On first looks the Arena looks like a smaller, slightly fatter iPhone. The screen takes up most of the phone with three buttons at the bottom of the screen and a small camera at the top. On the back of the phone, the camera lens is very small as to is the flash. The brushed metal finish is attractive but the plastic back seems to get dirty quick. Being a touchscreen phone thats very iPhone looking, this is obviously LG’s attempt to draw in those customers that Apple has attracted. However a smartphone this is not but this doesn’t stop it being a good all round phone.
For all of those waiting for free HD TV, Freeview HD is set to be launched before the end of the year. The service will start first in the North of England and then will then unfortunately roll out to the rest of the country across the next 2 or 3 years. Graham Plumb, … Read more
Today Microsoft has revealed official release dates and for its forthcoming OS. The release has been set for October 22nd so not long now till we get the opportunity to ditch Vista (yay!) Like Vista, 7 will be coming in a Home Premium package for £149.99, a Professional package at £219.99 and Ultimate at … Read more
No doubt trying to steal some of Palms thunder WildCharge have announced a wireless charging solution for the iPhone. Starting today, iPhone (3G and 3GS included) and iPod touch users can order up a WildCharge Skin along with a WildCharger Pad in order to bring wire-free charging to their Smartphone. The phone will require a … Read more
Finally BD-Live is going to become useful. Sony is teaming up with Gracenote, those lovely media database peeps that gets all the track info when you put your cd’s in your computer, have brainstormed MovieIQ. Basically its IMDB while you watch your film. If you want to know who’s who, what they’ve been in … Read more
Microsoft have announce its Zune HD will be powered by Nvidia’s Tegra chipset giving the OLED PMP brilliant visuals, great performance and better battery life which we all know is a massice problem when playing video on a PMP. Nvidia’s Tegra can give 1080p output on HDMI. The Zune itself will only do 720p playback … Read more
The Popcorn Hour A-110 was a big hit with geeks around the world for its almost unrivalled ability to handle media. Unfortunately it was not all perfect, the unit was a bit slow to navigate, it transferring files to it was extremely slow due to the 100Mb Ethernet and various other little annoyances.
Week now it seems most of these issues will hopefully be ironed out with the release of the Popcorn Hour C200. Some of the key improvements that are worth noticing are:
A more powerful SMP8643 Sigma Chip compared to the A-110’s SMP8635. This should improve a lot of the issues the A-110 had.
Gigabit Ethernet – This will make a huge difference if you are running a gigabit network.
Possibly support for DVD and Blu-Ray. The removable tray at the front of the player apparently will support a DVD drive or Blu-Ray Drive
It is significantly bigger than the A-110.
Obviously you will also get all the usual great features of a Network Media Tank including UPnP, Samba, NFS, BitTorrent, Usenet. Then web services such as YouTube, Vuze, and Revision 3 and finally the ability to play almost any media file you throw at it include 1080p videos.
Full specification after the jump.
The above image is from HomeTheatre.co.il and shows the C200 with a Blu-Ray Drive.
Earlier today Samsung released two devices are a part of its “mobile convergence plan” to “reinforce its status as a leader” in the mobile industry. The first two announced were the Omnia Pro B7610(rumoured to have been called the Louvre) and Omnia Pro B7320. The B7610 is the slider keyboard/touchscreen phone, the B7320 is a … Read more
Nvidia have announced that they’re updating they’re mobile series of graphics cards with five DirectX 10.1-capable chips(G210M, GT 230M, GT 240M, GTS 250M, GTS 260M) just in time for Windows 7 release, but disappointingly after the MacBook upgrade, which will contain the older series of GPU. Smaller(40Nm), less demanding on power consumption, improved performance and … Read more
Nothing as fun as the iPhone 3G S announcement recently but nokia have just announced the successor to the oh so popular E71, the E72. The E72 is actually quite a decent upgrade with a 5 megapixel camera, 3.5mm headphone jack, integrated compass, 10.2Mbps HSDPA, and an optical navigation pad. It should be available from … Read more
Archos have just held an even in France and announced the Archos 9, a nine-inch Windows 7 tablet. It has an 1.2GHz Atom Z515 processor, 80GB disk, Bluetooth, and dual DVB-T antennas. Looking at the specifications it is essentially a netbook in a tablet form (a netlet?).
Looking for a reasonably priced Blu-Ray player that does everything you need? Look no further. This little eco-friendly beauty should be out later this month priced at a mere £199.99, available in you guessed it……… Black!! 7.1 Surround 1080p Picture DTS-HD Master Audio & Dolby TrueHD BD-Live Profile 2.0 Eco-Friendly (20W when on , 0.7W … Read more
The Sony X1000 Walkman has been eagerly anticipated since its announcement at CES this year. The NWZ range of walkmans was already well known for their excellent sound quality and the X Series ups the game a little further with the inclusion of noise cancelling, an OLED Touch Screen, Wi-Fi and a Web Browser. These … Read more
With the conference been and gone, we gave you some snippets of news. The lower priced MacBook excited me personally, but with so much going on we’ll give you a summary of everything else.
Well the first day of WWDC is over and as expected there has been a new iPhone announced, the iPhone 3G S.
This announcement will come under mixed views as the 3G S isn’t so much of a new phone more just an upgrade.
The phone looks pretty much exactly the same however the processor has been upgraded, it is now 3.5G (7.2Mbps HSDPA), the camera is now a 3 megapixel unit with tap-to-autofocus and auto white balance with support for 30fps VGA video recording with editing features. The battery has also been improved with 5 hours of 3G talk time and 9 hours of WiFi internet use.
Finally there is the improved storage of 16GB and 32GB which should be priced as $199 and $299 respectively.
It will go on sale in the US on June 18th and 80 more countries in August. Interestingly this sounds like the new iPhone will beat the Pre on international release.
They are all obviously welcome additions, though I personally think some of them should of been there from the start i.e. 7.2Mbps HSDPA and video recording.
I do think it is perhaps a bit of a lazy release, it seems each iteration of the iPhone is very incremental to keep maintain a certain level of demand for each year. Personally I would of liked to see an OLED screen, Xenon Flash and better graphics capability as well as full flash support.
Hit the jump for a side by side comparison of the iPhone 3G & 3G S
Lots going on at the Apple WWDC Conference. Apple just announced that their 13-inch MacBook is getting updated to MacBook Pro specifications, at a lower price than the original aluminium MacBook it will replace. It will also have an impressive seven hour built-in battery.
The MacBook Air is also getting a price drop and will be available in two models. The base price has also been lowered to $1,499 for a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system with a 120GB hard drive and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, and a 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system with a 128GB solid state drive and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics for $1,799.
