Gadget Travel Guide Part I: Keeping Powered
Power is the pulsating lifeblood of every gadget, and unless you find away to keep the battery cells in your army of electronic gizmos topped off, all you’re looking at is a black screen. Though advances in battery technology and more efficient circuitry have done wonders to keep your gadgets alive for longer in recent years, keeping them juiced up on longer trips can still be problematic. Here a few simple tricks to make sure your digital life doesn’t come to a grinding halt right as you need it.
Turn off features you don’t use
Tag Archive: Yen
Travel Tips: Keeping Gadgets and PCs Powered
Message to all CE Manufacturers: Ditch the Gloss Black Finish
I received a radio here at the office lately that had a pair of white gloves packaged alongside it. Butler-style, valet-style, Michael-Jackson-style gloves… explicitly to handle the radio.
“Please unpack your cubo elements with the gloves provided…” the manual instructed.
It wasn’t studded in diamonds, exceptionally delicate, or even slippery. It was just gloss black. And the surface collected fingerprints like a murder weapon on CSI, thus the point of the gloves.
Sony Officially Drops PSX prices In Japan
“The company quietly dropped the price of the low-end PSX system, which incorporates a 160Gb hard drive, to 44,800 Yen (333 Euro), while the high-end system, boasting a 250Gb hard drive, will nowhave an RRP of 59,800 Yen (444 Euro).
These latest drops shave 15,000 Yen (111 Euro) off the low-end system’s price tag, and 20,000 Yen (149 Euro) off the high-end one – but when combined with some earlier price drops, which also happened without fanfare a few weeks ago, the cut is even more drastic.”
RealNetworks Offers College Music Discounts
From RealNetwork’s press release:
RealNetworks, Inc. today announced agreements with the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota to offer its award-winning Rhapsody Internet jukebox service to students starting this fall. The agreements, which will give more than 80,000 undergraduate and graduate students deeply discounted access to Rhapsody, are the first the company has signed within the higher education community. The service will be available this fall as part of first-year pilot programs at each university.
Nintendo GameCube Profits Double
“The Kyoto-based company reported net income of 22.6 billion Yen for the three month period ended June 30th, almost twice the 11.5 billion Yen figure which was reported in the same quarter last year.
Shipments of the GameCube during the quarter stood at 650,000 units, compared with 80,000 units a year previously, while 2.3 million units of Game Boy Advance hardware were shipped in the quarter. Despite this, revenues from hardware sales dropped by 13 per cent year on year to 39.5 billion Yen due to lower price points.”
New Panasonic LCD Projector Supports WiFi
Set to go on sale in Japan near the end of April, the 400,000 YEN device is only 2.2kg and has some amazing featres.
The TH-LB10NT mobile projector is the first in the world to support wireless connections to up to 4 PCs simultaneously. Also, using a wireless load dispersion technology independently developed by Matsushita, the projector includes the ability to display and operate the 4 PC’s screens simultaneously, through the function called “Multi Live Mode.” This means that one can conduct presentations from each PC without having to change PCs, or even clown around with cabling. The wireless standard 802.11b is used, and AES encryption is supported.
EA Commits To Sony’s Portable PSP System
“I would imagine we would do something between eight and 12 PSP titles in the fiscal year (2005),” EA chief executive Larry Probst told the conference call, although the company did not reveal whether it planned to support the device with launch software when it arrives next Christmas.
EA expects PSP to be released worldwide in late November or early December, a timescale which is in line with Sony’s own official projections, and anticipates that around 3 million units of the device will be shipped by the end of Sony’s financial year in March 2005.
Matsushita Ends Production Of Q
The attractive silver Q system was widely considered to be one of the most desirable pieces of gaming hardware on the market when it first launched, and Nintendo was quick to latch on to the appeal of the Q by launching its own silver hued GameCube.
The price of the system has fallen significantly since its initial launch in 2001, however, and it now costs a mere 34,800 Yen (
Sammy Buys 22.4% Stake In Sega
Sammy has hinted that it may make Sega into a subsidiary in the future.
The purchase, which is being made for some 45.33 billion Yen (
Sony drops PSX features to meet Xmas launch
The PSX, which is set to launch in Japan on December 13, features DVD playing and recording abilities, a hard drive video recorder, a PlayStation 2 console and a media centre for handling music, image and video files.
However, the company has now admitted that some of the functionality which was claimed for the device at its unveiling on October 7th will now not appear, due to a rushed production schedule to launch the device for Christmas.
