CrunchGear |  |
- NEC to ship Blu-ray powered 3D PC in Japan next month
- B&N launches a Nook iPad app
- Exclusive: The Helio Ocean 3 that could have been
- CrunchGear’s maker bar at TechCrunch Disrupt: assembling MP3 players from scratch
- CrunchGear hits the big time: Our “Getting things built” panel at #tcdisrupt
- fidipidi: a Facebook app for sending real greeting cards
- Effectology recreates the Dr. Who theme
- Y’all spent 4.8 million hours playing Google Pac-Man
- Sony: 3D will really shine once the games start hitting it off
- Greenpeace says Nintendo is the worst company on Earth, tells Dell to clean up its act
- Is the Prince of Persia movie racist?
- OLEDs are the future: Canon buries development of SEDs
- The CrunchGear MakerBar gets underway at TC Disrupt
- Video: Bill Nye The Science Guy (!) explains why 3D movies can make you sick
- New HP monitors look – well, practical
- LaCie’s Rugged Safe external hard drive is both rugged and safe
- Via Labs is showing off its 4-port USB 3.0 host controller at Computex
- Sony announces portable DVD player with LED backlight and 7.5 hours of battery life
- Lens pr0n: The Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 fisheye monster
| NEC to ship Blu-ray powered 3D PC in Japan next month Posted: 27 May 2010 12:21 AM PDT
Valuestar N VN790/BS – that’s the name of the 3D PC that NEC today announced [JP] for the Japanese market. The company’s faster than expected: just last month, NEC teased such a machine in Tokyo, saying it’s likely to ship by October 2010. But Japan will get the PC as early as next month. And it appears to be a pretty cool machine. Buyers will get a 20-inch 3D screen with 1,600×900 resolution and a Blu-ray drive to view content (images and video) stored in that format in 3D. NEC says for DVDs, users will be able to switch between 2D and 3D. Needless to say, the machine accepts 3D content in other forms, too (3D pictures from Fujifilm’s 3D camera, for camera).
Spec-wise, NEC throws in a Intel Mobile Core CPU (no details yet), 4GB RAM (8GB max.), a 1TB HDD, 3W×2ch speakers, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit as the OS. The main unit is sized at 490×362×169mm and weighs 8.6kg. The PC also comes with a pair of glasses (an extra pair will set you back $67), a remote control, an integrated TV tuner, and a wireless keyboard.
NEC plans to start shipping the 3D set at the end of next month (price: $2,450). The company hasn’t said anything yet about international sales plans.
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| Posted: 26 May 2010 09:01 PM PDT
If you’ve been waiting to get the Nook experience on your iPad, your wait is over. Barnes&Noble just announced the availability of their Nook app, available free from the App Store. Nook is behind in the race to ereader hegemony so they’ve decided to add a few iPad specific including eight different fonts, customizable line spacing and margins, different font sizes, and themes. In short, B&N reps said, “It’s a giant canvas.” The app has two book “views:” grid – showing all of the covers and split which shows details of the book on a split screen with the cover. You can also lend books to friends by shooting emails to contacts using the built-in contact book interaction. The app supports in-book search, bookmarks, and syncs among devices. It also supports ePub formats. They also said the Android App is arriving this summer. Click through to read the full release.
