Nokia has just put up a flash demo of the latest in its N-series phones, the N96 which is slated for release sometime this quarter. Like we already know, the N96 sports a dual-slide design, a 2.8-inch screen and supports high-quality videos in various formats. In addition the N96 also features a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, flash, video light, video recording at 30 fps, A-GPS for geotagging of photos and 16MB of internal memory.

As this seemed to be not an official announcement, expect Nokia to delete the flash demo once this news spreads out. If you don’t get to watch it, don’t worry because like what happened with other Nokia mobile phone models, once a flash demo leaks out, and Nokia deletes it, for sure Nokia will issue an official announcement in no time at all. Also, rumor has it that the N96 will retail in the ballpark of $870.

Via [SlashPhone]

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by Thomas Ricker, posted Jun 30th 2008 at 7:26AM
Matrox just announced er, last week, it’s new M-Series of graphics cards powered by the industry’s first QuadHead GPU. All the PCIe X16 cards offer 512MB of graphics memory and support up to 4x widescreen monitors (DVI or analog) simultaneously as one large desktop or as independent resolutions. The cards can connect a pair of monitors at a max digital resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 or just 1,920 x 1,200 if you’re looking to go quad. What, you’re not still getting by with just a single display are you? Look for the M-series to go retail before September is through.

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Filed under: Desktops, Displays

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You know, when I got a MacBook with an 80GB hard drive it seemed huge. But after about five minutes of BitTorrent shenanigans, I realized my naiveté. I also realized that offloading files, especially music files, to an external drive is problematic.

The point of a notebook is portability, and hooking up a USB drive just to listen to podcasts in the kitchen (what can I say, Danny, Jose and Dylan; your soothing voices stop the mayonnaise splitting every time) is a pain. What I need is something like Maxtor’s Central Axis, a one Terabyte NAS (Network Attached Storage). It has a gigabit ethernet connection to keep speeds up near those of a local drive, and two USB ports to add further storage when you need it.

And even if you are not hooked into the network via CAT5, you can still get your media wirelessly when whipping together eggs and oil in the evening (via a Wi-Fi router). It’ll even stream movies to your X-box or PS3 without a computer in between. The price is a not unreasonable $330, available July.

Product page [Maxtor via Uncrate]

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Yesterday I took a trip to the Deutshes Technikmuseum Berlin, an oddity of a place containing all manner of weird and wonderful German technology, from a yard full of locomotives to an exhibition on cutlery and plates from railway dining cars. Unlike many science museums, the DTB doesn’t have a whole lot of interactive exhibits – just a few push buttons here and there – but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t full of screaming kids on a Sunday.

What it does have, though, is an amazing collection of historical German camera gear. The exhibit is full of retro gadgets, as you’ll see below, but the most interesting to me were the bisected lenses and cameras, the insides of which show the precision of a CAD drawing. Read on to see sawn-off gadgets, the origin of digital cameras, and a secret doorway just for horses.

This is a lens from Leitz, made for Leica rangefinder cameras. You can see the lens elements, which look a little rough due to having been sliced in half. The amazing thing here, though, is the mechanical wizardry going on inside. This lens is from the thirties (or so my badly scribbled notes tell me), and contains an astounding amount of intricate machining, more akin to a watch than a lens. While there were no modern versions on display, I would expect that a Leica lens looks much the same today.

Here’s another. Bigger and simpler. I think this is an SLR lens.

One more, and I think it’s another Leica (the font on the ƒ-stop scale looks familiar). Check out the huge block of glass second from the top: It’s a wonder any light gets through to the film.

This exhibit shows lots of manly long lenses, and – with the shots of footballers in the background – the glass was almost steaming up with testosterone. I’m not sure which one I like best. In terms of utility, I’d pick the third from the right, which looks like it would double as a handy bludgeoning tool if I were ever caught snapping through my neighbor’s window.

The last internal shot, this one shows the leaf shutter for a 1932 Voigtlander Bessa. Instead of the focal plane shutter we’re used to these days, the leaf shutter is actually inside the lens. They don’t give such high speeds as a focal plane shutter, but they have one big advantage: Because they open all the way up, you can use a flash at any speed.

This is Agfa’s ePhoto 1280, an early attempt at a digicam. The camera, made in 1997, shows just how far we have come in a decade. These are the specifications, cribbed from the excellent DP Review: 0.7 Megapixels (1024 x 768), maximum 1/500 sec shutter speed, ƒ2.8 maximum aperture (actually better than a lot of cameras today), a 38-114 mm (3x) zoom and a 2″ LCD. The 1280 (the name I think comes from the maximum interpolated resolution of interpolated: 1280 x 960 pixels) shipped with a SmartMedia memory card boasting a huge 4 Megabytes. I guess some things haven’t changed.

Lastly, this is the door at the end of the corridor. “Stairs for Horses”. WTF? I tried the door and it was locked, so we’ll never get to meet the equine gadget-fiends that might use this exclusive entrance.

Museum page [DTMB]

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Small business owners who have domains registered through Yahoo! are in for an expensive shock come July. The company have decided to up their annual fees by 350% taking them from US$9.95 to US$34.95.

Yahoo! hasn’t hidden the fact the fees are increasing and has sent e-mails to those coming up to renewal at 90, 60 and 30 day intervals before payment is due. The reason for the increase has been put down simply to cost. Yahoo! are putting prices up to match how much it actually costs them to offer the service.

