Sony’s new entry-level Alpha SLT-A37 and NEX-F3 digital cameras were hardly a secret, we first saw pictures of the pair, followed by full specs three weeks ago, but today they’ve been made official. The two cameras are successors to the single lens translucent (SLT) A35 and the mirrorless interchangeable lens NEX-C3.
What you need to know, and what makes them appealing, is that both the A37 and NEX-F3 get a spiffy new 16.1-megapixel APS-C sized sensor, lilting LCD displays and a more ergonomic design with chunkier handgrips. They will also both retail for $599.99 together with an 18-55mm kit lens.
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Google is in full-speed research and development mode with its Project Glass augmented reality eyewear project. When Project Glass was first announced we heralded it as the first step to popularizing wearable computing and Google is hard at work devising ways to make them even more interesting.
A Google patent that has just been published details how a wearable marker, like a ring, a bracelet or even a decal attached to a fingernail may be used to control a head-mounted display (HMD), i.e. Project Glass. The HMD includes an infrared (IR) camera that detects IR radiation reflected from the wearable marker. The wearer can perform different hand gestures, which will then be tracked by the camera and translated to actions. Pretty nifty huh?
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If you are an HTC Sensation owner and the Sense-skinned Android 4.0 experience isn’t your cup of tea then you are in luck. The CyanogenMod team has added the HTC Sensation (a.k.a. Pyramid) to its target devices for CyanogenMod 9 (CM9) nightly builds.
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We’ve been hearing rumors about Apple’s upcoming refresh of its MacBook Pro line for a while now. It’s almost certain that they will feature Intel’s latest 22nm Ivy Bridge processors, but two other long-standing rumors have been that they will have a new thinner Air-like design and high resolution retina displays.
Now according to Bloomberg sources the rumors have been confirmed. Apple is said to be unveiling the new MacBook Pro lineup at the WWDC starting on June 11. The MacBook Pros will have a slim design, retina displays and also feature SSD drives, though they could be coupled with standard magnetic hard drives for larger storage capacity.
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Although HTC’s One smartphone series has stolen the limelight the manufacturer hasn’t forgotten the rest of its lineup. HTC has just announced the Desire C, a new budget Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich device. However the Desire C is no upgrade to the Desire S, instead it’s been scaled down to take its place between the new 3.7-inch One V and the 3.2-inch Wildfire S.
The Desire C is a 3.5-inch QVGA (320×480) device with a 600Mhz Snapdragon processor. As a reminder the Desire S sports a 3.7-inch WVGA (480×800) display and a 1GHz processor, but that position has now been taken by the One V.
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The Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone is said to hit retail stores on May 29th in Europe, but that didn’t stop an Italian blog from getting hold of a boxed unit now, and you know what this means, video action!
The video, which you’ll find embedded below, includes an unboxing of the most anticipated smartphone, well at least for this month, the 4.8-inch Android 4.0 Galaxy S III (SGS3). There’s also a pretty nice size comparison between the SGS3 and the Galaxy Note, Galaxy Nexus (which we’ve reviewed in great length here), Galaxy S II and the HTC One X and One S.
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Fujifilm has just eliminated one reason why we would want to upgrade to the X-Pro1 from the X100 — you can read our in-depth real world review of the latter right here. The camera maker has just announced a new wide angle conversion lens for the Fujifilm X100.
The WCL-X100 conversion lens attaches directly onto the X100 and effectively multiplies the camera’s focal length by a factor of 0.8, converting it from a 23mm (35mm equivalent) focal length to a 19mm wide angle (28mm equivalent).
The wide angle conversion lens is made of four glass elements in three groups and Fujifilm promises comparable image quality as the X100′s excellent fixed lens element. Fujifilm also mentions that the WCL-X100 will have no negative effect on autofocus speed, the X100′s 10cm macro capability and the hybrid viewfinder.
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Japanese have an affectionate bond to the lampyridae family of insects — that’s fireflies for common folk. For centuries they’ve flocked to waterways to watch aquatic insects light-up the night. Well this ancient habit has now taken a modern twist.
As part of the Tokyo Hotaru (which means firefly in Japanese) festival, 100,000 LED-lit “firefly” orbs, were floated along the Sumida river that runs through central Tokyo and empties into the Tokyo bay. The blue LED lights were made by Panasonic and were powered from a photovoltaic cell and rechargeable battery. Don’t cringe yet, they were recaptured downstream using a net.
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We can watch high end camera gear being made all day long. We were awed by the commitment and skill of the individuals at the Canon lens factory and now Leica wants to show us a thing or two of its own.