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| Exclusive: The Helio Ocean 3 that could have been Posted: 26 May 2010 03:16 PM PDT
Yesterday was a sad day for me, albeit one that was a long time coming. Yesterday, Helio, a wireless MVNO co-operated by EarthLink and South Korea’s SK Telecom, let out its final death cry. As I predicted in March, Virgin Mobile, who had acquired the failing company just two years prior, was pulling the plug on the post-paid side of their service that Helio had become. The lights were dimmed, the blinds were closed, and accounts were terminated. Just like that, Helio was dead. As a small (yet lovely) chunk of our MobileCrunch readers may know, Helio was of some importance to me. On a whim one weekend, long before I became a writer here, I founded a community called Heliocity — which, as you could probably guess by now, was focused on Helio. It was a pretty tightly knit group of 10 thousand-or-so of the geekiest geeks you’ll ever meet, hacking at — and nerding out over — every Helio phone we could get our hands on. That community got me into blogging, which took me to all sorts of industry events, where I in turn met all the people who eventually lead me to my job here at TechCrunch. To celebrate this nostalgia and recognize the rather cool company that once was, I present: the Helio Ocean 3. This is the phone that was to be Helio’s savior; this is their unfinished magnum opus. Prior to today, it was a myth; no one outside of the company had seen it, and the number of people within the company who had seen it could be counted on two hands. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
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| CrunchGear’s maker bar at TechCrunch Disrupt: assembling MP3 players from scratch Posted: 26 May 2010 01:46 PM PDT
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| CrunchGear hits the big time: Our “Getting things built” panel at #tcdisrupt Posted: 26 May 2010 01:36 PM PDT If you haven’t been watching Disrupt today, you’ve missed out. The best panel ever? Ours. I talked to Liam Casey, Adam Hocherman, Chris Hawker, and Bre Pettis about open source hardware, manufacturing, and entrepreneurship in the manufacturing space. I won’t spoil anything for you, but I recommend you watch it.
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| fidipidi: a Facebook app for sending real greeting cards Posted: 26 May 2010 01:30 PM PDT
The first 15,000 people to sign up for fidipidi can use the code 1stCardFree to get their first card created and sent for free! For a variety of silly reasons I don’t really use Facebook, let alone any Facebook apps, so I can’t provide a real testimonial here. If Facebook is your kind of thing, this might be a good app to try.
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| Effectology recreates the Dr. Who theme Posted: 26 May 2010 01:07 PM PDT If you’ve ever watched old-timey Dr. Who, you probably wondered how they made the music for that series. It’s simple, really:
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| Y’all spent 4.8 million hours playing Google Pac-Man Posted: 26 May 2010 12:30 PM PDT
Good job, everyone. Research firm Rescuetime says y’all spent (wasted?) 4.8 million hours playing Pac-Man on the Google homepage since its launch last week. If we convert those lost man-hours to dollars and cents, then you can say the U.S. economy has lost slightly more than $120 million because of Pac-Man. Thanks to the game, the average visitor to the Google homepage spent 36 extra seconds on the site than usual. That sounds about right: I did a quick game and spent no more than one minute chasing ghosts. CNET mentions that many people had trouble turning off the game, so that may account for some of the time accounted for in the survey. That prompts me to ask how many people actually type www.google.com into their address bar, or even click a bookmark icon on their bookmark bar? Like, I though the normal thing now was to simply search from your browser’s built-in search bar? In any event, the game will forever be available on google.com/pacman.
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| Sony: 3D will really shine once the games start hitting it off Posted: 26 May 2010 11:15 AM PDT
“Not a fan of 3D movies? Wait till you play 3D games, that’s when the technology will really shine.” Not an exact quote, but that’s the spirit of what Sony Computer Entertainment Europe President Andrew House said in a recent interview. The idea is that, OK, 3D movies may be just sorta there, but it’s sitting there and playing something like WipeOut HD in 3D where you’ll really gain an appreciation for the medium. Having played several games in 3D at various events over the past few months, allow me to say this: meh. At no point did I play a game in 3D where I reacted like Homer’s mother seeing Joe Namath’s sideburns. That is, at no point did I go, “HOLY SMOKES THIS IS LIFE-CHANGING.” Neat? Sure, it’s neat, but if I never play another 3D game it won’t be so big a deal. Then again, we’re still pretty early in the transition 3D. Perhaps in a few years developers will have figured out how to make the most of the technology. First-gen graphics are always a little wonky. Specific to the PS3, well, we still have to wait for 3D TVs to be affordable enough to start showing up in your local Wal-Mart. We’re a little while away from that yet. I keep seeing the stat that HDTVs are still only in something like 50 percent of homes in the U.S. Considering that unemployment is still quite high, I don’t know if now is the time to depend on people to shell out $2,000 for a TV when they just bought a TV a few years ago… via Bit-Tech
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| Greenpeace says Nintendo is the worst company on Earth, tells Dell to clean up its act Posted: 26 May 2010 10:15 AM PDT
Greenpeace’s relentless march toward reminding us that we’re killing the planet continues. The organization released its annual “Who’s Green?” list yesterday, and Nokia and Sony Ericsson get A+ marks, while Lenovo and Nintendo are, apparently, the dregs of society. Also on the wrong side of Greenpeace: Dell. The Texas-based company found itself on the wrong end of a rather impressive Greenpeace action yesterday. Oh, dear… Greenpeace’s main issue with Dell is that the company promised, some time ago, to eliminate certain toxic chemicals from its manufacturing processes. Dell hasn’t honored its promise, said Greenpeace, so out comes the giant yellow scroll on the Dell building in Round Rock, TX. It should be noted that no company is 100 percent green yet in the eyes of Greenpeace. Nokia is the closest with a score of 7.5/10. The very worst? Nintendo with a score of 1.8/10. Microsoft gets a 3.3/10 and Apple gets a 4.9/10. The entire report is available for you to read here [PDF alert!]. Better make some tea beforehand: it’s a long one.
