We told you about Mio’s upcoming Knight Rider GPS (see Mio Knight Rider photos) but the synthetic voice of Kitt (William Daniels) being the star of the show, there’s nothing like a good video (with audio!) to get a better idea. The GPS will ship with a database of hundreds of pre-recorded names so that you don’t have to rename yourself into “Michael”. A subsequent update will add even more names (300 or so). It will cost $269 and will be on the shelves on August 8.
Developed by the Hirose Fukushima Lab (Japan), this “snake” is quite interesting to watch when it moves underwater. It needs water resistance to propel itself. It can also move on firm ground, but I suspect that the fins make it a lot more efficient in a liquid. Each section of the ACRM-R5 has its own micro-processor, motor and battery and knows where it is in the overall body, by counting how many siblings separate it from the head, which is unique. That might mean that the snake could be very long, but most importantly, researchers can easily replace a body part. Watch the video in the full post.
Videos of the all-dispay Samsung OMNIA mobile phone are showing up on the web. Shot during the OMNIA launch in Singapore, the first video shows someone from MobiFrance playing with the device at the event. The second video (in the full post) shows the marketing material from Samsung, it is interesting nonetheless to see how the company is promoting is “cool” phone. From what I can see, I would say that the Samsung OMNIA hardware is very good, but that the software and particularly the user interface still needs work (and design) to catch-up with the iPhone.
(Video in the full post - click on the link below)
Our friends from TeleRead have posted a link to this cool video of the Readius Rollable E-Book that also has a cellular wireless functionality. Now I wouldn’t call this a “cellphone ebook”, but I think that some might like the idea. There is a crowd of consumers that prefer the Readius device for its portability, compared to the Amazon Kindle, and it’s true, it is much more portable.
But in my opinion, e-books are far from ready for mass consumption. For one, they aren’t “good enough” from a technical standpoint. We need colors and faster refresh at least. Secondly, getting the content is still somewhat of a hassle and the choice is limited. Finally, it’s just too expensive. I would love to have the “perfect ebook”, but it’s just not there, yet. (Video in the full post)
The new player will be available only in 2009, but the Kaleidescape has started diffusing information about it. Note that given time launch time frame, a number of things can change and many highlights below are still hypothetical
Blu-Ray, DVD, CD compatibility
Up to 5 simultaneous Blu-Ray playback
Backwards compatibility with existing products
H.264, MPEG2 and VCD codecs
Possible online/streaming video feature
Possible Blu-Ray “ripping” feature (possibly with a per-copy fee)
[CES 2008] This is a demo of a handheld projector from Texas Instrument. The video is quite dark after being “YouTubed”, but seeing it running live was quite interesting and a photo won’t do it any justice. We imagine that one day, something like it could be integrated in a small computer or a cell phone…
I usually don’t pay attention to the low-end integrated graphics but I don’t think that there was a single integrated chip that could run Crysis before this. In this case, we are looking at a GeForce 8200 motherboard GPU running Crysis at 800x600, which is remarkable.
If you don’t know what “integrated graphics” means, it is simply the cheapest category of graphics processor (GPU). It means that low-cost computer shipping (in June) with this chipset will be able to “run” a game like Crysis – talk about raising the bar…