Digital Trends
Although the device has been expected for some time, today South Korean electronics giant Samsung officially announced its Samsung R1 media player, a followup to the Q2 it introduced earlier this year. The R1 offers a slightly bigger touchscreen, at 2.6 inches, and also roll in support for DivX video and a “Beat DJ” feature enables users to add their own voices and sound effects to songs—just the thing to entertain (or really annoy!) your friends when you hook it up to a stereo system.
Social networking giant MySpace has announced its latest belt-tightening moves in an effort to make the company more nimble and improve its bottom line: MySpace will be reducing its international staff by about two thirds—from 450 people to just 150—and plans to close at least four of its offices outside the United States.
According to the company, about half of MySpace’s user base comes from outside the United States. The move comes not even a week after MySpace announced it was cutting 420 positions, or about a third of its total workforce. After the latest round of cuts, MySpace will have about 700 employees.
It seems that only yesterday, Internet Explorer was a clunky abomination of a browser that lagged behind its competition in all features, crashed constantly, and was generally frowned upon by anyone with the knowhow to download something better. Seeing as the latest version, Internet Explorer 8, was just released yesterday, that embarrassing recollection of failure literally was last week.
The Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s great orchestras, is set to spearhead a movement in the classical music world by streaming its concerts live for a fee, the Guardian reports. That could turn audiences for a recital from the hundreds into the millions.
Marketed as Any Place, Any Time, people can pay around $15 for a single concert and receive 48 hours’ access to the performance, or $225 for an entire season of 30 concerts. There will also be an archive of previous performances. The first streamed performance will take place January 6, with the orchestra performing Brahms’s 1st Symphony and other works.
Though Berlin’s IFA 2008 consumer electronics expo hasn’t yet officially begun, Samsung used the day preceding the event to get one of its tamer announcements, a fifth-generation Blu-ray player, out of the way. The BD-P2500 will keep a look much similar to its predecessor, the BD-P1500, but adds long-awaited Blu-ray Profile 2.0 compatibility and a handful of other features.
Profile 2.0 allows the the BD-P2500 to access BD Live features on next-gen discs, meaning it can pull relevant content from the Internet using a built-in Ethernet jack, and store it on an included 1GB of memory. This enables features like wallpaper and ringtone downloads, peer-to-peer interactions, live events and even games.
Toshiba is indeed managing to keep its foot in the high-definition video market without actually letting Blu-ray into its shop, stepping out at this year’s IFA show in Berlin with yet another consumer-oriented product that makes standard-definition content look better. Toshiba claims its new Regza ZF series of LCD HDTVs are the first in the world to include upscaling technology, using a Cell processor—the same technology in Sony’s PlayStation 3—to take SD content to “near-HD quality.”
Next week at the IFA 2008 show in Berlin, Sanyo will be demonstrating its new “entry-level” PLV-Z700 1080p projector. Although Sanyo is more known for its business projectors, the Z700 represents a foray into residential installations, letting users throw high-definition content across the room…and with lens-shifting technology and a 10,000:1 contrast ratio, that content might look pretty good.
“Our entry-level Full HD projector addresses the increased interest in projection systems for home-based entertainment systems due to the rapid growth of high resolution material, from Blu-ray discs, HD game consoles, and digital camcorders,” says Sanyo presentation technologies VP and general manager Mark Holt, in a statement. “Sanyo recognizes this trend toward affordable higher quality video and the PLV-Z700 is capable of projecting large, beautiful images anywhere and now for more Americans.”
There are a number of interesting things coming out of Computex in Taiwan this week. The two that initially stood out were from AMD’s ATI unit and NVIDIA. Both promise a dramatic change in how some of us do things and with only few days to go till the iPhone launch, one of them could redefine the competitive landscape. Let’s chat about how these announcements could change our mobile future.
AMD XGP
Aside from the stir One Laptop Per Child’s XO-1 laptop has created stateside, and the mini-notebook revolution it debatably helped launch (alongside the Asus Eee), not much is often heard about the project’s ultimate goal: getting laptops into tiny hands abroad. The crew took one major step closer this week, though, with an order of 65,000 laptops coming in from one of Colombia’s major coffee-growing regions.
At this week’s IFA expo in Berlin, electronics maker Casio is showing off a prototype 6 megapixel camera which can shoot full-resolution images at an astonishing 60 frames per second—a speed Casio is touting as the fastest in the world, for the moment. Right now, the burst mode can only be sustained for a little over about half a second—35 images—but it’s a rate much faster than other digital still cameras and certainly faster than the human eye. The camera can also shoot VGA-resolution movies at 300 fps in Motion JPEG format, enabling possibilities like clear, ultra slow-motion movies, a capability previously limited to pro-level video gear.
Everyone wants to be an insider, and you can be one too! Choose your poison: sign-up for our Newsletter, join us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. Do all three and you'll be swimming in the the latest news, reviews, videos and more gadget goodness!
Become a DT soldier! Join us on Facebook and share the best news, guides, videos and other cool information directly with all your friends. Some might even thank you for it!
Join the thousands and follow the best of us on Facebook.
Do you like information in small snippets? Then our Twitter feed is just for you. Follow Digital Trends and you'll be able to catch up daily on our latest content, or even interact directly with our team. Tweet Tweet!
Join the thousands and follow the best of us on Twitter.
That’s Right, Sign-up For Our Monthly Random Prize Drawings and You Could Be That Winner.