Together with the Leica M Monochrom, the German camera maker also released a new special edition of its M9-P digital camera the M9-P Edition Hermès. Following on the footsteps of previous special editions, like the white Leica M9-P limited edition the Edition Hermès is a very small run of 400 copies, all hand-made.
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I’ve had the Nexus One ever since it was released and although I’ve moved on to several other smartphones, it has remained my backup device. Unfortunately the Nexus One suffers from a serious hardware fault, the power button will, after a while, require more force to operate and will finally give up, leaving you with no obvious way to unlock or power on your device.
You can surely send it back to be repaired, but after the first fix, my Nexus One suffered from the same fault after a few weeks.
Well there is actually life after the power switch, as long as you know a couple of tricks and first and foremost, how do you actually turn on the smartphone without the power button.
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It’s exciting enough to take one new device out of the loneliness of its factory box and into the world, but how about three? And then how about if those three devices can morph into each other, giving you a smartphone, a tablet and a laptop.
This is the ASUS PadFone, a 3-in-1 device that go from a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED qHD 960×540 smartphone to a 10.1-inch 1280×800 tablet and then dock with a keyboard to take laptop form. The PadFone is a dual-core Snapdragon S4 device running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich that was unveiled early this year at Mobile World Congress. It also has an 8-megapixel camera, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and a variety of other connectivity options, with nothing to be jealous of other high-end smartphones.
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So the rumors were true. Instead of an M10, Leica has just announced a black-and-white only camera, the M Monochrom.
We know that at first look you might think that Leica has gone crazy, but we’ve already gone through the benefits of a black-and-white only sensor camera before. By doing away with the color filter the resulting images are sharper, have better dynamic range and less noise.
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With Instagram on their belts, Android users are slowly, but surely, getting up to speed with their iOS counterparts. Now another iOS exclusive, Flipboard, was demoed running on the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S III.
The app, which pulls together news, your Facebook feed and tweets and presents them in a magazine-style layout, was supposed to be a Galaxy S III exclusive. So the rest of the Android crowd would otherwise have to wait. Well, leave it to the endearing Android developers to leave no wall ubroken. The app has been ripped from a Galaxy S III and the APK file has been posted on xda-developers for all Android users to enjoy.
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Nokia’s 41-megapixel PureView camera module is a thing to behold. The technology that drew inspiration from satellite imaging first found its way into Nokia’s 808 Symbian Belle handset.
The PureView camera module is made up of an oversized (at least according to smartphone standards) 1/1.2 inch sensor and a Carl Zeiss f/2.4 lens. We’ve already seen images of the sensor but it wasn’t clear just how much internal real estate the camera module demanded.
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Audio-Technica makes some pretty awesome audio equipment, like our favorite noise-cancelling earbuds the ATH-ANC23, which we’ve reviewed here. Well the company is now updating its full-sized cans and has just announced the ATH-ANC9 QuietPoint active noise-cancelling over-the-ear headphones.
The ATH-ANC9 headphones improve noise cancelling performance, with Audio-Technica claiming that they can block up to 95% of outside noise. Active noise cancelling headphones include a powered circuit that creates an out-of-phase wave to outside noise that effectively cancels it, you can read more about the technology in our primer here. The ANC9s provide three different selectable noise-cancelling settings, targeted for use in airplanes, trains and buses, crowded places and finally already quiet locations like libraries for even more peace of mind.
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Apple has just released a new update for iOS devices, and that includes the iPad, iPhone and the iPod touch. The update is barely incremental from iOS 5.1 to 5.1.1 but you might want to get it sooner than later since it comes with a number of fixes.
The update brings among other things:
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Now that the 4.8-inch quad-core Exynos Samsung Galaxy S III is official we’re sure you’ll want to see it in action. Well in the following video you can lust after this fantastic new device and get a peek of all its new features. Enjoy!
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No surprises here, the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone is official. The Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich device will now happily take the throne as Samsung’s flagship smartphone and it has been donned with some amazing hardware and software features.
First-off it features a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display with a 720p resolution. This is unfortunately not an AMOLED Plus RGB screen but rather it features the same PenTile Matrix RGBG technology as the Galaxy Nexus. You’ll find a new 1.4GHz quad-core Samsung Exynos 4412 SoC inside that should keep things speedy and a relatively large 2,100mAh battery to power it, and yeah that’s actually a removable one. The Galaxy S III can also do wireless charging.
The Galaxy S III will be offered in three storage capacities, 16, 32GB and 64GB and the ability to add more via the microSD card slot. It has 8-megapixel rear and 1.9-megapixel front-facing cameras with the a 990ms start-up time (they could have just said 1 second), 3.3 frames-per-second burst shooting ability and will also happily pick the best shot out of eight for you.
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