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Actress Paula Patton Feels "Free" After Divorce From Robin Thicke | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/actress-paula-patton-feels-free-000000062.html | Yahoo Louisa Goebel | null | 0001-11-30 00:00:00+00:00 | When she isnt promoting her new blockbuster Warcraft, Paula Patton is speaking out about her divorce from Robin Thicke. In a new interview, she says that life after divorce is freeing. Patton and Thicke were high school sweethearts who had been together for over 15 years. Rumors of infidelity swirled as they broke up. The couple share a son named Julian. Related Story: Robin Thicke and Paula Patton Split Up After 8 Years of Marriage Paula Patton and Robin Thicke in happier times. Pushing forward with her life, Patton is putting her focus on her work, as she stars in the highly anticipated movie adaptation of the popular video game Warcraft. In a recent interview, she dug into why the character of Garona stood out to her: Warcraft: Paula Patton Explains Garonas Dual Role Patton hasnt stepped out with a high profile new relationship following her split. Thicke has debuted a series of younger girlfriends following his divorce, most notably Love Geary who is 18 years his junior. |
MAIA Biotechnology Touts Positive Safety Data From Its Potential Lung Cancer Candidate | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/maia-biotechnology-touts-positive-data-184356174.html | Benzinga | http://www.benzinga.com/ | 1970-03-25 08:00:00+00:00 | MAIA Biotechnology Inc (NYSE: MAIA ) released topline data from the completed Part A safety lead-in of its THIO-101 Phase 2 go-to-market trial in advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) and has commenced recruitment in Part B randomized efficacy/dose selection. Topline data from Part A demonstrated that MAIA's telomere-targeting agent, THIO, administered sequentially with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc's (NASDAQ: REGN ) Libtayo (cemiplimab), was generally well-tolerated. No dose-limiting toxicities (DLTs) or significant treatment-related adverse events were observed. Part A was designed to assess the safety and tolerability of the highest dose of 360 mg/cycle in six patients. Mild toxicities, such as grade 1 fatigue and muscle pain, were reported, as well as only one occurrence of grade 3 nausea, but no grade 4 adverse events were reported. Part B of the study will allow the randomization of patients to three THIO dose levels, including 60 mg, 180 mg, and 360 mg, followed by cemiplimab treatment every three weeks. The objective of Part B is to determine the most efficacious and safe dose, which will guide Part C of the trial. Price Action: MAIA shares are up 0.35% at $3.62 on the last check Tuesday. Don't miss real-time alerts on your stocks - join Benzinga Pro for free! Try the tool that will help you invest smarter, faster, and better . This article originally appeared on Benzinga.com . © 2023 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. |
T-Flash: aka "Yet Another Memory Card Format" | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-03-02-t-flash-aka-yet-another-memory-card-format.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-03-02 18:12:00+00:00 | t-flash Not that anyone seems to be demanding yet another Flash memory card format, but SanDisk just took the wraps off of T-Flash, which is meant to be used with cellphones. The new format is just 11mm by 15mm, or half the size of a SIM card (i.e. easily lost), and comes in 32MB, 64MB, and 128MB varieties. Motorola is the first cellphone manufacturer to get behind T-Flash, and conveniently, the cards will work in an SD card slot with the proper adapter. |
The Nostromo n52 | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-03-08-the-nostromo-n52.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-03-08 15:39:43+00:00 | nostronmo n52 Tom's Hardware Guide review of the Nostromo n52, Belkin's intimidating-looking (where exactly does your hand go?) new one-handed game controller with a built-in mini-keyboard. [Via BoingBoing ] |
Kodak sues Sony | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-03-10-kodak-sues-sony.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-03-10 05:48:53+00:00 | Rather than come out with digital cameras that people want to buy, Kodak is turning to the tried-and-true method of suing its rivals for patent infringement. The latest to be sued is Sony, who Kodak alleges has violated ten of its patents for digital imaging; Sanyo and Olympus have already licensed Kodak's technology, which probably doesn't bode well for Sony. |
Telson's watchphone | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-03-10-telsons-watchphone.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-03-10 15:55:36+00:00 | twc1150 The Telson TWC 1150 is by far the craziest watchphone we've ever seen, and unlike so many of the others (um, Samsung?), it's actually on sale. However, unlike the others (and this is maybe why it's actually available), it's so big that calling it a watchphone is being kind; the thing is bigger than one of Wonder Woman's bracelets and you could probably get the same effect just strapping a regular cellphone to your wrist. That said, the TWC 1150 is a CDMA 2000 1x wristwatch, err phone, err wearable computer with a mini numerical keypad on the band, menu keys, a speakerphone, and has a color LCD on its double-wide face. And if that's not enough, you can plug in attachments like the included VGA camera and a "finger-phone" (you can probably guess what that is). |
RFID sushi plate in action | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-03-25-rfid-sushi-plate-in-action.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-03-25 19:02:08+00:00 | RFID sushi plate Reader Andy Brenner went to Japan last month and actually experienced first-hand one of those sushi restaurants that calculates your bill by scanning RFID tags attached to each of the plates. Fortunately for us he snapped a picture of one of the plates, flipping it over to reveal the waterproof RFID tag glued underneath. |
GameBoy Advance goes old school | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-03-30-gameboy-advance-goes-old-school.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-03-30 20:21:33+00:00 | gameboy advance nes It's not exactly news anymore that the Eighties are in again, and Nintendo, who were the console kings back then, are taking advantage of the nostalgia for all things Reagan-era and releasing an NES-styled Special Edition GameBoy Advance SP. The special edition starts with a plain old silver GBA SP, but they've swapped the A and B buttons out for red ones and slapped on a black decal with grey stripes to make the GBA look much like the original NES controller. Even if you don't like the looks of retro controllers, everyone loves retro games. As part of this retro celebration, Nintendo are also releasing eight classic NES games as GBA carts. There are some arcade classics like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man as well as some serious NES old school favorites like Legend of Zelda, Bomberman and the original Super Mario Bros. |
Sony's wireless tablet PC | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-05-10-sonys-wireless-tablet-pc.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-05-10 13:27:21+00:00 | Sony U70 And a third surprise out of Sony today: a wireless tablet PC that's not actually a Tablet PC (since it runs on the regular flavor of Windows rather than Windows XP Tablet PC Edition) and is just 2.6cm thick. The Vaio UGN-U70, which has a 1GHz processor, a 20GB hard drive, and built-in 802.11g WiFi, isn't meant to be anybody's main PC (its screen is rather small), but is pitched as a mobile multimedia machine for accessing watching videos, listening to music, reading ebooks, and looking at digital photos. We're not sure about that Sony iPod, and there are plenty of other 17-inch laptops out there, but someone at Sony must have realized that this is exactly what we've been looking for. Now all they have to do is hurry up and release it outside of Japan. |
VIA's MoMA Eve portable game console | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-05-13-vias-moma-eve-portable-game-console.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-05-13 13:22:48+00:00 | VIA MoMA Eve As expected, VIA introduced a portable game console of their own yesterday (why does every manufacturer suddently think they should have one of these?). The MoMA Eve is actually designed to play PC games as well as custom-built games, and will have a 533MHz processor, a 20GB hard drive for storing games (and videos), built-in WiFi, and a CompactFlash memory card slot. Games can be uploaded from a PC, but here's where things get weird: you have to have a SIM card that'll let you play games that you've purchased on the console, but if you want to spend a little more, you can buy a second SIM card that will completely unlock the MoMA Eve entirely. There are a lot of problems here besides a complicated content protection system. First, the price. The MoMA Eve is supposed to cost "under $500" which means it's going to cost a lot more than most people will want to pay for a portable game console, even with all those fancy features. Second, the design. Yeah, we love the white plastic, but did they not realize that without folding up there's no way anyone can carry one of these around? |
Scamming the scammer | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-05-14-scamming-the-scammer.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-05-14 11:59:36+00:00 | p--p-p-powerbook powerbook A guy selling his Powerbook on eBay realized he was being scammed by a buyer in Europe with a stolen account — the scam being that you send the Powerbook to what you think is a legit escrow service, but is actually in cahoots with the scammer (one of our good friends actually fell for this once!). You send them whatever you're selling, and they just keep it. So he decided to scam the scammer, sending him the P-P-P-Powerbook, in the form of a tricked out plastic three-ring binder, instead. Even better, the seller marked the value of the package at the full price of a Powerbook, so that the scammer had to pay several hundred dollars in import duties just to get customs to release the package. Anyway, it turns out that the seller has been posting updates about his saga to SomethingAwful.com, and several readers started staking out the barbershop/Internet cafe (we weren't aware these existed) that the scammer had the laptop shipped to, reporting back with glee the scammer's befuddlement upon discovering that he'd been had. [The link is down right now, but MetaFilter has the dish] |
From sidetalkin', to, um, rear talkin' -- modding your N-Gage | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-06-01-from-sidetalkin-to-um-rear-talkin-modding-your-n-gage.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-06-01 14:44:44+00:00 | N-Gage QD We suspect that they might want to rethink their coinage of the term "rear talkin'", but All About N-Gage has DIY guide to modding your original sidetalkin' N-Gage so you can talk out the back of it instead. If you don't know how to handle a drill — or are afraid to violate your warranty — then this is probably not for you. |
Self-cleaning glass | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-06-04-self-cleaning-glass.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-06-04 12:17:22+00:00 | anti-fogging glass Pilkington, PPG, Asahi Glass Co. and Saint Gobain (glass companies all) have designed a titanium dioxide coating for glass which, when exposed to UV light, breaks down oil on the surface, allowing it to be easily washed away and causes water to "sheet" over the surface (which prevents it from fogging). It can also be used as a coating with the same properties, something which could prove useful for Tablet PCs (if they ever really catch on, of course), PDAs, or anywhere else fingerprints are unwelcome. |
The art of useless machines | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-06-07-the-art-of-useless-machines.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-06-07 15:58:13+00:00 | Maywa Denki Maywa Denki Usually we tend to cover objects that make a concerted effort to convince users of their need. And while we'll concede that way too many of them fall short of the mark, at least an attempt is made. But we were more than happy to find a website of Japanese designers who, in the tradition of Chindogu (the art of useless inventions), have created Maywa Denki — an art collective dedicated to creating "nonsense machines". Founded by brothers Masamichi and Nobumichi Tosa, who say they began their career in an art unit of Sony Maywa Denki Entertainment (hey, they could have just stayed there if they wanted to focus on uselessness !), the collaboration features different sections inspired by different themes. "Naki" is filled with "fish motif designs", like "Uke-tel", a fish cage with creepy hanging needles which (in theory) drop and potentially skewer an unlucky fish, or "Pachi-Moku", a backpack type winged musical instrument that operates by electronic finger snappers. Another section "Tsukuba" displays electric-powered music devices like the "Taratter", remote-controlled tap shoes enabling easy tapping and an accompanying fake digital tapping sound. Maywa Denki don't sell most of their machines (though they do sell some of them), but they do have a Maywa Denki uniform for sale (a spoof of a typical Japanese electronic store outfit) as well as other goods like Ryota Kuwakubo's Bitman (which was previously featured here on Engadget ). [Via Metropolis ] |
Powerful green frickin' laser beam | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-06-09-powerful-green-frickin-laser-beam.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-06-09 10:45:50+00:00 | frickin laser We can't think of any reason you'd want to tote around a red laser pen besides the occasionaly fun you can have with an organic house pet, but if you do- trade it up for a green laser. This thing seems to be the closest you can get to a light saber. According to the site, the beam can reach more than 5 miles away. Don't burn an eye out, gallery of photos here. |
Nyko Air Flo mouse will save your game | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-06-10-nyko-air-flo-mouse-will-save-your-game.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-06-10 14:00:58+00:00 | nyko air flo The Nyko Air Flo mouse is one of those inventions you think you don't need, until you use it. A small fan on the inside keeps your palm cool and dry, giving you that extra edge you need in Warcraft 3. Who has time to wipe it on your pants? The mouse's super powers are powered by the USB cable. No batteries required.There's also an obscure, and slightly scary, factoid in the article that will make you look at mice with newfound respect. |
How-To Tuesday: Make your own Pirate Radio Station with an iPod | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-06-15-how-to-tuesday-make-your-own-pirate-radio-station-with-an-ipod.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-06-15 15:07:53+00:00 | ipods pirate radio This was going to be "How-To increase the range of your iTrip mini". But after playing around with the new iTrip mini, the FM broadcasting accessory for the iPod ( our review here ) our little minds got working on some ideas. We thought we might be able to make the range of Griffin's iTrip mini a little better if took it apart and exposed the antenna, turns out we could. And then we thought, hey- we could use a couple iPods to broadcast something we wanted to get out there, perhaps not "should" that is, but could. So that was our motivation, and here's the How-To. Ingredients: 1 iPod mini 1 iTrip mini Optional: Addition iPods, iTalks and iTrips Getting Started exposed ant First, to become your own pirate broadcast station you'll need to increase the range and signal of your iTrip mini. Turns out, there is an antennae built inside the iTrip mini. All you need to do is remove the top sticker-like protection which hides the antennae and then using tweezers or your fingernail, pull the antennae out. We've found a 20% to 30% increase of range on average. This likely voids the warranty, so there, we said it. stations Next up, if you're using the iTrip mini, then you know that you can install all the stations on the dial to broadcast on. At first we we're really sure we'd ever use them, but now we have good reason. So make sure you've installed all the stations, on the go you might need them to switch to. Remember, the iTrip is a FM broadcasting device, intended to broadcast 10 to 30 feet to a FM radio. Next, choose your broadcast, it can be any song or a spoken word MP3, don't worry we have a few suggestions. A lot depends on the situation you're in. Pirate Broadcasts iroc-z We usually keep a couple tracks of silence ready to go, ever get stuck at a stop light for like 10 minutes and the dude in the next car is blasting the radio? With the super easy iPod interface you can quickly get to the station he's on and send over whatever you want, a couple gentle ocean waves or birds usually works out great. gym If you've ever gone to the Gym, or starred in to one from the outside- you'll notice the TVs are muted and set to broadcast on specific FM frequencies, folks then tune in their radio headsets to whatever station to listen to the audio as they exercise. Now we're not suggesting you go around and broadcast over CNN or anything, but we think broadcasting "Aliens have landed today, the President and UN will be making an announcement immediately" could be quite fun. We'll be trying this out with our gym pals who are usually up for a good gag. Story continues boombox There are other times where you simply need to broadcast back. Let's say you're at the park, enjoying a nice quiet day with your family- then comes along someone blasting the radio. We've found broadcasting a silent track tends to work nicely, sure you need to be within 30 to 40 feet, but no one will even suspect that their FM broadcast is getting usurped by you. Advanced Pirate Radio Broadcasting techniques italk We've also discovered another fun example. If you use the iTalk, Griffin's voice recorder accessory with 2g/3g iPod you can record your pirate broadcast on the fly, pop in the iTrip and start broadcasting. Usually pretending to be an omnipotent being and asking folks to build a water proof car, drive across the English Channel with two of every gadget gets some interesting reactions. Now, if you really get in to this- you could easily increase the range even more, google around for ways to do this- we're working on a few and will let you know too. You can additionally use multiple iPods, when you're broadcasting something like a silent track, you and a pal can cover more area and really surround the FM receiver. And finally, there are also a lot of other things which use FM that you can discover and broadcast to, happy hunting. This concludes our broadcast. Send comments and ideas to [email protected] |
Introducing Joystiq | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-06-16-introducing-joystiq.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-06-16 15:00:00+00:00 | joystiq logo Last month's E3 video game expo forced us to confront a hard reality: there is just way more video game news out there than we could possibly cover here at Engadget. So in partnership with our old friends Weblogs, Inc. we've decided to create Joystiq , a new weblog dedicated to covering everything related to video games. The site will be edited by a team of contributors who, besides being obsessive gamers themselves, actually know the game biz inside and out. Check it out! PS - Make sure you roll your mouse over the logo. You'll see what I mean. |
Doom 4 could be three megabytes total | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-06-24-doom-4-could-be-three-megabytes-total.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-06-24 20:00:14+00:00 | kkrieger See the picture to the right? That's from a first person shooter that clocks in at 96 kb. That's right. The whole thing is 96 kilobytes — the size of most spam. The game is called .kkrieger and it's the work of a small developer. Though the game is in beta and really only includes one level, it's still an engineering feat. You have to see it to believe it. What this might mean for gaming in general? Not much, except a lot of jealous and intrigued programmers. |
Is Sony's NW-HD1 really an MP3 player? | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-07-01-is-sonys-nw-hd1-really-an-mp3-player.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-07-01 15:25:06+00:00 | Sony Network Walkman There seem to be conflicting signals flying around on whether Sony's latest Network Walkman, the 20GB NW-HD1, actually plays back MP3 and WMA files or not. The English press release states that "It plays back ATRAC3(R) and ATRAC3plus files and supports the most popular Internet audio formats, including MP3, WAV and WMA files"—note the difference between "plays back" and "supports". A comb through the Japanese specs released by the Sony mothership yields what looks to be the truth: under "supported audio compression formats", ATRAC3 and ATRAC3plus are listed, followed by "audio formats supported by SonicStage software: ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, MP3, WAV, WMA". In short, it looks like you'll need to convert MP3 files to ATRAC3 using Sony's software in order to transfer them to the NW-HD1 and play them back. You have to admire Sony's persistence, if nothing else. [Thanks, Kakyou ] |
MoMA's Eve takes a bite of forbidden trademark fruit | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-07-09-momas-eve-takes-a-bite-of-forbidden-trademark-fruit.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-07-09 18:18:51+00:00 | MoMA Eve Besides forgetting to design a portable game console that anyone could actually carry around with them, apparently the Ministry of Mobile Affairs, the grandiously named group behind the Eve game console, also neglected to run a simple trademark search on the name for their product. The result? They've pulled down their website while they try and sort things out (which seems way extreme to us. Presumably they're scrambling to come up with a new name, but we're hoping they follow the example of countless rock bands which have run afoul of the trademark thing before and just call it "The Eve U.K." or something or other. |
