Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Look out, tweens — Philips has a new line of LCD TVs aimed squarely at your wall / bedroom pedestal. Introduced over in Italy, the Flavors family will initially consist of a 22-, 32- and 42-inch set, the latter of which packs a 1080p panel, 30,000:1 contrast ratio, 5-millisecond response time, 500 cd/m2 brightness and a pair of HDMI ports. The concept here is pretty easy to grasp — each set comes bundled with two interchangeable frames which are reportedly held up by good ole magnetism, and if two just aren’t enough, more can certainly be ordered. Currently, Philips simply has a placeholder page up for the new crew, so we’ll just let you simmer on the prices for now: they’ll be €549 ($803), €799 ($1,168) and €1,199 ($1,754) in order of mention.

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Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Look out, tweens — Philips has a new line of LCD TVs aimed squarely at your wall / bedroom pedestal. Introduced over in Italy, the Flavors family will initially consist of a 22-, 32- and 42-inch set, the latter of which packs a 1080p panel, 30,000:1 contrast ratio, 5-millisecond response time, 500 cd/m2 brightness and a pair of HDMI ports. The concept here is pretty easy to grasp — each set comes bundled with two interchangeable frames which are reportedly held up by good ole magnetism, and if two just aren’t enough, more can certainly be ordered. Currently, Philips simply has a placeholder page up for the new crew, so we’ll just let you simmer on the prices for now: they’ll be €549 ($803), €799 ($1,168) and €1,199 ($1,754) in order of mention.

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Filed under: Cellphones

SkyTerra’s Mobile Satellite Ventures, ICO Global Communications and Qualcomm have jointly announced today a partnership that could have far-reaching implications in the mobile realm. In short, the trio has agreed to “integrate satellite and cellular communication technology in select multi-mode mobile baseband chips,” which will essentially enable handsets to have “ubiquitous mobile communications coverage from anywhere in North America, including areas where traditional cellular service is currently unavailable or unreliable.” The release proclaims that this hookup will lead to satellite connectivity being in mass-market devices, but only time will tell how long it takes for compatible handsets to get adopted by carriers. Unfortunately, we do know it won’t happen prior to 2010, as that’s the planned ship date for the newfangled chips. Thanks for the heads-up, guys — but oh, how the tease hurts us.

[Via PhoneScoop]

Update: Images provided are of Mobile Satellite Ventures’ design concepts.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Portable Video

Movies on flash drives aren’t looking like the next big thing, but Gemalto reckons its approach to getting DVD content on smaller surfaces is different enough to get noticed. In an admittedly bizarre release, the digital security firm has announced a new Smart Video Card for Italian carrier WIND, which “embeds a DVD-compliant optical disc into the card body of a regular SIM card.” The card can store practically any digital content (including video, software or URLs) and can reportedly be played back on any DVD drive. So what, we buy a new SIM card each time we’re looking for a new batch of miniaturized content? Fabulous!

[Via FashionFunky, thanks Bob]

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Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

While we were just able to take a look at Sony’s BRAVIA VPL-VW70 SXRD at CEDIA, it appears that the company is showing Europe a little love with the awfully similar VPL-VW80. The Full HD beamer includes High Frame Rate SXRD panels, a 100Hz Motionflow Dark Frame Insertion system, the BRAVIA ENGINE 2 processing tech and a 2.5-millisecond response time. You’ll also find a 60,000:1 contrast ratio, Advanced Iris 2, electronic panel alignment, two HDMI connectors and a 1.6x motorized zoom lens. Unfortunately, there’s no mention of a price and / or release date, but we’ll go way out on a limb here and suggest you start saving up immediately.

[Via AboutProjectors]

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Filed under: Gaming, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Time flies when you’re having fun, but not when you’re waiting anxiously for a new piece of kit — particularly one that has been delayed numerous times. For Europeans waiting on pins and needles for the release of the PlayTV DVR for PlayStation 3, your time has arrived. Before rushing out to get one, however, might we interest you a short unboxing and a brief overview? No pressure whatsoever, though.

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Filed under: Wireless

While much of the world rallies around LTE, Intel’s still doing its thang with WiMAX. According to Garth Collier, general manager of WiMax at Intel Asia-Pacific, the outfit is gearing up to “start supporting other markets outside of the US at 2.5GHz and in other spectrum profiles.” As it stands, the Centrino 2 chip package supports a version of the technology that uses the 2.5GHz spectrum, and while Mr. Collier didn’t specify which WiMAX profile would be added in 2009, deductive reasoning leads us to believe that 2.3GHz (used in South Korea) and 3.5GHz (used in Pakistan) are in the cards. Beyond that, details are few and far between, but we’d expect to hear something a bit more solid at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

[Via InfoWorld, image courtesy of CNET]

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Filed under: Cellphones

Vodafone expected the Touch Pro to touch down in the UK this month, and sure enough, said expectation has become a reality. HTC’s mighty WinMo-powered smartphone is now available from official UK distributor devicewire, and if you just so happen to use pounds as your primary currency, you can claim one of your own for the eye-popping price of £514.99 (including VAT). We won’t bother converting that into dollars — trust us, you’re better off pretending you don’t know.

