Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
We tried and we tried but we just couldn’t get COWON to show us its new S9 Curve at IFA — they weren’t meeting with the press, only business partners. At least we have a ship date and full specs in consolation. Germany at least will get its hands on the 3.3-inch, 480 x 272-pixel, 16 million color, capacitive touchscreen, AMOLED player at the end of October. The 57.08 x 105.75 x 12.7-mm player (a bit shorter and narrower than the 8-mm thick iPod touch with 4.3-inch display) will initially ship with 8GB / 16GB of storage before getting bumped to 32GB sometime down the road. A 3.5-hour charge off the mains (5.5-hours off USB) will deliver up to 8-hours of video (MPEG-4 SP, WMV9 SP, H.264 BP codecs) or 40 hours of audio (MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, WAV formats). Integrated Bluetooth is of the more power hungry 2.0 (not 2.1) variety with support for A2DP stereo and AVRCP remote control profiles. The S9 for Europe supports FM recording and dictation buts lacks the integrated DMB television tuner of its Korean cousin. Line-in recording and DAB radio is also in the works.
[Thanks, Vesal]
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Filed under: Wireless
Sprint’s XOHM WiMAX network is finally due out this month in the launch market of Baltimore, with Chicago and DC to follow, and the company is already working on the next phase of the rollout, which will bring the high-speed wireless service to Boston, Philadelphia, and Dallas-Fort Worth. Sprint says it’s already started installing WiMAX equipment in those three cities and that it’s a “month ahead of schedule,” but given the delays getting XOHM up and running in Baltimore, we’re not exactly certain the “schedule” really matters. Still, it’s good to hear that XOHM is growing up — now launch, already.
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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
So, iLounge has a hot tip on dimensions for the hotly-rumored, upcoming iPod nano and iPod touch refreshes. The diagrams appear to the type of thing provided to case manufacturers so they launch their player-hugging wares on day one, but could just as easily be faked, so we’ll take ‘em with a grain of salt. Of note, the new fourth-gen iPod nano has supposedly slimmed down to a mere 6.08mm thick, compared to the 2nd gen’s 6.5mm, while the second-gen iPod touch got all curvy on us like big brother 3G, and similarly adds thickness: 8.4mm thick, instead of 8mm on the original. More exciting than the design tweak is the addition of volume control buttons to the side of the iPod touch, though the headphone port has stuck to the base of the device. Hopefully we’ll know more soon, the mock-suspense is just killing us.
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Filed under: Gaming
According to a GameSpot interview with Sony’s US director of hardware marketing John Koller, that new PSP-3000 screen may look a bit better… but it’s going to cost you about 20 minutes of battery life. Luckily for you gamers with endless pockets out there, Koller assures that minor wrinkle be offset because, “We’re going to have the extended life battery that’s still available for consumers, so we’re still going to get the eight-to-ten hours out of that battery.” So just to make that clear, the regular battery life will be diminished, but you can buy a new, larger battery from Sony to extend your gaming time. Got that? Good. Watch him say it for real in the video after the break.
[Via T3]
Continue reading PSP-3000 battery life diminished by new screen, Sony suggests buying a bigger battery
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Filed under: Cellphones
Details on this one are remarkably skimpy, but here are the facts as we know them. A fire caused around $30,000 worth of damage to a mobile home in Delaware this past week, but thankfully, the Millsboro and Indian River firefighters found no one home at the time of the incident. The culprit? A “malfunctioning cellphone charger that ignited the wall covering in a bedroom.” That’s it, folks — no manufacturer, no brand name, nothing. In other words, unplug your chargers when you leave the house… or store your home in a fireproof safe, either one.
[Thanks, Carl]
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Filed under: Gaming
It’s hard to tell if those awesome consoles up above are artists renditions or very real pieces of gaming technology that will shake the industry at its core. So hard to tell. We won’t humor Piicron enough to actually describe their ideas (okay, just one: Ubercron, a $500 console that can play “any game ever released to any console” with its 3.2GHz quad-core processor) but we do recommend clicking on over to the website, where you can easily squander an afternoon reading through all this insanity. To be honest, we’re almost a little disappointed none of this is grounded in reality, or even vaguely aware of reality: at least Phantom was trying.
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Filed under: Cellphones
It’s still a rugged little bastard — and yes, it still has a laser pointer — but there’s one thing the LM801 cellphone is not: a Sonim. The CEO of Sonim, maker of the purposefully overbuilt XP1, wrote in on our LM801 piece to let us know that they don’t actually have any association with Condurro, the company advertising it. If anything, the LM801 is actually a direct competitor for Sonim’s wares — and at £149.99 (about $270) at retail, it’s bringing the heat. Assuming it actually lives up to its tough look, anyway.
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Filed under: Laptops
Dell’s Inspiron 910 / Mini Inspiron hasn’t exactly been a secret since we first heard about it back in April, but it sounds like this baby bump is about to go from open secret to bouncing bundle of joy — Dell just confirmed to InformationWeek that the netbook is scheduled to arrive later this week. That’s all we know right now — Dell reps called those earlier specs we’d heard “pretty much rumor and speculation” — but we’ll go out on a limb and say we wouldn’t expect anything less than an 8.9-inch screen and 1.6GHz Atom in there. Sorry if we killed the surprise, guys — but remember, you can still wow us with the price tag.
[Thanks, AC]
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Filed under: Handhelds, Laptops
While the idea of
Commodore showing off some early prototype devices isn’t exactly the sort of thing that’d normally get many folks’ hopes up, the never-say-die company looks to have managed to impress the doubters at IFA, where it had a number of intriguing-looking concepts on hand in addition to that soon-to-be-released netbook we saw
yesterday. That includes two Pocket PC devices — one with a sliding QWERTY keypad and one that opts for a folding design (pictured above) — as well as a much slicker-looking netbook than the one that is actually going to be released, naturally (check it out after the break). Of course, specs for any of those are virtually non-existent, although there’s apparently some talk that the Pocket PCs could sell for between €100 and €150 (or roughly $220 to $290) whenever they’re actually released. Be sure to hit up the gallery below for plenty more shots courtesy of Engadget Spanish.
Continue reading Commodore impresses with prototypes at IFA, really
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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
We won’t lie: this started as an excuse to do a visual gag pertaining to the abundance of Nintendo Wiis in action at IFA 2008 (that most excellent headline pun is just a bonus). But we got carried away and ended up with some deeper impressions we took away from the show, which took place last week and this week in Berlin, Germany.
The Wii was naturally not the only thing we saw at IFA. Panasonic was back with its 150-inch plasma, a large rock garden of displays backed by a row of 103-inchers and its fully-featured Blu-ray players. Sony’s gigantic room-within-a-room forest was mesmerizing, and the surrounding technology like that paper-thin LCD (though Philips got the last laugh) and intriguing Sountina were no doubt of interest. Samsung brought its A-game once again, with a breathtaking wall of LCDs, and enough miscellaneous gadgets to significantly, literally raise the temperature in the back of the booth. Toshiba’s more modest affair hid many technology demos and futuristic technology like a Cell-powered television and resolution upscaling. LG was a tad subdued, but by “subdued” we mean “not as insane as Samsung.” A slew of a Europe-only companies weren’t slumbering either, with wild displays of their own, primarily of televisions.
Continue reading Sights and sounds of IFA 2008: look how far Wii’ve come
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