Comparisons with GoDaddy.com and other competitors are also being laid to rest by Yahoo! saying that it is not their core business and therefore can’t match those lower prices. But, in order to continue to attract new customers Yahoo! will offer first year fees at US$9.95 increasing to US$34.95 after that.

The decision has predictably been met with anger by some, with one blog called “The Big Yahoo Domain Rip-Off” repeating the wording of the e-mails Yahoo! are sending round to customers. It does clearly state the fact the price is going up, but also contains the following:

Please note that the billing center will not reflect the new $34.95 domain-renewal price until July 1. Until that time, you will continue to see the old renewal price next to your plan.

Meaning some users who do not read the e-mail, but do check their account, will not realize the new charge is being applied.

Read more at CNET.com

Matthew’s Opinion
That is a huge increase Yahoo! are applying and their reasoning, if true, means they have been making significant losses on their registration business for some time.

To argue that it costs them more because it is not their core business also seems like an excuse. With Yahoo! being the size that they are the business they get from domain registration must be significant. They should be able to compete on price with competitors and really it should be a case that if they can’t, why can’t they? Then the department handling domains should solve the problem.

Domain registration can lead to businesses spending more money with the company they use to register. This move by Yahoo! makes it look like they really aren’t interested in this area and the introductory lower price of US$9.95 will backfire when customers leave after a year.

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Snackfood giant Mars is teaming up with IBM and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to understand the cocoa genome – the hereditary information encoded in its DNA. The project will see Mars spend US$10 million in an attempt to understand the cocoa plant seed and hopefully solve a number of problems and improve chocolate.

The seeds are located in batches of between 20-60 in the fruit, called cacao pods, produced by the plant. But the plant can suffer badly when hit with black pod fungal diseases and one of Mars’ hopes is to minimise its affects with what it learns from this project. However, it also aims to find and understand the flavor genes allowing for more tasty chocolate to be created.

Surprisingly, Mars will make the information it uncovers public, allowing competitors to benefit from the work carried out. Howard-Yana Shapiro, global director of plant science at Mars commented:

For us the fact that Hershey [Mars’s competitor] has similar information that every other chocolate company in the world has, that’s fine

The work will be carried out with the aid of IBM’s Computational Biology Center in New York and will benefit from previous research done through the Human Genome Project, which managed to map the very complex human genome in just 13 years.

At this time Mars have not commented on whether the research could lead to genetically modified chocolate entering its products.

Read more at Times Online

Matthew’s Opinion
I am surprised Mars are willing to share the information freely, but in this case it seems like the combating of disease and better yields of crops are the main concerns. Ensuring better harvests for the future not only partly guarantees Mars gets the cocoa it needs, but also that competitors don’t go after their existing contracts with farmers.

The use of genetically modified crops is a debate filled with passionate people on both sides of the argument in many regions of the world. Mars is a global brand, so in the current market it would be best for business if it stayed away from genetic modification. What it learns from this project, however, could be used in crops of the future, or utilized for chocolate in areas of the world where it is acceptable to do so.

I am most intrigued to see what they can do once they find the flavor genes. Then the question becomes how good can chocolate really be made to taste?

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by Thomas Ricker, posted Jun 30th 2008 at 4:16AMThe price isn’t the only thing swelling on ASUS’ Eee PC. According to DigiTimes’ proven ASUS sources, bigger Eee PC 904 and 905 models are cueing up for release. In a return to the Eee PC salad days of the big bezel, the new models will slot the same 8.9-inch display found in the 901 into a larger, Eee PC 1000-esque chassis with proportionally larger keyboard. Decisions about battery and storage have not yet been finalized although the new models would be priced similar to the 900 and 901 which they would ultimately replace.

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That’s not much, but it’s a reminder to those who are waiting for the Dell E Series that it is coming soon. A search on Dell.com will yield the following result: “Coming Soon: Laitude E-Family Laptops!”. Yes, that Latitude with a typo… If you don’t know what the Dell E Series is about, go check our previous post on the subject.

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That’s not much, but it’s a reminder to those who are waiting for the Dell E Series that it is coming soon. A search on Dell.com will yield the following result: “Coming Soon: Laitude E-Family Laptops!”. Yes, that Latitude with a typo… If you don’t know what the Dell E Series is about, go check our previous post on the subject.

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We first featured the lotus Sanitizing System about 2 years ago. Since then, maker Tersano, has rolled out a few more products to complement and fill out the line. First up is a baby bottle attachment cleaner. Simple to use - put the kid’s bottles, pacifiers and small toys in and have them cleaned up by the power of ozonated water.

Next up is the battery powered lotus wet mop (pictured). Using 4 AA batteries (use rechargeables, plz) that last a year, the lotus wetmop with the lotus Sanitizer System cleans up your floors nicely without streaks, harsh chemicals or residue. Within 15 minutes, the ozonated water reverts to regular water and you’re left with just clean floors. Clean enough to put that baby and his clean toys on.
Last up is the Toothbrush Attachment, which allows you to get your toothbrushes (source of entirely too many germs) thoroughly cleaned. Remove the basket and you can even clean things like knives and combs.

Gimme!

Price: $19 to $40
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Posted in Gizmo of the Day, Home Automation

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