Mike Slocombe

Disney to Sell Movies Over Internet
Purveyor of fluffy, family-friendly feature films, Walt Disney has become the latest Hollywood studio to offer movies for sale on the Internet, with a new service offering films via the CinemaNow online service.
CinemaNow, based in sunny Santa Monica, California, has announced that Buena Vista Home Entertainment – Disney’s home video division – will be offering movies on a download-to-own basis for PCs/portable devices on the same day they are available on DVD.
Starting from today, Disney will be offering both new and back catalogue fillums via CinemaNow, with pricing set around the same price as DVDs (roughly $20 for a new release, and $10 for older films.)
Of course, studios tend to have a different concept of ‘ownership’ than the rest of us when it comes to all things digital, and in this case punters still won’t be able to do what they actually want to do, and that’s to burn their downloaded copies onto DVDs.
Instead, the movies can only be copied to a total of three other devices (including laptop PCs and handheld electronic devices) supporting CinemaNow’s copyright-protection technology.
Disney’s shuffle into the world of online film flogging follows a 3rd April announcement by rival studios to offer movies for sale via Movielink, a joint venture owned by big-league competitors Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount Pictures.
Visibly purring with satisfaction, Bruce Eisen, president of CinemaNow, rubbed up against the mic, saying, “The main thing is Disney chose us to be first for them to go out with electronic sell-through.”
“We take that as a real nice vote of confidence,” he added, before trotting off to the litter tray.
A Disney spokesman said their deal with CinemaNow is a non-exclusive one, so they’re free to make similar deals with other online services in the future.
CinemaNow
Disney
6 June, 2006
Nokia’s M-tickets Go Mainstream With Guns’n’Roses
Dandruff shakers looking forward to some geriatric rocking with Guns’n’Roses at the Hammersmith Apollo tomorrow night can forget all about keeping their tickets as a memento after the show.
That’s because the gig is set to be a high-profile trial of the new fangled mobile ticketing technology, where paying punters are sent barcodes to their phones instead of getting scrapbook-friendly paper tickets.
The m-tickets are disappointing looking affairs too, taking the form of a boring barcode and some text with event details.
Powered by technology provided by Nokia spin-off Ticketrush.co.uk, headband-toting rockers arriving at the gig will have to form an orderly queue to get their barcode tickets scanned by door staff.
It sounds nice and modern, but we’re already fostering fears of long lines of disgruntled rockers waiting in line as the door staff try and work out where the reset button is on their scanners.
Moreover, we don’t even like the idea of having tickets on our mobiles. What happens if your battery runs out, or if you delete your text message by accident?
It may save promoters printing costs and make the process of booking tickets all sleek, modern and Metropolis-like, but there are a lot of memories in old ticket stubs and, to misquote Johnny Thunders, you can’t put your arms around an m-ticket.
You can, of course, attempt to grab a personal record of the gig and annoy the people behind you all night by waving your glowing phone in the air.
With luck, you’ll end up with a blocky, distorted set of unrecognisable moving blobs in the far distance obscured by a forest of glowing phones in front of you.
Regardless of what punters want, The Man is pressing ahead for a bright virtual ticket future, with O2 working with technology provider, Mobiqa to provide m-tickets to this month’s O2 Wireless Festival in London – and in their first week, they managed to shift a hefty £100,000 worth of the things.
For kids too poor to get into gigs – and crafty freeloaders – the new m-ticketing may raise the bar for sneaking in free, but a part of us hopes that some clever nerds find a way to beat the system.
Otherwise they’ll never know the joys of our misspent youth, where we managed to get into a gig by the mighty Thin Lizzy by drawing a ticket.
The band were so impressed by our cheek that they signed the well-dodgy tickets after the gig. Try doing that with a chuffing m-ticket.
Ticketrush
6 June, 2006
Scythe PowerWatch Panel For PC Modders
Look, we know there’s something a bit sad about wanting a PC that glows brightly with useless dials, flashing lights and obscure read outs, but we just couldn’t hide our juvenile excitement when we saw this new gizmo from Japanese manufacturer Scythe.
Available in a silver or black finish to match the PC case of your choice, Scythe’s new PowerWatch panel comes with enough buttons and dials to keep Lieutenant Uhuru busy through a Tribble onslaught.
