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Toshiba’s new Gigabeat V30T plays music, displays photos, and shows video, and so qualifies as a PMP, or Personal Media Player, and as if that were not enough, the thing also receives and records TV. Unfortunately the V30T only works with digital TV, so it’s unlikely to make an appearance outside of Japan. Aside from that, the V30T has a nice bright 400cd/m2 3.5-inch QVGA display, a long battery life and a 30 GB hdd. The V30T is a kind of bigger, badder version of the Gigabeat S30.

Toshiba Gigabeat V series – Toshiba News, 2006 5 30

Posted in Music Players ~ No Comments

The New York Times has a new review of the 2007 Mercedes-Benz S-Class. It’s safe to say that the reviewer liked most of the car – he called the S a pleasure to drive, with an impressive powertrain and thought highly of the Distronic Plus, which is a kind of cruise control that uses radar to work the brakes and accelerator in order to maintain a safe distance from the cars ahead.

Much of the remainder of the article, however, is an invective on the ills of over-automation. The author laments such things as the 700 page owner’s manual, the 12+ buttons that control the front seats, the not-walk-up-and-use sound & GPS systems and the sporadic yet cryptic error messages sometimes displayed on the control panel. The S550 Sedan specs can be found here.

Lest we label him a luddite, the author reminds us that the previous-gen S-class suffered from a number of electrical and warranty problems. Still, at the end of the review he’s able to squeeze off a compliment, albeit a stingy one.

Those among us, Benzophiles included, who are dismayed by the tone and timbre of the Times’ article and who seek comfort in a more traditional, respectful even lyrical review, should instead go to this article by Automobile Magazine.

2007 Mercedes-Benz S-Class: Leave the Driving to the Microchips – NYT, May 28, 2006

Posted in Automotive ~ 3 Comments

Nintendo keeps moving from success to success. Their Nintendo DS Lite game console just went on sale in Japan on March 2, 2006, and 690,000 units were sold in the month of April alone. When combined with the previous-gen Nintendo DS, which sold 138,000 , Nintendo has an astonishing 72% market share of game hardware in Japan.

An approximate translation of the name Nintendo is “left to heaven’s hands“, and is in keeping with the whimsical nature of the company and it’s products.

Xbox 360 fails to take off in Japan as DS dominates – gamesindustry.biz, 17/05/2006

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Sony Ericsson has a new MP3 phone, model W42S, with a remarkable 30 hours of music playback. The W42S comes with 3 dedicated music buttons. The knurled knob at the bottom of the phone is the Music Shuttle button – it controls music playback features such as stop, play, rewind, fast-forward and track selection. There are also separate Vol+ and Vol- push buttons on either side of the Shuttle knob.

The phone has 1GB of onboard memory, with an additional 2GB available via Memory Stick, as well as a 1.25 megapixel camera. Only in Japan for now.

Sony Ericsson W42S – Press Release with product specs, 2006/05/22 … a partially-rendered translated version is here.

Posted in Phones ~ 11 Comments

While many parts of China continue to industrialize at a rapid pace, a few parts have already begun to experience Deindustrialization.

Reports from Korea speak of the problems facing some 7000 Korean textile and shoe manufacturing companies who located across the Yellow Sea to Qingdao in the 1980’s in search of low labor costs. These labor-intensive manufacturers are now experiencing labor shortages, large increases in labor costs and in indirect costs such as employee benefits including medical/dental insurance and pension plans. Some have already closed their doors, while others are relocating to Guangxi, Xian or even to other countries in south-east Asia.

Deindustrialization isn’t necessarily a bad thing – Qingdao can now move on to more attractive sectors such as services, high-tech and research. The end-game, however, remains unclear – in 120 years time, after the entire world has deindustrialized, the question becomes: what will there be left to sell and who will want to buy it? The closest approximation to an answer for that question is probably to be found in the country that industrialized first, namely Great Britain … and so it seems that all of us will eventually be selling insurance and providing banking services to one another, with a bit of light manufacturing on the side.

