The BBC is set to revolutionise radio listening with the introduction of a new “visual radio player” this month.
The technology is set to be trialed for a week on Radio 1’s Chris Moyles weekday mornings show (6.30am to 10am) and on the Annie and Nick show on Sunday evenings (7pm to 10pm), and will let users listeners head off to the DJs website and get a load of “complementary visuals.”
The popularity of Blu-ray went ballistic during 2008, with sales and rentals of Blu-ray content discs almost tripling in the US and quadrupling in the UK.
US sales notch up $750 million
Laughing in the face of an overall downturn in the U.S. home entertainment market, the entire Blu-ray Disc market in the U.S. totted up to a hefty $750 million last year, up from $270 million in 2007.
The pen-pushing Eurocrats in Brussels are ready to ban large screen plasma TVs if a new EU standard goes through this spring.
The EU is displeased with the vast energy needs of plasma screens, which are thought to hog four times as much power than regular screens, and produce four times as many carbon emissions.
With the dust settling on last week’s annual CES tech fest, we take a look at some of the gadgets and gizmos that caught our eye.
Top of the pile – and incidentally a recipient of CNet’s ‘Best In Show’ and ‘Peoples’ Voice’ awards – is the hugely innovative and exciting Palm Pre smartphone. Just when we thought Palm were ready to slide into oblivion, they pulled out a stunning new phone with an interface that makes even the iPhone look out of date.
Taking time off from stuffing their faces with turkey and mince pies, nearly 4m Britons waddled away from the dinner table to go online and spend more than £100m on Christmas Day.
According to figures issued by the IMRG, around 3.8m consumers turned their backs on Wallace & Gromit and the Dr Who special to log on and splash out a record breaking £102m online – an average of £26.80 per shopper.
We must admit that our expectations were running low for Palm’s do-or-die press launch yesterday, but we’ve been left blown away by their hugely impressive new Palm Pre handset and WebOS operating system.
Palm Pre handset
Featuring a 3.1-inch accelerometer-sensed 320 x 480 multi touch display with full QWERTY keyboard in portrait orientation, the phone packs in all the features conspicuously absent from previous Palm OS handsets, including 802.11b/g WiFi, GPS with turn by turn mapping, Bluetooth with stereo A2DP and EV-DO Rev. A 3G.
Burger King has releases a rather strange Facebook App – Whopper Sacrifice.
In exchange for you un-friending (burning) your Facebook ‘friends,’ it gives you credit towards a Whopper. Burn ten and they’ll give you a burger in the US.
Apple has done it again with the announcement of their Mac Book Wheel.
The revolutionary design does away with the pesky keyboard that dominate laptops, replacing it with a single ‘wheel,’ as you’ve seen on their iPod products, further streamlining the look of the machine.
As is quoted in the video Steve Jobs says, “People who use keyboards stand in the way of human progress.”
When we first clapped eyes on Sony’s delightfully slick Sony Vaio P subnotebook, we almost cried with desire and want.
The shiny slimline device measures up at a pocket palpitating 9.6 x 4.7 x .78 inches and packs a positively ludicrously lush 1600 x 768 pixel resolution, 8.9 inch display, crammed into a featherweight 1.4 pounds device.
You may well have seen our enthusiastic story on the first viewing of the