears ya loud and clear, and is bringing out the HTC Tube – no, not a phone for once but a clever box that adds DLNA streaming capabilities to your DLNA-less device such as the HTC Desire or the HTC HD2, or even other Android handsets.

Using the Tube you can now wirelessly stream your videos to your TV through the Tube’s HDMI out – excellent for showing those interesting holiday videos to the family or just big screen films if you’ve loaded them onto your phone.

Bringing wireless HDMI to your phone with HTC’s Tube, the portable media centre phone just got more interesting.

Here are the specs for the HTC Tube:

[Source: SlashGear]

Just how well does the Sony Bravia Internet Video platform succeed in putting YouTube and the like on your Sony Telly though? Is it just a gimmick (as well as a mouthful!), or does Sony Bravia Internet Video successfully turn your telly into the biggest social gadget in your living room, and the ultimate social hub?

Read on to find out.

Why choose the Sony Bravia Internet Video platform?

The Sony Bravia Internet Video platform massively extends what you can watch on your TV by giving you almost limitless options of new videos and content. Not just movies-on-demand from the likes of Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand, but all the countless videos on YouTube as well.

This sounds like a great idea, but it’s not eactly new – in fact, every manufacturer now has its own version of Internet TV, so why should you choose the Sony Bravia Internet Video platform over the competition?

The answer lies with the choice of applications that Sony have provided combined with a range of arguably the best HDTVs on the market. Add to this 3D, WiFi and DLNA support, and you’ve got a mouth-watering combination of superb features that makes the new range of Sony HDTVs super-social gadgets!

Sony Bravia Internet Widgets

The applications themselves are called the Sony Bravia Internet widgets, which again, isn’t exactly the most concise term! The widgets are simply Web apps displayed on your HDTV. You can position the widgets anywhere you like, and there’s a good selection to choose from, including:

• Netflix
• Amazon Video on Demand
• YouTube
• Slacker Internet Radio
• Pandora
• NPR
• Sony Pictures
• Sony Music
• USA Today sports
• Yahoo Finance
• Twitter
• Flickr photos
• and many more, including news and weather.

The widgets connect to the respective Web sites through built-in Wi-Fi, which makes connection set-up simplicity itself – no worrying about how you’re going to get an Ethernet cable to reach from your home router to the TV; simply switch the Tv and it’ll find your Wireless LAN automatically.

Sony Bravia BRAVIA XBR-LX900 Series 3D HDTV – the best of the bunch

The widgets provided offer a good selection of Web apps. Certainly the usual suspects of video streamin gsites and social media sites, but nothing quite as open and extensible as Samsung’s offering via its SamsungApps Store.

What makes Sony’s offering unique, though, is the quality and features of the TVs that support the Bravia Internet video platform.

Take, for example, the BRAVIA XBR-LX900 Series 3D HDTV. With screen sizes ranging from 40″ up to 60″, these technological marvels offer full HD 1080p, 240HZ MotionFlow PRO for smooth images with fast moving video, Sony’s BRAVIA 3 engine for superb picture quality and contrast, and full 3D.

That’s right – one of the best screen displays on the market, combined with 3D, plus all the benefits of Internet widgets. It’s this combination of TV quality and Internet and social media extensibility that makes the Sony BRAVIA Internet Video platform so compelling.

This advantage might not last for long, though. With every manufacturer releasing their own version of Internet TV, Sony’s superior display technology might not be enough to beat the competition in the long run. Just like the war currently being waged in the mobile phone world, in the end it might all be about who has the best range of apps.

Samsung have managed to endow (for that really is the right word!) the CL80 not just with cracking camera optics and all sorts of image improvement trickery, but also a plethora of connectivity options including WiFi, Bluetooth and DLNA. And HDMI. And then they threw in email as well. Oh and auto-uploads to a range of Web apps!

Seriously, the list goes on and on. So I suppose I’d better start then (deep breath!)

Samsung CL80 camera specs

First, the camera. The CL80 offers the following:

• 14 megapixels
• SchneiderKREUZNACH lens
• 720p video recording
• 7x optical zoom
• Digital image stabilization
• Smart face recognition with up to 20 faces
• Smile shot, blink detection, red-eye fix
• Panorama shot
• Object tracking auto focus
• Smart filter

Nothing too amazing there – indeed, it’s not that different from the latest top end camera phones! However, it’s the other features that Samsung have added that make the CL80 a revolutionary camera.

