Hey you Europeans! You may have all your hot Swedish and Italian and Spanish and British girls, and all those old stones, and all the awesome cuisine, and all the delicious wine, and all that great coffee, and all the cool clubs, but guess what we have? We have the number one position in 3G mobile phone subscribers. Yes baby, número uno, nummer ett, número um, première position, beste Stellung by a whole 0.1%! Nyah nyah nyah!

Read More »

Here's the first print ad for the Sony A900, spotted in a Danish photography magazine, enjoying bubbles like an 8-year-old girl. But if that's still not enough to convince you that this 25 megapixel SLR is just days from release, Sony has confirmed an SLR announcement during a Tokyo event next Wednesday. Short of bribing Mr. Sony knocking on your door with an A900 in-hand, this is pretty much the best we can nail things down for the time being. [DPReview and PCWorld via Photography Bay]

Read More »

Recently green-lit to be built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IBM's future Blue Waters supercomputer is peta'd all over. It'll have up to 2-petaflops processing speed, more than a petabyte of memory and a 10 petabyte disk storage system. It'll also have more than 200,000 processor cores, and cost around US$208 million, which is even more 000s. All this power is going to be used for proper hard science like simulating the Sun's coronal mass ejections, studying black holes, and molecular biology. Probably developing on IBM's previous Roadrunner supercomputer power, it should be accessible nationally, at campus-level. And you can bet someone'll program it to sing "Daisy, daisy" pretty soon after it goes online in 2011. [NetworkWorld via Slashdot]

Read More »

We've seem our share of good packaging ideas and bad packaging ideas, but this new method from HP is a great packaging idea. Their Pavilion dv692 systems available at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club will sit on the shelf in their own recycled material messenger bags, stabilised and protected with internal air bubbles. This alternative to huge boxes shoved full of styrofoam has reduced HP's individual consumer packaging by an outrageous 97%.

Read More »

We've been keeping you up to date on the CDMA version of HTC's Touch Diamond, coming soon to Sprint, but the lucky buggers over at the Wall St Journal got their mitts on one ahead of its launch. It's fatness turns out to be 15mm in size, partly due to that 1,350 mAh battery good for 4.2 hours of talk time. It comes with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition with a Sprint-customised TouchFLO interface plus a bunch of extras like Dataviz's Documents to Go Suite, Opera browser, a YouTube app and it works with Sprint TV and the Sprint Music Store. There's also 4GB of internal memory, a 3.2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth A2DP. The price is now set at US$250, apparently, with 2-year contract, and it's now due mid-September. [WSJ via CNET]

Read More »

This is what you get when you combine Lego and massive mechas done at the minifig scale: the biggest robotic overlord I've laid my eyes on. Then, when you go through the massive gallery, you get what I call a robner followed by a brickgasm. Updated: actually, reader/brother Oscar sends me pictures of a huge Bionicle mecha he saw last weekend, which looks even bigger.

Read More »

Forget "pretend" black holes in optical cables: astronomers at MIT have taken the highest-ever resolution imagery of the region of space near the giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, as shown in this image. In fact, the bright spot in the centre is what they were looking at: it's a funky space-object dubbed SgrA* which may be a fiery disc of matter spinning round outside the event horizon.

Read More »

Folding screens (that occasionally useful piece of furniture, and classic movie prop) get a dab of 21st Century tech with the DID-FS from Daewoo. The old-fashioned wooden frame is there, but supplemented by four LCD widescreens, mounted vertically. That leaves you free to choose what pictures you're using to break up your living space into themes. It'll probably leave you with an empty wallet too, given current LCD prices for displays that big, but there's no info on pricing or availability. That doesn't stop me from lusting after this though... maybe I can achieve the same effect with some MDF, a Dremel and a couple of cheapo LCD photo frames from the local store? [Born Rich]

Read More »

Last week we mentioned a "premium" TV from Sharp (while talking about the XS1) that appeared to be destined for European shores: now there's news that the D65 is coming to the US too. The D65U range has 1080p resolution, and will come in sizes between 42- and 52-inches. The HDTVs will have a 6ms response time, Sharp's Advanced Super View and Black TFT Panel tech, and will apparently be very energy-efficient, through its dynamic back-lighting and contrast system which also reduces power consumption. Standard connectivity is supplemented with five HDMI inputs. Available in October, the 42-inch will be priced at US$1,600, the 46-inch for US$1,900 and the 52-inch version for US$2400. [Electronista]

Apple has been working in new multi-touch technology that combines touch interfaces with input from the camera and the microphone. For example: this will allow you to select text in the iPhone, say "copy," go to another application and say "paste" to make this task really easy. The most intriguing part, however, is the use of a camera in laptops and desktops.