AT&T Wireless introduces 3G wireless | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-07-20-at-t-wireless-introduces-3g-wireless.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-07-20 17:39:50+00:00 | Nokia 6651 Yep, the rumors were true: AT&T Wireless officially announced their new 3G cellphone service just over an hour ago, confirming that they're using UMTS, or W-CDMA, for the network. If you live in San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, or Phoenix you'll be to get download speeds of up to 320 Kbps on your cellphone (or laptop via a wireless card), which is more or less like being able to carry a slow DSL connection in your pocket. The only thing really like it in the States is Verizon's EV-DO service, which is limited to just San Diego and Washington, D.C. right now; AT&T says they'll expand to San Diego and Dallas before the end of the year. Crazy enough, they're only charging $25 a month for unlimited data access. (Pictured at right, the Nokia 6651, one of the first phones compatible with their new 3G network). |
New search engine… IceRocket.com | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-02-new-search-engine-icerocket-com.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-02 15:23:48+00:00 | icerocket There's a new search engine on the block, IceRocket.com. It has some cool Google-like features, and there's a nice one for gadget folks that caught our eye and that we hope all search engines will adopt. It's called a "Search Relay": Email a Search This is for PDA users in particular and is unique to Icerocket.com. It's a pain in the butt to go to a search site, whether it's icerocket, Google, Yahoo, or wherever and input a search term. However, most PDAs are very email efficient. So we have created a "Search Relay". All you have to do is send an email with the search terms as the subject to [email protected] and it will return the results to you via email. You can do the same with [email protected] or [email protected] We tried this (pictured above) and it worked nicely. On a side note, could all the search engines please make some AIM bots, so we can add a "Search Buddy" to our AIM list? We use Instant Messaging more than anything else, so how about it? We have ones on IRC already. P.S. - There are sites offering "Google by Email", but it's being done by third-parties, not by Google themselves. [via BlogMaverick ] |
Eidos' Shellshock is coming in September | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-05-eidos-shellshock-is-coming-in-september.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-05 20:01:03+00:00 | Shellshock: Nam '67 While we're on the topic of Eidos, I thought it might be important to announce that the company's latest shooter Shellshock: Nam '67 has finally gotten a release date. Eidos has confirmed that its addition to the flood of Vietnam titles hitting the market is set of September 14. The game looks to be no walk in the jungle, as Guerilla Games (Shellshock's developer) has tried to recreate the experience of a rookie soldier on his first tour of duty in one of the most controversial wars of the modern era. War is hell, so don't expect to be feeling like a true hero after this one is over. If the game does deliver, this could be another important franchise for Eidos—and whoever ends up buying them. |
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery… | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-09-imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-09 15:20:54+00:00 | PolyStation Japan's supremacy in the electronics world was at one point so great that even Western companies started branding their stuff with Japanese-sounding names. Some Asian firms were less subtle—hence, the PolyStation, Panosoanic TVs, and Misushita kettles in this gallery (site's in Japanese, but there's enough English to navigate). Misushita in Japanese means "I made a mistake", incidentally, and we'd have to agree. [Via del.icio.us ] |
Ubisoft is frontrunner in Eidos buyout | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-09-ubisoft-is-frontrunner-in-eidos-buyout.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-09 17:27:20+00:00 | Eidos The French publisher Ubisoft appears to be on the verge of sealing an estimated $400 million takeover bid for British publisher Eidos. Negotiations have been in the works for more than two years now. Eidos has seen its share of struggles in recent years—need we mention the huge commercial flop that was Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. But with Ubisoft soon to be in control, and Toby Gard returning to the franchise, Eidos' stocks are on the rise. Look for more updates on the takeover in the coming days. |
The iPod superCase | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-13-the-ipod-supercase.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-13 13:54:01+00:00 | superCase If you can't quite afford that any of those Gucci or Louis Vuitton or Prada iPod cases we just mentioned, you may want to get something a little more on the low-end of the spectrum. Like the superCase, which as far as we can tell mainly consists of a dirty white sock and some cellophane. Not that it won't protect your iPod any better or worse than anything else, but it will give you tons of hipster cred with your burnout friends who already think you're sellout for buying an iPod in the first place. Currently on sale on eBay with an opening bid of $35.00. [Via Gadgetopia ] |
Apple's new handheld? | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-13-apples-new-handheld.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-13 15:40:00+00:00 | Apple handheld computer Three months ago Apple filed a European design trademark for some sort of a handheld or tablet-style computer (it's hard to tell how big it is from these sketchs that accompanied the filing). Read into this what you will, but people have been buzzing about a tablet Mac for months and months now and Steve Jobs himself admitted that the company developed a new line of PDAs which they then abandoned at the last second . A new multimedia tablet, or could this possibly even be the design for the new iMac, which could turn out just be an all-in-one flat-panel PC? [Thanks, Tim] |
Samsung's SPH-i550 Palmphone lives | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-19-samsungs-sph-i550-palmphone-lives.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-19 15:31:14+00:00 | samsung i550 We'd almost given up all hope of this phone ever seeing the light of day, but apparently Samsung is confirming that the SPH-i550, their new Palm-powered flip phone, will indeed come out someday, they just won't say when or how much it might cost. We do know that it'll run on Palm OS 5.2, and have 32MB of RAM, an SDIO expansion card slot, and a built-in one megapixel digital camera. |
The AlphaSmart Neo portable word processor | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-31-the-alphasmart-neo-portable-word-processor.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-31 16:40:48+00:00 | AlphaSmart Neo AlphaSmart has a new portable word processor out called the Neo which is basically a keyboard with a small 5.75-inch by 1.5-inch monochrome LCD screen attached to it. It's aimed pretty much exclusively at the educational market, and is way cheaper and easier to carry than a laptop (at least it's easier to carry than most laptops) and more useful for taking notes or writing a term paper than a PDA (unless you invest in a good portable keyboard). The major downside is that you basically still need a PC or Mac to transfer files to (via IrDA or a USB cable) if you want to print something out (unless you have an IrDA-enabled printer), but it does get up to 700 hours of battery life on just three AA batteries and retail for just $249. |
First look at the Philippe Starck-designed Microsoft optical mouse | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-08-31-first-look-at-the-philippe-starck-designed-microsoft-optical.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-08-31 18:00:48+00:00 | starck mouse If you're going to hold something in your hand for over 8 hours a day and have it part of your desk landscape, it should at least be nice too look at—and if you're lucky, functional, too. We're talking about the humble computer mouse; specifically, the new Microsoft optical mouse designed by Philippe Starck, which we had a chance to take for a test drive. As we mentioned back in June , Philippe Starck has worked up a USB optical mouse for Microsoft that cunningly hides a scroll wheel in the coloured line that bisects it and includes the requisite two buttons. Comes in two colors, Blue and Orange, and when plugged in it lights up. After 2 days of use, we?re pretty impressed?accurate, fast and looks great. Best part, it matches the silvery finishes on our PowerBook and Sony VAIO. starck mouse Nice packaging, a rare treat with Microsoft goods. starck mouse Glowing blue with silvery plastic case. starck mouse starck mouse Orange model. starck mouse <>Starck vs. Apple Mouse. Lastly, the price isn?t bad at all?on it?s on Amazon for $29.95.</> |
The Capcom Power System Changer: the next-gen of yesteryear | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-09-01-the-capcom-power-system-changer-the-next-gen-of-yesteryear.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-09-01 14:15:42+00:00 | CPS Changer Roughly a decade ago, Capcom released the little known CPS Changer in an attempt to compete with the Neo Geo home arcade system. Only available through mail order, the CPS was unique in that it that it contained no game logic and connected to arcade PCBs. And with only 11 games, the CPS quickly fell off the map. Check out the full analysis over at NFG… And let this be a warning to all you next-gen developers! |
Atari Flashback: "It's a time machine. You go back to your childhood and you play." | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-09-08-atari-flashback-its-a-time-machine-you-go-back-to-your.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-09-08 12:11:34+00:00 | Atari Flashback Seems Atari is taking a lead from Namco, and has begun a serious wave of retro-gaming re-releases. First they're going to be selling 85 games bundled as the Atari Anthology for Xbox and PS2 for $20—not a bad price! (Shh! No one tell them about emulators!) But we're really amped on is the Flashback, which is a 7800-style box with two joystiqs (pardon our spelling) and 20 integrated games—including an unreleased title, Saboteur —for $45. Not the most killer deal by comparison, but either way they get the +15 nostalgia points, and thus, props. |
Sony's Clie PEG-VZ90--the world's most expensive Palm? | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-09-14-sonys-clie-peg-vz90-the-worlds-most-expensive-palm.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-09-14 11:43:29+00:00 | Sony PEG-UZ90 This may be the exception that proves the rule, but Sony shows that the PDA isn't quite dead yet (at least not in Japan) with their latest, the multimedia PEG-VZ90. The biggest news is that it's the first Palm with an OLED screen, but besides that it also plays back MPEG-4 video and both ATRAC3 and MP3 audio (hallelujah!), includes 802.11b wireless, and has a CF card slot that will take both communications and memory cards, plus the usual MemoryStick slot. The multimedia angle is further emphasized by losing the keyboard (and camera) of the PEG-UX50 in favour of a slide-out console of multimedia controls, and it looks like the preferred use for this one will be to slam in a CF card or Microdrive loaded with video, though you need to encode with the proprietary software (sound familiar?). Also, the pricing point is an awkward (OK, wallet-destroying) ¥95,000 ($870 US), which puts it way above the hard-disk video players coming onto the market. |
PS3 Blu-Ray details | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-09-22-ps3-blu-ray-details.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-09-22 14:32:55+00:00 | blu-ray Lost in yesterday's PStwo frenzy was another announcement regarding the Blu-Ray Discs to be used for the PlayStation 3. Sony simply made its commiment to the Blu-Ray technology official. And with the statement, came some specific details regarding the discs, most significantly, that they will have an impressive 54 GB storage capacity—compare that to the PS2 DVD-ROMs' 4.7 GB capacity, wow! The discs are dual-layered and single-sided, and will have the capability to store high-quality video using MPEG2-TS compression technology. While Blu-Ray was initially designed to record hi-def television broadcasts, Sony will not be implementing a recordable feature on its discs. In related news, the optical device for the PS3 will be able to read CD, DVD, and BD formats, but Sony has refused to comment on the possibility of backwards compatability. |
Sony working on 200GB Blu-ray disc | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-09-22-sony-working-on-200gb-blu-ray-disc.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-09-22 18:37:12+00:00 | blu-ray We were only just getting used to the notion that those 50GB Blu-ray discs and recorders were totally beyond our reach when the news comes that Sony is prepping an even more capacious 8-layer version of the Blu-ray disc that can hold up to 200GB of data. No word on when it'll hit, but a 4-layer version with storage capacity of 100GB is expected in 2007, so it'll be sometime after that. |
Toshiba says 0.85-inch hard disk drives by end of 2004 | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-09-30-toshiba-says-0-85-inch-hard-disk-drives-by-end-of-2004.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-09-30 12:43:46+00:00 | toshiba drive Earlier this year reports of Toshiba's ultratiny 0.85-inch hard disk drives (which consume half the power, are roughly 80 percent smaller, and can withstand more than twice the impact than the 1.8-inch drive Toshiba makes currently that is used in the iPod) sparked the usual speculation about all the fancifully small new gadgets it could eventually turn up in, like in cellphones or an even more mini iPod mini. Now they're getting down to business and say that they'll be throwing into mass production before the end of the year, which is actually a tiny bit ahead of schedule. They haven't said what the capacity of the drives will be (probably 2GB or 3GB), but do expect a flurry of "world's smallest hard drive-based MP3 players" sometime early next year. |
Engadget Podcast 001 - 10.05.2004 / How-To: Podcasting (get Podcasts and make your own) | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-05-engadget-podcast-001-10-05-2004-how-to-podcasting-get.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-06 00:15:00+00:00 | how to podcast This week's How-To is a three part special complete with our first Engadget "Podcast" MP3. The first part is how to get "Podcasts" on your iPod. So what's a Podcast? To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3, most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn't live, so you can listen to it whenever you want. Doc Searls may have said it best: "PODcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well." For the second part of the how-to you can listen to a Podcast we made featuring Lenn Pryor and Phillip Torrone . It's about 40 minutes long, and we're thinking about doing one each week (let us know what you think, this was just a test). The third part of the how-to is about making your own Podcast. Think of this as DIY Radio. We looked around for resources, and while there were many ways to do this, most required buying some sort of sound software application, so for our how-to we're using a Mac, GarageBand (came free with our Mac), and two free sound tools. Getting Podcasts on your iPod Here are the Mac and PC ways to download the Podcast MP3s, with listings for some different feeds (audio shows) following. Mac On the Mac side of things, there?s iPodderX , which is basically a newsreader that reads RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures. It takes those enclosures and automatically downloads them in the background. If the file is an audio file, it then moves it to iTunes for download to your iPod, so with iPodderX you constantly have fresh content to listen to. iPodderX downloads any type of file, (even Torrents) so you can wake up in the morning with a fresh set of audio shows, video programs, or whatever else you?ve subscribed to. Story continues ipodderx PC iPodder.NET is a media aggregator that automatically downloads content to your machine. All you have to do is subscribe to RSS feeds, and your machine handles the rest for you. It integrates automatically with iTunes, creating playlists and synching with your attached iPod. The Feeds Once you?ve installed the Podcast retriever, add some feeds to which ever application you?re going to use. Now, if you don?t want to use a tool to automatically download the MP3 podcast you can right click / option click this link and grab the MP3 directly. The good part about this method is that you don?t need an iPod, just anything that plays MP3s. Here are some feeds that are currently floating around. Engadget PodCast feed (our beta) https://www.engadget.com/common/videos/pt/rss.xml Adam Curry?s Daily Source Code http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014/categories/dailySourceCode/rss.xml Dave Slusher?s Evil Genius Chronicles http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/audio/bittorrent.rss (Torrent Feed) http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/index.rss20 (MP3 Feed) Dave Winer?s The Scripting News http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml Legal Torrents http://www.legaltorrents.com/musicrss.xml Others Keep an eye out here for new feeds, on podcaster.net , podcasts.org as well as googling for ? podcasts ? and also check out the Podcaster?s Yahoo Groups list. We?re also going to ping some friends who do web shows as well and see if we can help get their files up in Podcastable format. We?d love to see Off the Hook and Off the Wall, just to name a few. Making your own Podcast We suspect there are going to be a zillion ways to make your own Podcast, after we show you how we set up ours, we?ve also including some links for other methonds that people have posted up. Once we figure out how to do the same with our PC, we?ll have another how to on that as well. The main reason you need to do anything other than hit record in a sound app for a Podcast is you?re likely to want to have other people talking, with a proper Podcast you can use iChat and record both parties talking as well as mixing in music. In our first attempt we were able to invite a friend and talk, play music as well as feed other sounds, all recording to one final track in GarageBand. Ingredients for our Podcast recording set up Mac (15-inch G4 Powerbook) Headphones Microphone (we used the built-in mic) Garage Band SoundFlower + SoundBed (free) Line-In (free) We?re going to assume you have your Mac set up, Garageband is installed, headphones, mic and you have iChat running. We?re also going to list the applications that need to be downloaded, then how to configure them all. Soundflower The first apps to download are Soundflower and Soundbed. Soundflower is a Mac OS X system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Once you install the Soundflower application, you?ll need to restart. Then it?s time to run SoundBed. SoundBed When using Soundflower to send audio to and from applications, you may find that you are not able to send audio through another device to monitor audio output. In those situations you can use Soundflowerbed, an application that resides in the Finder?s Menubar allowing you to tap into Soundflower channels and route them to an audio device. While this is not required, it makes it easy to test audio devices and turn it all on and off. Line-In Line-In is a simple application for OS X to enable the soft playthru of audio from input devices. In simpler terms , you can use LineIn to play sound coming in through a microphone or any other device plugged in to your Sound In port. Configuring the applications Once you downloaded and installed the applications, now it's time to route all the audio to their final destination: GarageBand. Using Soundflower Open the Sound Preferences (Apple Menu > System Preferences > Sound). Click Sound Effects and select "Built-in Audio: Headphones". This will play any sound effects through the headphones and not into the recording. Click Output and click Soundflower (2ch). Before you do this you may want to adjust the volume, which is what you're hearing in the headphones. soundflower Click Input, again, adjusting the Input level if needed, and then Select Soundflower (2ch). soundflower Later, if you want to turn Soundflower on or off on the fly, you can use Soundbed by opening it now, it appears in the FInder's menubar as a flower. Line-In Next up, Line-In. Open the application and click "Enabled" "Built-in Audio" in the Input Device area and for Source choose "Internal Microphone". For Output in the Line-In under device choose "Soundflower (2ch) and for source default. line-in This will take the microphone sound and add it to the Soundflower audio, which is where we're pushing all the audio to and then recording it. iChat settings Open up iChat and go to iChat > Preferences > Video. For Microphone choose "Soundflower (2ch) and for Sound Output choose "Soundflower 2ch" again. ichat This takes the iChat sound (the person you're going to chat with) and adds that to Soundflower for recording. GarageBand Open up Garageband, it will likely ask you to start a new song, so click "Create New Song". new song You can name yours whatever you want, and Save As any location you wish on your system. We chose test and put it on our Desktop. When starting a project, you also have other options such as Tempo, Time, Key, bpm, but we're leaving those all as default, since we're not going to be recording a song. garageband Click Create. When GarageBand starts up, it will automatically have a Grand Piano track, click that track and then delete it (Track > Delete > Track). garageband Add a new track, Track > New Track. Click "Real Instrument" Vocals and "No Effects". Also Choose "Stereo" in the Format selection. Click OK. garageband garageband In preferences (GarageBand > Preferences > Audio/MIDI choose "Built-in Audio" for Audio Output and for "Soundflower (2ch) for Audio Input. garageband This