Hasta La Gadget!

Meeting what we’d call the bare minimum for being able to say there’s “touch capabilities,” the new Archos 2 Vision PMP has quietly stepped out of the shadows and onto UK retailer MyMemory’s website. Just under the 2-inch, 220 x 176 resolution display is a tactile slider for menu navigation and volume control. The credit card-sized player also sports a FM tuner and recorder, a microSD slot in addition to internal memory, and support for MP3 / WMA audio and AVI video — nothing too fancy here. Battery life is a depressing 10 hours for audio and 4 for video, which at €60 / $85 for 8GB and €99 / $140 for 16GB models, it’s just a tinge south of acceptable in our book. Europeans still intrigued can pick one up now, while US consumers will either need to pay a premium for import or just wait patiently.

[Via DAP Review]

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

New Archos 2 Vision PMP pictured, priced, and predictably short on battery life originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, Google Voice and Slingbox on iPhone might give carriers the willies, but at midnight tonight (ET) you can tune into a live feed of British techno duo Underworld’s concert in Oakland, California. Being touted as the first-ever live event streamed to the iPhone — and if not, it’s certainly the highest profile — the feed utilizes iPhone OS 3.0’s HTTP streaming capabilities and plays via Quicktime. Simply point your iPhone’s browser to either one of the two streams linked below to join in on the fun tonight. Assuming your local carrier’s service (hello there, AT&T) doesn’t cave in under the strain, that is.

[Via PC World and NewTeeVee]


Read – Akamai stream
Read – Underworld live

Filed under: Cellphones

UK group Underworld streaming footage of tonight’s concert live to iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Aug 2009 19:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You probably already know exactly how each and every one of your friends would feel about seeing an autonomous robot photographer at your next shindig. Crave Asia managed to snag one of Sony’s new Party-shot docks for the office, and while the set up is described in an almost heartbreaking tone — “We’ve got the lights, we’ve got the disco ball, but unfortunately we’ve got no friends,” says the narrator — you do get a pretty good feel for how the gizmo would work in a more celebratory setting. The swivel seemed to move a lot slower than we expected it to, although we can’t be convinced without seeing it firsthand in a setting with more than two people. Now all that’s left to prepare for is how to convince your camera shy guests that there’ll be enough narcissistic attendees blocking the lens anyway. Video beyond the gates of the read link.

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Sony’s Party-shot dock crashes faux festivities to prove its potential for automated blackmail originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Take this rumor with a fairly large grain of salt and please hold your “bag of hurt” comments until the end. Boy Genius claims he’s got it on word from a “pretty reliable source” that the next big iTunes revision will include better organization options for your iPhone / iPod touch apps, something vague concerning integration with Twitter, Facebook, and Last.fm, and… Blu-ray support. To be fair, the HD disc format wars are all but over at this point, and the most recent Final Cut Pro actually lets you burn video directly to a third-party BD drive, only to have to play the discs on another, non-Mac device. This is all pretty sketch at the moment, and we doubt the boys in Cupertino will be showing their hands until just after the eleventh hour — let’s not forget, also, that iTunes is also available for Windows which does have other third-party Blu-ray playback software. In possibly related whispers, AppleInsider has offered some none-too-descriptive hints at possible iMac refresh with some improvements catering to the “semi-professional audio / video crowd.” Between this and talk about a tablet, we can’t wait for the next Apple press conference, if only to subside all the rumors for a few months.

Update: Our resident HD expert Ben Drawbaugh has chimed in on the matter, hypothesizing that this might be referring to support for Managed Copy, a digitized (and DRM restricted) copy of the film that you would save onto your local hard drive. But in that scenario, it still doesn’t behoove Apple to add that to iTunes unless it was looking to put Blu-ray drives on its own machines, which makes this (still very faint) rumor all the more interesting.

Read – Apple iTunes 9 details, Blu-ray, app organization
Read – Apple’s next iMacs rumored with compelling new features

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Blu-ray support coming with iTunes 9? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What could possibly replace the ubiquitous barcode? The new Bokode might be able to. Bokode is a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor.

Bokodes open up a whole new range of applications in the areas of tagging, user interaction, machine vision and near field communication not possible with traditional barcodes. For example, it can be used in street mapping services such as Google Streetview: shops use Bokodes to provide meta information to the trucks as they drive down the street taking pictures.