Read More »

Sony's issuing a recall for Vaio TZ laptops sold between May 2007 and July 2008: apparently there's a risk of overheating leading to "abnormal heat deformation of the enclosure"—which sounds like a lot more than the usual knee-burn heat of a laptop. It's not due to the battery, mind you, rather it seems like a manufacturing flaw related to the power connector and LCD frame. The news relates so far to just Japanese machines, with Sony offering free inspection and repair, but keep your eyes peeled for news of the problem in other countries. [PCWatch]

Read More »

A laptop that smells good: yep—that's the new idea Asus has had to try to delineate its products in the marketplace. And I don't mean that "Mmmmm... new plastic gadget" sensation either, this is a full-on scent. Floral, Cologne, Ocean and Grass to be exact, though I'm not sure how many people will go for the "smells like your front lawn" option. The PCs have patterned lids too, in pink,
blue, green and black as well as a white carbon-fibre wrist wrest, which is a boon for those of you who regularly wear out your wrist rest (wait... what?) Apart from these features, they're pretty standard 13.3-inch screen laptops, running Core 2 Duo processors, with 320GB drives, and a fingerprint reader, and they're available on pre-order from Amazon for US$1,299. Press release below.

Read More »

Until 6AM September 9th, according to Dell's own blog, if you buy a Studio 15, XPS M1530 or XPS M1330 machine from Dell, you can buy an Inspiron Mini 9 for a suitable mini price of US$99. It's a mini bargain.

AU: Not sure if this will follow through to the AU site, but I don't think it will, somehow...

Read More »

We've known Amazon and Sony's VOD plans since they were in diapers, but today Amazon has introduced their promised instant-view capabilities to their Video on Demand service for both Macs and PCs, and rolled out a beta for Sony Bravia Link owners to start testing--allowing you to pair your TV with your Amazon account for instant purchases and rentals. Your purchases are also automatically added to "Your Video Library" for instant streams from any web browser. [Amazon]

Read More »

The way Dell introduced the Inspiron Mini 9 was pretty inspired, so it's almost been depressing watching the steady stream of leaks deflate it into a now familiar device, even though it's only being released today. As leaked, inside is an Intel Atom Diamondville processor and it has a 1024x600 LED-backlit screen with 4, 8 and 16GB SSD options (plus you get 2GB free online storage at Box.Net) and about three hours of battery life. Only the Windows XP version is available now for US$399, in black or white—the US$349 Ubuntu flavour, along with the rest of the six-colour rainbow are a few weeks away.

Read More »

All you outback Gizmodians out there longing for some smartphone love, your prayers have now been answered, with Telstra giving the Palm Treo Pro their blue tick of approval.

The blue tick is the stamp Telstra pops on phones that recommend the handset for rural coverage on the NextG network. The Treo Pro is the ninth handset in Telstra's stable to be awarded the classification, and the first smartphone with the label.

So now our farmers, bush-bashers and outback neighbours can enjoy the wonders of Windows Mobile 6.1 where they live. Welcome to the club, boys and girls. Hope you enjoy your stay.

[Telstra]

The Gadget: Motorola's universal wired portable speaker, the MOTOROKR EQ3.

Read More »

If you thought the Acer Predator gaming desktop looked powerful, then you'll love the design of Toshiba's new Qosmio X300.

According to Toshiba, this is Toshiba's "fastest and most powerful notebook to date", and comes with the latest components, including an Intel Core 2 Duo processor T9400, two hard drives (200GB and 320GB), 4GB DDR3 RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTX graphics card, Harman Kardon speakers and a heap of connections.

It naturally comes with Vista Ultimate, its 17-inch screen has a 1680 x 1050 resolution and it weighs in at 4.16kg.

There's a heap more specs after the jump if you're interested. Me, I just like to look at it. The $3,999 price tag isn't cheap, but gosh-darnit that fire-engine red looks purty. Makes me want to go and buy a fast car.

Read More »

The TiVo HD is a good, cheap alternative to the recently de-listed TiVo Series 3 for people who didn't need all that much storage and all that many fancy features. But what if someone wants even more built-in storage than the 20 hours of HD that the TiVo HD provides? They've now got the TiVo HD XL.

Read More »

Hackintosh machines are nothing new, but the guys over at APC have got a rough guide to troubleshooting the process of installing OS X onto an MSI Wind netbook.