will take all our sounds and record them directly in to GarageBand. You are now ready to record. Believe it or not, this is the easy way to do this for now, though we suspect there will be a simple application that will do all of this (just like blogging started out complicated, then all these great tools hit the market). Once you hit record, you're on your way. To add sound, we opened up MP3 files in Quicktime and played them in the beginning and end of the show. We also tested to see if playing sounds from website (Macromedia Flash) would get recorded too, and it does, so that means there's a lot of potential to choose what types of sounds, music, and effects you want to add to a broadcast. You can either have your friend on iChat before or after you start recording. We had our pal on the entire time just to do some testing, and that's what we're going to suggest here. Do some tests and bang away until all the settings are working and the results are what you're happy with. lenn Once you've finished recording, click the record button again to stop recording. You can also click the rewind button here to listen to your handywork and make any edits if you wanted to. Exporting to iTunes Click File > Export to iTunes to export to iTunes, this is where we're going to convert it to a MP3. iTunes will then open up and you can listen to it there as well, but we're not done yet. Exporting to MP3 iTunes can convert the huge file we just sent over to it and convert it to a MP3 all with the built in encoder. For this test we used the following settings: iTunes > Preferences > Importing, Click Setting "Custom" and choose 32kbps for the Stereo bit rate, Quality Medium, Sample Rate 16.000 kHz, channels stereo and Stereo Mode: Joint Stereo. We may ultimately change these, but for now it sounds good the file it will create is under 10mb. Click OK and then click the song and Click Advanced > Convert Selection to MP3. itunes Once the file is converted, you can drag it out of iTunes to the desktop or find it via Music > iTunes > iTunes Music in your music folder. From here you can send the file, post the file, put it on your iPod, whatever, but if you want people to download it automatically, here's how. Making the Podcast feed (RSS feed with enclosures) RSS 2.0 allows you to have an enclosure (much like you'd send an email with an attachment), so after the feed is pulled down the file is there with no waiting (besides the download time, of course). The key premise is No More Click-Wait. Ideally, when your computer isn't doing anything, it can be using RSS feeds to automatically download audio and video content. Anyone can do this, and there is no central authority, no spectrum to allocate, and it's open to amateurs, just like the Internet itself. More on that here and here . For our tests, and for now, here's our Podcast RSS 2.0 feed that you can use. Here's what it looks like...at least the mp3 part that is... <enclosure url="https://www.engadget.com/podcasts/Engadget_Podcast_001.mp3" length="1023800" type="audio/mpeg"/> Enclosure is where the file lives, length is how big it is, and the type is what it is. So, there it is...as this gets easier, we'll likely update with a new how-to, and if you're looking for another way to do this, Hugo Schotman has an excellent overview of how he rolled his together. Phillip Torrone can be reached via his personal site http://www.flashenabled.com |
Introducing Hack A Day, the gadget hack archive | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-07-introducing-hack-a-day-the-gadget-hack-archive.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-07 19:44:44+00:00 | hack a day We're pleased to announce the addition of another site to the Engadget and Weblogs Inc. extended family: Hack A Day , a new web magazine devoted to seeking out all the best hacks, mods and DIY (do it yourself) projects from around web. Our own resident mad scientist Phillip Torrone will post a new hack every day, with at least one special how-to (also known as How-To Tuesdays here at Engadget) to look forward to each week. We thought it was about time there was one spot on the web where you could keep track everything related to hacking and modding iPods, digital cameras, robots, game consoles, portables, locks, Macs, PCs, etc. This site is still currently in beta, so enjoy the occasional oddity and sawdust while we get things cooking. |
Namco's new 3-in-1 retro cabinet featuring Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario Bros. | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-15-namcos-new-3-in-1-retro-cabinet-featuring-donkey-kong-donkey.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-15 13:41:16+00:00 | namco nintendo 3-in-1 Namco are making 30-somethings rejoince as they offer a new arcade cabinet featuring three of the biggest Nintendo classics ever: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Mario Bros. The new cabinets will host a big 25-inch screen so you can bask in the detailed 80s graphics like never before. All cabinet artwork includes the original goofy graphic design work as well as original-style controls for that pizza-and-cigarette atmosphere. This is vintage stuff, people. A fine wine, if you will. Enjoy with a spritz of Aqua Net. [Via Slashdot ] |
Music Thing: Jazz Mutant's Lemur | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-16-music-thing-jazz-mutants-lemur.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-16 18:08:51+00:00 | Jazz Mutant Lemur Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that's coming out these days. Last Saturday it was Astrasound's Polyvox duophonic synth and ESCO-100 tape-delay unit , this week it's Jazz Mutant's Lemur: It has a pungent whiff of vaporware hanging around it, but the most interesting thing I've seen this week is the appallingly named 'Lemur', from the really appallingly named French startup 'Jazz Mutant' . It's a 12-inch touchscreen monitor with an embedded CPU / graphics chip and an ethernet port. Plug the screen into a laptop and it becomes a control panel displaying movable faders, buttons and keyboards for live tweaking of music software. So far, so much like any design student's final year project. Then, you watch the video clips on the site. They're tiny and dark, and you can't hear the music that's being tweaked, but they're amazing. The interface looks great and seems really responsive. We can dream, right? Click to read on. Jazz Mutant Lemur So who are ?Mutant Jazz?? They?re three music geeks from Bordeaux, who work with Scrime , a music research lab attached to the University. The French can?t get enough of experimental music. Underneath the Pompidou Centre in Paris is IRCAM , a huge government-funded music research lab that?s been there since 1977. That?s where MAX/MSP , the music ultra-geek?s programming language of choice, was developed (it?s now used by Aphex Twin and Autechre). So, the Lemur looks interesting, but we?ll probably have to wait for Roland or Korg to steal the idea before it gets anywhere near Guitar Center. [Thanks to Tommy Walker III for the tip] |
How-To: Make your own photo mosaics | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-19-how-to-make-your-own-photo-mosaics.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-19 15:30:00+00:00 | bill gates This week's How-To shows how to take just about any ordinary image you've taken with your digital camera (or from the web) and make a photo mosaic. A photo mosaic is one large image made out of hundreds and thousands of tiny images from your personal stash, from google images or even frames from a movie. There are a few applications that do this for free, on Macs / PCs, and we'll show you where to get them and how to use them. Getting starting... Awhile back we saw a post on "The Future of Television," which had a picture of Bill Gates made out of all the company logos Microsoft bought up, sued, or was sued by over the years. While we thought the image was kinda amusing, along with the ones of Dick Cheney made of oil, what was more interesting to us was how they did it. Since it didn't tell us, we started looking around. Once we found a few free tools and made our own, we figured a lot of other people might want to make their own posters, giftwrapping paper, and more. Once you make these you can go to just about any print shop and have them run off a high quality print at almost any size. We also realize there might be other and better applications that can accomplish the same thing we've got here, so please feel free to post them up in the comments. Ingredients for this How-To PC and/or Mac lots of images PC application Andrea Mosaic Mac application MacOSaiX PC Download and install Andrea Mosaic . Make sure to have a folder full of images, at least 100 or so, somewhere on your hard drive (My Documents / My Photos, etc.). The images should all be in the same folder, but can have sub-folders within the main folder. These are the images you'll use to build the photo mosaic. You may need more or less than 100 images for your mosaic, but after you build one you can always add or remove images to get the best results. Start the application Start > AndreaMosaic. start In Step 1. Click Find Tiles, this is where we will locate the images on our hard drive. Click "Create Collection" and browse to the folder with the images. create We had a folder on our desktop called "puppy" with about 150 images of our puppy. Type in the name of your collection in the file name area and click Save. save doggie Click "Load Collection," and choose the collection your just created. Once loaded you will see a dialog with the total number of images and how long it took to load them. loaded There are other options such as updating collections, making the photos black and white (while keeping the final image color) as well as extracting frames from a movie to make a mosaic, which you can explore once you get the hang of making mosaics. Story continues load For now, click close. Next up, in Step 2 there are seven default values: final size, number of tiles, distance between duplicates, modifications, algorithm, movie parameters, and lines around each image. For our sample, we used the default settings and it worked out pretty well. Feel free to change these parameters to get better or different results. params Click "Create the Mosaic" to, you know, create the mosaic. A new window will appear along with a status of image processing. You'll also see a preview when the processing is completed, you can close it and modify the parameters or just use your image. finished The image will appear on the desktop or whatever location your original image is located. Here is our before and after. doggie before Before. Click here for full sized image (warning big file). after After. Click here for full sized image (warning big file). To get the full effect of these, it's usually best to print them out and stand back, or squint your eyes to see the main image and stand close to see the individual ones. Movies Andrea Mosaic also offers AVI to Mosaic (or movie to mosaic) so if you have any movies in the AVI format (many digital cameras store movies as AVI as well as many movies found on the web are usually AVI). Other applications On the PC, here are a couple more free apps we've seen, but haven't tried yet. Centarsia . Rick and Steve's Photomosaic Program . Mac Download and install MacOSaiX . For the Mac walkthrough we're not going to use a collection of images like our first example, although with this application, MacOSaiX you can, of course. Instead, we're going to use Google image search as our image source(s). This is a really cool feature so we're just going to show this part (otherwise making regular mosaics is really simple). It's also really handy to use Google image search as your source because you're likely not to have hundreds of images on one specific subject, but google does. open Start "MacOSaiX" and select "New" in the File menu (File > New). In the menu area click "Choose" image to make mosaic from. For this example, we're going to use a picture of Phillip Torrone (me) who rarely smiles. mosaic In the "Shape of tiles" pull down list you have a few options, rectangles, Puzzle Pieces and Hexagon. We're going to stick with rectangle. The default number or tiles down and across are 20 each, we're going to boost those up 25 and 25, that way we get more images and a better mosaic for a total of 625 images. Under Image Sources, the default is your Picture folder, we're going to select that and remove it and then add the google images. robot Click "Add source" and choose "Google Term" for this example, we typed in "robot" we're not sure what's going to happen, but here it goes. After that click "Go!", MacOSaiX will now go out and grab 625 images from google to make the final mosaic. downloading As it finds the images, you'll see them fill in on the left pane. At any time you can zoom or pause the process to see what's going on and what images it's grabbing. When it's finished (it will say "idle") you can save the image (File > Export Image). If you're not happy with the quality, try increasing or decreasing the number of rectangles and/or trying another google search term. before Before. Click here for full sized image (warning, big file). after After. Click here for full sized image (warning, big file). Same drill as before; to get the full effect of these, it's usually best to print them out and stand back, or squint your eyes to see the main image and stand close to see the individual ones. As a bonus tip for the advanced user, you can also open up PhotoShop or GiMP and overlay the original over the mosaic and alpha it out a bit to make the image pop a some more. Have at it and experiment! Mosaics from Movies... If you want to take the beta version for a spin, its newest feature offers the ability to pull images from QuickTime movies, so in theory you could make an image like this, every second of Star Wars . Just set the image to something blank (or one of the characters for added geek). starwars starwars Phillip Torrone can be reached via his personal site: http://www.flashenabled.com |
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas leaked to the masses early | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-21-grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-leaked-to-the-masses-early.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-21 04:35:20+00:00 | GTA San Andreas Here we go again. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has now fallen victim to the latest craze — leaking. How are people getting their hands on the code so easily? The game has been spotted on bitorrent, among other virtual places. This comes hot on the heels of the Halo 2 leak that shook the gaming world. The official press release pleads, "We take the theft of our intellectual property very seriously and we are and will continue to diligently and aggressively pursue this matter. If anyone finds information on websites with links to unauthorized downloads, information, scans or videos, please contact us at [email protected]." Don't fall victim to the " If They'd Charge Less I Wouldn't Download It" syndrome. These folks have spent years on this project, and they deserve every sale they get. Give them a shout if you spot the title floating around. |
AMD's Personal Internet Communicator brings the Internet to the people | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-25-amds-personal-internet-communicator-brings-the-internet-to-the.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-25 09:00:47+00:00 | AMD PIC Not a week after Ballmer was saying that software piracy would peter out if PCs were $100 commodities, AMD busts it out on us with their reference design for the Personal Internet Communicator, or PIC. Aimed at Latin and Indian nations where the dollas ain't so heavy on the intake, the PC features a 366MHz AMD Geode x86, 128MB RAM, 10GB drive, USB, 56k modem, a host of Internet-centric software, and Windows CE with XP-extensions (for XP app compatibility), which apparently enables the little sucker to boot in 25 seconds (which is way faster than our 3.0GHz workstations we got up in this joint). Not that you'd be interested in getting one (if they're even ever made available in the US, that is), but they're going to go for $250 with monitor and $185 without. Computers for one and all, comrades! |
Sony's new Network Walkman NW-E99 and NW-E95 rock MP3 | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-25-sonys-new-network-walkman-nw-e99-and-nw-e95-rock-mp3.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-25 13:44:45+00:00 | Sony NW-E99 Yeah, they're saying Sony's two new players won't make you deal with that ridiculous SonicStage MP3 to ATRAC converstion stuff anymore, and it's being reported that the two new players will be among the first to natively support MP3 . We're going to remain vigilantly doubtful though, especially after just a couple days ago Sony released their non-MP3-compatible NW-S23 S2 . Whatever, we'll see, right? Anyhow, the NW-E99 will have 1GB of space (for about $300) and the NW-E95 512MB (about $250), and apparently lacks those now-standard features we've all become used to in every other Flash player on the planet (FM tuner, line-in encoding, etc.). We'd like to say way to go, Sony, but you aren't even being clear what you're doing, so we're going to hold our tongues for a little while longer. [Thanks, Lars and Leo] |
The SwiMP3 bone conducting underwater MP3 player | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-25-the-swimp3-bone-conducting-underwater-mp3-player.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-25 14:24:49+00:00 | SwiMP3 Finis just announced the SwiMP3, a waterproof MP3 player which uses bone conduction to vibrate the sound directly into your head via your cheek bones (it actually attaches to your goggle straps, but we've also seen a prototype for goggles with a bone conduction MP3 player built right in). They don't much storage capacity, but they say it has enough space for 30 songs, which sounds like it should clock in somewhere around 128MB. [Via MacMinute ] |
GlucoBoy brings blood sugar monitoring to GameBoy | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-26-glucoboy-brings-blood-sugar-monitoring-to-gameboy.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-26 05:31:24+00:00 | glucoboy Guidance Interactive have created GlucoBoy, an attachment for the Nintendo GameBoy that monitors blood sugar levels. Creator Paul Wessel noticed that his son, who was diagnosed with diabetes at age 3, carried his GameBoy everywhere. Wessel figured, hey - why not just turn the thing into a blood sugar monitor? He is also developing games that work with the GlucoBoy beyond the standard testing. Finally, GameBoys that are not only sticky with candy and soda, but bloody with glucose tests! Yummy. |
Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) launch date and price | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-27-sony-playstation-portable-psp-launch-date-and-price.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-27 11:59:25+00:00 | sony psp Sony's PlayStation Portable, or PSP, will be released in Japan on December 12, 2004 - just 10 days after the Nintendo DS launches there. Sony has set the price at 19,800 Yen, just under $200 US. Sony is also promising 21 games out before end of year. Confirmed launch titles will include Metal Gear Acid, Dynasty Warriors, Vampire Chronicle, Puyo Pop Fever, Hot Shots Golf, Ridge Racer, Need For Speed Underground Rivals, and Tiger Woods PGA Golf Tour. As for battery life, Sony has gone on record to promise "between four and six hours for game titles and continuous four to five hours for video viewing." Memory sticks, straps, and cases will be available at launch separately as well. Looks like an early 2005 release for US and Europe isn't crazy talk. [Thanks to everyone who sent this one in] |
Samsung gets all Diane Von Furstenberg on us | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-27-samsung-gets-all-diane-von-furstenberg-on-us.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-27 19:20:02+00:00 | MGF Mobile So now that we can all officially say that technology and fashion go hand-in-hand , we can really stop being surprised when designers come out with special-edition gadgets. Like, for example, Vogue's and Dianne Von Furstenberg's new couture-tech line, which includes the DVF Mobile (a gussied-up Samsung SPH-A680 cameraphone) and an accessory called the CityBand which makes carrying the essentials (cellphone included, we presume) easier. A lady gadget bag, if you will. We think we may wait it out for palmOne to release a Issei Miyaki Treo 650, though. |
Dragon Quest Slime PS2 controller from Hori | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-10-28-dragon-quest-slime-ps2-controller-from-hori.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-10-28 14:31:27+00:00 | dragon quest slime controller For the hardcore SquareEnix RPG fans out there, Hori has released the Dragon Quest Slime PS2 controller. Sitting on your floor or shelf, this controller looks just like a Slime from the Dragon Quest video game. Flip it, and you have a fully-functional Dual-Shock controller. For those confused readers, Slimes are the most common monsters encountered in SquareEnix's Dragon Quest Role-Playing Game series. They've become something of a Dragon Quest icon, with fan fiction sites and FAQs and other unmentionables. For those in the know, you can get one of these from Japan for around $30. |
The XGameStation lets you build your own console | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-11-04-the-xgamestation-lets-you-build-your-own-console.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-11-04 19:34:42+00:00 | xgamestation If you aren't having as much playing games these days, we have a suggestion for you. Head over to this site and get yourself an XGameStation kit. The kit allows you to build your own console. But the kicker is that it also has the tools to make games as well. Here's a chance to geek out on hardware and software development at the same time! The site has a pretty robust community that can help you get up and running. Demos are also available for you to check out the machine's abilities, as well. I love the old Atari joystick in the pic. Tempting… |
