Hasta La Gadget!

Look, we’ve seen an awful lot of HDTVs in our day — one lap around the average CEDIA show floor makes your local Best Buy look awfully small — and to this day we’ve yet to put our peepers on a more stunning set than Mitsubishi’s LaserVue HDTV. Sure, it’s fat, ugly and expensive, but the image is otherworldly. Before Mitsu can even take the logical next step, a California startup has arisen to introduce what it calls the world’s first laser-based 3D HDTV. We’re talking 1080p 3D like you’ve never seen before, with CTO Edmund Sandberg noting that this production is smoother than RealD, Dolby, film and pretty much every other 3D solution. The secret here is in the speed; this set is so fast that the image “no longer needs to flash from one eye to the other,” and no flashing should equate to no headaches. Too bad there’s no planned release date, but we’re still cautiously optimistic for a sneak peek (in addition to the video past the break) at CES 2010.

[Via OLED-Display]

Continue reading HDI concocts 100-inch laser-based 3D HDTV, calls rivaling technology child’s play

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

HDI concocts 100-inch laser-based 3D HDTV, calls rivaling technology child’s play originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh, global economic crisis, when will you stop claiming our favorite companies? Oh, wait, it’s just i-mate folding this time? So, the company that already laid off its US staff is totally going away? We can live with that. It seems i-mate’s remaining employees in Dubai Internet City were told yesterday that they had to take an unpaid two-month leave. That, apparently, was a typo, as the people were actually supposed to take an indefinite unpaid leave. Oops. The company has already been delisted from stock markets around the world, and this abrupt closing has left a number of retailers hanging as orders for the 810F are apparently still pending. Now they, just like our hopes of a Dirty Dancing sequel, will never be fulfilled.

Filed under: Cellphones

R.I.P. i-mate, we barely knew ye originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RSS is a great way to read news, especially if reading news is your job. Until recently, I used NewNewsWire, on both the desktop and an iPod Touch (handy for starting work while still in bed), but a recent (and rather sudden) death of the backend service meant I couldn’t keep the pair in sync. Enter Newsstand for iPhone, recently updated to v2.0 and probably the best mobile RSS reader I have used.

Newsstand syncs with Google Reader, as does the latest version of the NetNewsWire for the Mac. You can also subscribe to feeds by entering a URL (RSS feeds are automatically detected) or by importing an OPML file. Anything you do on one platform syncs to the other, which makes things pretty seamless.

Newsstand elegantly addresses one big shortcoming of the iPhone: shifting data around. On a computer, you can drag things from here to there, or save them for later. With the iPhone, you have to quit applications to do something else. Newsstand solves this by incorporating pop-up exporting to almost anywhere. You can email full articles (including pictures) from within the application (no quitting to go to the mail app) or add to Instapaper, Delicious, Twitter, ReadItLater or just copy the URL, all from a pop-up screen. Better, this option persists when you browse out to websites, meaning you can navigate to a linked article and send it to Instapaper to read, say, in a bar later.

But where Newsstand really shines is in the browsing. Everything, excepts pictures, syncs fast. I have hundreds of feeds and the whole list is updated in a minute or so. You can choose universal settings for downloading pictures, and also specify these settings for individual feeds. For instance, I have the low-traffic but high quality Strobist set to grab all photos on all posts. This is useful on the Touch as I often read off line.

Navigating is done per-feed, unlike another glossy reader, Byline, which offers no choice as to how much is downloaded from each feed, and in what order you get them. Mark as read is quick, and you can delete and re-order feeds in bulk.

Hit the little button in the title bar and you get the snazzy newspaper view, which gives a virtual newsstand, browsable with a neat cube-flipping animation. It’s gimmicky, and not nearly as utilitarian as the list view, but it’s certainly fun.

There’s more. You can subscribe to your own Twitter timeline, a Twitter search, or even various inputs from Delicious. There’s a built-in directory for popular feeds (although Gadget Lab isn’t in there, yet) that lets you browse by category and even shows you what feeds you are already reading. In the two weeks I switched to Newsstand, it has made it into my iPod’s dock. In short, it is one of the best apps I have. If you’re an avid RSS-head, go buy it now. It’s just $5.

Product page [iTunes]

See Also:

• Instapaper: A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase

The world is an ever more extreme place — and ever more safety conscious too. That means more helmets per capita and thusly more helmet cams. The Tachyon XC is the latest, shipping in not one but two flavors. First up is the standalone model for $180, which packs a couple of batteries and an SDHC card into a lightweight, durable, fully waterproof case. Rather more interesting is the $380 XC 3D, a pair of the cams joined at the hip that record simultaneously and ship with software to join the fruits of their sensors into one mind blowing segment. 3D footage can be displayed in a variety of formats, including the red/blue standard style that rocked the ’60s or cross-eyed mode, like those magical posters that look like fields of dots but explode into shapely images of naked ladies when you focus right. Sure, gluing two separate cameras together is perhaps a bit of a crude way to enter the third dimension, and strictly VGA recording is decidedly disappointing, but check out the video results below in cross-eyed mode before you write this off as an over-priced novelty.

Continue reading Video: Tachyon XC helmet cam, and its Siamese 3D sibling, now shipping to headgear worldwide

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Video: Tachyon XC helmet cam, and its Siamese 3D sibling, now shipping to headgear worldwide originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG's retro design evokes the 300 SL.

(Credit: CNET)

With all the very expensive new cars being unveiled at the Frankfurt auto show, you would think the economy never went into recession. It did, and yet here they are, a parade of new automotive objects …

Originally posted at Frankfurt Auto Show 2009