Hasta La Gadget!

Oh it’s boxy alright. But what Blazepro’s Wireless Keypad for the PS3 lacks in highfalutin curves is more than made up for in price: just $11 compared to the $50 you’d have to pay for Sony’s own Bluetooth Wireless Keypad. Unfortunately, there’s no mention of included rechargeables and Blazepro’s keypad communicates with the PS3 via a 2.4GHz USB dongle instead of using the PS3’s built-in Bluetooth. Shame, but at least it includes a “Leap-frequency communication solution” and “strongly anti-jamming.” Maybe you should just wait for the reviews.

[Via DCEMUUK Forums, thanks Craig]

Filed under: Gaming

Blazepro’s Wireless PS3 Keypad is 80% cheaper than Sony’s, and it costs less too originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Nokia’s all-you-can-eat Comes With Music service has been humming along quite nicely across the pond, but until now, we’ve been left in the dark about its plans for world domination. No more, as a recent Reuters report has it that the unlimited music service should be headed to Australia, Asia and Singapore later this quarter and Latin America / USA sometime this year. We’re also told that more corners of Europe should get served in the future, though no window of time was handed out there. It should be interesting to see if any carriers jump in to subsidize these, but our gut feeling says they’ll be sold for a premium unlocked at your nearest Nokia flagship.

[Via UnwiredView]

Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio

Nokia’s Comes With Music service plans world tour originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Jan 2009 03:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Polaroid’s desperate stab at digital relevance, the Pogo, showed us just how desperate the much loved company has become. The  printer/camera hybrid follows the letter of the Polaroid law – instant printed pictures – and almost willfully ignores its spirit — low-fi, Lomo-like artifacts.

The folks at the Impossible Project know this, and are set to resurrect the beloved instant cameras. The Netherlanders have bought up the Polaroid factory and all the equipment inside, signing a 10 year lease on the whole shebang, and they plan to restart production of the shake’n’bake film.

Curiously, they will not be selling it as a straight Polaroid replacement. The plan is to "develop a new product with new characteristics, consisting of new optimized components, produced with a streamlined modern setup." Weasel-words aside, the film will work with vintage Polaroid cameras. What these "optimized components" will do we don’t yet know. What we do know is that the Impossible Project clearly loves the classic instant film cameras, and hopefully it will be able to sustain a small, cult following. Just like Lomo has done for junky, plastic Soviet film cameras.

The Re-Invention of Instant Film [Impossible Project]

See Also:

• Polaroid Ends Instant Film Production
• Polaroid Stages Comeback With Instant Printing Digicam
• New Polaroid Camera Will Shake it With Built-in Printer
• Video: Retro 1970s Polaroid Commercial Rocks Out

This amazing Scrabble keyboard comes to us by way of BoingBoing Gadgets’ John Brownlee who, in the course of describing Doc Datamancer’s steampunk hack, makes some startling admissions.

Those of you familiar with his work might expect a smattering of references to wet bodily functions, or at least some show-off allusions to the works of Vladimir Nabokov. You would, just this once, be disappointed. Instead, Mr. Brownlee gives us a revealing insight into his writing process, something which turns out to be far more complex than just letting dolphins push balls printed with random words to the top of their tank and copying the result — our previous assumption:

[W]riting is not about randomly shaking up a tray of letters in one’s head and plucking words from the alphabetical mnemonic slurry… if it was, my posts would make more sense. [emphasis added]

As somebody who has spent time with Brownlee in his Berlin bachelor pad, this is thick with irony. He actually owns a Scrabble set which he keeps at his desk. And while he doesn’t shake the letters "in his head", he invites his neglected parakeet to peck at the tiles, thus outlining post after post. It’s a testament to the bird’s uncanny language skills that we understand the man at all.

Product page [Doc Datamancer via Humbert Humbird]

Over the last couple of decades, televisions have grown wider in order to accommodate new content (mostly movies) that come in rectangular aspect ratios. Later this year, Philips will unveil a TV with the widest aspect ratio yet, the Cinema 21:9.

The 56-inch LCD TV aims to provide the closest proportion yet to screens at movie theaters. But that might not be enough to make it a worthy investment for people planning on using it for more than watching movies.

According to Philips, the aspect ratio of the screen is 2.33:1, which is about the same as the regular ratio of most movies, which come in at 2.39:1 (many 35mm films also come in at 1.85:1.) As a result, the TV won’t suffer much from black-stripe letterboxing when watching a widescreen movie, like many current regular-sized HDTVs. And because it’s not a plasma set, the potential damage of burn-in with the black bars is pretty much nil.

So it might be destined to become a widescreen movie-lover’s best friend. But at that width, most content will still get narrowed down to fit into the frame, including high-definition satellite feeds. Considering that there are other excellent new technologies competing for the short dollar, like the color-rich (and energy efficient) Laser TV as well as widget-full TVs, an especially wide screen isn’t really at the top of anyone’s list.

Add the fact that only a fraction of movies are available to rent with widescreen ratios near 2.35:1 (about 3,000 of them, according to IMDB.com), and you can figure it out yourself. This TV will have a hard time justifying itself in the next year, or at least, until every movie starts coming out with widescreen versions.

Of course, classic movie advocates would strongly disagree with that claim. Most regular HDTVs come in at a ratio of 16 by 9 inches tall, and they provide a good representation of the size of the shot film. But they still fall far short of the wide camera lenses that best captured the long, epic scales of classic movies like Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia.

Interestingly, the main reason why the movie industry started using
wider aspect ratios (from their original 4:3 ratio, or 1.33:1) was due
to the creation of television. Out of fear TV would take away their
audience, movie studios helped establish wider film formats
and built screens appropriate for their size. They ended up with
super-wide monster formats, including Cinemascope (2.35:1 to 2.55:1, Star Wars), Cinerama (2.60:1, How The West Was Won), and Super Panavision (2.20:1, 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Those movies have been cut-down to size by their creators to match
smaller screens, but if you’ve ever watched them in their full
widescreen glory, you know there’s a big difference.

Full Screen (4:3)                       Wide Screen (2.39:1)

The new widescreen will probably look good, but the 56-inch
widescreen likely won’t match the impact of a theater just yet. But
if some company manages to make a 150-inch super-widescreen, well, all
bets are off.

The Cinema 21:9 will be available at some point this year, for an undisclosed price.

Photos: Philips, Wikipedia, widescreen.org