Hasta La Gadget!

Betcha didn’t think this day would come, but it finally has. Sony has just come clean with its next-generation PlayStation Portable. It’s actually codenamed NGP and will revolve around five key concepts: Revolutionary User Interface, Social Connectivity, Location-based Entertainment, Converging Real and Virtual (augmented) Reality. It will be compatible with the PlayStation Suite and is backwards-compatible with downloadable PSP games and content from Sony’s PlayStation Store.

Specs include a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 5-inch touchscreen OLED display with 960 x 544 resolution, dual analog sticks (not nubs as on the current generation), 3G, WiFi, GPS, a rear-mounted touchpad, the same accelerometer / gyroscope motion sensing as in the PlayStation Move, an electronic compass, and cameras on both the front and back. Available this holiday season. Wait… what?!

Games will come on “new media,” not UMD anymore, but we’re unclear on what sort of flash memory is being used. Sony’s rather proud of the fact it’s offering the world’s first dual analog stick combo on a portable device, though we’re more geeked about the quadrupling of pixel count from the original PSP.

Sony’s live event has been graced by demos of some pretty popular games, including Killzone, Resistance, Little Big Planet, and Uncharted — with the latter serving as a demo platform to show off how the NGP’s rear touchpad can be used to more intuitively climb up some vines. That touch panel on the back is the same size and positioned directly under the front OLED touchscreen, which allows for some pretty sophisticated controls when using the two simultaneously.

The new console’s UI will be called LiveArea, which has a bunch of vertically navigable home screens and built-in social networking through PlayStation Network. You can jump between games and the LiveArea without losing your progress and comment on your buddies’ great feats of mobile gaming.

In closing its presentation, Sony trotted out Hideo Kojima to show off a cutscene from MGS 4 rendered in real time on the NGP. It was pulled directly from the PS3 version of the game and ran at 20fps, which looked very smooth indeed to our liveblogging eyes. Videos and Sony’s full PR are now available below.

Continue reading Sony’s next PSP, codenamed NGP

Sony’s next PSP, codenamed NGP originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re gonna level with you, we’re not entirely sure what (if anything) Sony will show off at its Tokyo meeting today — other than “business [overview] and strategy,” of course. All the same, with the rumor mill in high gear about a possible PSP2 debut, we decided to take a chance and fly halfway across the world. Will it end up a worthy excursion with momentous payoff? Some fiscal and corporate chatter? A new Japanese ad campaign featuring a terribly dubbed Kevin Butler? Follow along!

Continue reading Live from Sony’s Tokyo event

Live from Sony’s Tokyo event originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on October 01, 2009 by CyberNet.

A few weeks ago we wrote about a free audio converter that was pretty nice, but when installing the app it tries to also put a bunch of third-party software on your machine. I made sure to point this out, but our readers stepped up and mentioned several other apps that are both free and clean. One of them, called winLAME, was recommended by Ian and really caught my attention. Not only is it free, but it’s also open source.

There were a few reasons why I really liked this app. First, it already has support for Windows 7. Second, it has presets for people looking for no-brainer audio conversion in addition to custom settings for people looking for more control. It’s basically a four-step process: Select your input file(s), select your output settings, choose from one of the quality presets or customize the advanced settings, and then let it go to town. And not only can it convert your audio files, but it can also rip CD’s.

Here’s a more complete list of features and supported formats:

• Encoding and decoding of many audio formats, including:
  • .mp3 via LAME mp3 encoder (encoding) and MAD (decoding)
  • .ogg Ogg Vorbis
  • .aac via libfaac/libfaad
  • .wav, .aiff, .au, .voc and many more, via libsndfile
  • .wma via Windows Media Audio codec
  • .flac via FLAC library
• Uses LAME features, including:
  • high quality and optimized mp3 encoding
  • nogap encoding of continuous-mix-cd’s
  • optimized 3DNow! and SSE routines
  • ID3 v1 and v2 tagging
• Easy-to-use wizard-like user interface style for easy encoding setup
• CD Audio extraction (aka. CD ripping), including freedb support
• Presets for fast settings setup
• User interface translations to english and german language
• Batch Processing
• Detailed HTML Help File
• Easy install- and uninstall process
• Small size

If you’ve got some audio files to convert this is one app that I highly recommend downloading.

winLAME Homepage
Thanks Ian!

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Ah, the Facebook phone. Despite statements by the company that it is flat out not making a phone, the rumors persist, and not one but two separate stories have now cropped up on the same day that a mysterious “call” button has appeared on some folks’ Facebook pages. The first of those comes courtesy of BGR, which says it has heard from someone involved in a recent focus group that supposedly centered on a Facebook phone. As the story goes, the phone (which apparently wasn’t actually referred to as a “Facebook phone”) would have an always-on GPS service, no or very little local storage, a camera (with images stored in the cloud), a “news ticker-style message notification system” with all messages funneled into one “mass inbox” and, last but not least, some sort of location-aware coupon service that’s described as “Facebook Deals on steroids.”

Joining that is a report from the London-based City A.M. financial newspaper, which says it has learned from unnamed sources that HTC will debut two Facebook-branded phones at Mobile World Congress next month. Details on those are otherwise expectedly light, but the paper says the phones will run a “tweaked version” of Android and sport Facebook’s colors — supposedly, Facebook’s Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos (formerly of Firefox and Google, respectively) are largely responsible for the launch. Of course, the paper also says HTC is responsible for “Google’s Nexus range,” which doesn’t exactly help its case, and leads us to suspect that we may simply be dealing with one big game of telephone here.

Facebook phone rumors resurface: cloud-based, HTC-built? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For years, suit-and-tie circles have bowed to BlackBerry as the king of corporate communication, but iOS has been creeping in on enterprise territory, calling into question RIM’s sovereignty in the boardroom. The folks at Deutsche Bank Equity Research struck the most recent blow to RIM’s enterprise dominance with the announcement that they’ll buck BlackBerry for iPhone, following a trial using Good Technology’s secure email app. The company tested the app in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange Server, delivering AES 192-encrypted email and calendar data to employees, and, according to the firm’s research analyst, the iPhone proved an easier and faster solution to BlackBerry. Last summer, AT&T announced that 40 percent of iPhone sales are enterprise, and we just reported on RIM’s possible move to devices beyond the BlackBerry. We’re not saying it’s off to the guillotine with the old standard bearer, but it definitely looks like there are new contenders for the enterprise crown.

Deutsche Bank ditches BlackBerry for iPhone, Apple puts chink in RIM’s enterprise armor originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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