Philips Xenium phones are generally known for their long-life battery performances but if these photos are in fact real, then the designers are venturing into new iPhone, Diamond touchscreen territory. PC World China is saying that the upcoming Xenium x800 will have an “e2e” screen— that’s an edge-to-edge touchscreen, apparently. From the photos it looks like it’s got an orientation sensor, Wi-Fi, a browser, a curved design and a bevelled metal edge. Sounds a little familiar? Check out the photos yourselves.
Shown off at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona back in February, the Samsung i200 was launched today, with a view to going on sale in Europe next month. Boasting HSDPA and EDGE/GPRS, the tri-band slider has a two-megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.1, MP3 player, 25MB built-in memory and a micro SD card slot, and mobile printing. Full press release, and a bonus pic, after the jump.
Canon’s new dye-sublimation photo printer is a departure from the boring old box designs: it’s basically a bucket, and is aimed at kids. The bucket part unclips, and is supposed to store wires and accessories rather than sand and a collection of worms. The printer itself is designed for easy operation, with big buttons, a 2.5-inch TFT and accepting all varieties of SD card, MMC and MemoryStick and xD too.
Fujitsu might have been the first to introduce a 2.5″ 7200rpm hard drive with 320GB capacity, but Hitachi is hot on their trail. Today, Hitachi announced that they too have a quick lil’-drive, the Travelstar 7K320. The HDD will support the same SATA 3Gbps interface as the Fujitsu, but will supposedly use less power. With only a 1.8 watt read/write power draw and a 0.8 watt low power idle, Hitachi claims the 7200rpm 7K320 power consumption is on par with their 5400rpm models. So if you were set on getting a faster 2.5″ 320GB HD for your notebook, Hitachi’s version should be available in a few weeks with a US$219 price tag. Press release after the jump.
You might not know this, but 120GB hard drives don’t actually cost US$180. Unless they’re for the Xbox 360. The teardown fanatics at iSuppli attempted to find some method to this madness. As you can guess, the numbers don’t quite add up to US$180, but it actually gets a lot closer than you’d think.
Other than Time Warner’s single-city foray into monthly data caps, consumption-based billing has mostly been little ISPs with little monopolies, and given the market, we thought it’d stay that way. Broadband Reports is, uh, reporting that now Comcast is mulling monthly caps (which Comcast’s PR guy confirms, though not the details)—something like 250GB, and then US$1.50 for every GB over that. According to their source, the idea has “a lot of momentum” and it’ll start rolling out in the next two months. The other part is that they’re going to start ramping up DMCA notices to pirate assholes, with a total disconnect if you’ve gotten four letters in a 12-month period.
Malcolm Gladwell (smart guy, puffy hair) has a feature in this week’s The New Yorker about the history of simultaneous invention, the best example being Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Grey both patenting the telephone on the same day. There are many other examples, leading to the conclusion that “scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.” The story is put into modern perspective by including scenes drawn from meetings of members of the company called Intellectual Ventures. The founding member, Nathan Myhrvold, also founded Microsoft’s R&D labs. His idea for IV was to see if “the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered.” The whole point being the creation of powerful ideas. Bill Gates, who works with them on H.I.V prevention, is quoted:
Besides supporting the latest iPhone OS version, beta 5 doesn’t do a whole lot else besides throwing in small tweaks to the UI, tweaks to the developers tools and some bug fixes. No big feature addition like last time, but you gotta update if you’re making iPhone apps. You just gotta! There probably won’t be very many more of these before the next iPhone’s out.
Cameraphone photography always reminds me of that Arrested Development episode where they find “proof” of WMDs, only to discover that it’s actually just a close up of Tobias’ junk taken from George Senior’s mobile. I mean, so many photos come out looking nothing like what you see in the frame – and that’s on the higher-end, 5-megapixel models.
So what kind of photos can we expect now that Samsung’s dropping their G800 phone – which comes with 5-megapixels, 3x optical zoom (yeah, we said optical), xenon flash, face detection, digital image stabiliser, red-eye reduction, panorama, mosaic and macro shot modes, and a lens cover? Hopefully not scrotum shots that look like scrotums – that’s probably just too much detail.
Aside from photography, the G800 offers quad-band HSDPA (7.2Mbps), a large 2.4-inch QVGA screen , plus easy connection to social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Flickr for uploading your pics and video (it also does MPEG4, H.263 video). There’s even a mobile blogging client on board for potential Giz writers to practice with, and you get a bonus 2GB MicroSD card in the box.
It’s available through Optus, Vodafone and 3 for $799.
[Samsung]