Breaking news: iPod socks available for pre-order!! | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-11-11-breaking-news-ipod-socks-available-for-pre-order.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-11-11 14:09:20+00:00 | iPod socks When I first saw the headline, I thought Apple was making something to warm my geeky feet. But the reality is even better: Apple is selling socks for your iPod ! Steve Jobs gave a tongue-in-cheek announcement of the socks at the Apple Special Event in San Jose, CA in October. Some may have giggled at this latest innovation, but Apple is having the last laugh by actually selling them. :) You can pre-order your socks, in multi-colored packs of six, for $29 from the Apple Store . How to make use of this latest in iPod technology? Luckily, Apple includes a set of instructions for the Luddites: “Forgive us if we’re stating the obvious, but here’s how it works: Just slide your iPod into the sock to keep it safe and warm,” said Apple. “Slide it out to dock or change playlists. It’s as easy as … putting on a pair of socks.” Will this information be posted in the Knowledge Base ? Update: It was pointed out to me that Laurie actually covered the advent of the iPod socks last month , thus making two posts about what may arguably be the most unimportant news ever! Gotta love it. Sorry, Laurie, didn’t mean to… erm… step on your toes. (I’ll be here all week, folks… try the lobster!) |
Judge tells Virgin to leave Apple alone and come up with their own DRM | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-11-11-judge-tells-virgin-to-leave-apple-alone-and-come-up-with-their.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-11-11 17:24:05+00:00 | virgin So VirginMega just lost their suit in a French court to get the rights to use Apple's FairPlay DRM technology. They claimed that given the iPod's dominance of the digital audio market, Apple's refusal to let other people sell DRM'd downloads for the iPod constituted an anti-trust violation (which straight up seemed really silly), and that they should have access to Apple's FairPlay code.The judge didn't buy the argument and told Virgin they'd have to figure out things on their own (sort of like how RealNetworks did ). |
Nintendo giving away gold Game Boy Advance SPs | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-11-17-nintendo-giving-away-gold-game-boy-advance-sps.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-11-17 13:32:16+00:00 | Game Boy Advance gold In a tradition that's about as old as the Zelda series itself, Nintendo is giving away seven 24 karat gold-plated Game Boy Advance SPs to celebrate the release of The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap (a game that hasn't generated much hype in the storm of Nintendo's new handheld gaming unit). Six will be given away via golden tickets placed in a new limited edition SP / Zelda pack, and the seventh is being given away via gamesTM.co.uk. It doesn't do anything special, but it's gold. Gold! [Thanks, Mike ] |
Creative declares war on Apple | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-11-17-creative-declares-war-on-apple.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-11-17 17:23:37+00:00 | Creative Zen Touch These could turn out to be some very famous last words, but at a press conference earlier today Sim Wong Hoo, the CEO of Creative (the company that makes all those Zen MP3 players like the Zen Touch and the Zen Micro ) literally declared war on Apple, announcing plans to try to out-spend and out-market Steve Jobs next year with a $100 million advertising and marketing designed to dethrone the iPod, and that "the MP3 war has started". Might be tough, given that over 90% of new hard drive-based players sold in the US sport an Apple logo, but we're always game for a down and dirty gadget war. [Via MacWorld ] |
Creative declares war on iPod | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-11-18-creative-declares-war-on-ipod.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-11-18 15:25:16+00:00 | u2 ipod So much for friendly competition: CEO Sim Wong Hoo of Creative Technology Ltd. announced plans to launch the ‘MP3 war’ against Apple’s iPod . Sim made the announcement to reporters in Singapore at a press event celebrating the release of Creative’s own Zen Micro, a 5G portable digital audio player. Not with spears and swords will this war be fought, but with $100 million (US) and ruthless marketing executives. Creative, having no music service of its own, may find it an uphill battle against the popularity of Apple’s iTunes Music Store. This could get ugly, folks. We hear from inside sources that Brad Pitt has accepted the role of Steve Jobs for the upcoming made-for-TV movie documenting the MP3 war. Eric Bana could not be reached for comment at the time of this publication. |
How-To: BroadCatching using RSS + BitTorrent to automatically download TV shows | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-11-23-how-to-broadcatching-using-rss-bittorrent-to-automatically.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-11-23 18:08:00+00:00 | broadcatching Over the last couple week's TiVo let slip that they're going to start adding banner ads when we try to fast-forward commercials (and to make things even more annoying, Congress is considering a bill that might make fast-forwarding through the commercials on DVDs illegal). So we've pretty much decided we're not going to use a TiVo anymore and that instead we'll go with other solutions (for now) like a Media Center PC, as well as rolling some of our own ways to download TV shows. For this week's How-To we're going to show you how you can use RSS and BitTorrent to find and download your favorite shows, automatically, using free software. There are a lot of ways to do this, we cover one example that worked well for us, and there are a couple great tutorials we spotted that are basically the same but offer other ways of downloading, other plugins and more information. You can check them out here and here. If you're already a pro, be sure to post up your set up and experiences in the comments area. RSS and BitTorrent Before we get started, it might be a good idea to introduce a few topics if you're not familiar with them. We'll be using RSS and BitTorrent to look for and download TV shows. RSS also known as "Really Simple Syndication" is a way to publish information so other computers can read it in a simple and standard way. In the context of this How-To there are RSS feeds that will tell another application where and when a new TV show is available. BitTorrent is a way to transfer files over the web, instead of download the same file over and over from a central server, which will become slow or busy with high demand, BitTorrent uses the bandwidth of all the people downloading the file and sends parts to everyone as it downloads, so the more people who are downloading the better, and the more you upload, the faster you get your files (it definitely ends the free rider problem of other p2p applications). For downloading TV shows, this of course is a perfect match, the more popular a show is, the easier it is to get. Disclaimer Make sure you check with your local, state and country's laws—In some cases you may be downloading (and uploading) copyrighted material. So far, there hasn't been a legal case that we know of where broadcast TV networks have stopped or wanted to stop BitTorrent downloads of their shows, but we have heard that pay networks like Showtime, HBO, etc. have sent letters to some individuals for sharing recorded TV. This is all new territory for the most part, and it will be interesting to see what happens and if the TV networks realize that this could be their future distribution chain. The future of TV? Story continues max While your average TV watcher is probably not going to set up RSS feeds and BitTorrent clients, many people are, and there is a lot of interest in using these technologies solely for the purpose of downloading and watching TV shows. (Mr. Quirk reminding us of a possible future recently. If you remember the old Max Headroom shows TV companies were locked in a ratings war fought in real-time, changes in viewer numbers affected the stock price and net worth. Stopping channel hopping was vital. One company invented "blipverts" that fed the adverts at high speed. Trouble was: fat viewers [couch potatoes] were exploding and the TV company wanted to keep that quiet.) The future of TV isn't certain, perhaps we'll have set top boxes that do what we're about to describe, i.e. look for shows you like, download them in a decentralized way over high speed networks, delivering high-definition picture and sound. All the parts are here, it just needs to get simpler. Getting started This How-To is fairly straight forward, we're going to download a Java engine to run a BitTorrent client, along with a RSS plugin which will look for the TV shows we tell it to look for. For our example we're going to use a PC (Windows XP) but all of this work on Mac OS as well and possibly Linux, but we didn't have a chance to test that out on the Linux box here. Installing the Java Run Time Engine The first thing we need to do is install a Java Run Time Engine, this allows you to run Java based applications on your specific operating system, for our example, we're using Windows XP. You may or may not have a JRE already installed, even if you do, it's a good idea to get the latest one, Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 which you can download here. Once downloaded and installed (a reboot may be required) we need to install the BitTorrent client, Azureus. Installing Azureus, the BiTorrent client Azureus a full featured bittorrent with multiple download options, queuing and priority, pause/resume seeding as well as detailed information about your uploadind and downloading status. azureus Download and install Azureus from here. Run Azureus and click through the settings wizard, this will walk you through any configuration needed. For the most part, clicking through next with all the defaults will work on most systems. Installing the RSS Plugin for Azureus Once Azureus is installed and running, we'll now need to install a RSS plugin. The RSS plugin will watch sites and allow you so search as well as download for specific shows you're looking for. There are a couple RSS plugins, for our example we're going to use RSS Import, which can be downloaded here. Another one to try out is RSS import Feed Scanner , there's a link to a tutorial for using this one at the end of the How-To. Unzip the file and place the "RSSImport" folder in the plugin directory of Azureus, it's most likely located here, where you installed Azureus. C:\Program Files\Azureus\plugins Now start Azureus. If Azureus is running, then close the application and start it again. In the top menu, choose Tools > Option. On the left side expand the + box next to Plugins azureus Click "Activate RSS Import Plugin". Under RSS Channels to import, type in a RSS feed, for our example we're going to use: http://www.tvtorrents.net/rss.php azureus You may also want to try: http://www.btefnet.com/backend.php http://varchars.com/rss/suprnova-tv.rss If you add more than one use a ; to seperate them (no spaces). The "Filter for channel entries" field is where you add the names of the shows you're looking for, basically you type the name of the show and subsitute spaces in the name with periods, like this... viva.la.bam malcolm.in.the.middle australian.idol These are "regular expressions" you can add other filters, such as SVCD oe HDTV versions. Many torrents come in different flavors of encoding, HDTV quality, DiVx, mpeg, etc... For our example, we're on the prowl for some good ole' Cylons action in Battlestar Galactica . So we're going to use... battlestar.galactica If we only wanted the SVCD version, we'd use this battlestar.galactica.*svcd* Another option might be to download the HDTV PDTV or DSRip versions, to do this, use (thanks Rick). battlestar.galactica.+([ph]dtv|dsrip) For more on this, make sure to check out the RSS Feed Scanner forums here. And, if you want to learn more about regular expressions, here is a list of handy resources to get started. RSS Import uses this type of filter called regex (regular expressions). As you learn these, you can test out your filters here. Downloading Once the TV shows your specify are discovered, they will automatically start to download. azureus You can check out the status as well as all the other information available as you download. azureus azureus It can take hours for some to download, so many users have a computer on all the time that just downloads in the background with TV shows eagerly waiting to be seen at the end of each day. azureus As more portable video players hit the market, we expect to see a lot of people then transferring their TV shows to these devices, right now converting is a little tricky, but if there's enough interest, we'll do a How-To on that as well. And there you go, please don't watch Desperate Housewives , that's all we ask, thanks. Phillip Torrone can be reach via his personal site: http://www.flashenabled.com |
Codename Asteroid: Apple develops Firewire audio interface for the consumer | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-11-23-codename-asteroid-apple-develops-firewire-audio-interface-for.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-11-23 22:14:21+00:00 | Asteroid Apple has an audio interface device in the works that plans to aggressively compete with prosumer hardware recording devices. The interface, known as ‘Q97’ or, more affectionately, ‘ Asteroid ,’ is being built around Apple’s GarageBand application. The Asteroid will include two XLR/TRS audio inputs, two RCA outputs, and a headphone jack. It will draw power via a single Firewire 400 port. Rumour has it that an alternate version of the device that includes a S/PDIF digital out port is circulating on the Cupertino campus, and may end up being the final version send to manufacturing. This is a smart move. It leverages the benefits of Apple’s acquisition of Emagic to create a ‘Middle Path’ device that targets the consumer who just wants to make music without needing all the pro audio bells and whistles of a high-end prosumer digital recording environment. At an expected retail price of $129-149, this unit could really appeal to those aspiring musicians who just want to get a decent recording of their guitar or vocals onto their Macs. |
Hands-on with Motorola's RAZR V3 for Cingular | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-12-06-hands-on-with-motorolas-razr-v3-for-cingular.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-12-06 19:23:00+00:00 | RAZR V3 4 Ok, so I couldn't resist it anymore and broke down and bought Motorola's new RAZR V3 superskinny cellphone. Click to see a mess of pics and some initial impressions. Design Without question, the biggest draw of the RAZR V3 is the looks, and in those incessant Cingular ads the RAZR slices and dices away, as if it really were razorsharp when it's unfolded. What you don't see in the ads is that the phone is a bit wide. Not obnoxiously wide, thankfully, but wider than my last two cellphones, the Motorola T720 and a Nokia 8290. I found that it's still easy to hold even while talking for 30 minutes, and there's no external antenna marring the RAZR V3's shapey looks. Motorola made the casing out magnesium and aluminum to keep the RAZR at a scant 3.3 ounces. The phone has a solid feel, with no creaking or cheap plastic feeling during normal use. It is easy to flip open or close with one hand, I prefer to open it up with my middle finger of my left hand as it is less stress than bending my thumb in an odd way to open the phone. One-handed operation is important to me, as I often do several things at once and try to be as efficient as possible. I left the phone out in the living room and it got quite cold rather fast, no doubt due to its aluminum housing. There have been reports of the phone getting pretty hot sitting out in the sun as well, but as this isn't sunny season right now in Seattle, I have yet to find that out first-hand, and probably won't until sometime in the middle of next year. The mini-USB port also jets out just a bit on the back of the phone, ruining the smooth design in the back. I'm surprised they didn't position the port just up a bit and further down, as that would have made the design on the back more symmetrical. Packaging While Cingular might be offering Motorola's RAZR V3 for $500 (with two-year contract), they do skimp a little bit with what they include in the box. Regular retail versions of the RAZR V 3 include extras like a nice aluminum case, a Motorola PhoneTools CD, a USB sync cable, and 3 Java games. What Cingular does offer, though, is just about the cheapest price you'll find on the slickest-looking new cellphone available this holiday season. They do lock the quad-band (GSM/GRPS 850/900/1800/1900 MHz) to Cingular service only, but there are stores that provide unlocking service or if you are so inclined, you can probably hack it yourself. Unlocked RAZR V3s are going for around $650 on eBay. RAZR V3 1 RAZR V3 2 The packaging is very weak and is boxed like any other Cingular phone, there's no wow factor at all to give the user of what they are getting. There's not even a side shot of the phone on the box showing the RAZR slimness. I usually keep product boxes and I'll probably keep this one, but the box is just flat-out plain and boring. Story continues RAZR V3 8 RAZR V3 9 RAZR V3 10 RAZR V3 14 Screens The main screen is absolutely gorgeous, a 176x220 pixel TFT LCD screen with 262k colors. It's a beauty and there's three skins included to choose from (Moto, Scarlet, and Silver) of which I'm partial to Silver. It's the most 'business' like color and isn't overly colorful like the others. The front cover LCD looks good and also doubles as the self-portrait LCD (no look at the silver reflection here) after you turn on the camera and close the lid. Look, there's Yoda, my Yorkshire Terrier , posing for my wallpaper. Startup The startup time is quite lengthy, I timed 32 seconds from when I pressed On to when I got to my default page with my custom wallpaper. That seems unnecessarily long, so I'll just turn the ringer off where cellphones aren't welcome rather than turn it off. RAZR V3 16 Keypad and Buttons The keypad buttons have a tactile feel to them, I've found them to have a slight sticky feel to them even after cleaning. While the buttons are flat and do not stick up from the keypad, you can push them in and get a good responsive feel. I found the buttons on the top lid (on the side of the phone) to be a bit of a reach, as you have to move your thumb quite a bit to press those buttons on the left. The top left button on the lid is for Voice Records, the button below that is for Volume (up and down). The button on the right of the LCD is for Voice Name dialing, which is in an easy position to press. Since the keypad lights up blue, it's easy to dial and use the phone at night or in the dark. When you flip open the phone, the Camera and AOL Instant Messenger are default options which are prominently displayed and selectable by two of the three top buttons. The usual navigational icons (up, down, left, right functions) are hidden by default, but if you press any of them, the selected option will appear. All of the default menu options can be changed in the Personalize section of the phone. RAZR V3 17 Cingular Branding I find the Cingular branding to be obnoxious. There's the cingular logo (at least it's in white and not over the top) on the back of the phone, and when the phone is in use, the bright orange Cingular logo shows up on the top cover LCD until you close the phone. It's one thing to have the LCD display the cellular network you are on, but the orange logo turns you into an easily seen walking billboard for them. I'd definitely be interested in learning how to hack the phone to remove or change this picture. Digital Camera The RAZR V3 can take VGA resolution pictures, at 640x480 resolution. There is a 4x zoom, but it's digital and as digital zooms go, it's pretty awful. The pictures it takes are of a okay quality, but the camera is definitely not this phone's strong suit. It's there and it works, but in the age of cheap multi-megapixel cameras, the RAZR's onboard camera isn't that impressive. When considering that Nokia has quality 1.3 megapixel cellphone cams, it's yet another knock on this phone's camera. Here's some images (resized) taken with the RAZR's camera: RAZR V3 18 RAZR V3 19 RAZR V3 20 Call Quality Call quality was superb, very clear, especially for not having an external antenna. It's definitely the best call quality that I have personally experienced on any cellphone, and the friends I called commented I sounded fine. One in particular said that he couldn't tell I was calling from a cellphone, whereas before he had always complained when I called on a cell that I sounded like I had just drank a fifth of vodka because of the raspiness in my voice from bad cellphone voice quality. I do have to note, however, that while the earpiece is very clear while talking, if you move your ear a bit and cover up the small speaker hole, it becomes very muddled and hard to hear. So you don't want to be jostling too much while talking, or you could miss some important details. Ringer I left the ringer to both ring and vibrate when I get a call, and in my pants pocket, the speaker is loud enough that I notice and the vibrate buzzed me enough, much better than my previous phones. I do like the fact that I can set any MP3 as my ringer, but I haven't decided what I want yet, though, perhaps some Britney Spears will do. Memory Built-in storage is only 6MB, and to top it off, there's no memory card slot at all. So while the RAZR can play MPEG-4 videos, MP3s, and view JPGs, you're not going to be able to store many of the space hogging videos or MP3 files on the phone. This is a glaring omission, and with some Nokias having 96MB onboard, with even more possible with a memory card, 6MB is just flat-out pathetic. Battery The RAZR V3 battery is rated for 7 hours talk time and 10 days of standby, during my testing (talking quite a bit, taking many pictures, Bluetooth file transfers, and playing around with menus) I found that the battery lasted about a day and a half, which is quite a bit, as this would translate to three days with my usual phone usage. I'm satisfied with the battery life, you can't expect too much out of 680mAh battery. The back cover is a bit awkward to take off and put on, I still can't do it smoothly. Removing the battery cover will need a fingernail, it's a tight fit to push in the cover release