Hasta La Gadget!

Oh ZTE you cheeky monkey. Towards the end of day one at IDF in Beijing, we stumbled upon this awkwardly titled Android Jelly Bean phone that is the Geek at ZTE’s booth. Needless to say, this is yet another phone powered by an Intel processor — a 2GHz Clover Trail+ Atom to be exact, which is what Lenovo’s K900 also has. The rest of the device isn’t too shabby, either: you get a nice 5-inch 720p display with Gorilla Glass, along with an 8-megapixel main camera, a 1-megapixel front-facing camera, 8GB of storage space, 1GB of RAM, 2,300mAh battery and wireless charging. Radio-wise we see UMTS 900/2100 courtesy of Intel’s XMM 6260 chip, and there’s also the usual lot of 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 LE and GPS.

Design-wise the Geek takes a huge step away from the Grand X IN and shares a similarly clean look with the Grand S, but without the black eye around the main camera. This particular unit had a glossy white finish as well, but we’d prefer a matte finish for a more premium feel. Since ZTE admitted that it had to rush this prototype for exhibition at IDF, we’ll come back to the build quality once we see a final retail unit. Until then, check out our hands-on video and the press release after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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One of the hottest gadgets at NAB isn’t quite what you’d expect. Freefly, the company behind a series of professional-grade cinema hexacopters, is demoing its new Movi three-axis stabilized camera gimbal. We heard some rumblings about such a device last week, but the $15,000 price tag is quite a turnoff — until you see it in action. We dropped by the company’s booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center to check it out with an attached Canon EOS-1D C. Movi weighs in at just 3.5 pounds, jumping to 10 pounds once you mount the Canon camera and lens.

It’s a very robust system, despite the weight and footprint, letting you pull off shots that otherwise may require hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, and a substantial crew. In other words, you can capture incredibly compelling motion scenes with just a single camera operator. Don’t take our word for it, though — join us past the break to see Movi in action, along with a glowing testimonial from director Vincent Laforet, who Freefly tapped to shoot the gimbal’s very first sample reel.

Filed under: Cameras, HD

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Source: Vincent Laforet

Red’s clean room on the NAB show floor is typically no place for camera crews, but after adding a bit of protection, Red President Jarred Land gave us the green light to step inside the company’s sacred space for a closer look at operation Dragon upgrade. (The $8,500+ sensor swap gives Epic cams the gift of 6K shooting.) The view from behind the glass wall separating spectators from technicians isn’t significantly different, but we were able to get quite a bit more insight into how the process goes down, including stops at each of the workstations.

The temporary assembly center that Red built at the Las Vegas Convention Center is a miniature version of the company’s primary facility in Irvine, California — while Dragon upgrades are underway in Las Vegas, a structure that’s estimated to be 20 times the size of the one here in Nevada is processing the updates remotely, though admittedly with far less fanfare. Join us past the break for an exclusive look at the process, live from Red’s booth at NAB.

Filed under: Cameras

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If you ask most people, they’d tell you there’s nothing wrong with the standard classroom set-up of a blackboard and chalk, or a whiteboard and dry-erase markers. Nicholas DePorzio isn’t most people, though. At Northeastern University’s Husky Startup Challenge Demo Day, he took home first prize for KrystalBoard, a liquid crystal-based writing board. His early prototype takes a few cues from Boogie Board’s line of scratch pads. Functionally, they’re almost identical: use a stylus to scratch your message into the panel then, when you’re done, simply press a button to erase it. What DePorzio believes sets his creation apart is the ability to scale to much larger sizes. His first prototype, tossed together in just six weeks, certainly has some rough edges (literally, the stand is made from roughly cut cardboard boxes). But, with a different selection of liquid crystal panels, the hope is that high-contrast classroom-sized KrystalBoards are well within his reach.

The first iteration uses a nine-volt battery to force the crystals to reorient themselves and wipe out any missives, but DePorzio is confident that a small solar panel (like the one on your 99-cent calculator) will have more than enough juice to “power” a much larger model. And “power” is a relative term, since technically there’s no electricity coursing through the single-crystal panels. The goal is to save time and money by doing away with erasers, chalk, markers and other disposable supplies. The Northeastern student even believes he can get the cost of materials below that of a standard whiteboard or blackboard, but only time will tell on that one. Though, taking home a large novelty check should give the fledgling company a good head start.

Filed under: Misc

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When a 48 frames-per-second version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was released, some viewers questioned whether high frame rates necessarily translate to a better viewing experience. Whether or not you embrace this trend, it’s clearly not going away. Case in point: today, Christie Digital Systems introduced two new 4K projectors capable of 60 fps — a “world’s first,” according to the manufacturer. Unveiled on the NAB show floor, the 35,000-lumen and 25,000-lumen models display extremely crisp and bright images — big-budget car commercials and surfing footage basically pop off the screen.

The projectors are available for pre-order now, so it’ll likely be quite some time before they begin showing up in your neighborhood cineplex. Their price tags ($125,000 for the 25,000-lumen model and $161,000 for the 35,000-lumen D4K3560), not to mention their bulky 250+ pound bodies, make them destined for state-of-the-art cinemas rather than home theaters. If you do manage to squeeze one of these giants into your den, we’d be more than willing to drop in to catch a flick or two. Take a look at the 25,000-lumen D4K2560 in action in our eyes-on video after the break — it looks incredibly sharp and vibrant, despite the reduced brightness output.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

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