Death of HD-DVD
February 16, 2008
Its official-the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has ended, and Blu-Ray has emerged as the victor. Things looked pretty bad for HD-DVD when Blu-Ray began dominating sales worldwide, and things got even worse when the majority of Hollywood studios announced they would be using Blu-Ray technology instead of HD-DVD. The final nail in the coffin came when Wal-Mart, the notoriously huge global retailer, announced yesterday that it would stop selling HD-DVDs this coming June. And today, Toshiba has finally announced that it will end production of HD-DVD systems and technology. Blu-Ray has emerged on top; but where does it go from here? And what does this all mean for the consumer?
Blu-Rays will succeed the DVDs of today much like the DVDs replaced the VHS tapes of the 1990’s. Slowly but surely, the Blu-Ray section of stores will expand, and the DVD section will shrink. Studios will offer movie releases on both DVD and Blu-Ray, and then eventually just Blu-Ray. Portable Blu-Ray players will be released, and laptops will become compatible with Blu-Rays, perhaps even becoming incompatible with DVDs altogether. Sony backed the winning horse when it picked Blu-Ray technology to produce its games with, and the successor systems to the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 will reflect this. The 360’s successor will no longer play games on HD-DVD, and will instead play Blu-Ray ones, as the PS3 does already. The future looks bright for Blu-Rays…unless it is eclipsed by downloading.
This is Kolametal, signing off.
Polymer Readius: E-book reader and a phone
February 14, 2008
Read about this in Popular Science a few months ago, recently came across an article about it on another blog. Enjoy.
Polymer Vision is a company spun off from Philips. Its claim to fame is the Readius, an e-book reader which is also a mobile phone. Though it has been around for more than a year, there’s renewed interest in it because it will finally be shipping in 2008. We tracked down the company’s booth at the GSMA Mobile World Congress to learn more about this device.
The primary purpose of the Readius is to act as an e-book reader. Even though the display resolution is pedestrian at 320×240 pixels, the fact that it can be rolled up allows it to be much larger than regular mobile phone displays. The 5-inch gray scale display uses power only when it is drawing an image, which means once your page is loaded, your battery won’t be sapped as you are reading what’s on the screen. We found the display to be very sharp and easy on the eyes, just like real paper with no uncomfortable glare that LCDs can sometimes give. 
The main menu is divided into six rows on the screen, each one selectable using the touch-sensitive buttons found on the unit’s body. The main categories are RSS feeds, e-books, messages and emails–all text-heavy items. The row of touch-sensitive buttons also acts as navigation control. Depending on whether you slide your finger upward or downward, you can move between pages. From what we observed, there is no smooth scrolling, so you can’t read a page like you do on a computer text window where you can pull a navigation bar on the right. We also found that the pages take a while to refresh, which could explain why it’s more efficient for whole pages to load at one time instead of allowing smooth scrolling.
As a mobile phone, the Readius may not be able to meet everyone’s expectations. While it does have the latest connectivity features like HSDPA and Bluetooth, the form factor of this handset makes it a little hard to use. For example, you can’t really have a decent voice conversation with the Readius without using a headset. You can synch your contacts into the device, but if you want to punch in numbers, you’ll need to use a virtual keypad.
Another thing: What could potentially be a deal-breaker is that you can’t conveniently reply to emails and text messages because there is no easy way to enter text. This could, we reckon, be solved by using a separate Bluetooth QWERTY thumbpad. But that’s one more thing to carry, a proposition that won’t go down well for many. A representative from Polymer Vision also told us the company is developing speech-to-text software for text input, but this was not available for a test run at MWC.
The Readius has a battery that is not user-replaceable. A microSD slot is onboard for memory expansion. As of now, Telecom Italia is the only operator that has a publicly announced deal to carry this handset later in the year. We understand that Polymer Vision is in talks with some companies in Asia. These are in countries with established 3G networks, although the representative could not be more specific as discussions are still ongoing.
As an e-book/newspaper/RSS reader, the Readius is an excellent proposition, thanks to its compact form factor and ability to sync with feed providers over the air using its cellular capabilities. As a mobile phone, we think it still needs a bit of work. The unit we saw was far from final, and Polymer Vision still has half a year to make changes before shipping. Hopefully, we will see a much improved version when it gets into the hands of consumers later this year.
Source: CNET blogs
This is Kolametal, signing off.
Website of the Month
February 12, 2008
This is a new monthly feature I will be trying out. Each month, I will post a cool or interesting website I’ve run across. So for February 2008, the website of the month is…
Cracked.com
http://www.cracked.com/
Cracked is a video and humor site, responsible for Youtube videos like Internet Party. Also, every other day visitors are treated to the “News on Cracked” feature, which provides a Jon Stewart-esque take on the news of the past 48 hours. Yesterday’s News on Cracked: http://www.cracked.com/video_15896_botox-writers-strike-have-in-common-news-on-cracked-21108.html Cracked.com also allows users to participate in several contests, usually involving who can Photoshop the best picture or write the best caption for a picture.
But most of Cracked’s humor comes from their daily lists of things. Some examples include 9 Most Racist Disney Characters, 7 Viral Videos You Didn’t Know Were Staged, 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You, If Banner Ads Were Forced to be Truthful, etc., etc. If you haven’t checked out Cracked, I would highly suggest that you do. Its always good for a few laughs.
This is Kolametal, signing off.