Korean Manufacturing in China: the End of an Affair? – Chosun Ilbo, May 25, 2006

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Music player maker iRiver released the Clix MP3 player a week or 2 ago. We were all set to ignore it as being merely an incremental improvement to last year’s U10, until we saw that the Clix is now CNet’s top-rated MP3 player.

CNet gives the Clix a rating of 8.7, which makes it about 5% better than any other MP3 player, including the iPod…at least according to CNet. The reviewers especially liked the styling and the buttonless user interface to Windows Media Player 11. CNet also thought highly of the device’s integration with the soon-to-be-available MTV Urge music download service. They even went so far as to say that the device is ‘close to perfect’ – strong words indeed!

Clix costs $199.99, has 2GB of storage, a 2.2 inch QVGA screen and the battery lasts for up to 25 hours. iRiver characterizes the Clix as a multimedia player, supporting music, photos and video, but the video frame rate is only 15 fps.

It will be interesting to see how much market share Microsoft/MTV/Urge/Clix takes away from Apple/iTunes/iPod.

iRiver Clix – product website

Posted in Music Players ~ 1 Comment

Inventables has a new concept phone, dubbed the Origami Cell Phone … unrelated to the UMPC.

The OCP uses e-paper and a pop-out folding screen in order to provide a display that is much larger than that found in today’s cell phones. The company estimates that it may take about 2 years to convert this concept into a working phone.

Flexible displays look interesting, and the one shown is probably do-able, but in general they seem too fragile to be in widespread use.

Origami Cell Phone – Inventables website

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The quiet, efficient, but costly Samsung 32GB Solid State Disk, rolled out just 2 months ago, is finally being put to use. Samsung has introduced the Q30-SSD notebook computer, and the Q1-SSD UMPC, which are simply SSD-ized versions of 2 of their existing products. The Q30-SSD now has the distinction of being the world’s first solid-state laptop.

The benefits of Flash memory are well documented: the stuff is more durable, lighter, uses less power, is silent, boots faster and is speedier. In the case of the Q1-SSD, Samsung started with their model Q1 Ultra-Mobile PC, ripped out the 40GB hard drive and replaced it with the aforementioned 32GB SSD … this reduces the weight of the device by 4% or 28 grams, brings the boot time down by up to 50%, improves the battery life by an estimated 8% to 3.8 hours, but increases the cost by more than 100%, to $2430 … ouch.

World’s First PCs with NAND Flash-based Solid State Disk – Aving News, 2006-05-23

Posted in Computers ~ No Comments

ABI Research is predicting that the stand-alone MP3 player will go the way of the PDA, and end up being assimilated by the Borg of our generation, namely the cell phone. As evidence they cite the growing number of high-capacity phones with built-in music players. ABI suggests that the Samsung SGH-i310 is a good example of a converged device that not only operates as a phone, but also has PDA functionality, a 2 Megapixel camera with flash, an MP3 player and an 8GB capacity hdd that can hold up to 2,000 songs.

Device convergence is old news, but it’s always interesting to speculate how much and how well music, video, games, camera, GPS, PDA, email, web browsing, spreadsheets, documents, powerpoints and telephone functionality can co-exist in such a small form factor.

Hard Drives in Cellular Handsets Could Spell the Beginning of the End for Portable MP3 Players – ABI Research press release, May 4, 2006

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Dell recently refreshed it’s D600 series of notebook computers. The new D620 is fairly well spec’d, with a 14.1 inch wide-screen LCD, an Intel Core Duo processor, a fingerprint scanner and EVDO.

Trusted Reviews just had a look at the D620 and gave it a grade of 9 out of 10, a ‘Recommended’ stamp of approval and a Value rating of 10/10. TR liked everything about the D620, including the wireless connectivity options, the security features and the 1,440 x 900 screen resolution.

Interestingly, the D620 was also reviewed by CNet a while ago, but it only got an Editors Rating of 6.9 out of 10, which is merely ‘Good’. Makes one wonder if TR and CNet were looking at the same machine & how objective and reliable these ratings systems really are.

Dell Latitude D620 – Trusted Reviews, 18th May 2006

CNet Editor’s Review for the Dell Latitude D620 – CNet, 4/24/06

Posted in Computers ~ No Comments