Still reeling over the death of FlyWire this summer? So were we, until we saw this beauty pop up in Berlin. Philips Wireless HDTV Link promises to set your TV free from the tyranny of cables with an HDMI transmitter / receiver pair that’ll let you place all those A/V components of yours a whopping 20 meters from your set. The base station has two HDMI connections, two component connections and boasts transmission of full 1080i and 1080p / 30 HD video. Coming soon (hopefully) this bad boy is retailing for €599.99 (about $850). [Warning: PDF read link]
The Sony Walkman outsold Apple’s iPod in Japan last week, the first time in more than four years, according to a study by Japanese electronics research company BCN.
Sony’s slice of the market for digital music players in Japan rose to 43 percent for the week ending August …
Xperia Pureness — the phone formerly known as Kiki — reared its head today, mostly in the form of press shots of stylish people who demand stylish handsets. Don’t have any tech details yet, but we do know that it’s a fine example of Sony Ericsson’s new “brand direction,” which — as we heard yesterday — can be summed up succinctly (and a bit nauseously) as “make.believe.” Right. What we do know, however, is that it will be officially launched in November 2009 “through selected retail distribution channels in key cities around the world,” that the company wants us to approach this as “a work of art rather than technology,” and that the company hoped to “sculpt an object of design that reflected the purity of water and a sense of calmness when not in use.” Just what we needed! We’re sure Frank Lloyd Wright would approve — you know, if only he hadn’t died fifty years ago. See for yourself in the video after the break.
After multiple cancellations and attempts to get him on the show, Mr. Ngo is finally in the 404 studio in New York! We’re excited to pick his brain on all the new advancements in the CNET labs, but we get side-tracked by the most random conversations. Dong and I have a special relationship (don’t go there): Dong was actually the first person I met when I first started working at CNET! In fact, you could consider him my printer mentor! Thanks, Dong.
Since we have Dong in the hot seat, we take this opportunity to pick his brain about his experiences coming to America from Vietnam. As you can imagine, it took the young Dong awhile to adjust to our idioms and figures of speech, which he illustrates beautifully in a cheeky story involving an attractive blond woman and a big, yellow Hummer.
In addition, Dong surprises us all and tell us that it was actually Michael Jackson that inspired him to learn English! I can just imagine little Dong saying “Who is the Man in the Mirror and why are we asking him to change his ways?”
Believe it or not, we finally arrive at an actual news story in the second half of the show. This one is about a Japanese teddy bear robot nurse named RIBA (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance) meant to transport the elderly and handicapped in its creepy outstretched arms. Has anyone noticed that it looks a lot like a certain bear meme?
Either way, we all take issue with the fact that the bear can only hold up to 134 pounds in its foam-padded paws! Clearly this robot ain’t picking any Americans up anytime soon. I think we actually have babies that weigh more than that.
Big thanks goes out to Paul Ramsay for inviting us to last night’s hypnotism show at the Julliard Academy. It was tons of fun–who knew a group of kids could Riverdance so well!? Maybe you can help Jeff through his knife phobia! If you’re not familiar with Paul’s work, be sure to check out his appearance on our show. Also, head over to the Inside CNET Labs Podcast to catch more of Dong Ngo’s crazy antics.
This article was written on March 21, 2008 by CyberNet.
Digg users were all over a new file sharing site that seemingly popped up overnight called File Dropper. It’s a completely free service that will let you upload as many files as you would like, and they can total up to 5GB each.
The whole point of the service is to make the process drop-dead simple, and they really do just that. You can’t create an account, remove files that you upload, or anything like that. There are no privacy options, encrypted URL’s, and for some odd reason no progress bar for your upload. So if you’re uploading a 5GB file you’ll have no idea how long it will be until it’s actually done.
One of the things that I do like is that you can upload a file from your computer or just provide a link to the file elsewhere on the Internet. After the upload process has completed you’ll be given a link to share with anyone that you want.
As of right now it looks like the service is completely ad-free, but it’s unlikely that it will stay that way. There’s next to no way that they could afford to foot the bandwidth bill every month without some kind of revenue coming in… just as we’ve seen with DivShare.
And if you go looking around the site you’ll see no mention of limitations, which means your files may stay online forever or they could be deleted tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll really be using the service, but I might if I have an unusually large file to share.
Well, we knew this was coming: Amazon’s trying to convince a federal judge to block the $125m settlement that’ll let Google Books make out-of-print works available online. According to Amazon’s newly-filed brief, allowing the settlement will essentially force copyright holders into allowing Google to scan in and sell their works whether they want to or not — a thorny area of the law Amazon’s gotten pretty familiar with as it builds out the Kindle library. Of course, since the actual settlement is between Google and those very same authors and publishers, it certainly seems like Amazon is crying crocodile tears here — according to our old friend Paul Aiken of the Authors Guild, “Amazon apparently fears Google could upend its plans” to make the Kindle the dominant ebook platform. Heady stuff — and with more briefs against the settlement due in the next few days from heavy hitters like Sony, Yahoo and Microsoft, things seem like they’re building to fever pitch. We’ll keep you updated.
We recently got a chance to check out a new music-making title for the Sony PSP from Rockstar Games (best known as the creators of Grand Theft Auto), called Beaterator. It’s not really a game at all, but instead a boiled-down music production suite, combining premade samples and loops …
HTC’s recently announced third Android phone, the HTC Hero, has found a telecom carrier in Sprint. The device will sell for $180 after a $100 mail-in rebate, and with a two-year contract, in Sprint stores starting Oct. 11.
It will be the first Android phone on the Sprint network. So far, only T-Mobile in the U.S. offered phones running the Google-designed Android mobile operating system.
HTC had introduced the Hero in June though at that time the company did not reveal the telecom carrier for the device. The Hero has a 3.2-inch touch screen display, GPS, digital compass, a 5-megapixel auto focus camera and expandable MicroSD memory. It also features an anti-fingerprint coating on the screen for smudge resistance and a Teflon coating on the exterior. The HTC Hero will be the first Android device to support Adobe’s Flash standard.
The phone has been given a minor face lift for its American debut. Instead of sporting a ‘chin’ that we have seen on recent HTC phones such as the T-Mobile G1, the Hero has a sleek, flat compact design that should please consumers.
The Hero’s user interface will be reminiscent of the Palm Pre webOS as it tries to organize the phone around contacts and other user information. The HTC Hero will also allow users to add widgets such as Twitter feeds, weather, email and calendar to the home screen in a bid to customize the phone.
The device is a coup for Sprint, which also has the Palm Pre exclusively available on its network. For mobile phone buyers who want an alternative to the iPhone, Sprint is fast emerging as the better choice in terms of the range of smartphones that it has, compared to Verizon or T-Mobile.
And so it is. Toshiba, the one-time cheerleader for HD-DVD, has now officially gone to the azure side with the BDX2000 Blu-ray player. It supports BD-Live (Profile 2.0) and REGZA-LINK (HDMI-CEC), outputs 1080p at 24 frames per second, and does Dolby True HD / DTS-HD Master Audio… but really, all that needs to be said here is that it’s a Toshiba Blu-ray player. Look for this one-time paradox this November for a penny under $250. As for yesteryear, we think this line from the press release says it best: “This product does not play HD DVD discs.” It’s at once both sad and poetic that this very well may be the last official line ever uttered in the once-promising format’s story.
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