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| Is the Prince of Persia movie racist? Posted: 26 May 2010 09:00 AM PDT
Is the new Prince of Persia movie racist? Almost certainly not, but that’s the accusation being levied by independent film maker Jehanzeb Dar, saying that the part of The Prince “really needed to go to someone who’s Persian.” So, rather than try to find someone of Persian (or at the very least, Middle Eastern) descent, the film’s producers instead went with a well-known Hollywood actor. Is there anything wrong with that, really? Let’s think this out a bit. Prince of Persia tells the story of Prince, a fine young man who hails from Persia. My guess is that the average American doesn’t know that Persia = Iran. If they did, we’d be hearing the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck railing on and on about how the movie glorifies Iranian civilization, and Real Americans obviously hate everything Iranian. (I’ve never met someone from Iran, but I’m sure they’re nice people.) Anyhow, Dar also said:
Dar’s way over-thinking this. I’m sure the film’s producers were merely thinking, “We need to find a male actor who’s reasonably well-known to the American movie-goer. Quick, intern, go through this list of actors and see who’s available for two months sometime in the next six months. We’ll go with whoever the hell answers our phone calls.” I guess Jake Gyllenhaal, the actor who plays Prince, wasn’t busy. That’s all that happened, people. And another thing, and it’s the reverse of what Dar is saying: why can’t a white person portray an Iranian? Can the audience, which is watching a FAKE SHOW, not handle an actor who doesn’t look like what they think he or she should look like? And why does skin color even matter? Why can’t an actor act? Didn’t men play woman in the time of Shakespeare? What if I, a nerd of Puerto Rican descent (even though I know absolutely nothing about Puerto Rico—I know more about the cultures of World of Warcraft than I do anything about Puerto Rico), wanted to play George Washington in a community theater production of “George Washington Does Some Stuff”? Would the audience not be able to handle that? I’m a great actor, I’ll have you know! We’re all people, folks. Jake Gyllenhaal has as much right to play Prince as does some guy from Tehran. It’s not like the show’s producers called up a giant lizard to play Prince, then I can see an issue.
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| OLEDs are the future: Canon buries development of SEDs Posted: 26 May 2010 08:40 AM PDT
Remember SEDs? Those surface-conduction electron-emitter displays were around for quite a while, competing with FEDs (field emission displays) until Sony decided to pull the plug on the latter back in March last year. That gave one company, Canon, enough of a push to continue to believe in SED. Canon even filed new patents on SED technology in the US in May 2009. But that’s over now (we kind of anticipated this as early as December 2008). Canon yesterday decided to freeze development of SED technologies, mainly because the company was unable to push down production costs to an acceptable level. The plan to establish SED as the next standard for flat TVs also proved to be more difficult than expected because Canon faced a lawsuit based on their work with SEDs in the US (the picture shows a Canon SED prototype from 2008). Toshiba left a joint venture with Canon that was aimed at developing SEDs in 2007 already. Now if only the hardware makers would focus on producing affordable OLEDs (Samsung Mobile Displays’ Sang-Soo Kim said this week he expects OLEDs to be the standard for flat TVs in about five years).
