This has to be pretty close to my ultimate gadget - robots and beer all rolled into one. I know this video has been around a while, but I think it’s super cool, so I’ll cover it again ;)
According to Slash Gear the Asahi Robocco Beerbot can hold six brewskis in it’s refrigerated belly, just enough for a quiet evening in but the kicker is the $799 price tag. Also I’m not too sure about the frothy head that it produces but hey a beer’s a beer!
All Asahi need to add is a popcorn maker or a may be a small pizza oven and we’re set for the evening!
The guys at Sony unleashed a new range of Bravia HDTVs on Wednesday. The range starts with a 50 inch ‘baby’, the KDS-50A3000 and stretches up to a 70 inch ‘big boy’, the KDS-Z70XBR5. The cabinets on these suckers are at least 20% thinner than last year’s offering according to Sony’s press release.
“Going bigger is not a compromise with Sony SXRD micro-displays,” said Randy Waynick, senior vice president of Sony Electronics’ Home Products Division. “With slim cabinets, advanced features like high frame rate and full HD 1080p resolution, SXRD TVs give consumers who want big picture impact exactly what they have been looking for.”
All models include Sony’s Motionflow 120Hz high frame rate tech, boast 1920×1080 res, and using Sony’s Digital Reality Creation-Multifunction tech can upconvert ordinary TV signals into ‘near-HD’ quality. How much of a dent in your wallet will one of these babies cause, or should I say how big will your personal loan be?
The KDS-50A3000, KDS-55A3000 and KDS-60A3000 models debut in August for about $3,000, $3,300 and $3,500, respectively. The KDS-Z60XBR5 and KDS-Z70XBR5 ship this fall for about $5,000 and $6,000 respectively.
With September bringing the Rugby World Cup and the NFL to our screens looks like these suckers will arrive just in time for the dedicated sports fan!
With Hitachi announcing their portable 250 GB this week, Western Digital bounce back and announce their own 250 GB portable, slip in your pocket, hard drive. As noted over at DailyTech although the WD 250GB offering rocks in at US$50 under the Hitachi price, it is a good inch longer than the Hitachi and most importantly doesn’t have the ‘go faster’ stripe down the side ;)
So as usual you pay for what you get, although with a saving of US$50 I’d be happy with a larger option, I’ll just have to buy trousers with extra large pockets!
With Microsoft bringing you the Digidesk, a PC in a desk, here’s the reverse from ASUS, a desk around a laptop. Whilst funky wooden laptops are nothing new, I think that they do look super trendy and would certainly turn heads down at the local Starbucks! I wouldn’t be so sure about placing my coffee cup so close to the keyboard though. One thing to note is that the mousepad looks wooden too, touch sensitive wood eh? Very clever ASUS ;)
There appears to much ado about the latest cellphone offering from HTC called ‘Touch’ in the tech blog world at the moment. It’s being touted as a potential competitor to the iPhone and with its whizzy ‘TouchFLO’ technology you may think that HTC are onto something here. Certainly a few sites believe so
HTC Corp. has just launched the HTC Touch, a smartphone whose fingertip-oriented control system was clearly created to compete with Apple’s iPhone.
However I’m not so easily convinced, sure the Touch looks good in ‘wasabi’ and ’soft black’ colour choices but what about the numbers, how does it really stack up against the iPhone. Well let’s take a peek at them shall we?
HTC Touch
iPhone
Screen size
2.8"
3.5"
Screen res
240 x 320
320 x 480
GSM
900, 1800, 1900
850, 900, 1800, 1900
Camera
2 Mp
2 Mp
Talktime
5 hours
5 hours
Size
100 x 58 x 14mm
115 x 61 x 12mm
Weight
112g
135g
Memory
1GB microSD
4GB or 8GB
Sure the Touch is smaller and lighter but at the guts of it there’s less memory for your tunes and less visual display for your vids. The final kicker, how much moola will I have to part with to be Touched? It will sell in Europe for 449 Euros which is about US$600, the price of an 8GB iPhone. Hmmm, brave try HTC but I don’t think Apple execs will be Touching the alarm button with this release. Roll on June 29th.
Hitachi have unleashed a new range of external USB hard drives, with a 250GB portable and a massive 1TB, err, non-portable version. Smaller versions are also available with the 160GB portable rocking in at US$140. All the drives feature USB 2.0 connectivity with the portable versions sucking their power from your PC.
I decided to do a little head to head comparison of the 160GB portable against cheaper competitors to see what I was getting for my dollar.
Sony have slashed $100 off the price of their Blu-ray player the BDP-S300. This price cut makes the BDP-S300 cheaper than a PS3, which was the cheapest device to view Blu-ray movies on. It’s possible that Sony were losing too much money to customers purchasing PS3s just to watch movies as the PS3 was being sold at a loss. They will be hoping that those customers will now purchase the player rather than the game console.
However at $500 the player is still more expensive than an HD DVD equivalent. For instance the Toshiba HD-A2 is available at Amazon for a mere $250 although this offer runs out mid June. But even after the offer it’s list price should be $400.
So the BR vs HDDVD war is heating up with player manufacturers and movie studios divided. The loss-making PS3 was obviously a brave gamble by Sony and they are now trying to re-coup their losses, but it still looks as if HD DVD has a slight advantage.
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