button. WAP/Internet The WAP and Internet experience on this phone is passable, I'm not one for much WAP use at all, I just can't stand typing without a keyboard of some sort. Since my Cingular plan is not at all geared towards data usage, I did not try to pair it up and use it as a Bluetooth data modem, which I'm not sure is even possible with this phone. Bluetooth I was able to successfully connect via Bluetooth to my Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop, a Dell Axim X30 Pocket PC, and a Motorola HS810 Bluetooth headset after some initial difficulty. I still think it should be easier (I spent quite a while getting them all to talk to each other), and the Motorola manual was pretty lacking when it came to Bluetooth instructions. For the record, the default passkey for the RAZR V3 is 0000 (are all Bluetooth passkeys set to 0000 as default?), which I couldn't find anywhere in the manual. That is, I set the passkeys to 0000 on every device and it worked in my case. Bluetooth connectivity definitely should be easier to use. Using Pocket Informer 5 on my Axim X30, I am able to send a number from my contacts list to be automatically dialed on the RAZR. Pretty neat and useful, however, due to the phone's limitation, I was not able to use my Motorola HS810 Bluetooth headset if I wanted to use the Axim X30 to dial. I believe it's the phone can only have one Bluetooth connection at a time, since I successfully used Bluetooth with two devices simultaneously on my laptop, sending a file from the RAZR to my laptop while syncing my Axim X30 at the same time. Gripes Yes, even this chic phone isn't flawless. The front cover does not sit flush with the bottom of the phone. I'm not sure if it's just my phone, but when closed, the cover sticks up about 1 or 2mm and isn't smooth when running your fingers up and down. When I push the cover down as much as I can, the cover will sit flush, so it may just be my particular phone (I have yet to see the phone in person at a Cingular store). There also seems like there are some imprints on the LCD screen of the keypad graphics. I don't think the LCD has been scratched at all, but it is something to watch out for in the long run. Ideally, I'd like the top cover LCD to always be on so that a thumbnail of my wallpaper and the time would always be bright, but I couldn't find anything in the options menus to do so. It would also probably be a battery drain, but it'd be nice if I could choose to have that. As it is now, the LCD backlight turns off 10 seconds after the lid is closed. After the cover is closed, the top LCD shows the current time and wallpaper. But without the backlight on, it's rather hard to see the top LCD without some light shining on it. In a completely dark room, there's no way to see the time without flipping the cover open. As I use my phone quite a bit to check the time (no watches for me), I would like to easily see the time without having to fumble with it. Also, the center Select button, in the middle of the directional arrows, is a bit hard to use, as the circle button is quite small. Using a thumb to control the navigational buttons as most would do, I found myself to accidentally press down or left instead of the center Select button. Fortunately, in almost all menus, you can choose to use the bigger top right button which is also the Select button. You could use your thumbnail to use the circular Select button, but then you may scratch the keys, which I've read can happen. And that'll be one sad day if you scratch up this beauty at all. Conclusion Overall, I like this phone a lot. Yes, I'm a sucker for good design, but the phone functions as it should and its features work as advertised. Did I mention the phone looks cool? Do I even have to mention that? Motorola has a winner here and I'm sure that more designer fashion phones are headed our way since this phone will be a success. The only real critical aspect missing in the RAZR V3 is the lack of a memory card slot, or perhaps more onboard memory. The average fashion phone buyer may not care about memory and only about looks, but the fact is there are power users that like nice-looking phones as well, and many will be put off by the lack of memory. The phone is definitely pricy and it isn't for everyone, so one should definitely try to scope it out in person before purchasing. I do think it's a bit overpriced, maybe by $100 or so, but you often do have to pay a bit more to have the absolute latest gadget as you well know. RAZR V3 6 RAZR V3 7 RAZR V3 12 RAZR V3 11 Dan Wu's personal reviews and commentaries can be read on his personal site, http://www.wooba.com . |
The Engadget Interview: John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos, Inc. | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-12-13-the-engadget-interview-john-macfarlane-ceo-of-sonos-inc.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-12-13 22:29:00+00:00 | John MacFarlane Sonos Veteran journalist J.D. Lasica interviewed John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos, Inc., about the company's soon-to-be-released digital music system, the state of home entertainment, and how to throw a wireless party. Please give me the 30-second rundown on Sonos – what do you do, where are you located, when were you founded? We're in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass. We've been going at this for a little more than two years now. We're a group of people with prior successful backgrounds who all enjoy music, and we all wanted a better way to experience music around the home. How big is your staff? We're a little north of 50 people. The Sonos Digital Music System is your first product. Will it be out next month? That's correct. We're racing to get our first product shipped by mid- to late January. What does your system do? The system is designed around someone who enjoys music in multiple locations in their home or their office. So tell me about the components. There's the handheld controller, which is a horizontal, 3.5-inch color LCD with a scroll wheel, which is your main experience with the system as a user. Then there are units called ZonePlayers, which serve as very high-quality two-channel amplifiers and computer networking. The ZonePlayers connect into your home speakers. Those units will pull music off a PC, Macintosh or a Network Attached Storage, including an Internet radio stream. The controller aggregates up a view of all your music by album, artist, genre or playlist and lets you navigate what you want to listen to and where you want to listen to it. Network Attached Storage is those dumb boxes, right? Yeah. It's basically the evolution of USB storage to include an Ethernet connector. What's pushing that is digital photography - people have such a huge accumulation of pictures and they need a place to store them. Does your music system essentially replace the home stereo system? Yes. We started from a different set of principles. If you were going to design an audio system for the next generation of digital music, how would you do it? That's the approach we took. The other viewpoint we took was, while some of us are technical people, all of us enjoy ease of use and not having to think about technology. The aim was for a nontechnical person to be able to set up the system and enjoy it. How do the ZonePlayers connect up to the system? First, they work wirelessly over the wifi band. Very few people have structured Ethernet wiring. This allows you to put the units where you want them to go, not where your networking is available. We built a mesh networking technology on top of that, so you're not tethered to an access point. Basically, as long as each unit can see another unit, they'll work together as a system. Is this 802.11g? It is 802.11g wave form. The mesh networking is something else, which we call Sonosnet. I understand that the system can play music from multiple devices, not just off a computer. There are a lot of features built in. There's a line-in on the back of each ZonePlayer, and you can plug a CD player, MP3 player, or iPod or TV into it. There's an auto-sensing jack in the back so when you pop the RCA cables in, it will pop up on your controller. Just this weekend my brother brought his iPod over and we were playing music throughout the house on it. When I interviewed Musicmatch founder Dennis Mudd last year, he said his main motivation for founding the company was because he wanted to create the ultimate party CD. With a Sonos setup, sounds like anyone can bring a party to your house. Listening to your music when you're sitting at your PC is not most people's idea of musical enjoyment. So, yeah, you bring your iPod over, plug it in and enjoy away. With some subscription services you can access the music on your account and play it anywhere. Did Sonos create the software, design the hardware and contract it out to factories in Asia to build? We designed the entire product: hardware, software, industrial design, mechanical. The manufacturing was done by a super-high quality contractor in Taiwan - the same people who built the iPod. Who are you targeting as your main customers? If you're eight years or less out of college, this is a no-brainer to you because most of your music is in a digital music library. So those people get the idea right away. Of course, that's generally not the sweet spot of homeowners with a desire to listen to music in multiple zones. Our customers are people who are generally broadband connected, have digital music, are music lovers. They're not technical but they'll often have more than 100 MP3s or digital songs. How are sales going? It's too early to say. We have a healthy pre-order list but you never know until you're six months into sales what the run rates are. How much does this cost? The most meaningful package for a first-time customer is our bundled package, which includes two ZonePlayers and one controller for $1199. Who are your main competitors in this space? First, there are the companies that make digital media receivers, and I don't really view that as direct competition. They include the Apple Airport Express, DLink, Linksys - a whole variety of folks make these gateways between the home stereo and your computer. They don't include a controller, so with the Airport Express you run it through the iTunes software on your PC or Mac. The Roku Soundbridge is another. Second is the category of CEDIA or custom home installers like Escient, Fireball and Yamaha's MusicCast. They're self-contained systems, but they're somewhat proprietary and very high end. Fitting into this market, we saw that products like the Roku and Airport Express do a good job of bringing music into one room. And you have the high-end hard-wired CEDIA types that do multi-room audio and are very expensive. An installer places infrared eyes in each room and they home-run all the speaker cables to one spot in your house and put this huge rack of gear there. If you wanted to get four rooms of music done by a custom installer, you are looking at about $12,000 vs. $2,300 with our system. So we're fitting in the middle of those two product categories. We're offering a product that is multiple room and at a price point that's well below anything you can get from Yamaha, Escient or anybody else. Digital music and networking allow just a really rich multi-zone experience. And our controller is the bread and butter that none of them offer. So we're developing a new category called digital music systems. Let's touch on rights management for a moment. What kinds of files will play on your system? At release, it'll play MP3, WMA without the DRM, AAC without the DRM, WAV and a couple of other formats. Both Apple's FairPlay and Microsoft's DRM aren't supported right out of the gate for us. Apple doesn't support its format with any other vendors yet. Microsoft's DRM is centered around a handheld, not around a multi-zone approach. What about if some kids at MIT wanted to tap into their dorm neighbors's ZonePlayers - could they? We considered that scenario. The ZonePlayers have an encryption key between them, and if you're in a college network and in the same dorm but don't want to share your music collections, the systems won't allow the two to intercommunicate. But if I were interested, I could. You could for formats that are not DRM-protected. If you were playing an MP3 stream, you could link it into another room and play it, yes. Sonos get any buzz at the Digital Music Summit last week? Quite a bit. Ted Cohen of EMI was raving about us during his keynote. He stopped by our booth with somebody new about five times. We're asking him to be part of our beta program to try out the system. We're a new company and so our first impression has to be our best impression. What can EMI or the music industry do for you? What Ted liked about us is that this isn't a gateway product. We look at our product as a consumer electronics device, not as a PC peripheral. We're not relying exclusively upon a PC or Mac. We are big supporters of DRM. However you look at it, the artists have to be paid. IT's not sustainable if they're not. The challenge is getting that industry to getting understand the computer industry a little better so that there's a good solution that works. Apple as one solution, and Microsoft DRM is another, but you're out of luck if want to play a song with Microsoft DRM on an iPod. All these kinds of competing DRMs just extend the longevity of MP3 and the open formats. So our focus out of that conference and the interest out of EMI for us is an open DRM that we could embrace so make them happy and comfortable. Open DRM? You mean cross-platform? Yeah. One DRM that's usable and cross-vendor formats. We're in the Betamax-VHS wars right now. Those wars don't benefit consumers or content producers. The industry has got to mature beyond that. One of the parties that can push that is the people who produce the content. Sonos won a Best of Audio award at last month's Consumer Electronics Association awards competition last month. Not too shabby. That was beyond our most hopeful expectations. We're pretty proud. What other kinds of devices might we eventually see coming through the Sonos pipeline? We're pretty focused on getting this product out the door and getting a lot of happy customers right now. It's just the very beginning of this industry. DRM is a major topic, how you work with the music industry in home entertainment - there are just a lot of interesting areas. J.D. Lasica is author of the upcoming book Darknet: Hollywood's War on the Digital Generation . |
The Olympus wants you to take pictures of your food with the Stylus 500 | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-12-15-the-olympus-wants-you-to-take-pictures-of-your-food-with-the.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-12-15 12:34:24+00:00 | Olympus Stylus 500 You know how we joke about how everything in Japan is craziness times a million? Well, we're not joking anymore. The new five megapixel Olympus Stylus 500 digital camera has all sorts of different picture modes, you know like portrait, landscape, sports, but it also has one other setting, "Cuisine," that's designed to cash in on what is supposed to be the big new trend in Tokyo right now: taking a picture of your restaurant meal before you get down to business. (Yes, we know this isn't the first Olympus camera with a "Cuisine" mode, we'd just been to busy not taking pictures of all our meals to notice). |
Sony PlayStation Portable/PSP hands-on review | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-12-20-sony-playstation-portable-psp-hands-on-review.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-12-20 17:50:00+00:00 | psp04 We got our dirty mitts on a PlayStation Portable! Read on for a nice long review with plenty of pics: Introduction Ever since the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) was announced at E3 in May 2004, we have been eagerly anticipating the hottest console launch (sorry Nintendo DS) this year, even if it is only for the Japanese market right now. We were fortunate enough to get a unit to test a mere five days after the Japanese release date and have been playing with it all weekend. The Sony PSP features a large 4.3-inch 16:9 widescreen LCD TFT screen with a 480x272 resolution, button layout similar to the PlayStation with a digital control pad, an analog stick, circle, square, triangle, x, and 2 shoulder buttons, USB 2.0 connectivity (via mini-USB), a Memory Stick Duo media slot, and 802.11b WiFi support. It uses Sony's proprietary Universal Media Disc, which stores up to 1.8GB in a format reminiscent of MiniDiscs. The Japanese launch release date was December 12th and the first shipment of PSPs quickly sold out. psp01 The Box We got the Standard edition PSP, which comes with the PSP itself, a battery, an AC adapter, and a manual, along with Ridge Racers and Minna No Golf Portable. (The Value Pack adds a 32MB Memory Stick Duo, a soft carrying case, and headphones with an in-line remote.) The box does not come with a sticker seal of any sort, which we weren't quite used to considering anything and everything comes with some sort of factory seal here in the US. When we shook the product box, we could hear some rattling around. We weren't too thrilled about that, since the unit did come a long ways from Japan. Luckily, when we opened the package, the PSP fits snugly into the surrounding cardboard, the rattling we heard was mostly likely the power adapter cables. We noticed a lack of any type of demo disc included with the unit. Some PSP Value Packs apparently do come with a UMD Demo Disc, but we've also heard from a few people that got Value Packs without any demo discs inside as well. Story continues psp05 The Unit Itself When you first lay your hands on the PSP, you immediately notice the screen. The 4.3-inch display dominates the device, it looks like it takes up two-thirds of the real estate on the front fascia. In other words, massive. The unit feels expensive, and exudes sexiness, much like Apple's iPods (and you know how big of a fan we are of iPods). The unit feels perfectly balanced when held with both hands. It does not feel like a $200 console (Japan MSRP for console only) at all. We're sure Sony is losing a few hundred bucks off each unit sold as the PSP easily feels like it's worth $400 of gadgetry (when compared to portable video and audio players and the DS). We feel Sony could have gotten away with a $300 sticker price, but in an effort to destroy Nintendo's firm grasp of the handheld gaming market, they've set the price just $50 more than the Nintendo DS (which was released in both Japan and US markets just last month). It feels like an extreme bargain for two bills. The screen is immersive, drawing you in when playing videos or games and so big that you may not need your glasses to play. The black color fits well and matches the Playstation 2's color. The dimples across the top row of the screen reminded us of carbon fiber, currently the rage in import tuner cars. When you pay for a new console, you expect it to be perfect. Alas, ours was not. We noticed two lit pixels (always-on pixels), one in the middle of the screen, about one-fourth of the way down, and one near the very right edge of the screen. So out of 130,560 pixels on the LCD screen, we got two defective ones. It's actually not too noticeable unless you look for it and we didn't notice until we played with the PSP in pitch black darkness. We could make a big fuss, but we'll just deal with it, and hope that Sony will be as honorable as Nintendo when fixing units with dead pixels for their customers. Another complaint of the PSP so far has been the ejecting UMD problem in which the user in the video appears to flex the PSP quite a bit to get it to eject spontaneously. We're happy to report that we didn't have such problems with any self-ejecting discs and that our PSP is built rather solidly, though we didn't dare to twist the unit as hard as we could. We initially had some light squeaking noises when we pressed right on the directional pad, but after a weekend of use, the annoying sound has disappeared. The PSP, with battery, Memory Stick Pro Duo, and UMD inserted, weighs 10.3 ounces, making it fine to put in a jacket pocket (with case or cover of course), but not exactly friendly in a pants pocket with its long form factor. We've heard of some Japanese folks wearing the PSP like a necklace (there is a strap handle at the bottom left section of the PSP), but as cool as that may make them look, we didn't think our necks could take the strain. psp33 Unfortunately, with the fine glossy screen comes the problem of fingerprints and smudges. While we didn't use latex gloves while handling the unit, we were very careful to try and handle it with the utmost of care. That said, there were smudges around the control buttons within seconds. It's pretty much unavoidable to smudge the smooth front cover, so we recommend a very soft cloth to wipe off smudges and smears, but make sure the cloth doesn't scratch up the LCD. The back of the unit is textured plastic and does not smudge. Within an hour of playing some games on the PSP and constantly wiping off smudges, there were some light scratches on the screen. We're hoping that Sony will sell replacement PSP faceplates at a reasonable price. The front of the PSP unit has the directional pad on the left side, and the analog thumb stick (looks like speaker mesh) below that. The analog thumb stick is quite a burden to use since it's so far down, as there is no thumb support from the unit when you use it. It was fine to play Ridge Racers with it, but after 15 minutes, we felt as if we were getting thumbitis with a sore thumb joint. To the right of the LCD is the standard circle, square, triangle, and x buttons any Playstation junkie has become accustomed to. The left and right trigger buttons are at the top of the unit and are clear, looking a bit like jewelry. All buttons on our review unit were easy to press and click fast if necessary. psp10 The bottom edge of the PSP is raised ever so slightly, with buttons for Home, lowering and raising the volume, brightness, sound settings for various music genres, and Select and Start buttons. While Home, Select, and Start are quite easy to press since the size of the buttons are a good size, the volume and brightness and music buttons take quite a bit of effort to depress as the buttons are half the size of the other ones and further away if you use your thumbs to depress. Since you may use the volume buttons quite