Archive for April, 2010.
“Eye of Dragon” must be Chinese for “better kit lens, fancier neck strap, a branded photo album, and a leather case.” Because that’s the totality of substantive changes you’ll be getting if you opt for the upgraded Jackie Chan variety of Canon’s Rebel T2i. Of course, there’s also the knowledge that you’ll be one of only 2,010 owners of this exclusive kit, which will set buyers back an unenviable 10,000 Yuan ($1,467). If you ask us, we’d rather just buy the body and add on the EF-S 18-135mm lens ourselves, but then we were always more partial to Bruce Lee anyway.
Canon brings out Jackie Chan-branded Rebel T2i / 550D for Chinese market originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 05:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
iTech News Net | 
MyDrivers | Email this | Comments
While we were fretting about what special tech Nintendo’s 3DS would use to generate autostereoscopic imagery on its comparatively puny screen, Toshiba Mobile Display (and others) have been working on bringing that same headgear-free 3D to TV-sized panels. Employing a “multi-parallax” technique, the latest from the Toshiba spinoff firm promises “significant reduction in eye fatigue” as well as approximately a 30 degree horizontal viewing angle. The latter might be peanuts compared to a quality 2D display, but let’s not begrudge being offered at least some positional flexibility. Other specs include a 1280 x 800 effective resolution and 480 nits of brightness, which are notable achievements when you consider that the 9-parallax implementation requires the generation of 9 separate images and therefore could be achieved with only an “ultra-high definition LCD module.” We’ve sadly no info about this panel’s potential for retail availability, but judging by the bezel-free picture we’ve been given, that might be a good way off from now.
Toshiba Mobile Display touts 21-inch glasses-free 3D HDTV, raises a few eyebrows originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | 
Toshiba Mobile Display | Email this | Comments
The
Emotive EPOC “mind-control” headset may not be quite as advanced as some of the
brain-reading devices unavailable to the general public, but it looks like it’s at least accurate enough for some basic tasks — like controlling a
WowWee Rovio robot via Skype. That impressive feat was accomplished by the folks at
ExtremeTech, who paired the headset with the
Robodance 5 software program and Skype (not to mention plenty of custom code), which allows the Rovio to be controlled from afar using both facial and mental commands. Needless to say, that’s a lot easier said than done, but you can check out the results in the video after the break, and find the complete details on the project at the source link below.Continue reading Rovio robot controlled via Skype with Emotiv brain-reading headset
Rovio robot controlled via Skype with Emotiv brain-reading headset originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Slashdot | 
ExtremeTech | Email this | Comments
How’s your memory today? Specifically, can you remember the last time AMD had a legitimate claim to the desktop performance crown? Don’t hold your breath, the latest and greatest Phenom II still can’t steal the spotlight from Intel’s spectacular top-of-the-line Core i7-980X, but if prices actually matter to you, you’ll wanna read on. Whereas you’d need to shell out $999 to get six cores from Intel, AMD is offering you its flagship 3.2GHz 1090T model at a reasonable $285, or an even more affordable option with the 2.8GHz 1055T at $199. The T in those names stands for Turbo Core, which automatically downclocks half the cores in order to provide a little extra speed (up to 500MHz more) to the other three. Reviewers agreed that its inclusion helped significantly improve single-threaded performance, to the point where the faster (in default clock speed) 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 965 was falling behind in benchmarks. The general opinion by the typically jaded journalists was that AMD has finally regained some pep in its step and that these new 6-core CPUs are going to give Intel’s upper midrange offerings something to worry about. Lest we forget, the 1090T and 1055T also retain socket compatibility with current AM2+ and AM3 motherboards, making upgrades a cinch too. The full reviews await below.
Read – AnandTech
Read – HotHardware
Read – PC Perspective
Read – Hexus
Read – Legit Reviews
Read – TweakTown
Read – TechSpot
AMD’s 3.2GHz hexacore Phenom II X6 1090T comes out for a review roundup originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 03:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | Email this | Comments
Right on time, Denon’s dropped the details on its hardware for 2010 on us. Taking top honors are two Blu-ray players: the DBP-2011UDCI ($799, August, not pictured) and the DBP-1611UD ($399, June, pictured above) that are touted as “true universal players”; with DVD-Audio and SACD playback out of the box and Blu-ray 3D on the way in a fall firmware update the company’s confident they’ll play most any 5-inch optical media you may be able to get your hands on. If you’re past discs don’t worry, Netflix, DLNA and YouTube streaming is also part of the deal.
Those should pair well with any of the slew of receivers due up including the AVR-991 (SRP: $999, July), AVR-891 (SRP: $799, May), AVR-791 (SRP: $499, May), AVR-591 (SRP: $349, May) and the AVR-391 (SRP: $249, July); or the custom install-focused AVR-4311CI (SRP: $1,999, Sept.), AVR-3311CI (SRP: $1,199, June), and AVR-2311CI (SRP: $899, June). All of the above bring HDMI 1.4a repeaters for 3D compatibility, onscreen displays through HDMI, and some include web browsers plus music streaming from Pandora or connected PCs. Check the press releases after the break for all the details including a few new headphone models, though we recommend taking it in just a bit at a time — the threat of overdosing on this much info is high.
Continue reading Denon’s 2010 receivers, Blu-ray players are Control4, streaming & 3D ready
Denon’s 2010 receivers, Blu-ray players are Control4, streaming & 3D ready originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | Email this | Comments
Research In Motion on Monday unveiled two new BlackBerry smartphones and a voice over WiFi feature to its voice technology. The new devices are the BlackBerry Pearl 3G and the BlackBerry Bold 9650. The new BlackBerry Pearl 3G measures 4.25 by 1.96 by 0.52 inches and weighs 3.3 ounces. It has a 624 MHz processor with 256 MB of flash memory and a microSD/SDHD memory card slot that supports cards of up to 32 GB capacity. Other Pearl 3G features are an optical trackpad and a keyboard; a media player for videos, pictures and music; and dedicated media keys.
Why go into a Barnes & Noble, find a comfy chair and flip through the pages of a physical book when you can go into a Barnes & Noble, find a comfy chair and flip through the pages of a virtual book on the Nook e-reader? It may sound like an only-in-the-21st-century situation, as digital technologies vie to reshape the reading and browsing habits of bookworms. However, the new in-store browsing feature introduced for the Nook, part of a wider firmware update introduced on Thursday, is actually designed to boost sales of real-world books in Barnes & Noble stores.
The market is in a planning cycle, and analysts are being asked to take a look in their crystal balls and describe what 2013 will look like. Clearly, we will have more bandwidth, 3-D TV will be ramping, and most of us will either be using tablet devices for something or moving to the next big thing. I’m going to look out to 2013 and make some assumptions and then paint a picture of what the world will look like through the eyes of someone who is on the cutting edge of technology. I’m picking cutting edge because that is where the most change is likely to be.
There’s no doubt FOSS is steadily gaining popularity in government circles, as evidenced most recently by the United States White House’s own decision to adopt — and even contribute back to — open source Drupal. A proposal from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, suggests that certain regulation-mandated submissions should be required to be written in Python for better consistency and interpretability. Then, too, there are all the various reports of governments embracing free software as well.
If you love Major League Baseball, you’ll love MLB’s At Bat app for the iPad. The tablet’s expansive display gave the software’s designers lots of room to be creative, and they took advantage of it. Habitues of the MLB website will see a familiar interface in the iPad app. Like the website’s Gameday feature, you look at the field from behind home plate. A graphic of a hitter appears in an appropriate batter’s box. The strike zone is a tinted box over the plate. As each pitch is thrown, its location appears on the screen.