Connectivity

The CL80 is all about connectivity. To that end, Samsung have given it the following features:

• WiFi
• Bluetooth
• DLNA
• HDMI

This means you can view your shots in loads of different ways:

• Connect the CL80 to your HDTV via the HDMI connection and a cable
• Upload the pics to your PC via WiFi and view them there
• If your HDTV supports DLNA and WiFi, you can view the pics on your telly without the need for wires
• Same goes for a DLNA-equipped PC
• Transfer your pics to your digitial photo fram wirelessly (if your photo frame supports WiFi and DLNA)
• Share your photos with your own or your friends’ mobile phones via Bluetooth

One touch uploading to the Web

What if you want to upload your pics to the Web? Nom problem – if you’re in range of a WiFi connection, you can automatically upload them to the following:

• Facebook
• Picasa
• YouTube

Email sharing

Photo sharing Web sites not your thing? Fine, simply email your pictures instead. Yep, not only has the CL80 got an email client built-in, it’s also got a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard, so you can write an email, attach the pic, and send it to whoever you want!

Somebody from Samsung’s mobile phone division obviously walked into the wrong room one day and started working on the CL80 thinking it was Samsung’s latest wonder phone!

Other Features

I’ve still not finished, though. Aside form all the connectivity and super-sociable gadgets, the CL80 also features a tonne fo super-cool tech, including:

• 3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen
• 720p HD video recording
• SmartGesture touchscreen interface, which lets you access the phone’s various menus using swiping and gestures (told you someone from their phone division got lost!)
• Accelerometer – scroll through your pics by tilting the camera left or right

The Samsung CL80 – superb!

The Samsung CL80 is a fantastic new camera, and probably the most sociable camera around. With its huge range of connectivity options and super-easy uploading to loads of different Web sites, the CL80 makes it absurdly simple to share your photos with anyone or any device.

And surely that’s the point of photos – to share? I don’t want to go all wishy washy on you, but how many photos have you got trapped on your hard drive, or in your mobile phoe or camera?

At last, camera manufacturers are making a real effort to help not just take great photos, but to let others see them as well.

Samsung should be congratulated on make a cracking camera with the CL80 that really helps the user get the most out of their memories.

[Source: Gizmodo]

The Wooo also supports the increasingly-popular DLNA, which is used to transmit pre-recorded video to your DLNA-equipped TV (the Wooo incorporates a DLNA server), and also to browse the contents of the Wooo’s videos through the TV via the TV’s standard remote.

The Wooo supports H.264 for its HD pictures, and incorporates an IPTV server to stream live HD video over to your TV in real time.

The new Wooo won’t be cheap. Not only do you have to buy the camcorder itself, but you’ll also need a TV capable of supporting DLNA, IPTV and WiFi (although you can buy STBs and other boxes of tricks that’ll support the last two).

However, it shouldn’t be long before this technology finds its way into most HDTVs, and so WiFi camcorders should start to become more and more popular.

Effectively, this turns the Wooo into a sort of reverse SlingBox, which currently streams “live” TV programmes from your TV to any client device with an Internet connection, anywhere in the world.

With the Wooo you’ll be able to stream genuinely live video that you shoot in real time not just to your TV, but to any TV (or screen, for that matter) that has an Internet connection, again, anywhere in the world.

An intriguing development indeed.

It’ll be interesting to see the applications that emerge for this new way of recording and broadcasting video.

Security is an obvious application, as it turns your camcorder into an instant CCTV camera.

You can also picture people streaming events such as conferences live over the Internet.

All this won’t take place for a while, but a new era in amateur video broadcasting looks like it’s about to dawn.

[Source: TechOn, via SlashGear]

Why? Because the new Samsung STB you see here is actually a DVR, capable of storing HD programmes internally. Better still, it comes with DLNA, meaning it can browse the content from your DLNA-equipped phone and camera (and any other DLNA device) without any configuring; and it’ll also be able to access “Internet media”, which I’m guessing means the likes of YouTube and Flickr.

Put all this together and you have a low-cost alternative to the Sky+ box that will also help DLNA finally reach market penetration, as well as getting the masses used to seeing YouTube and Flickr on their TV. In other words, the Web is about to go mainstream as a major distributor of video content, and the process of it replacing traditional TV broadcasting is really gaining momentum.

Better still, with more and more companies supporting DLNA in increasingly-cheaper devices, the vision of all devices around the home being able to seamlessly share each other’s content is at last starting to become a reality.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this Samsung box to see exactly what lurks behind its impenetrable facade (i.e. more news as soon as we get it!)