You have to make some small sacrifices (like losing the headphone and microphone jacks) and if you want wireless you'll need to open your Wind up, but for $700 bucks or so, this solution makes it one of the cheapest Mac options around. And while it's not exactly legal in the eyes of Apple and their army of lawyers, that doesn't mean it can't be done.

[APC Mag]

Most people have thousands of digital photos in their collections. One of the cool new features available in Picasa's Web Albums (which kind of got swept away in the torrent of Chrome coverage the last couple of days) is the ability to tag faces in your photos quickly and easily.

If you have photos on a Picasa web album already, you can enable the feature in settings. It then scans all your photos in the Picasa web album, before grouping similar faces together. You then work through those by giving name tags.

You'll quite often have to repeat the same person in different groups of photos, so it's a far from perfect solution. But it does make the tagging process much quicker than manually going through every photo.

It's also secure, enabling better searching and more freedom for specific collections of photos, and you can share tagged photos with the people in them easily as well. Any images you share via Picasa also only shares the nicknamed tag you've put on the photo, not any further details like contact information.

This is a really useful development for cataloguing your photos, but why it's only available online and not in desktop photo management software like iPhoto or Picasa for Windows is beyond me. Hopefully we'll see it rolled out to desktop applications sooner rather than later.

[Picasa nametags]

We saw Sharp's "Limited Edition" Aquos XS1 LCDs at IFA, and now at CEDIA they're official for an as-of-now unpriced U.S. release in October (seeing a pattern here?). The 65-inch LC-65XS1U-S and 52-inch LC-52XS1U-S are 1-inch thin (at their thinnest point), and feature Sharp's RGB LED backlight which they say improves colour accuracy over other blue-only LED backlights and allows for a 1,000,000:1 claimed contrast ratio. Joining them are the D65U and D85U serieses, which bring 120Hz to the mid-range. For full details and more shots of all, hit the jump.

Read More »

It's hard to look at the new iPAQ from HP and wonder where it came from. In the past few years, the smartphone market has been dominated by Blackberry, Nokia, Palm and more recently Apple, while HP seems to have been suspiciously quiet. Sure, they had products, but more often than not they were as ugly as sin.

Clearly their time away from the limelight has given them a chance to consult the manual on style, because the iPAQ 912 looks the goods. A tri-band HSDPA handset, it features Windows Mobile 6.1, GPS, Wi-Fi, 3-megapixel camera, touchscreen display and a qwerty keypad. It's obviously clearly targeted towards business users and comes complete with a suite of business software from HP built in.

But the best feature of all on this device is the price: $799. It's not locked to any carrier, either, meaning you can just drop your 3G SIM card in and you're away.

A banner year for Blu-ray, to be sure, with a 100% drop in the most important stat of all, there in yellow. All this according to "Sony Figures." They just can't help themselves.

The official PlayStation 3 Bluetooth headset will be arriving in the US on October 14 for US$49, or a bundle price of US$59 if you want to buy it and SOCOM Confrontation together. The headset itself has a "High-Quality" mode, which activates its dual mics and apparently uses "high bandwidth" to make you sound better to the other dudes on your team. There's also auto-pairing with the PS3 when you connect the headset via USB, and a speaker mode when you dock it in the desk charger. The problem with this "high-quality" mode is that it's only available for the PS3, not for your mobile phone. Our guess is that HQ-mode takes up more power, or it'd be on all the time.

Read More »

Sony may have teased us with its newest projectors at IFA, but today in the US, the company announced availability and pricing. We guessed US$3,000 for the VPL-HW10, but we were close but not totally right. The solid 1080p Bravia SXRD (LCOS-based) projector with 30,000:1 dynamic contrast is a "value" play, but it's still expensive at US$3,500. The step-up VPL-VW70 doubles the contrast, and lets you fit an external lens that morphs the picture into a 2.35:1 widescreen ratio without losing pixels. (That extra lens is sold separately.) The VW70 is US$8,000. There aren't much more details about either yet, but what we do have is below.

Read More »

Sony's DA6400ES and DA5400ES hi-def A/V receivers won't exactly get your nerd juices (it's a thing) flowing, but if you're in the market for a high-end unit for your home entertainment system, they might be worth considering. Merging a relatively predictable feature set with newer DLNA streaming technology and an array of connection and input options, the receivers are intended to help integrate your central home entertainment system with the rest of your household media hardware, streaming files from your DLNA-compliant PC as well as sending out a second HD signal via CAT5e (ethernet cabling) so that you can distribute the system's output over your home network.

Read More »