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Friday, 09 April 2010 |
Wrap your head around this one: a 150-button guitar peripheral. That's for the pro version of Rock Band 3, whose goal is to actually turn the controllers into something more fitting of actual musicianship in a separate, more advanced "Pro" mode (the core game is still intact for those want it). First up is the aforementioned two-octave keyboard / keytar, whose difficulty goes from pressing within one of five ranges to actual dead-on notes. For drums, the three cymbals can now actually function as separate notes, sharing three lanes but given their own shape to know which to hit. Guitar, however, is a whole new beast. A $150 Fender Mustang pro (pictured up top) boasts 17 frets and 6 strings of accurate placement for a total of 102 buttons, and six nylon strings that must be plucked individually. Of course, if that hits the uncanny valley of plastic peripherals too closely, there's a Rock Band 3 Squier Stratocaster that'll be coming out that can actually be used as a real guitar or a Pro model. Vocal melodies from Beatles Rock Band carry over here. No concrete release date; head on over to new Joystiq for the preview, or if you want to see true trendsetters, watch Devo predict this game all the way from 1982 -- that video's after the break.
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Wednesday, 24 March 2010 |
Were you looking forward to purchasing a 16GB smartphone with unique screen technology and an app-centric OS this month? Great, because the Galaxy S pre-order has now gone live in the UK, offering a delivery only four days away from now and prices that are pretty much par for the superphone course. If you want the Super AMOLED machine for free, minimum monthly cost will be steep, starting out at £35 ($51) a pop over 24 months or £40 ($58) over 18 lunar cycles. Both those deals furnish you with 900 minutes of talk time, unlimited texts, and 1GB of 3G data, but the latter works out to be the better value as it tallies up to £720 ($1,045) in total investment over the full term. Then again, most of what Vodafone has on tap compares favorably to the madness O2 is asking iPhone 4 buyers to pony up.
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 |
No shock and awe here, Apple's already given us plenty of warnings, but we thought we'd drop you a friendly note to say that if you've upgraded to iOS 4 early, your copy of Winnie the Pooh is flying at you right this minute. Tipsters point out that they get a notification encouraging them to download the heretofore iPad-exclusive iBooks app, though they're finding they have to do it via their desktop iTunes client rather than over the air. Ah well, Apple's probably being extra cautious with moving those big wooden bookshelves into the smaller dimensions of your iPhone or iPod touch. We've not been able to get the app running on our iPhone 3G, so perhaps this is another of those features you're not going to be able to enjoy on older hardware -- we hope it's just us though.
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Wednesday, 17 February 2010 |
Were Ubuntu Linux ported to any device you could name, it wouldn't be much of a surprise, but developer Canonical intends to release a tablet-specific branch of the OS this time. Like previous efforts on netbook and MID, you can expect the new version to be something of an Ubuntu Light, but with new multitouch gestures and an on-screen keyboard lovingly baked in. Based on Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat," the tablet version will actually be rolled into Ubuntu Light later on, but right now the company's busy romancing hardware providers -- Freescale, Marvell, and Texas Instruments have all signed deals, and both Intel and Pixel Qi will reportedly bring power-saving tech to the table. Time will tell if that means a Armada 618 or OMAP 4 powering the display of our dreams, or yet another ARM-based craptablet with a resistive screen.
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Friday, 12 February 2010 |
You know a product's taking off in popularity when new cases for it start dropping on a daily basis. So here we are, two Kindle cases in two days, only this one is klearly the feistier one. The KlearKase press release wastes no time in slamming yesterday's M-Edge Guardian for being twice as expensive, three times as heavy, and presumably nowhere near as cool. This new 6-ounce polycarbonate shell has some industry bigwigs behind it too, with Dick Brass and other former Microsoft execs forming its brain trust. We still don't see ourselves spending $39.99 on something like this, but if you feel otherwise, Amazon will have stock of the KlearKase by the end of the month.
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Thursday, 21 January 2010 |
You've seen parts uno and due already no doubt, so let's dive straight into the third and final installment of Nokia's N8 overview. Today we are treated to the Symbian^3 media player, which continues to closely resemble Apple's Cover Flow, but we're sure the companies will work it out between themselves. That cover-centric interface gets tugged around a few times to show the phone can handle it without lag, and we also get to see a repeat visit from our friend Mr. Long Press, which functions as a mobile version of a right-click by popping up a menu of contextual options. The video continues into a look at the HDMI connectivity and points out that the N8 will be compatible with Bluetooth keyboards -- you know, if you're in the mood for an Espoo-approved version of Google TV. See the whole thing after the break.
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Friday, 08 January 2010 |
Giant corporations may have huge, sprawling campuses sitting ominously just outside of city limits, but sometimes even they are running short on desk space -- apparently. It's for those organizations that Lenovo has created the ThinkCentre M90z, which the company is touting as the "first large business-focused 23-inch all-in-one desktop." Starting at $899, it offers Intel Core i3 or i5 processors, DDR3 ram, SSD or platter storage, an integrated webcam, and of course that 23-inch touchscreen display. For more traditional establishments that like to keep things apart, there are the $1,199 and up ThinkStation C20 and C20x desktops, said to be 46 percent smaller than the ubiquitous Dell Precision T5500 and are also rack-mountable. Finally, and interestingly, there are the $259 C2230x and $279 L2321x Wide monitors, both 21.5-inch models that offer multi-tasking functionality. The former packs a port-replicator, making it easy to connect to multiple machines, while the latter can be split-screened and display two inputs at once. Hooray? All these wonderful things will be hitting fabric-walled cubicles between now and the end of July, and all are fully detailed in the press release after the break.
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Tuesday, 22 December 2009 |
NHK has been working on 33 megapixel, 8K Super Hi-Vision displays for quite some time now. As the story goes, in 2005 the group's Science and Technology Labs estimated a necessary 0.3mm dot pitch for plasma screens in the 100-inch category to achieve the necessary 7,680 x 4,320 pixels for display. At the time, the best plasma could muster was 0.9mm, but now the researchers have created a prototype 58-inch screen with 0.33mm pixel pitch. Ergo, four such prototypes stacked together should create a 116-inch window to the world that just about displays 8K video. It's still a ways off from market, but be honest, are you really already griping about the visible pixels on your 1080p set? Totally inadequate web video version after the break.
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