Thursday, March 12, 2009

Samsung sneaks Q2 PMP onto the scene with 50 hours of battery life


Looking for a PMP that can hang with you for every last minute of the long weekend, eh? Just in case MSI's MS-5552 is a bit too aged for your tastes, Samsung has quietly introduced a newcomer (the Q2, but not that Q2) which promises 50 solid hours of audio playback on a single charge. Specs wise, we're looking at a 2.4-inch QVGA display, built-in microphone, FM radio module, 8GB / 16GB of flash storage and little else. As for file support, this little bugger will play nice with MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, WMV and MPEG-4, though the lack of WiFi and Bluetooth keeps us from really, truly falling in love. There's no word on a price just yet, but we get the feeling we'll have to snoop around in due time for that as well.

iPhone OS 3.0 is coming, preview on March 17th

9:54 AM by Nitesh Bhatia · 0 comments
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We just got the announcement, iPhone OS 3.0 is coming. Set your clocks, mark your calendars. It's going down March 17th. Apparently, we'll get a sneak peak at the new OS, as well as a look at a brand new version of the SDK. Exciting stuff indeed, and we'll be there live at 10am PST (1pm EST) with the liveblog. Apple's calling this an "advance preview of what we're building," so we're not expecting anything ready to go as of the 17th, but hopefully this will allow developers to start building toward future functionality (hey, how about some push notifications?), and presumably users won't have too many months to wait after that for the real deal.

LG's Rumor 2 escapes rumor phase, goes live on Sprint


Tough luck, guys -- the secret's out. LG's long rumored Rumor 2 has finally launched exclusively on Sprint, bringing with it a slide-out QWERTY keypad, QVGA display, 1.3 megapixel camera, a removable backplate and your choice of Black Titanium and Vibrant Blue shells. As for availability, you can find the Black Titanium at Sprint's website on March 15th, while the Vibrant Blue edition won't hit until March 29th. If you're web-averse, you'll have to wait until April 19th for it to filter out to all Sprint retail channels before dropping your $49.99 (on contract).

[Via phoneArena]

Gallery: LG's Rumor 2 escapes rumor phase, goes live on Sprint

Samsung's HMX-R10 HD camcorder aims for April release


Samsung's devilishly cute HMX-R10 camcorder stole the hearts of many at CES, but ever since, we've been aimlessly wandering about Sammy's website attempting to locate clues on pricing and availability. Thankfully, it seems some answers are starting to surface, and we've only got a month or so before we discover whether these whispers were laced in truth. Reportedly, this pocket-friendly high-def camcorder will be hitting UK streets next month, with early estimates pegging the price at $550. We're told that Americans may have to wait until sometime this summer before they too can indulge, but at least the Britons will be able to test it out beforehand and give you a little heart-to-heart buying advice.

Vodafone's music catalog goes DRM-free for mobiles and PCs


We were wondering (seriously, it has been on our conscience at night) which carrier would be the first to go completely DRM-free in respect to its music catalog, and now Vodafone has stepped in to claim said throne. This week, the operator has inked deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Music to bring tunes to handsets and PCs sans any nasty DRM, and for those who already downloaded DRM-laced files in the past, they'll be able to upgrade to DRM-free without a charge so long as they do it soon. And to think -- something like this would've been stopped cold at the drawing board by record label execs just a few years back. Desperate times call for desperate measures, right?

New iPod shuffle first hands-on

9:47 AM by Nitesh Bhatia · 1 comments
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We just nabbed one of Apple's new button-free iPod shuffles, and in case you were wondering: yes, it's really small. We're gonna play around a bit with the VoiceOver navigation and get you our full impressions in a few, but at first glance we think this is totally usable, especially for the shuffle's sweaty target demographic. Also: it's really small.

Update: In-depth impressions are after the break, along with video!

