Ah, ha! Now we're cooking with gas. iriver teased us here at CES with a few ho hum offerings, but the real punch comes courtesy of its new networked line of devices. The outfit is getting super official with its long (long!) awaited W10 WAVE WiFi phone, which will boast a 3-inch WQVGA (480 x 272) touchscreen, 4GB of NAND memory, USB 3.0 connectivity, an FM radio module, web browser and all the usual cellphone amenities. Moving on, we've got the P35 PMP, which brings with it a 4.3-inch WQVGA touch panel, the outfit's SPINN platform, built-in mic /...
Adobe has updated its Camera Raw software to version 5.2. It adds a few features that Lightroom users already enjoy (output sharpening and targeted adjustment tools for adjusting images by clicking and dragging) but the most interesting part for us gadgeteers is the support for the Panasonic DMC-LX3. Up until now, users of this camera have been stuck with the bundled RAW converter software, Silkypix. Worse, Silkypix doesn’t then allow conversion to the more open dng, or digital negative, format. This was because of some internal jiggery-pokery by Panasonic. The wide angle (24mm) Leica lens apparently suffers from extreme...
Anyone who has been involved in the computer game for more than a little while knows what a PDF is. PDF is a file format that stands for Portable Document Format. A PDF is meant to be non-editable and the body of the document is an image and not editable, or selectable text. So if you received a document of say names and email addresses in a file called Leads.PDF. You can open the document, print the document and even send the document on to others. But if you want to import that information into your email address book, an...
Mufin, an automated music recommendation service, has publicly launched today. The Berlin-based company has been getting some positive reviews because of its technology, built by the Fraunhofer Institute, the German research organization that created the MP3 music file format. It uses an algorithm to parse more than 40 different aspects of music, like the rhythm structure of a song, or its tempo. To use the service, you search for a song on Mufin’s home site, or on its MySpace or Facebook applications. Then you can listen to a short clip of the song and to clips of other songs it...
Filed under: Text, Office, Productivity, Web Hosting documents online is nothing new, and neither is sharing them for collaboration. Right off the bat, you're probably thinking of Google Docs. I was too, until I found EtherPad. It doesn't beat Google Docs at everything, but it does have advantages, like editing in real time, and using highlighting to distinguish who wrote which text. EtherPad is also faster to set up, since it doesn't require an account to use. Just pass the URL to your collaborators, and everyone is set to start editing. There are stylistic limitations, with no fancy fonts and...
I have covered the affordable video camcorders from DXG before, such as the DXG-567V and DXG-569V. Now, there is the DXG-579V, an upright digital camcorder with 720p video capture and shoot still pictures up to 8 megapixels. The DXG-579V is a vertical form factor with a 2.4 inch rotation screen. It records H.264 video, or MOV file format, at up to 1280 x 720 at 30 frames per second. The user has the option of using High Capacity SD cards. I regularly use the DXG-569V, and I find it simple to use and easy to upload videos to YouTube. The...
Karlheinz Brandenburg, credited with at least jointly "inventing" MP3, has joined with a German development bank to invest in DJTunes, a European music download site offering house, techno, trance and electro tracks in that very file format. DJTunes targets DJs, club-goers and labels and claims over 300,000 tracks, all in the DRM-free format that is beloved of DJs for its lack of copyright locks - if not exactly for its high fidelity. The site lets users upload and sell their tracks and mixes, and will use the funds in part to branch out by launching a hip-hop site next year....
The explosion of Flash content like widgets has created several complex problems, like how to index it in search engines, how to make it work on mobile, and how to track it. The latter is being addressed today at Adobe Max, where Google is announcing Analytics Tracking for Flash, which will let publishers track metrics for their flash applications from within Google’s popular stats package. Aside from the unique file format, one of the major differences between tracking Flash and tracking webpages is that Flash can be embedded anywhere – meaning that analytics software needs to be able to measure...
The new MacBooks are made to prevent the jajilbreaking of iPhones. They do not recognize and iPhone in recovery mode, users will have to find another way to restore their iPhone. Piergiorgio Zambrini, creator of the Ziphone application, has found what is believed to be the largest security hole in Apple’s product line. The flaw lies in the audio portion of the Apple video file format. This security flaw affects all Apple devices including iPhones, computers and iPods. Videos of a third-party physical keyboard have been flying around the Internet this week. The keyboard is by no means quick...
Filed under: Digital Cameras The kids over at Photography Blog have finally got their hands on the Nikon Coolpix P6000 that became official back in August and have pronounced it "a mixed bag." It looks good on paper at least, with a 13.5-megapixel sensor, 28mm wide angle lens and bult-in Ethernet (a first for a consumer grade camera). Unfortunately, the big ticket items like on-board GPS (for geo-tagging all those coolpix you'll be taking) and NRW file format support (the new "RAW" image format developed by Microsoft and Nikon) are said to be poorly implemented and all but unusable. Even...
Taken from the Onion: “The Microsoft ads, which began airing earlier this week, are being blamed for generating critical system errors in more than 70 million televisions. In addition, thousands of frustrated Americans said that the ads have caused their TVs to become unresponsive, their screens to turn blue, and a small box with the message “terminal application error” to suddenly appear. “I was in the middle of watching Monday Night Football when, all of a sudden, that stupid ad comes on and my TV freezes up,” said Scottsdale, AZ resident Michael Chaplin, adding that he never wanted to...
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