[Via coolsmartphone]

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/Worldwide_PCs_in_use_surpass_1_billion’; So, we hear that Planet Earth is home to four billion phone lines. Now it can claim to house over one billion installed PCs — what do those neighboring planets have on that, huh? According to research firm Gartner, the number of “installed PCs worldwide has surpassed 1 billion units,” and it estimates that said figure is growing at around 12-percent annually. Should this trend continue, we’ll be reporting on 2 billion sometime during 2014. It should be noted that this figure accounts for computers in use rather than units shipped, and while the current ratio remains slanted towards mature markets, Gartner expects emerging markets to (expectedly) account for a larger share as we climb to 2 billion. Unsurprisingly, the firm also suggests that around 180 million PCs will be replaced this year, with around 35 million of those hitting landfills “with little or no regard for their toxic content.” Kind of puts a damper on things, wouldn’t you say?

[Via Reuters, image courtesy of Wikimedia]

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

DVD rental kiosks have been lighting up pharmacies and supermarkets across the US, but it seems that UKers and Irish lads / dames will soon have the great, great privilege of interfacing with Movie Booths in the near future. This particular unit doesn’t seem all too different from other variations we’ve seen, boasting a simple touchscreen display and a built-in android tasked with fetching your selected title and spitting it out for a nominal (read: undisclosed) fee. Apparently, trials have been deemed a success in outlets like Tesco, Centra and Applegreen, thus paving the way to see these pop up everywhere by the year’s end. Any chance we’ll see a Blu-ray Disc or two popped in there?

[Via Pocket-lint]

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Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Another month, another BRAVIA. Not that we’re kvetching or anything, though. On the docket today are four new ones from Sony which make up the all new S4000 family. Arriving in 26-, 32-, 37- and 40-inch sizes, the crew showcases Sony’s fresh “draw the LINE” design concept and features a deep piano black finish, clean lines, gently-rounded curves and a swivel base to boot. The largest of the four boasts a 1080p Full HD panel, 24p True Cinema mode and the outfit’s BRAVIA ENGINE 2 signal processing technology, while the other guys get stuck with the original BRAVIA ENGINE and “HD Ready” panels. The whole lot gets a trio of HDMI sockets ,an integrated DVB-C / DVB-T TV tuner and a dynamic contrast ratio at or above 22,000:1. No word on a price / release date, but we’re figuring that they land somewhere in Europe first.

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Filed under: Cellphones

Just a day after we heard that Vodafone was taking the iPhone on a world tour, in comes word that Apple’s darling will be headed to Latin America via America Movil. We aren’t told if the deal is one of exclusive nature, nor were we given a specific launch date, but residents of 16 countries in Latin America will have their shot at latching onto an iPhone sometime “this year.” Huzzah!

[Thanks, Jesus]

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Filed under: GPS

Check it, Europeans — Clarion has just dumped a new duo of PNDs on the market, and they’re both geared up to route you all over your humble lands. It appears that the only major difference between the MAP680 and MAP780 are the actual maps loaded in; the former is available in four regional versions, while the latter features a full 43 European countries. Specs wise, we’re lookin’ at a 4.3-inch widescreen display, text-to-speech, built-in TMC tuner, 3D display of buildings / POIs, lane assistant, Bluetooth (with phone book transfer and audio streaming), a 400MHz CPU, multimedia player and 2GB (MAP780) / 1GB (MAP680) of internal memory. No word on a price or any of that good stuff just yet, but feel free to get more acquainted with the pair in the gallery below.

[Via NaviGadget]

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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

We knew it was coming, and after waiting for quite some time for FreeSat to go from concept to reality, television viewers across the UK can finally indulge. If you’ll recall, a recent survey found that just 5-percent of Europe’s HDTV owners actually bothered to tune into HD programming, but now that number is likely to change. Effective today, 98-percent of the UK can fork out a one-time fee of £49 ($96) to £120 ($234) in order to acquire a FreeSat set-top-box, and after an £80 ($156) installation, users will have subscription-free access to BBC HD, ITV HD (coming soon), Channel 4’s digital service and around 70 other TV / radio channels. Better still, that number is slated to rise to 200 before the year’s end, and unsurprisingly, the launch is expected to boost available high-def offerings in the region. Anyone across the pond have their equipment set up already? How’s the service?

[Thanks, Ivan]

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