a bit, it's a bit of a pain and there seems to be enough room on the left bottom side to put in larger buttons for volume. But at least the volume buttons are not essential for quick pressing during gaming. For brightness, there are three settings, from Dim to Bright to Brightest (our wording), we found Bright to be the adequate enough. Since there's still not much sun in Seattle this time of year, we were unable to test the PSP in direct sunlight. psp09 The left side of the unit has the WiFi switch, a quick flip up and the WiFi mode is set to on. psp08 At the top edge is an infrared transmitter, a mini-USB connector and the Eject button for loading UMDs. Sony is planning an infrared remote controller for the PSP, and it looks like any future PSP add-ons will be plugged in up top, as there's two locking holes on each side of the mini-USB port. psp07 The combined power and hold switch is on the lower right side, you can push the switch down for hold, and pushing the slider up turns it on. The button always returns to the middle after pushing it up, which we found a bit annoying. A simple On/Off/Hold switch would have been easier to handle. When you power it on, the PSP returns you to where you left off (like returning from a hibernation state in Windows XP, but without any delays at all). When you toggle hold during a game, the PSP buttons become disabled, and the game just continues. Hold is probably most useful when playing a video or a music album and you don't want any accidental button presses to interfere. psp06 The bottom right is where the AC adapter plug goes in, which we find is quite an odd placement for it. When gaming with the power line plugged in, your right hand will feel the cord and plug. While it doesn't interfere per se, it would have been much neater if the power port was placed on the top edge of the unit. Not a huge knock, just a slight inconvenience. The left side is where the headphones plug in. When used, the headphone plug doesn't interfere with our movement as much as the AC adapter one because the headphones plug is on the bottom half of the PSP. Also at the bottom edge a sticker in a recessed area, with the product number and serial number in the middle. We don't we see it lasting after a few months of hardcore use nor do we see the point of this sticker, as there is actually an etched serial number in the battery compartment. USB Connectivity In USB Mode, if you have a Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo inserted, you can connect a mini-USB cable to the top of the PSP, and it acts like a USB drive, allowing you to access any folders or content on the Memory Stick. Windows XP immediately recognized the device as a Removable Disk after we plugged in the cable. File transfers both ways were incredibly fast thanks to the USB 2.0 support. psp20 Universal Media Discs The Sony PSP uses a proprietary 1.8GB Universal Media Disc (UMD) format, in part an effort to thwart piracy and so they can control what gets released for their system. They are much like MiniDiscs (the actual disc just slightly smaller), but with one serious drawback, a gaping hole in the back of the plastic case (no doubt for the PSP to read in data). While we know some of you are very meticulous and careful when handling your disc-based media, we also know quite a few people that have scratched up DVDs and games. We just don't get why Sony didn't put a metal faceplate over the hole like they do for MiniDiscs. UMD games are packaged in a plastic section which the UMD fits snugly into. But there is no small plastic case for UMDs (ala Gameboy carts) and one can not reasonably be expected to carry around the full game box when transporting extra games with the system. We're sure third party UMD plastic cases will be out soon enough, but for now, you'll have to resort to carrying the whole game box, as we don't recommend just putting a UMD in your pocket to carry around. The UMD drive makes a whirring noise at times when loading games or levels (but not while actually playing). It's not too obnoxious and sort of sounds like a hard drive spinning up, but you do hear it. After living with solid state handheld games (cartridges), we had to get used to load times again. The original Playstation 1 had horrid load times for some games, but it did improve over time as programmers got to know the system. We hope the same will be true for the PSP as it took 19 seconds after selecting UMD to get to the Namco logo on Ridge Racers. During the game, it took 10 seconds to load the course after selecting all the options. For Minna No Golf, it took 25 seconds to get to the intro screen and 16 seconds to start playing from the menu. It's tolerable but an aspect that could use some improvement. Targeting the Adult Market While kids will surely be begging their parents for the PSP (my 4 year-old nephew asked his father for one immediately after seeing it), Sony is targeting a more mature audience. We don't see younger kids handling the UMDs with the open area well and we can just picture screen scratches within a day after little Jimmy has their hands on one. As a friend pointed out, this system is perfect for the Japanese audience, a country where they are known for cleanliness, neatness, and taking care of their electronics well. That, sadly, can not be said for the American audience (in general), we are just more rough with our gear. It will be interesting to see if Sony changes the PSP at all for the American audience and we're thinking the USA warranty should be at least a year. This may be one of those times where you will actually want to purchase the extended warranty program. psp21 First Bootup At first bootup we were greeted with the option to choose between Japanese and English. Next you can give your PSP a nickname (for network play) via cellphone type text entry (press 2 three times for the letter C, etc). Seeing how the PSP has plenty of room for a keyboard layout on the screen, we would have much preferred that. The Japanese are used to the phone keypad text entry system, so I'm sure it's not a big deal to them, but for the US release, we hope they change it. Another annoying interface aspect was when we entered our IP address for the PSP. We had to scroll up and down through 256 numbers (0 to 255), rather than manually entering numerals. It's not very fun to scroll for 16 sets of numbers. After setting it to English the menus are pretty self-explanatory, the main options are Settings, Photo, Music, Video, and Game. Some of the options may not be available if you don't have a Memory Stick Pro Duo inserted. Japanese Differences As was the case with the Japanese versions of the PlayStation 1 and 2, the button you choose to select with is the Circle button not the X button (like in the US versions). The X button thus becomes the back or cancel option. When you're used to using X to select everything, there will be times you forget and accidentally hit the wrong button. The manual is in Japanese, not that we needed it at all for anything. Other than those two things, the PSP itself is very English-speaker friendly. Battery Life The PSP is powered by a 100-240V (5A) universal power adapter, which means you can use it anywhere in the world practically. There have been reports of a weak two hours of battery life when playing complex 3D games. We fully charged up our PSP battery and popped in Ridge Racers for non-stop gaming. We set the brightness to the middle level and set the volume to 15 button presses from 0 (the max volume is 30). That level of brightness and volume is adequate for the average gamer during gameplay. With no breaks in between, we played non-stop for 3 hours and 35 minutes. We also tried another Ridge Racers test, playing one game, then letting the system run through the replay in an infinite loop. That test also resulted in a similar playtime of 3 hours and 31 minutes. While not superb, 3.5 hours is acceptable and you can always buy a spare battery (~$45) if you need it. Cheaper third party batteries will show up sooner or later as well. We had really hoped the PSP could be charged via mini-USB, but unfortunately Sony did not include that support. But to be fair, our mini-USB cable was not able to charge our Motorola RAZR V3 cellphone either, though the phone is supposedly capable of doing so. So it may be that we have a bunk USB cable. If anyone has gotten their PSP to charge via USB, let us know. We'd also like to see a cigarette lighter power adapter for long road trips. After 3.5 hours of nonstop gaming, the unit is just barely warm to the touch. I ejected the UMD and the disc felt just the tiniest bit warm too. So hopefully that's a sign of no overheating problems (which plagued the first-generation Sony Playstations, anyone remember turning it upside down to alleviate the problem?). psp38 Memory Stick Duo The Sony is hoping that the PSP will help make the Memory Stick Pro Duo a viable memory card format, especially since the PSP does not take any of the older Memory Stick formats like the Memory Stick Pro. It only takes the tiny Duo flash memory card, which is about 85% of the size of a Secure Digital (SD) card. We believe the highest current available size is 512MB, retailing for $130 at stores (or about $85 shipped on eBay), and we have not seen the 1GB version in stock anywhere. You will need a Memory Stick to save your games or if you want to play MP3s or videos on it. The Ridge Racers save game takes up about 700K and Minna No Golf Portable needs about 769K. After formatting your Memory Stick Duo or Pro Duo in the PSP, you get a PSP directory, and GAME, MUSIC, PHOTO, SAVEDATA folders within that. The game folder will eventually house downloadable games or demos from the Internet, music is for your MP3s, photo for your JPGs, and save data for your saved games. Video files need to go in a different folder which we will get into later this week. psp35 Photos For photo viewing, GIF, BMP, and PNG files aren't supported by the PSP, but standard JPG ones are. When you have a full-sized 4 or 5 megapixel JPG file, the PSP takes a bit of time for it to load, about 3 seconds for a 1.8MB JPG file. It automatically crops the photo (most photos are in the 4:3 format), leaving white space on the sides of the picture when it is displayed (see above). psp36 psp37 For photos that you have cropped or Photoshopped to the PSP's native 480x272 resolution (say hi to my Yorkshire terrier , Yoda), the picture loads immediately and looks sharp with excellent detail. You can get file information (filename and file date), do a slideshow, or zoom in to certain parts of the picture. The photo gallery works much like Windows Explorer, showing a thumbnail of the picture, the filename, and date. You can also create folders within the \PSP\Photo directory in Windows Explorer to organize your photos. In the Photo section, when you press the Triangle button, you can delete folders or pictures, or get more information about a picture, including its full resolution and which camera took the shot by accessing the EXIF information within the JPG file itself. Playing Music The biggest knock on Sony in the past has been their insistence of using the ATRAC format, forcing you to convert your beloved MP3s to their proprietary format before their players could play it. They have finally listened to their users and done away with ATRAC only with native MP3 support in the PSP. Just drop files into your PSP/Music folder and your PSP can play them directly. The speakers are at the bottom of the unit, and the two little holes on the bottom produce good sound. We played a variety of MP3s just fine, including some variable bit rate ones, but we're sorry to report that we didn't have any ATRAC files to test out. Playing Videos Videos look amazing on the widescreen. The picture is sharp and detailed, and colors are vibrant. While it's fine to hold the PSP in your hands when playing games or watching short clips, it gets a bit tiresome if you're watching something an hour or more in length (rest assured that Sony will be putting out a stand for the PSP). psp22 psp23 WiFi Setup Setting up the 802.11b WiFi is easy. Just name your connection (Home, Work, etc), put in the SSID access point name, a WEP key if any, and then setup IP and DNS addresses (or choose automatic if using DHCP). There's a network test when you are done, telling you your current signal strength and whether your Internet connection succeeded or not. Taking a page from Microsoft, you can also update the PSP OS via a Network Update. Our tech geekiness led us to try to update the system (it's less than a week old) before even playing games. Our system already had the latest version, as there were no updates from Sony. The PSP in Public Not that we expected anyone to, but no one noticed when we whipped out the PSP to wait in line at the post office (for a lousy 30 minutes!) to mail a package. But we were surprised when we started playing while standing in line at Best Buy (to get a Sandisk 512MB Memory Stick Pro Duo for a whopping $130) and got no attention, either (though we were only in line for about 10 minutes). The checkout droids didn't say anything either. But when we took the PSP to the mall for a little tour (just outside a game shop), it was a different story. Within a few minutes a bunch of kids who looked to be aged 10 to 12 were asking questions about it, mainly where we got ours from and how much. (Kids these days must be on a different allowance scale than when we were kids, because when we said it would be just $200 come March or so, they were all over it and said they were sure that they'd get one.) Within 10 minutes we had gathered a small crowd of ten, all drooling over the gorgeous screen. With the Nintendo DS anyone looking over your shoulder may have a hard time to see what's going on, while the PSP is also a watch-while-I-play kind of system, and the people that were looking over our shoulders at the mall didn't have any problem seeing what was going on. We didn't stay too long, fearing a mob scene as people started calling their friends over. psp25 PlayStation Portable vs. the Nintendo DS We love the Nintendo DS, but it is bulky and feels and looks like a child's toy from the 1980s compared to the PSP, which is definitely one well-designed, slick little handheld. The DS weighs exactly 10 ounces with the thumb strap, battery, and DS game inserted (10.4 ounces if you add in a GBA cart), just slightly less than the PSP's 10.3 ounces. But two 3-inch screens does not beat one 4.3-inch one, at least not in this case. ridgeracerds The DS has a touchscreen on the lower LCD, which makes for more interactivity than the PSP, and the PSP would make for a great PDA if it had touchscreen functionality. While Nintendo is planning to add music and video to the DS for $50, the PSP has both features already, and video just won't be the same on a 3-inch DS screen, especially when compared to the PSP's 4.3-inch one. When we consider that the primary purpose of the PSP is to play games, the graphics of the PSP just blow away the Nintendo offering. The two powerful 32-bit MIPS R4000 CPUs overwhelms the Nintendo DS ARM7 and ARM9 processors. One direct comparison would be Ridge Racer DS vs Ridge Racers for the PSP, both created by Namco. The DS version has some chunky pixelated graphics (see above picture courtesy of GameSpot ) and the lower touchscreen looks rather useless in terms of gameplay usage. The PSP's Ridge Racers is Playstation 2-like, with smoother graphics and more detail in the cars. The one redeeming factor of Ridge Racer DS is that only one copy of the game is needed for up to 6-player wireless multiplayer action. psp34 psp27 PlayStation Portable vs. Creative's Zen Portable Media Center The Creative Zen Portable Media Center (PMC) is a portable media player with a 3.8-inch 4:3 screen and a 20GB hard drive, but beyond the hard drive (and perhaps 7 hour video battery life and TV output), it does not compare too favorably with the PSP. Since we do not yet have the Sony Image Converter software, it is easier to transcode video files to the PMC. But the PMC is a lot thicker and uses the 4:3 screen format, which in the current age of HDTV is going the way of the dodo bird. Interestingly enough the Sony PSP AC adapter can actually charge the PMC as well since the plug fits and both units use the same voltage power. Watching standard 4:3 size videos is okay on the PMC, but when you go to 16:9 format shows or movies, you definitely notice the annoying black bars on the PMC. In direct video comparisons, the PMC picture looks washed out (as you can tell in the pictures) and much grainier. I'm not sure why the 4:3 video on the PSP wasn't bigger, but it's still more clear and detailed. In the 16:9 Shark Tale trailer, I have no idea why the PMC didn't set the video to 16:9 format, as the original source was widescreen, but again, the PSP handily wins that comparo as well. The PMC has only one speaker (at the bottom right corner of the screen) for mono sound, whereas the PSP has two little speakers for stereo sound. The PMC has slightly better sound (even with only one speaker) and has a higher maximum volume, but when using a pair of Shure E3C earbuds to listen to some MP3s, we found audio fidelity to be great in both devices, with no noticeable quality difference. PlayStation Portable vs. Apple's iPod photo Apple's iPod photo handily beats the PSP in terms of the MP3 interface, ease of use, playlist creation, and storage space. We didn't have an standard iPod or iPod photo to do direct comparisons with, but we did do a listening test with an iPod mini. Again using Shure E3C earbuds, we found no discernable difference in audio quality between the PSP and the iPod mini, as both were equally superb with a variable bit rate MP3. When viewing JPGs, the 2-inch iPod Photo screen size just doesn't bode well for viewing pictures, plus you need to use iTunes to convert any JPGs into a format the iPod Photo can read. The PSP can directly read any JPG file (and fits the JPG onto the screen) and the pictures look gorgeous on the 4.3-inch screen, but the only downside of the PSP is that you can not listen to an MP3 file while browsing photos and it doesn't output the picture to a TV. Is the PSP an iPod (or iPod Photo) killer? No, but could it be an iPod video killer (when and if that finally comes out)? Perhaps, but only if Memory Stick prices go down in price and storage sizes go way up. Or if Sony opens up the UMD format (we can hope, can't we?) and lets people write to their own 1.8GB UMD discs. We're not sure what Apple has in store in terms of a video iPod player, but obviously they'd have to make the screen at least somewhat comparable to the one on the PSP and loads better than the iPod Photo's 2-inch screen. Games psp31 psp32 Ridge Racers is definitely a hit, and we've yet to hear anyone buy the PSP without buying RR too. Just like the original Ridge Racer was a success when the Sony PlayStation came out, Ridge Racers is a system seller. The intro CG looks amazing, and when you play the game, you get a sense of speed, which you need in a racing title. There were no graphic pop-ups, but you can notice jagged edges (jaggies) if you look close enough, namely the edge of the course (the bottom of the side walls) as you are driving. It may be a little distracting to some, but we aren't that critical to count it as a major flaw. The game itself has some intentional motion blur (we hope intentional at least) when you see the computer controlled cars turning in corners, their brake lights will blur a bit on the screen. There is some Japanese language in Ridge Racers, but overall, there's plenty of English and one can navigate through it reasonably well without knowledge of Japanese. We had to tear the PSP unit away from our test group of gamers to even try our other game. psp30 Minna No Golf Portable (Everybody's Golf, or Hot Shots Golf in the US) is a good golf title. The graphics are solid, but it is golf, and we didn't experience anything spectacular from this one. We do find it weird that our character runs at hyperspeed immediately after striking the ball, and waits at the spot for the next swing, even as the ball is rolling to that point. You can put topspin or underspin on the ball, and you can also hook and slice the ball around trees. It uses the familiar old three click method for the golf swing, click once to start your swing, once to set the power, and once for accuracy. It's the same method that's been used since Links for PC has been around. The menus are heavily in Japanese, and while we were able to start a game by pressing the Circle button a few times, we had no idea what we chose. There may be guides or FAQs at GameFAQs by the time you read this. psp26 Conclusion The Sony PSP is a great handheld gaming console, one that could prove to be as revolutionary as the original Nintendo Gameboy was, not only because it's basically a handheld PlayStation 2 with powerful graphics, but because of all the other value-added features it comes with, namely the photo viewer, the audio player, and video player. The most amazing thing, hands-down about the PSP is the large 4.3-inch widescreen LCD, which is simply amazing to see in person, and at two hundred bucks retail, it's definitely a good value. There is no handheld gaming competitor that comes close to it right now in terms of gaming power, and if weren't for the low storage capacity and high price of the Memory Stick Pro Duo, it might even hold its own as a portable audio and video player. The photo viewer is superb and sharp and the sound quality of the audio player is at least on par with the iPod mini. The videos when played back from Memory Sticks are superb, there's no doubt that movies on UMD will look just as great on the widescreen. Now maybe the time to put in your pre-orders for the February or March 2005 US PSP launch, that is if you can resist importing a system (around $500+ right now, check our PSP price watch). We really hope Sony holds to their word of no region coding on PSP games (we don't mind so much if UMD movies are region encoded), because we'd rather not have to rip apart our PSP to install a region-free modchip (which will surely come if there is region coding for games). You will pay a bit of a premium for a PSP now, unless you know someone in Japan that can get you one. The question of worth is of course dependant on what your income level is and how much you value having the latest system. Sony PlayStation Portable Price Watch Dead or lit pixels will continue to be an issue for any PSP buyer (as it is for any sort of LCD screen) and it's the only main gripe of our system. We're more forgiving than most for the slow load times, as it is the first generation of software, so this should get better over time. The battery life isn't amazing, so another battery is a necessity if you plan on playing the PSP more than four hours a day away from an AC outlet, and we do wish that it could be charged via USB. Other issues: it'd be nice if Sony made text input in the menus a little easier, and we would have loved to have found an Internet browser within the OS, seeing how easy the WiFi was to setup and get working. Greater Memory Stick Pro Duo storage sizes at more affordable rates should come as the system matures, as the PSP would an amazing powerhouse with a cheap 4GB of storage. A special thanks goes out to Siu-Wai Ho of Kicks Hobby in Seattle, WA for providing the Sony Playstation Portable unit to us a mere 5 days after it's Japanese release. Thanks! psp24 psp15 psp02 psp03 psp11 psp12 psp13 psp14 psp16 psp17 psp18 psp19 psp28 psp29 Dan Wu's personal reviews and commentaries can be read on his personal site, http://www.wooba.com . |