[Source: AkihabaraNews]

The Series 7 HDTVs are also DLNA-equipped, meaning they can seamlessly sync with other DLNA-equipped devices, such as your mobile phone or digital camera, and view all of the content stored there.

Best of all, though, is what Samsung is calling InfoLive: RSS content feeds delivered live to the TV via WiFi, with the information provided by Yahoo! Think of it as an extended (and hopefully less frustrating!) version of teletext,as it offers up to the minute news,weather and finance information directly to your TV.

That’s not all the Samsung Series 7 HDTVs can do though…

In addition, with DLNA and WiFi, these wonderfully flexible TVs will let you share content between any device in your house.

Not only can you view all the pics and videos from your phone (wirelessly too, remember), but also all the content you’ve download onto your PC.

Even more impressive, if you have a DLNA-equipped printer, you can print off any image directly from your TV, and all wirelessly.

The Series 7 TVs are high-end, and so,as you’d expect,come with some seriously impressive specs. There are two different types of technology used: Plasma and LCD. The three plasma models (in sizes of 50, 58 and a whopping 63″) feature full 1080p High-Def resolution, a 100Hz refresh rate, and a claimed 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

The small LCD TVs (40,46 and 52″) feature an Ultra Clear Panel that reduces glare and reflection, and more accurate reds, blues and greens (which, though no doubt important, doesn’t sound anywhere near as exciting as a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio!)

It’s good to see Samsung recognizing the changing ways we use our TVs now, and designing their new TVs to accommodate the broad range of content that we wish to view. TV has changed forever, and so naturally the TVs have to adapt to all the user generated content we now have, and the plethora of different devices on which it’s stored.

Now all they need to do is to provide the same technology seen in the Series 7 TVs onto their TVs that are much lower down in the range, as we haven’t all got thousands to spend on our new TV!

[Source: AkihabaraNews]

Now, though, Samsung may be about to change all that with the announcement of the new Samsung INNOV8 i8510, a stunning high-end smartphone that really does deserve to be called a multimedia computer.


So what makes the Samsung INNOV8 so great then? Well, it contains the usual array of high-end smartphone features: Wi-Fi, 7.2Mbps HSDPA connectivity, GPS, and a whopping 8 megapixel camera. But what’s got us so fired up about this new smartphone is its 16GB of storage (expandable to 32GB), support for DivX out the box, and DLNA support.

DLNA, for those of you who don’t know, enables suitably equipped devices to share their media with other suitably equipped devices. So, for example, you could stream your videos from your mobile phone to your DLNA equipped HDTV over your WiFi connection, for free (as you’re using your own network) and all without moving from your seat.

This has been theoretically possible for some time now, but Sony Ericsson phones have been the only ones to support DLNA. Furthermore, the storage capabilities and connectivity options simply weren’t there before, meaning what you could do with DLNA on your mobile phone was distinctly limited.

No longer. The Samsung INNOV8 has just blown all that out of the water. 32GB is a huge amount of storage space, and should let you hold entire DVDs on your phone, all encoded in a variety of formats, including DivX. You can then watch those movies on your DLNA-equipped TV simply by picking up your phone, pairing with your TV and streaming the movies onto it. In effect the phone becomes remote control and video storage device in one, with the added benefit that you can pick it up and tkae it with you and still keep watching your movie no matter where you are.

Imagine watching the start of a movie at your house with your girlfriend, before going out for a spot of dinner, returning to her house and picking up where you left off simply by pairing your mobile phone with her TV.

The DLNA future has been a long time coming, but the technologies needed to take it mainstream are slowly emerging, and at a decent cost point, too. The Samsung INNOV8 i8510 is a stunning mobile phone, and if any phone deserves to be called a multimedia computer, it’s the INNOV8.

Better still, it also comes with DLNA-support and Ethernet, enabling you to share your videos with any DLNA-equipped device that’s also connected to your Ethernet network. Add 24fps playback speeds and HDMI 1.3 with enhanced colour, and you have one seriously feature-rich DVD player. Looks cool, too!

The Pioneer BDP-95FD release date is October 2007, priced around $1000.

[Source: Electronista]

It also retails for just $1,000, or $1,000 less than the BDP-LX70. I guess you can look on the BDP-LX70′s support for 24p as an outrageously expensive luxury, or see it as a good sign that in a few months’ time, when 24p is supported by a much wider range of players, the price of a 1080p/24p player will come down to match that of the BDP-94HD.