The PowerWatch panel is a bit of a hefty beast (148×84× 71mm deep), hogging two CD/DVD-sized slots on your PC, but you sure get a lot of glowing widgets in return.
The panel is dominated by a large, circular colour LCD display giving readouts for computer temperature (centigrade/Fahrenheit, with up to four temperature sensors supported), fan speed, warning temperature and current time.
As well as the built in disco, the panel also adds two of the new PoweredUSB 2.0 ports and a card reader supporting SD and miniSD cards, MMC, RS-MMC and smart media, Compact flash, micro drive and Memory Stick (PRO and DUO).
Wrapping up the feature set, the Windows Me/2000 and XP-compatible panel also includes a microphone in/ audio out connector.
Pricing and availability to be announced. We’ll take two please!
Scythe [Japanese]
PoweredUSB
In case you hadn’t heard of it before (to be honest, we hadn’t), PoweredUSB is an enhanced form of USB that comes with two additional wire pairs.
These wires get past the current USB power limitations and can carry enough juice to power certain components – thus reducing cable clutter.
That all sounds great of course, but only if enough PoweredUSB peripherals start appearing – and we can’t say we’ve seen many in the consumer maket.
PoweredUSB
5 June, 2006
Suekage SOIOS Panoramic 55-Cam 360 Webcam
Japanese manufacturers Suekage are hoping that their new SOIOS 55-Cam 360’s unique ability to provide panoramic viewing angles and then relay them to 3G phones may make them a hit in the home security market.
The curious looking camera (it looks like an overgrown egg-timer to our eyes) offers three different vision angles; a conventional webcam ‘standard lens’ viewpoint, a panoramic 270 degrees and a complete 360 view. The system employs a CCD camera to take video images reflected on a hyperbolic mirror measuring 55mm in diameter.
Suekage’s omni-directional optical sensor (“SOIOS”) provides an ascending angle of 12 degrees and a descending angle of 50 degrees – measured vertically from the mirror’s focal point – giving a horizontal field of view over 360-degrees.
Well, that’s what their blurb said, and we’re not in the mood to get out a protractor and argue the toss, but that basic principle is: big curvy mirror = 360 coverage.
The webcam hooks up to PCs through a Firewire/IEEE 1394 interface, and images can then be streamed to a website for viewing on the user’s computer or mobile phone.
Danger Will Robinson! Burglar Ahoy!
A newly developed software component (SOIOS +alpha) offers a notification system to send out security alerts.
As soon as the system spots a purloiner in da house, the system bangs out an an e-mail to your PC or mobile phone with the ability to download a 15 second video clip of the bad boy in action.
The advantage of this system is that the webcam’s 360 degree all-seeing eye does away with the need for expensive motorised systems
The disadvantage is in its 0.35 megapixel sensor which is only capable of delivering low quality VGA images. So low in fact that you may only end up seeing unrecognisable blobs for faces on your fancy-pants 360 webcam.
No pricing or availability has been announced yet.
Suekage [Japanese]
5 June, 2006
Sony Alpha 100 SLR Camera Specs Leaked
Some details of Sony’s eagerly-awaited debut into the dSLR market have begun to emerge online.
The Australian Digital Photography Blog website has revealed that Sony’s new Alpha 100 dDSLR will offer 10.2 million effective megapixels and be fitted with an APS-C size CCD sensor.
As previously announced, Sony’s first dSLR camera will use an updated lens mount compatible with Konica-Minolta Alpha/Maxxum/Dynax lenses, with Sony expected to reveal a slew of new Sony G lens using the highly regarded Carl Zeiss optics.
The camera is expected to carry a large 2.5 inch format Clear Photo LCD Plus Screen with AR coating and a resolution of 230,000 pixels.
The bright optical viewfinder comes with a Spherical Acute Matte screen, 20mm eye relief, 0.83x magnification, dioptre adjustment and an interesting EyeStart Auto focus.
This feature – inherited from Minolta -begins autofocus and auto-exposure as soon as it detects your peeper gazing through the viewfinder. Neat
The camera is also rumoured to be incorporating Sony’s Super SteadyShot Picture Stabilisation technology, which employs horizontal and vertical motion sensors located inside the lens assembly area.