Gamespot's "Most Despicable Product Placement" | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2004-12-25-gamespots-most-despicable-product-placement.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2004-12-25 11:55:28+00:00 | money I'm a racing nut. REAL racing, as in around racetracks. I expect advertising there, since it's part of the sport. However, when I play other racing games, parts manufacturers aside, there is no excuse for advertising. Which makes "Need for Speed Underground 2" all the more loathsome. The product placement in the game is horrible. Game prices continue to creep upward, while the companies are obviously making more money from more advertising. In NFSU2, you have a well known Electronics store, a well known cellphone service, and a well known fast food joint. (I won't give any of the buggers free advertising.) I can't be alone in getting sick of paying $50 for an advertising laden game. As Gamespot says, "either pass the savings onto the consumer, or reduce the amount of advertising." |
The winners of the 2004 Engadget Awards! | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-01-03-the-winners-of-the-2004-engadget-awards.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-01-03 22:24:00+00:00 | 2004 Engadget Awards It was a late night of counting (and recounting) votes (just kidding, we didn't count all those thousands of votes-our interns did), but we've tallied up the final voting in the 2004 Engadget Awards and are ready to announce the results. Thanks to everyone who voted and/or submitted nominations. Our congratulations go out to everyone who won, you should be receiving a very heavy "e"-shaped statuette sometime in the next six to eight weeks. And now, on to the winners! Gadget of the Year Readers' Choice: Apple iPod (4G) Engadget Pick: Archos Gmini 400 Disappointment of the Year Readers' Choice: Sony Network Walkman NW-HD1 Engadget Pick: Treo 650 Merger of the Year Readers' Choice: Cingular/AT&T Engadget Pick: Sprint/Nextel Worst Gadget of the Year Readers' Choice: Sony Network Walkman NW-HD1 Engadget Pick: Sony Network Walkman NW-HD1 Comeback of the Year Readers' Choice: Netscape (as Mozilla) Engadget Pick: Nintendo Most Anticipated Gadget of 2005 Readers' Choice: Apple iPhone Engadget Pick: Apple iPhone Cellphone of the Year Readers' Choice: Motorola RAZR V3 Engadget Pick: None of the Above Desktop of the Year Readers' Choice: Apple iMac G5 Engadget Pick: Sony Vaio Type X Digital Camera of the Year Readers' Choice: Canon EOS 20D Engadget Pick: Casio Exilim EX-S100 Display of the Year Readers' Choice: Apple Cinema Display Engadget Pick: LG Flatron 2320A Game Console of the Year Readers' Choice: Sony PlayStation Portable Engadget Pick: Sony PlayStation Portable GPS Device or Application of the Year Readers' Choice: Garmin StreetPilot 2620 Engadget Pick: TomTom GO Handheld of the Year Readers' Choice: Dell Axim X50v Engadget Pick: Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 Home Electronics Device of the Year Readers' Choice: Humax TiVo DRT800 Engadget Pick: Toshiba 37LZ150 Laptop of the Year Readers' Choice: Apple PowerBook G4 Engadget Pick: ASUS W1000N Story continues Media PC of the Year Readers' Choice: Sony Vaio Type R Engadget Pick: HUSH ATX Peripheral Device of the Year Readers' Choice: Logitech MX1000 Engadget Pick: Logitech MX1000 Portable Audio Player of the Year Readers' Choice: Apple iPod (4G) Engadget Pick: Rio Carbon Portable Video Player of the Year Readers' Choice: Creative Zen Portable Media Center Engadget Pick: Archos Gmini 400 Robot of the Year Readers' Choice: Honda Asimo Engadget Pick: Roomba Discovery Tablet PC of the Year Readers' Choice: Fujitsu T4010 Engadget Pick: NEC VersaPro Wireless Technology of the Year Readers' Choice: Apple AirPort Express Engadget Pick: EV-DO Wearable of the Year Readers' Choice: Jabra BT800 Engadget Pick: Voltaic Solar Backpack |
SanDisk @ CES - SD card with built-in USB adapter | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-01-06-sandisk-ces-sd-card-with-built-in-usb-adapter.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-01-06 22:36:12+00:00 | SanDisk SD-USB Card We got our hands on this sweet new SD/USB card from Sandisk. Yeah, you got that right: it pulls double duty as a normal-looking SD card, but flip it over, pop off the cover, and it slips into any USB port just like that. We're not sure why Sandisk hopes to cannibalize their own USB card reader market by putting everything into one package, but we are definitely, definitely not complaining. Think we can get them to do this with TransFlash or MiniSD ? No? Well, click on to see some more pics. SanDisk SD-USB Card Flipped open to reveal USB contacts (well, kind of). SanDisk SD-USB Card Inserted in a USB port. We are just so in love. |
Live from Macworld 2005: Steve Jobs keynote | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-01-11-live-from-macworld-2005-steve-jobs-keynote.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-01-11 17:09:00+00:00 | Steve Jobs Keynote It's the moment you've been waiting for: they're running a few minutes late, but it looks like the big, big, big keynote is about to get underway at Macworld. We have a couple of reporters there, and barring any unforeseen technical snafus (the WiFi sitch is a mess, apparently), we'll be bringing you live updates from Jobs' keynote as they happen. Keep refreshing to get the latest. 9:11am PST - Steve Jobs arrives on stage, starts talking up HD projection, he's showing off their new Apple store in London, it's their largest store to date, and the second grossing store they have worldwide. 9:14am - Recapping the year, the iMac G5 launch "The most beautiful desktop computer." The best selling Mac they have. 9:15am - Mac OS X update, "The world's most advanced operating system, 12,000 native apps, 14 million users." Tiger on schedule to ship first half of this year with 200 new features. Any process will be able to address 64 bits of memory. 9:16am - New Tiger features. Automator, collects and accomplishes routine tasks. Most important new feature is Spotlight, desktop search allows you to find anything. Photos, PDFs, docs, integrated into OS and applications. 9:17am - Microsoft will be building support for Spotlight into their Mac apps. 9:21am - Spotlight just instantly searched 250,000 files, can sort by people. 9:22am - Spotlight offers searching within Corbis images. 9:23am - Steve just crashed Spotlight photo viewer! "Well, that's why we have backup systems here." Force quit and recovered. 9:25am - Demoing "smart folders" in the finder. "View this week" everything opened this past week is shown. Searched results actually show up in a spotlight effect. Very nice effect. 9:27am - New version of Mail for Tiger. Softer UI, no more brushed metal look. Can search across all mailboxes using Spotlight. Steve showing demo with 100,000 emails. 9:28am - Smart mailboxes" monitor anything with the search phrase. If someone emails you a bunch of pix, there's a "slideshow" button attached to the message. Can dynamically create slide shows from emails. Nice "expose" type ways to view multiple photos. Once in slideshow view you can automatically save any of the pix to iPhoto library. Slick transparent "genie" effect to add photos to iPhoto. 9:30am - QuickTime 7 - 24 channels of surround sound, support for high-def. video, live resizing. Full screen overlay. One button audio and video recording. More transparent onscreen controls. Using H.264 as codec so it could transcode movies for PSP. 9:31am - Lots of smooth resizing of HD video. Scalable from cell phones to full HD. Definitely a knock at you-know-who. 9:34am - Dashboard - "Get in, find something, get out" Controller for iTunes, world clock, measurement converter. Dictionary and thesaurus (applause). Translation, yellow pages, weather. Lots of yuks at stock ticker showing Apple and Pixar up and Microsoft down. Widget bar overlaid under dock. Widgets appear with ripple effect. eBay developed a widget for it to track auctions 9:36am - Demoing controls on "back" of widgets. They flip around like the tiles in that tic tac toe beanbag toss game "Toss-across" 9:38am - iChat - Up to 10 people in one audio chat, multiparty video, up to 4 people in one video chat using H.264. 9:40am - Demoing iChat video fullscreen. As more people are added to video chat, the screen positions them in a sort of folded format. Shipping "long before Longhorn." 9:43am - HD. Declares 2005 the year for high-definition video. Final Cut Pro the most popular HD video app. Introducing Final Cut Express HD. Adds powerful HDV editing. LiveType for animated titles, integration with iMovie titles. Soundtrack for custom music. Seamless iMovie file import. $299 in February or $99 upgrade for FCE current owners. 9:44am - iLife 05. "We are leading the digital media revolution." New cartoony logo, iPhoto has better organizing and searching, new photo editor. Calendar view. New search tool. Supports MPEG4 movies for import from, say, Sony cameras. Supports RAW image files from high-end digital SLR cameras. Editing view looks a bit like Windows filmstrip view. 9:46am - Editor adds controls for Brightness, contrast, histogram, saturation, sharpness, straighten, temperature, tint. And a straighten feature. Beefed up slideshow and new way to make books. Also adds a thumbnail list across the top so you don't have to back to "organize" just to edit another photo. 9:50am - Steve just fiddling with photos. 9:51am - Straigthen overlays a grid on the screen, then you can rotate the pic to match the grid and it recrops the photo. 9:55am - iPhoto demo thankfully ends. 9:57am - iMovie is dramatically faster. Non-destructive trimming. MPEG-4 support. "Magic iMovie." Support for HD up to 1080i. Loads all the video off of your camera and creates movie for you. 10:01am - Steve showing off high-def wedding video. "We're anxiously awaiting Blu-ray so we can burn high definition DVDs" 10:03am - Kunitake Ando, president of Sony just walked on stage. Ando giving Jobs props: "Great admiration and respect for Apple products." Jobs is filming Ando on Sony HDV camcorder. 10:05am - Ando talking about Grand Wega TVs and Blu-ray. 10:06am - Ando says "Just keep introducing great software" and "Stay off the PC!" 10:07am - Ando says looking forward he expects Sony to bring features of FX1 into smaller and lighter cameras. Seems like he's definitely overstaying his welcome. 10:08am - Jobs saying that maybe some day they'll work with Sony on "computers and music, too." 10:09am - iDVD. Supports all DVD formats. Can suck all the footage off a cam and burn it to a DVD in pretty much one click. Demoing new themes. Dropping movies into the theme. They continue to play as the window is rotating. Slick. 10:10am - Jobs says, "Better than most Hollywood DVDs." Even Pixar? 10:11am - Sappy wedding and cute upbeat kids birthday templates. 10:13am - GarageBand. Up to 8 track recording. Pitch and time fixing (so you can do mashups!). Can now change recorded tracks as flexibly as software instruments and loops. Create your own loops. Real time music notation. 10:15am - Vocal transformer. John Mayer walks on stage (just like last year!). He's about to start playing. 10:16am - Music notation does live transcribing as the music is being played. It's pretty sick. John sings "I didn't win any Grammys for playing piano." Now John's playing guitar and singing with a bass accompanyist. Jam session going on now. GarageBand is recording it all. 10:17am - They're recording bass, guitar, drums and vocals live into separate tracks. 10:20am - Steve's playing back the recordings. Playing each track by itself so he can demo that each voice was in a separate track. 10:20: iTunes. No big changes. iLife 05 is $79, goes on sale January 22nd. Free on all new macs. 10:21: iWork. Successor to AppleWorks. Now we're getting into stuff people were getting sued over. 10:22am - iWork is OS X only, includes Keynote 2, as expected. Can create kiosk shows. Cinemaquality presentations for everybody. 10 new Apple designed themes. Animated text. Powerful animated builds. Presenter display (applause). Interactive slideshows. Speaker display is cool. Interactive display. Can output just current slide to video out simultaneously. Compatible with AppleWorks, PowerPoint, Flash, PDF, QuickTime. 10:25am - Brand new app called Pages. Word processing with an incredible sense of style. Supports styles, multi columns, advanced typography, 40 templates, each template comes with a number of pages so not every page in a template layout has to look the same. 10:27am - Phil Schiller takes the stage. Phil picks a template. Don't start on a "scary blank white page." Can access media browser. Autoresizes photos. Pages has incredible live update of all sorts of elements: picture drop zones in templates, text wrap around graphics, etc. Can do charts, table objects. 10:30am - Pages does alot of automatic reformatting and resizing, so when one variable is changed (i.e switch from 3 columns to 2) other stuff is resized to fit. Compatible with Word files! 10:32am - iWork will costs $79, also available January 22. 10:33am - Things are getting good. "Why doesn't apple offer a stripped-down Mac that is more affordable?" The Mac mini. About the width of a CD. Slot load combo drive (DVD/CD-R). DVI & VGA out. Ethernet. USB 2.0. Firewire. Runs quietly. 10:35am - Holding it in palm of hand. Looks about a third of the size of the cube. Like you took a slice of the Cube. BYODKM: Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, and Mouse. It's about 6" x 6" x 2.5". Comes with Panther, iLife '05. $499 with 1.25GHz G4 processor. 40GB hard drive. 10:36am - Faster version is $599. Available January 22nd. Crowd is going wild. 10:37am - iTunes Music Store. Sold more than 230 million songs. 70 percent market share. Selling 1.25 million songs per day. 10:40am - "As you know we have the iPod and iPod mini." Sold 4.5 million iPods last quarter. Sold 733,000 in Q4 2003. 500 percent growth. 10 millionth iPod was sold on December 16th. Steve kept it for himself, we're sure he'll be ebaying it soon. 10:42am - Over 400 iPod accessories. Talking about iPod and BMW. More car adapters to come: Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo, Scion, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari. 10:44am - Cellphones. Rehashing stuff Motorola announced at CES. Will be Motorola-branded phone, out Spring 2005. No applause. 10:45am - One more thing... iPod market share last year: 31 percent. Flash had 62 percent. "Wannabes" were 7 percent. iPod mini went after high end of the flash market. Now iPod market share is at 65 percent, flash is at 29%, wannabes at 6 percent. "We'd like to go after the remaining 29%." 10:47am - Attributes of current flash players: AAA battery, tortured UI, very small display, no click wheel. Needed an original idea. 10:48am - Something happened in the iPod market. They discovered a new way to listen to music: shuffle. Basing new flash-based player around shuffle. iPod Shuffle. No display on player. Looks like a little stick. Smaller than most packs of gum. Like an elegant thumb drive. Weighs less than one ounce. Button to play and pause. Volume up and down button. Previous and next song. That's it. Nothing else. 10:50am - Cap on bottom hides USB 2.0 connector (you can use it as a flash drive!). PC or Mac. Shipping with lanyard. 12 hour rechargeable battery. Integration between device and iTunes. 10:52am - Something called "AutoFill." Will automatically build a playlist for iPod Shuffle. 10:54am - 512MB = $99. 1GB for $149. No 2GB version. Shipping TODAY from the factory. Accessories, armband, dock, waterproof sports case. Battery extender. Accessories are $29 each. 10:56am - Showing TV ad for the new player. "Life is Random" ad plays on silhouettes, adds shuffle arrows. 10:58am - "Might be some at the Apple Store over here today." 10:59am - Steve giving kudos to development team. Thanking their familes and spouses. 11:00am - John Mayer is playing "Daughters" as people leave. That's it! |
The iPod shuffle: Do not eat in the US or chew in the UK | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-01-12-the-ipod-shuffle-do-not-eat-in-the-us-or-chew-in-the-uk.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-01-12 14:10:56+00:00 | iPod chewer You know how Apple made that weak joke on the product page for iPod shuffle advising that you "Do not eat iPod shuffle"? Yeah, well they make the same joke on the UK version of their website, except that across the pond it reads "Do not chew iPod shuffle." Both are presumably a reference to the fact that the new player is about the size of pack of gum. Besides totally harshing our plans to consume at least one iPod shuffle at every meal for three weeks in attempt to convert ourselves into a cyborg, we're also trying to figure out whether there is some weird cultural or language difference we weren't aware of before that would explain this, especially since every American we've ever met has said "chew gum" rather than "eat gum." Maybe they figure Brits are smart enough to spit out the iPod shuffle after they've nibbled on it, but that Americans aren't and need that extra little bit of guidance? P.S. - We got hands-on with the iPod shuffle yesterday, check back in a couple of hours or so for our initial impressions (though we can tell you now that it is totally delicious). [Via waxy.org ] |
Apple launches "Made for iPod" seal | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-01-13-apple-launches-made-for-ipod-seal.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-01-13 17:41:51+00:00 | made for ipod In a move reminiscent of those annoying Windows stickers affixed to most PCs with some kind of permanent glue, Apple has launched a "Made for iPod" program, which will allow it to tag "authorized" accessories. Given the proliferation of third-party iPod gear , it seems like a smart (and obvious) move on Apple's part. Preferred vendors will get their stickers, Apple will get some extra cash (like they really need it), and makers of uninspired or cheesy accessories will languish in well-deserved obscurity. (Of course, Apple can also use the seal in less noble ways, like withholding it from vendors who also produce gear for competing audio players, but they wouldn't do that, would they?) |