Full details of the Pioneer BDP-94HD Blu-Ray player after the jump.

From the press release:

Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. offers the pinnacle of home theater to entertainment junkies with the introduction of its next generation Blu-ray Disc® player, the Elite® BDP-94HD. The well-rounded player offers playback of the newest high resolution audio formats, home networking capabilities and is easily integrated into even the most complicated home theaters. However, it shines most in its ability to deliver stunning image quality of Blu-ray Disc titles.

“The decision to purchase a Blu-ray Disc player is generally made because a consumer recognizes the benefits of the HD quality. This new player is a prime example of our dedication to exceptional quality, creating sights and sounds that leave an emotional impression for movie enthusiasts,” said Chris Walker, senior manager of marketing and product planning at Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. “A significant aspect to a quality home theater is convenience and this unit is designed to deliver high performance with minimal user effort for a premier entertainment experience.”

The BDP-94HD arrives at specialty retailers this month, and will be bundled with two Blu-ray Disc film titles giving consumers the opportunity to enjoy these feature films in premium Dolby® TrueHD lossless advanced audio. The BDP-94HD has a suggested price of $1000.

Home Theater Integration

Pioneer designed the BDP-94HD for seamless home theater integration via HDMI® Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) technology. The new feature allows users to synchronize the Blu-ray Disc player with multiple CEC-enabled home theater products to manage an entire system with a single remote control. The newly designed graphical user interface enables simple navigation with easy to read icons.

Home Media Gallery

The BDP-94HD offers an enhanced version of Pioneer’s exclusive Home Media Gallery home networking feature. With faster navigation, consumers can stream video and music content as well as view photo slideshows directly from their computer in high definition. With IP networking and a new user interface, Pioneer makes it extremely easy for users to access and load protected content and even download new digital media files straight from their computer for immediate viewing through the player on a large flat screen television. It is compliant with Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), Windows PC’s using Windows Media Connect, and Microsoft’s playsforsure™ DRM technology.

Movie Theater Playback Performance

Pioneer ensures smooth universal product compatibility with state-of-the-art HDMI connectivity to rapidly transfer pure digital video and audio data between source and display resulting in uncompromised imagery of Blu-ray Disc and standard definition DVD. It offers superb audio performance with internal decoding of premium Dolby TrueHD lossless audio technology for high-definition content and Dolby® Digital Plus, a highly flexible audio technology that delivers outstanding high-definition sound and up to 7.1 channels of surround sound for a richer, more involving entertainment experience.

More details of the Pioneer BDP-LX70 Blu-Ray player after the jump.

The BDP-LX70 doesn’t just content itself with playing Blu-Ray discs, though. It offers full 1080p support and features what’s known as 24p, which means it supports playback at a full 24 frames per second, which is the same rate at which the film being played was originally shot.

Pioneer BDP-LX70 and 24p

You may think that offering this as a feature is a little unnecessary, as surely all players playback their films at the same rate they were shot? But no – it’s a little-known fact that for HD players (of both types), the actual frame rate sent to the TV has to be speeded up in order for the TV to process the signal correctly.

The UK’s PAL format, for example, specifies a rate of 50 frames per second, so PAL-based TVs expect this rate from anything plugged into them. The only way to send a film shot at 24 frames per second to a TV expecting 50 without doubling the speed of the image is to send two identical frames instead of one, thereby increasing the frame rate to 48 frames per second without making everyone look like the Keystone Kops.

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that 48 frames per second still isn’t 50, and so what you’re left with is a 4% speed-up of the resultant image. This isn’t enough for the eye to notice (unless you’re an officianado), but it can make the audio sound a little odd, which also has to be speeded up by 4%.

None of this is a problem with the BDP-LX70, though, as through complicated trickery, it supports the complete 24 frames per second of the original source, without the TV or the viewer noticing anything.

Dolby True HD Sound

In addition to a fantastic picture that’s completely unmolested, the BDP-LX70 also supports Dolby True HD, which compresses sound without any loss whatsoever. The result is a film that’s not only shown as the director intended, but which also sounds as he intended it, too.

Pioneer BDP-LX70 Summary

With full 1080p/24p support, Dolby True HD sound and home network streaming via DLNA, not to mention killer good looks, the Pioneer BDP-LX70 should become one of the best Blu-Ray players on the market. The only down-side is its price – at £1,000, it’s for serious film-buffs only.

[Source: Crave]