Gallery: New iPod shuffle first hands-on


Gallery: New iPod shuffle unboxing and close-ups



Setup
Unboxing wasn't the Apple's best, but it was easy enough to get at all three components in there: the shuffle, the earbuds and the USB adapter. Setup was similarly slightly more complicated than the regular iPod, since in addition to requiring an update to 8.1, it required an installation of VoiceOver -- it all happens quite automatically with a couple clicks of automation, but it's an extra step all the same.

The actual formation of VoiceOvers for our tracks and playlists was easy enough that it was actually difficult to even spot iTunes working on it. Since our iTunes library is larger than 4GB, we built a few playlists, set them to sync with the shuffle, clicked sync and were ready to go in seconds. According to Apple, the space used up by the VoiceOvers on the shuffle is "negligible" and doesn't impact that vague "1000 songs" figure.

Usage

Excuse the audio, we had to tape the earbud to our camera mic for obvious reasons (to Apple, anyway).

The controls are harder to use than a traditional shuffle button layout, and it depends on how you wear the shuffle as to whether the placement of the controls on the cord is better than having them on the player. That said, it's really not difficult at all to use even the most "advanced" features here (like playlist browsing) and Apple has essentially made the controls to train you to delve into that functionality.

With the newer iPods and iPhones people are already used to pausing and starting the music with a click, and double clicking for skipping forward isn't much of a stretch. A triple click to skip backwards seems like the silliest gesture here -- and really, would it have been so hard for Apple to put a set of controls on the player? -- but it's not a deal breaker. The track identification and playlist features, however, both being unavailable on the original shuffle, would have required some learning any way you slice it, unless Apple were to add a button or two to the original layout -- something they're none too fond of doing.

Holding the button to hear the track name is simple and easy, and to go to the playlist mode, you just press and hold long enough to hear a beep. After that the shuffle just starts reading off names of playlists, you don't need to keep clicking to tab through them, and a single click sends you to one of the playlists. If you don't hear anything worth jumping to, you don't need to touch anything and the shuffle will return to the music you were playing. Both the song identification and playlist features speak over top of the song you're currently playing, which fades in and out accordingly.

Hardware
The player itself makes the old shuffles like almost giant in comparison. Its featureless face might be a bit odd if it weren't for the fact that your thumb covers the entirety of the player when you hold it. The shiny clip in back is impressively strong, and gravity should have a tough time knocking this off your workout clothes. Though suspiciously small, the off / shuffle / loop switch is easy enough to toggle with a fingernail.

Unfortunately, Apple's biggest mistake here might be with the one thing it didn't change: the earbuds themselves are terrible at staying in most ears, which just doesn't fly for a player that's primarily designed for workouts and those "on the go." It's also a needless hassle to buy an adapter cable to output songs to a stereo or a car -- Apple itself had a hacked cable to demonstrate the player to us with a sound system.

Wrap-up
Still, people seem quite satisfied to put up with this sort of inconvenience and hassle when it comes to Apple, and with design, size and build quality like this, not to mention the welcome addition of VoiceOver, we imagine those third party accessory makers are going to like this new shuffle just fine.

Samsung Q1EX UMPC reviewed, dismissed


Rats. Just when we thought that someone had figured out how to make a winning UMPC configuration for consumers, out comes a review to pan it. While the Samsung Q1EX sounds good on paper with its 7-inch resistive touchpanel with 1,024 x 600 resolution, 1.2GHz VIA Nano processor, 4.5-hour battery, and $775 price tag; Laptop Mag was unimpressed when it came to go-time. Unfortunately, Laptop found text entry to be too much of a chore thanks to the loss of the thumbpad used on previous Q1-series UMPCs and the lack of a digitizer that severely impacts the unit's ability to accurately recognize handwriting under XP Tablet Edition. Boot times were slow and battery life was poor at just two hours compared to the 4.5 hours stated. Sure, you can add a dock with keyboard (pictured) and optional 6-cell battery (bringing the price to $977), but at that point, you'd be wise to look at the latest in wee netbooks offering bigger screens, the same power, and longer battery life at half the price.

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