HOW-TO: Turn your Mac mini into a media center | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-01-25-how-to-turn-your-mac-mini-into-a-media-center.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-01-25 18:24:00+00:00 | Yep, everyone's talking about using the Mac mini as a home media center , and there's a reason why: its diminutive form factor makes it a good candidate to fit unobtrusively into an existing audio/video or home theater setup. It looks more like a consumer electronics device than a computer, so it won't look out of place in your living room. We think of it as the central brain of our system; the glue that holds all the devices together. It can serve the role of scheduler, controller, audio/video recorder, audio/video playback, audio/video download, and it even makes a decent audio/video production unit, as well. You might not win the next Sundance with your iMovie, but you sure can impress everyone at the next family reunion. So for this week's How-To we'll cover the various aspects you'll need to think about when planning your Mac mini media center system, plus show you how to control your Mac mini headlessly from any computer in your house-there's no need to BYODKM; just BYOB, pop in a DVD and enjoy your HDTV, OK? Mac Mini media server There's more than one way to skin a mini, so we're going to walk you through our setup and give some overview of what tools are required. Audio and video connections are going to vary greatly depending on your particular setup, so we'll do our best to show what we're doing with ours and give you a head start on what you'll need to get your own setup up and running. Most of the connections are fairly simple, so this how-to is geared towards covering the basic issues you'll have to resolve, plus show you how to divert the cash from the D, K, and M into better investments for your media center. Without further ado... Storage First problem to solve is the storage issue. Whether you get the 40GB or 80GB drive, you're still going to run out of space right quick. Start thinking about external storage right now. This is going to depend much on your available space, your personal preferences, and what equipment you already have lying around. If you have an old PC of any OS flavor lying around, now is the time to repurpose it into a file server. You don't need a speed demon to serve in this capacity, because you can schedule large file transfers to happen overnight or at other times your home network isn't in heavy usage. We turned an old PowerMac G4 400Mhz machine into our file server. It lives at the 'front end' of our back end/front end media center solution, which we'll talk more about later. We run it headless, as well - another DKM chunk of change you can sink right back into extra storage. Story continues G4 file server If you go this route, you'll want to soup up the chassis with as many hard drives as you can. Cannibalize old drives, look for sales online, keep an eye out for friends with neglected machines lying around. Leave no hard drive behind, my friends. Setting up your server on your home network should be fairly straightforward. You'll want the connection to be wired for faster file transfer. If the server machine is running OS X, getting it to talk with your Mac mini is easier than selling a marked up iPod shuffle on eBay - your success is assured. If you're planning to set up your server as a Linux box, you probably don't need any further instruction from us. Go nuts. If your server is a Windows box and you're unfamiliar with the vicissitudes of cross-platform networking, you'll have to do a little bit of research on best practices for smooth communications between the two. Sadly, this is beyond the scope of this how-to, but if many people request more information we may cover it in a future how-to. If you don't have a spare machine lying around to serve duty as a file server, you can either get a cheapo bare bones PC to fill the role, or invest in an external storage solution. Depending on your needs, this can be as simple as a single external Firewire drive; 250GB drives are going for less than $200. If you plan to ultimately burn most of your recorded TV and video to DVDs, you will most likely be fine with this solution. You can also daisy chain several Firewire drives together (or use a Firewire hub), and add more as your needs require. An alternative to using external Firewire drives is to set up a Firewire enclosure, which converts one or more IDE drives into a Firewire-accessible storage solution. This can be a more robust and compact solution to housing multiple drives, and it can also be less expensive than buying multiple Firewire externals. It's an excellent way to get some usage out of any old IDE drives you have laying about; there are also enclosures made that will convert notebook drives into Firewire storage. Audio Now we get to the fun part. We've set up our media center in a back end/front end arrangement. We're going to do our video recording on one end and playback on the other. Our Mac mini is the brain of the back end. We've set her up in the upstairs office, which sports a relatively ancient Panasonic TV/VCR combo. Awwwww, yeah. We're using a 4-device audio/video switch and RF modulator to route all of our audio and video components. For about $45 this unit will take inputs from multiple devices and route them to a single output device: in our case, the stereo. This device allows us to quickly switch between multiple sound sources without having to plug and unplug cables all the time. One input is the output from the Mac mini, another is the output from the TV itself so we can bypass the crappy internal speakers, a third is output from our trusty old Windows laptop we use as a dedicated jukebox (serving up Audiogalaxy Rhapsody, last.fm , and internet radio), and the last input is reserved for portable audio devices: iPod, MPIO, another laptop, etc. All of these are regular analog 1/8" minijack to RCA, or RCA to RCA, cables. Audio/video switch and RF modulator If you have a stereo or home theater system with digital inputs, you're going to want to take advantage of that high fidelity by keeping your audio signal in the digital realm along the entire pathway. An all-in-one solution for piping digital audio out, as well as playing back TV, video, and image content on your Mac is the EyeHome from Elgato Systems. The box connects to your Mac via ethernet, or wirelessly via Airport Express. It gives you your S/PDIF optical audio out as well as composite, component and S-video out, which we will talk about again later on in the video section. The unit comes with software that lets you easily view the media on your Mac: music, images and video files in MPEG and DivX formats. New units go for $199, and Elgato is also offering refurbished units for $149. An alternative to the EyeHome is a USB to digital audio solution: the M-Audio Transit . It provides TOSlink optical digital output and allows AC-3 and DTS pass-through. If the digital inputs are on your stereo are coax S/PDIF, you can use a converter like this one to hook the Transit up to your stereo, keeping the audio in the digital realm all the way from your Mac mini. Video For piping the video out to your TV, you face the familiar analog/digital choice once again - choice being predicated largely on what you already have. In the best of all possible worlds, you have a nice spankin' new TV with a DVI connector, which you simply hook up via the Mac mini's DVI out to achieve the holy nirvana 1920 x 1200 resolution signal. If you're considering purchasing a new TV for your media center, make sure it has either a DVI or an HDMI connector. The industry is moving in the direction of keeping all of these signals digital from end to end, which is good for us because it means higher quality video and audio, and that we don't have to keep buying a gazillion adapters from the Apple store. Huzzah! If, like most of us, you have to convert your Mac mini's sweet digital output back to old analog, there are two fairly straightforward options: cheap, and not so cheap. Cheap is a $19 DVI to S-video adapter from Apple . Note that that product page must say at least a dozen times the adapter is only for use with a G5, which is truly annoying since they link right to it from the Mac mini product page. They must not have gotten around to updating the page yet, but it reportedly works just fine with the Mac mini . If your TV uses composite/RCA in instead of S-video, you can use an S-video to RCA adapter. My G4 Powerbook came with one: S-video to componenet adapter If you don't already have one lying around, you can order one online for about $13-$17 depending on the length you need. You'll have to get both the DVI to S-video and the S-video to composite adapter, connect them, and hook that contraption into your composite RCA cable: S-video to componenet RCA cable For those of us who are really old skool, there's always beloved coax. We've got coax coming out of the RF inverter switch to our TV. Coax cable If you've got a TV that's old enough to only have coax in, you'll need an RF modulator also. You don't have to shell out for the $45 4-port version, though; you can get a regular 1 in/out unit for as little as $10. RF modulator - front RF modulator - back Coming back to the not so cheap solution is our old friend the EyeHome . Again, it offers an integrated hardware and software solution for playing the media on your Mac for $199, or $149 refurbished. If you have a TV that has component video connectors, this is the highest quality analog solution you are going to get. Component cables HDTV will travel over component connections, although it's still less optimal than a DVI connection because the signal has to undergo a D/A conversion and back again with component cable, whereas DVI stays in the digital realm entirely. Still, it's a noticeable improvement over S-video, and probably worth the investment if you have a TV that supports it. Video in Finally we arrive at the heart of your home studio: how the heck are we going to record all of this acronym soup? This past fall we tested out the Formac DVR solution for TV recording and video conversion. Let's just make a long story short and say that it technically works, but you don't want it. The hottest kids on the block right now are from Elgato Systems - sound familiar? In the States, we basically have two choices, because the USB solution is just not going to cut it when we can have Firewire. Choice one is the EyeTV 200 for $329. This box has gotten consistently positive reviews on its own as well as combined with the EyeHome as an integrated PVR solution on the Mac. The EyeTV 200 was our choice for a PVR unit. At press time, our unit was still on back order because we're not the only ones who had the same idea, and the thronging Mac hordes beat us to it. So we can't show you our EyeTV in action, but its place in our existing setup couldn't be simpler: it fits snug with the Mac mini via Firewire, with one composite video cable going from the TV to the back of the unit, and the audio output that is now routed to the stereo will route in to the EyeTV. We're old skool and don't have cable, but if you do your cable box is basically a step in the chain between the TV and the EyeTV. We chose the EyeTV 200 over the EyeTV 500 because of its versatility: you can use it to record any analog or digital source you can find a connector for. It functions as a nice analog to digital converter, so you can capture all of those old VHS tapes to luscious MPEG-2 format. You can even record gameplay on your Playstation, when you get really bored. Your video will get transcoded into MPEG-2 format and stored on your Mac. It will suck up about 2GB worth of space every hour, so make sure you have enough free space either in your staging area, if you offload files to a central server, or that you capture the footage to an internal or external drive with enough space. EyeTV offers scheduled recording options, and the excellent TitanTV channel guide, but one of its major limitations is its inability to switch channels on your cable or satellite box. If you have unscrambled analog cable you're fine, as the coax feed can go right into EyeTV's built-in tuner for changing channels. But if you've got digital or satellite cable, this is the most serious issue to consider before purchasing EyeTV. You won't be able to use it like TiVo. Apparently Elgato is working on a solution to this problem, but as of right now it's still vaporware. Recording and playback of HDTV For the HD enthusiasts, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is you can record in HD perfectly fine on your Mac mini at either 1.25 or 1.42Ghz, using the $349 EyeTV 500 from our favorite, and basically only, company providing PVR solutions for the Mac: Elgato. In fact, you only need a 500Mhz processor for recording, because it's the breakout box itself that does the heavy lifting, and not your Mac. The bad news is, you'll need either a digital TV with a DVI connector, or a serious horsepower Mac to play back your recorded MPEG-2 content over component HD cabling, because in the reverse process, the Mac's CPU has to bear the burden. On the other hand, you could use the 'bad news' as an excuse to finally give in and get that sweet HDTV plasma screen you've been drooling over. As the old adage says: when life gives you lemons, buy a plasma TV. To those of you early adopters who have an HDTV with component instead of DVI connectors (like us!), we hear the pristine Dolby 5.1 sound of you tearing your hair out. Yep, it sucks. Especially since the reason for this whole shenanigan is that Apple is holding out on third-party developers like Elgato. If they had made the interfaces of their graphics cards easily accessible to developers, Elgato could have taken advantage of the hardware acceleration on the graphics cards themselves, instead of forcing the Mac's CPU to shoulder the entire load. Why is Apple holding out on third-party developers of PVR solutions for the Mac? Our best guess is that Steve jobs has some sort of HD PVR solution up his black turtle-necked sleeve, and we'll see it roll out sometime this year. It is, after all, the Year of HD , remember? If you are stuck in this boat with us, and you happen to be lucky enough to have a dual processor G5 just lying around collecting dust that you can dedicate to the front end of your media center, then you probably have the cash to pony up for a new DTV anyway, so please send Engadget the G5 for *our* media center, eh? It's not as bleak as all that, really - Apple's not the only game in town. There's nothing stopping you from using a cheaper Windows or Linux solution for the front end of your media center. What's more, some sub-$300 solutions for networked media playback of MPEG-2 content are starting to come to market, like the Roku PhotoBridge HD Digital Media Player . MPEG-2 is the current digital video standard, so look for other solutions to be emerging in the near future, as well. If you do choose the EyeTV 500 as your PVR du jour, you'll be happy you spent some time up front thinking about storage, because HD recording will suck a whopping 8GB of hard drive space per hour. That's some seriously phat video, yo! Remote Controlling your Mac mini: Do Not BYODKM (subtitle: the Tao of VNC) One last item on the problem-solving agenda: remote control. You can pipe the video output of you Mac mini to use your TV as a monitor and shell out for the keyboard and mouse. You'd have to spring for the Bluetooth module in the Mac mini, plus a Bluetooh keyboard and mouse, if you wanted to control it from your couch. Considering that most of you probably already have other computers in the house, there is a much easier, and more elegant, way to control your Mac Mini media server: enter VNC. Virtual Network Computer ( VNC ) is a remote desktop protocol used to remotely control one computer from another. It transmits all input data from screen, keyboard and mouse between the two machines across a network. It's complete platform independent, and there are client and server applications written for almost every operating system, including the Pocket PC , Palm , Java-enabled cellphones , and even the Apple Newton . 300 bonus points to anybody who sends us a shot of their Newton controlling their Mac mini. VNC is also open source code at its core, and most of the clients/servers are open source as well. There may be no free lunch, but there is free desktop remote control, which means you can turn almost anything into a remote control for your media center and impress all your friends for the low, low price of $0. Who said the Mac was more expensive? ;> Let's get cracking. VNC consists of two parts: the machine you wish to control runs a VNC server, and the machine you control from runs a client. Both work over TCP/IP, which means you can control your headless Mac Mini from any machine on any OS in your wired or wireless home network. It also means you can control your mini from anywhere you can get internet access. There are issues to be resolved concerning dynamic IP addressing and security if you want to access your NYC Mac from your next trip to the Swiss alps, but neither is it rocket science. If you'd like to see this covered in a future how-to, just let us know. Installing a VNC server on your Mac mini You can install the standard UNIX version of the VNC server on OS X via Fink, but it only supports X11 programs. There is an Aqua-friendly version that we'll use called OSXvnc . Click on the "Download OSXvnc" link and the application itself will be downloaded to your default download location. When you first launch the server, you have to do a little configuration. VNC 1 Most of the information under the General tab should be filled in for you automagically. Display number 0 and port 5900 are both defaults. The Display name will be based on your computer's name. You should enter a password for VNC access to the Mac mini and, ultimately, set up an even more secure connection via SSH. Next, click the Sharing tab: VNC 2 If you're running other OS X Macs in the house, make sure to check "Advertise Server via Rendezvous" - when you launch a VNC client on a Mac on your network, it will automagically show you the Mini as an available VNC server. Next, click the Startup tab: VNC 3 Click on "Configure startup item." You will get a dialogue box asking for your password to authenticate enabling OSXvnc at startup. Enter it and click OK, and you will see that the vnc server startup item has been enabled, and the next time you boot up your Mini, the vnc server will automagically run. vnc 4 At this point you may want to enable any other applications you want to run on startup. When I have had troubles with VNC, it has often been when attempting to launch programs. Since it's easy to enable what you know your media server is going to use at boot time and leave those applications running, you can avoid potential program launch errors. We've set iTunes and iPhoto to launch on startup. You can enable startup items in the System Preferences: go to Accounts and click on the Startup items tab. Connecting to your Mac mini with a VNC client You can find a good VNC client for whatever operating system you want to connect to your Mini from here . Follow the documentation to see how to establish a connection. It's usually pretty straightforward: enter the display name/hostname of your Mac, the port number (default is 5900), and the connection password. Then, hit connect and witness the wonder of your new multiple personality machine. Dell itunes Other remote control options As noted above, you can download a VNC client to your Pocket PC, Palm, or Java-enabled cellphone. Better yet, load up all three and make sure you always have a remote handy wherever you are. One other option is to use an excellent piece of software called Salling Clicker . Controlling your Mac mini from your cellphone is an elegant solution for your living room media center, and inexpensive if you've already got a device supported by the software. It is not a true and total remote control as with VNC, but it does have support for many of the applications you would be interested in controlling remotely, plus support for AppleScript so you can hack up other solutions to meet your needs. EyeTV/EyeHome come with remotes, also, but they're only useful for controlling their own software domain, and not your whole Mac. If you want power over the whole kit and kaboodle, give VNC a try. After all, when else do you get to dig on your old Dell laptop running Aqua? Dell running Aqua |
NASCAR SimRacing goes gold | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-02-01-nascar-simracing-goes-gold.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-02-01 13:51:10+00:00 | If you're into NASCAR, Electronic Arts first attempt at a serious racing sim has gone gold, just in time nascar 2 for the Daytona 500. (Okay, so the 24 hour race is before then, and infinitely more interesting, but oh well.) At least, according to Blackhole Motorsports it has. I am seriously irked by the claims of EA saying that fields of 43 drivers online are the largest of any racing game. That's garbage. NASCAR Racing 2003 from Papyrus supported that many two years ago. Of course EA are fighting the dead with that claim. Regardless of the absurd hyperbole, the game has gone gold. Expect it on shelves soon. Be sure to give Junior a little nudge from me. |
Tekken 5 clip goes into detail | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-02-02-tekken-5-clip-goes-into-detail.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-02-02 14:06:00+00:00 | tekken 5 If you're a Tekken fan, you'll want to see this thing. 1up has posted a video of Tekken 5 director, Katsuhiro Harada, narrating over extensive game action. He discusses the arcade version, as well as the Playstation 2 port, which should be exactly the same product for all intents and purposes. The interview is filled with interesting factoids. Apparently, you'll be able to bring your PS2 controller to the arcade and plug it into the game machine. The developers feel this will offer the player a comfort level that should keep them coughing up money until they have nothing left. Also of interest are the console bonuses. The exclusive PS2 port will include an entire adventure game using Tekken characters. And to top it all off, the console iteration will also include full versions of a couple of the older Tekken titles. All in all, it sounds like an amazing value. |
Haute cuisine, meet high-tech: "Printing" sushi | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-02-03-haute-cuisine-meet-high-tech-printing-sushi.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-02-03 15:59:21+00:00 | Homaro Cantu/Moto printed sushi We're going to try and avoid using the word "gimmicky" here, but you have to admit, Homaro Cantu's dishes at Moto definitely whet the palate (even if it's only the color palette). His sushi is prepared by printing images from organic food-based inks onto edible paper via a Canon i560; he seasons and serves his menus the same way—the plat du jour may taste suspiciously like the edible menu from which it was chosen. What's next for Cantu and Moto? Well, part of that $240 a head for dinner is being invested in R&D: 30 patent applications in, Cantu's got experiments underway in combining cuisine and superconductors (no comment), liquid nitrogen, and helium, as well as plans to utilize a 3D polymer printer, and high-powered class IV surgical/cutting laser. Okay, we'll bite. |
The Xbox 360? Looks like it… | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-02-04-the-xbox-360-looks-like-it.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-02-04 19:12:50+00:00 | Xbox 360 logo Until Microsoft makes their official announcement on it, this one is still firmly in the rumor category, but we've gotten word from one of our trusted sources that Microsoft has pretty much settled on a name for the next Xbox : the Xbox 360 (let that sink in for a moment, because you're probably going to be hearing it a lot for the next several years). Our source, who has worked on several projects involving the Xbox and the Xbox 360, has seen the proposed packaging and other design elements for the new console, and says that as of right now the console is being branded as the "Xbox 360." That's definitely not that first time we've heard that mentioned as one of the possible names for the next-generation Xbox; last year a marketing firm conducted a survey where they asked people whether they thought Xbox 360 , PlayStation 3, or Nintendo N5 sounded more "next-gen" (apparently Microsoft was worried that calling their new console the "Xbox 2" would make it seem older or less "cutting-edge" than the PlayStation 3). UPDATE: Get your Xbox 360 pics here |
Thailand bans cameraphone pics in voting booths | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2005-02-07-thailand-bans-cameraphone-pics-in-voting-booths.html | Engadget | https://www.engadget.com/ | 2005-02-07 07:14:21+00:00 | Thailand Concerned that cameraphones were making it easier for people to sell their votes in this past weekend's election, the Thai government decided to make it illegal for anyone to snap a picture of their ballot while in the voting booth. Apparently it's a big problem over there, but then again, anyone who feels up for selling the vote probably isn't going to be too concerned with the legality of snapping a few cameraphone pics while in the voting booth. [Via PicturePhoning.com ] |
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