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| The CrunchGear MakerBar gets underway at TC Disrupt Posted: 26 May 2010 08:26 AM PDT
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| Video: Bill Nye The Science Guy (!) explains why 3D movies can make you sick Posted: 26 May 2010 08:00 AM PDT There was a bit of controversy a few weeks ago when Samsung published a note warning people about the dangers of 3D movies. Pregnant women, the elderly, and a whole host of other people were told, in no uncertain terms, to limit their exposure to 3D movies, lest they become sick. What was never explained was why these people, or anyone else for that matter, could become sick when watching 3D movies. Thank God for Bill Nye (and his patrons at VSP, the eye care group). The famous scientist/greatest American ever, in this video, explains why certain people become unwell while watching 3D movies. It turns out that up to 30 percent of the population suffers from something called “marginal binocular vision,” which basically means that your eyes don’t always work together as well as they normally ought to. If the eyes aren’t in complete coordination, then you’re not going to get the proper stereoscopic 3D effect when watching movies. Fixes include taking the 3D glasses off for a moment, closing one eye and then the other briefly, or merely changing the angle at which you’re looking at the screen. And now for “Smells Like Air Pressure.” I daresay I prefer the Bill Nye version to the original Nirvana version. Is there anything like this on TV anymore? Kids today are missing out.
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| New HP monitors look – well, practical Posted: 26 May 2010 07:30 AM PDT
Basically you’ve got four models, at 20″, 21.5″, 23″, and 27″. The 2010i is kind of low resolution, and has a slow response time and (relatively) low contrast as well, so we’ll just strike that one from the running. The 2210m and 2310m (pictured above) are nearly the same, except of course for the slight size difference and a ever-so-slightly slower grey-to-grey time on the 2310m. 1000:1 contrast ratio (and the usual vastly exaggerated 40,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio), 2.5ms response time, 1920×1080 resolution, and a couple integrated 2W speakers. The 2210m costs $220 and the 2310m costs $260.
The 2710m (above; also, that link is kind of janky) has virtually the same specs (and, disappointingly, the same resolution) as its smaller brethren, but costs significantly more at $456 (or at least, that’s what is listed at Amazon (you can get it for $366 though)). With a rather larger pixel pitch, this one won’t give you as crisp an image as the others. My pick for value out of this bunch is the 2210m; it could make an excellent second monitor if you already have a large, high-quality one for your primary.
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| LaCie’s Rugged Safe external hard drive is both rugged and safe Posted: 26 May 2010 06:57 AM PDT
The drive comes in both 500GB and 1TB flavors, but alas neither USB 3.0 or eSATA is available although the drive does rock Firewire in addition to USB 2.0. All the extra security and manly toughness costs a bit more with with the 500GB version retailing for $189 and the 1TB costing $299. It’s obviously up to you if you need the equivalent of the A-Team protecting your data.
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| Via Labs is showing off its 4-port USB 3.0 host controller at Computex Posted: 26 May 2010 06:43 AM PDT
But we still don’t know when this is going to happen. Via hasn’t announced when we’ll actually see this chip make its way into any devices although we are getting in a 4-port USB 3.0 hub for review shortly, but we’re not sure if it contains this Via chip. Guess we’ll have to tear it apart to find out.
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| Sony announces portable DVD player with LED backlight and 7.5 hours of battery life Posted: 26 May 2010 06:25 AM PDT
We have numerous super-light laptops, a plethora of netbooks, and the iPad to choose from. But some companies still produce portable DVD players. One example is Sony, which yesterday in Japan announced [JP] just that, the DVP-FX950. The player has two selling points: a 9-inch LCD screen that features an LED backlight and a battery life of 7.5 hours (up 25% from the previous model). Other than the LED backlight, the screen features a resolution of 800×480 and a viewing angle of 180 degrees. Next to DVDs and CDs, the player also has a USB port, meaning you can plug in a USB stick to view JPEGs or listen to MP3s (other formats aren’t supported through USB). The player, which is sized at 227×170.8×34.4mm and weighs 0.88kg, also has an internal speaker.
Sony plans to start selling the DVP-FX950 in Japan on June 16 (price: $390). The company hasn’t said yet whether the device will go on sale in other markets as well.
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| Lens pr0n: The Nikkor 6mm f/2.8 fisheye monster Posted: 26 May 2010 06:19 AM PDT
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