Gizmodo.com
Ah, but you see, it's not a console, it's a game receiver service. Well, crazy or not, the Phantom's going to have a 40gb hard drive upon which you will store games that you have downloaded from your broadband internet connection. Perhaps the weirdest thing of all is the "controller" - if you can call it that. Apparently you'll be able to play multiplayer with the Phantom against fellow gamers on their PCs. Microsoft refused to develop a keyboard, insisting that the Xbox was for the livingroom, damn it, and no one uses a keyboard in the livingroom.
PC crammed into a handheld case, powered by a Via Eden 533 MHz chip with 128MB of ram and a 20GB hard drive. Not only that, but the form factor looks horrendous, with an immobile screen that juts up in such a way as to prevent any sort of easy storage (which might be important in a portable gaming device, I think). Who the fuck do these people think are going to make games for these 1823192837 different devices?
The first, the X505, is a 185 lbs featherweight with a 11GHz Pentium M, and averages (it's wedge-shaped) only a half-an-inch thick. The big mammajamma of a laptop is the VAIO A series, with a wide-screen 1,920 by 1,200 17-inch display, TV tuner, and built-in DVD burner all wrapped around the latest Pentium M (Dothan, the Intel chip we like) chipset. Prices on the A series climb to as high as $2,800, while the X505 series prices even higher--all that small technology costs $3,000.
MovieBox, that makes a great case for why college kids should stop smoking pot. Geoff wants to build a digital film distribution system that's like iTunes Music Store for movies, basically, and while is ideas are fine, technologically, he never quite explains to us how the movie industry will shake off fifty years of encrusted paranoia to embrace something as piratey as digital distribution. The MPAA is old, Geoff, and sort of sketched out by change and new ideas, and they won't deliver movies over the internet for the same reason you can't convince your dealer to deliver to you: it's a good idea, but why should he have to change when you keep buying his product? Besides, even if Apple or someone wanted to get in the movie business, the MPAA would just pull the same sort of bullshit scare tactic/price hike/DRM customer cockpunch game that the music industry continues to do, despite the fact that people want to buy their product for a fair price/use.
Just a few days ago, see, Intel made modest headlines when they announced plans to scrap future Tejas and Jayhawk roadmap (the next iterations of its Pentium4/Xeon architecture) to instead build a dual-core version of its wildly popular Pentium M chip. Don't let that news slide past without notice--Intel essentially said, "We blew it," and have conceded the next 6 to 18 months of innovation to AMD and others. Now add into that news that Michael Fister, head of the Itanium project is leaving, and, well, crazy things are afoot.
Down the line, the green Mitsubishi V401D has a 2-megapixel camera with multiple lens covers, plus powers up the camera as soon as it is flipped open. An SD card slot boosts internal storage, should it be needed. The brown V401SA is from Sanyo, with a 13 megapixel camera, built-in FM radio, and 12MB of on board memory. The baby pink V402SH is a Sharp handset, with a terrestrial analog TV tuner and a 13-megapixel camera. The LCD can be flipped around to use a camera viewfinder when closer, too. The orange V601T is the Toshiba karaoke phone we talked about a couple days ago, with the T4G graphics accelerator and, once again, 13-megapixel camera. Finally, the silver V602SH stands out as the world's first handset to feature an optical 2x zoom for its 202-megapixel auto-focus camera, as well as the ability to connect to a TV to display pictures. All in all, some pretty hot phones (especially the V602SH), but sadly only available in Japan through Vodafone for now. I bet we see an optical zoom camera in the States before the end of the year.
First of all, Alienware's system is two things, really: the X2 motherboard, based on Intel's Tumwater chipset that includes two PCI-Express slots (PCI-Express is essentially the new hot version of AGP), and the 'Video Array' technology, which somehow harnesses the power of two video cards working in tandem that Alienware is claiming will result in performance gains of up to 50% over a single-card solution. It's not an unheard of trick--the old 3dfx VooDoo 2 had a dual-card mode--but from what little I grok about modern pixel shaders and the like, it's not possible for the Video Array to do the same ol' SLI "line for me, line for you" sharing that the Voodoo did. If any hot shot game programmers would like to explain to me how they think this could be working, I'd be happy to listen.
Not only is this a solid progressive scan player, but it can play files burned to CD and DVD+R in most major formats, including DivX (3/4/5), VCD, SVCD, ASF, and XviD. The only complaint most people seem to have is its inability to play subtitles from external SRT files, but unless you watch a lot of anime or foreign flicks without the subs burned it, you'll probably be able to live without it. Oh, and it can be region unlocked with the remote--no firmware hack needed.
Also, and I don't recall where I heard this, but some are saying that Infinium is claiming not to have been able to get a broadband connection to the floor, so they weren't demo'ing their 'games downloading service' (sort of the whole point of the Phantom). That doesn't bode very well at all, especially when plenty of other booths had broadband without issue.
Even when the PC is powered off, the box can be used as a home stereo, playing CDs and even MP3s, all controlled by the snazzy front-mounted LCD panel. Unfortunately, the included remote has very poor range and no ability to function as a mouse (for those lazy, kick back Freecell sessions), nor does the unit, best suited for duty as a Home Theater PC, have integrated TV tuners or capture card. All in all, it's a nice box, and worth considering if you want to build a small form factor PC with a few extra bells and whistles, but it looks like MSI needs to do a little more work to really make it a capable all-in-one unit.
If you keep most of your photos online and just need to pop out a small print now and then, the $180 DPP-EX50 looks worth considering, with a small desktop footprint, great print image quality, and direct printing from CF or MemoryStick Pro cards. Sony even squirts a layer of laminate called 'SuperCoat 2' on the finished prints which protects them from fading, smudges, and liquids.
While some have questioned the need for that many tuners, saying there's rarely more than two shows that interest a single person on at once, one of the readers at PVRBlog had the same idea that came to my mind when I heard the news. Part of the HDTV 'idea' (although not part of the current official spec, to my knowledge) is to allow broadcasters to send multiple camera angles (you know, like in porn DVDs! If a single event is being broadcasted from three or four angles, seven tuners recording seven streams doesn't seem that superfluous at all.
Tapwave Zodiac image Tapwave, makers of the mobile gaming PalmOS PDA the Zodiac have pushed out their E3 news, and while there aren't any real bombshells (some news games here and there), it is good to hear that retailer CompUSA will be carrying the device in its brick and mortar stores. The Zodiac isn't a bad device, but it needs to get out there and make a little more noise if it hopes to gain some ground before the Nintendo DS/Sony PSP waves come crashing in.
|
http://csua.com/feed/