In its battle with Sony for 1080i pistol grips, Sanyo just announced a minor, but notable update to its premium HD1000 Full HD MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 camcorder. The new HD1010 adds improved image processing and stabilization, new “face chaser” technology for stills and video, and amusing new 300fps slow-motion mode. Nothing compared to Casio’s freakish EX-F1 but a nice novelty for shooting the kids’ sporting adventures. Sanyo also tossed in a new 7fps continuous still shot mode which snags images at the sensor’s maximum 4 megapixel resolution. A minor bump for sure but it makes for a compelling offering at the (relatively) low asking price of $800 when it hits the US in July (Japan, June 20th).
Update: Akihabara News went hands-on in the video posted after the break.
During our time on JetBlue’s BetaBlue aircraft, we came away mildly impressed with what was available. Thankfully, the airline isn’t resting on its laurels, and has today announced expanded services for those lucky enough to secure a seat on the connected Airbus A320. By utilizing LiveTV’s Kiteline platform, patrons can now check their Gmail, AOL Mail, Hotmail and Windows Live Mail from the comfort of their seat, and just in case you get bored with that, a “customized in-flight version of Amazon.com” will also be accessible. Yeah, we’re talking really minor updates here, but at least the whole gamut of what’s available is still totally free. Gratis and airlines just don’t go together these days, so it’s certainly a welcome change.
With just about every other US city shutting down any Muni-Fi project that managed to get off of the ground, we can’t help but have mixed feelings about this one. Oklahoma City is boasting of having the world’s largest municipal WiFi mesh network, but for whatever reason, it’s being reserved exclusively for “public safety and other City operations.” In other words, it’s not there to provide wireless internet access to the general public — yet, at least. The network itself covers 555 square miles with 95% service coverage in the city’s core, took two years to construct and was funded with $5 million from “public safety capital sales tax and City capital improvement funds.” Talk about a tease.
Sapphire Technologies is showing off some new 3D gear at Computex this week, with a pair of 3D monitors and a new stereoscopic graphics driver on display. The driver works with ATI graphics cards to send a polarized image to the dual-layer monitors, which displays a 3D image to viewers with special glasses. Details on the monitors are pretty sketchy, but Sappire says it’s not working with Zalman and that it’ll have something on the market in the “next couple of months.” Great — now just ditch the shades and we’ll be all good.
It looks like the multitude of problems stemming from the recent slicing and dicing of five undersea cables could soon be eased significantly, with Reuters now reporting that three of the cables should be repaired by this weekend. Those include the FLAG Europe-Asia cable between Egypt and Italy and the FALCON cable system between Dubai and Oman, which are each expected to be fixed by February 10th, and SEA-ME-WE 4 cable near Egypt, which should be fixed by Saturday at the latest. What’s more, while the causes for most of those cuts and outages remain a mystery, the culprit behind the cut to the FALCON cable between the UAE and Oman has now apparently been determined to be a ship’s anchor, which was reportedly found abandoned near the cable. That’ll likely do little to put most folks at completely at ease, however, and we’re guessing they won’t be until everything is back up and running, and stays that way.
Read – Reuters, “Three undersea cables seen fixed by weekend”
Read – Physorg, “One Internet cut explained, but four others still a mystery”
It looks like the multitude of problems stemming from the recent slicing and dicing of five undersea cables could soon be eased significantly, with Reuters now reporting that three of the cables should be repaired by this weekend. Those include the FLAG Europe-Asia cable between Egypt and Italy and the FALCON cable system between Dubai and Oman, which are each expected to be fixed by February 10th, and SEA-ME-WE 4 cable near Egypt, which should be fixed by Saturday at the latest. What’s more, while the causes for most of those cuts and outages remain a mystery, the culprit behind the cut to the FALCON cable between the UAE and Oman has now apparently been determined to be a ship’s anchor, which was reportedly found abandoned near the cable. That’ll likely do little to put most folks at completely at ease, however, and we’re guessing they won’t be until everything is back up and running, and stays that way.
Read – Reuters, “Three undersea cables seen fixed by weekend”
Read – Physorg, “One Internet cut explained, but four others still a mystery”
If our description from CES of the perplexing (and frankly inconvenient) navigation associated with E-Lead’s Noahpad wasn’t enough to truly depict what is going on with this thing, then perhaps these videos will help. Sure, they’ve gotten a British guy to do voice-overs, and the company is playing some interesting angles with the multi-use concept, but we’re not sold that anyone could really get used to that keyboard. Take a look for yourself… you’ll see what we mean.
If our description from CES of the perplexing (and frankly inconvenient) navigation associated with E-Lead’s Noahpad wasn’t enough to truly depict what is going on with this thing, then perhaps these videos will help. Sure, they’ve gotten a British guy to do voice-overs, and the company is playing some interesting angles with the multi-use concept, but we’re not sold that anyone could really get used to that keyboard. Take a look for yourself… you’ll see what we mean.
The Skyfire browser is set to finally bring PC-like browsing to your Windows Mobile device with crazy speeds and support for all manner of embedded content. Sure, there are ways to get Youtube and other mobile video content through proxy sites that convert on the go or with other 3rd-party applications, but this puppy does it all in one sweet and free package. Facebook and Myspace pages load up in no time, video plays in the browser, and all of this is accomplished with some server side magic on the part of the Skyfire server but is completely transparent to the user. All flavors of Windows Mobile — 5 and 6 for both touchscreen and not — are supported with the roadmap hinting at Symbian support in the near future. Sounds too good to be true? It is, and you don’t have to just take our word for it, follow the read link to get signed up for the beta, this is something that just cannot be missed.
Update: Check the video of it in action after the break.
You know what your mother always used to say about things that seem too good to be true, but the deafening amount of hype and hyperbole being thrown about in reference to the “game changing” Qtrax with “25 million tracks” is quite distracting enough to take note of. According to the Qtrax website, the P2P client — Windows only, a Mac version is slated for March 18th — will be available at midnight EST, but while Qtrax is confident of its supposed deals with the majors, a few of those labels claim to be short of an actual deal with Qtrax. The business model is simple enough: DRM’d tracks count the number of times they’re played and then report back to the mother ship — which will divvy up revenue based on ad sales. It sounds like there’s PlaysForSure under the hood, and Qtrax claims it’ll have an iPod-friendly version ready before too long, but there’s a disturbing lack of detail on the official site. There is $30 million of VC funding behind the venture, so they clearly expect some results, but $30 million and high hopes certainly is no guarantee of label support of a crazy — and perhaps entirely overdue — scheme like this. We’ll be certainly watching for what happens at midnight.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read – Qtrax
Read – Times Online (It’s a go)
Read – NEWS.com.au (Labels back away)
Read – ZDNet UK (Rupert Goodwins weighs in)
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