Sony Goes Super Shiny With Vaio CR Series Laptops

Sony Goes Super Shiny With Vaio CR Series LaptopsSony has officially unveiled their new range of VAIO CR-Series laptops.

Looking shinier than a shiny button with a highly reflective finish, the laptops look absolutely lovely and come in a range of attractive colours, excitedly christened with marketing department-spawned names like, “Blazing Red”, “Indigo Blue”, “Pure White” and “Luxury Pink”.
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Is The Love Affair With Apple Over? WWDC Fans Subdued

Is The Love Affair With Apple Over? WWDC Fans SubduedWatching The Keynote by The Steve at yesterday’s WWDC, Apple Developers Conference in San Francisco, it was notable that the normal level of insane adulation was absent.

Don’t get us wrong, we’re still huge Mac fans, but many times where it was clear that The Steve was expecting at least applause – on past experience, it’s more common for the audience to stand on their chairs whooping as if witnessing the second coming – the audience gave no reaction at all.
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Say Goodbye To Boring Fans With The LED Art Fan

Say Goodbye To Boring Fans With The LED Art FanWhen it comes to what Alan Sugar might angrily dismiss as “useless tut,” this LED Art Fan must be a prime candidate to be fired.
Utilising no less than 42 LEDs mounted on its blades, the LED Art Fan hurtles along at a fair old whack to create an animated image through what the fellas in white lab coats describe as ‘persistence of vision’ – i.e. the process by which your retina retains an image long enough to create the illusion of a solid image.

The notion of a humble fan having memory still strikes us as more than a little odd, but this Chrome Art-Deco number comes stuffed with 5MB onboard storage, letting you keep up to 128 individual images ready for spinning up.
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Apple Releases Safari Browser For Windows

Apple Releases Safari Browser For WindowsThe browser wars just kicked off again as Apple’s CEO announced a new Windows rival for market leaders Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Declaring himself ready to “dream big,” Steve Jobs declared that he wanted his company to expand on the the 4.9% market share currently enjoyed by his Safari browser, which until now has only been available on the Apple platform.
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Apple In Video On Demand Talks With Hollywood Studios

Apple In Video On Demand Talks With Hollywood StudiosApple is knee deep in advanced talks with some of Hollywood’s biggest hotshots as it prepares to launch an online film rental service to challenge cable and satellite TV operators head on.

According to a report in the Financial Times, the company is looking to sign up enough studios to provide a mass of in-demand premium film content.
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Palm “Gandolf” Phone Rumours

Palm has provided a rich source of rumours in recent times, with months of speculation about possible buyouts culminating in the company selling a 25% share to Silicon Valley private equity firm Elevation Partners last week.

Currently doing the rounds of several sites are hot rumours (and a blurry pic) of a new low cost Palm smartphone sporting a new form factor and expected to be available on both Palm and Windows platforms.
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Ericsson Buys Drutt: Gets Into Mobile Content Delivery

Ericsson Buys Drutt: Gets Into Mobile Content DeliveryEricsson has bought 100% of Drutt, a dominant player in providing Mobile Service Delivery Platform’s (MSDP) that is headquartered in Sweden.

This is another purchase by Ericsson who have set themselves up as a provider of complete solutions for mobile operators and content producers who want to have their content distributed over mobile networks.

Ericsson are building a service they call Ericsson IPX which is an end to end service that lets any content producer sell their material through the system, splitting the revenue.

Speaking to senior people close to the division who have bought Drutt say that parts of the system the Drutt has built will fill in a number of functions that they are missing.

Drutt

AVS: China’s H.264 Rival In Testing By China Telecom

AVS: China's H.264 Rival In Testing By China Telecom It’s clear that China like to do things their own way.

The latest in the list is a video CoDec’s, the algorithm that is used to compress/decompress video signals. Much of the world currently uses H.264, but China has developed its own equivalent, that they call AVS, standing for Audio Video coding Standard – an acronym that is bound to cause confusions with the Microsoft-backed AVC.
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Beijing Could Go Wireless: Rumour: WBFA

Beijing Could Go Wireless: Rumour: WBFAIt was mentioned at the World Broadband Forum Asia in Beijing that an unnamed Chinese Government Official has said that they hoped that Beijing will become a city bathed in Wireless before the World Fair arrives in China in 2010.

They also hope for Shanghai to benefit from city-wide coverage too.

We’ll dig around to try and find out more over the next few days.

I’m in Beijing for the Broadband World Forum, so thought it would be interesting to pick stories from the local press on their reporting of technology news.