Although there’s no firm details of pricing yet, some pundits are estimating a street price of $1,000 (body only) which places it in the highly competitive enthusiast market.
Other leaked details include an Anti-dust protection system (We like these – a lot!), 1600 ISO equivalent, Burst shooting, advanced flash modes and BIONZ Image Processing Engine.
The onboard high-speed autofocus is said to sport 4 focus modes – Single-shot AF; Direct Manual Focus; AF Automatic; AF Continuous – with centre-weighted, spot and 40-segment honeycomb pattern metering modes.
The Sony Alpha 100 looks to weigh in at 545g without battery, with dimensions of 94.7 x 133.1 x 71.3 mm (L x W x D).
We should point out that Sony don’t actually call it the ‘Alpha’ in print, preferring to use the arty squiggly symbol (a bit like popstar Prince and long forgotten 80s nobby band Freur), but we couldn’t be arsed to try and find that on our keyboards.
Sony is expected to make an official announcement about the Alpha 100 later this month, but if these tempting specs are on the money, Sony could be set to make a big splash in a market currently dominated by Canon and Nikon.
Digital Photography Blog
Sony dSLR
5 June, 2006
TalkTalk ‘Free’ Broadband Hits Problems
There’s been some deep rumblings of discontent from tens of thousands of customers trying to sign up to Carphone Warehouse’s offer of “free” broadband.
It seems that the Talk Talk calls/broadband package has been the victim of its own popularity with a slipping launch date and Carphone Warehouse CEO Charles Dunstone admitting that callers faced delays in getting through to the company’s call centres.
The TalkTalk offer gives punters unlimited landline telephone calls and broadband access for £20 per month, with a one-off £29.99 connection fee.
Carphone Warehouse had announced customers could sign up immediately to the service, which would be made available to “nearly 70 per cent of the UK population.”
Despite a promised connection date at the start of July, new customers applying for the offer have been told that they can forget all about their freebie surfing until August at the earliest.
The Independent has reported that chatrooms have been “inundated” with punters venting their frustration over their attempts to sign up to the service, with the TalkTalk website offering a rueful apology on their website:
“Your free broadband might take a little longer to go live than we would like. There is huge demand for this amazing offer and there are lots of local difficulties to deal with, so even with our engineers going full tilt, there’ll be some customers we can’t connect immediately”
TalkTalk
5 June, 2006
Personal Train Timetables Review: For Mobiles, PCs and Palms (85%)
If you’re a regular train traveller across the UK, or you’re planning a holiday involving lots of different journeys, keeping track of all the various train times can be a bit of a pain.
Normally, you’d have to lug around a bag full of separate timetables or fork out for those spoddy jumbo timetable books often seen in the clammy paws of trainspotters, but thanks to the cunning skills of the German railway Website bahn.de, you can download customised timetables direct to your PC, phone or Palm handheld.
Setting up individual timetables is simplicity itself – just type in your start and destination stations and then select the date period you want journey information on.
Then tick off what days of the week you want included in your timetable along with the outward/return journey times (or select ‘whole day’ for the all trains) and select what modes of travel you want included or excluded from your file.
Next, you have to you choose what format you want your timetable in: PDF, PDB (for Palm handhelds) and J2ME for Java mobiles, downloadable as a zip file or via a WAP URL.
Then it’s a case of bashing the ‘create’ buttom and waiting for a few minutes as the Teutonic technlogoy does it thing, before being presented with links to your timetable (you can elect to download the timetable directly from the site or have the files emailed to you).
Free Palm viewer
Palm users can also download a highly functional free custom viewer called, appropriately enough, Personal Viewer, created by the German company that powers the timetable engine, HaCon.
This small download provides a simple interface serving up enough timetable-related data to give train buffs a moist spot or two.
Users can store as many timetables as they like on their Palm (the files can also be run from the card to save space), with the tabbed interface letting travellers select their journey and time of travel and then see available trains, journey details and stops on the way – there’s even an indication whether snacks will be available on the selected train!
We’ve been using this program on our Palm handheld for years, and can thoroughly recommend it – especially as it’s totally FREE!
Overall score: 85%
Personal Timetable
1 June, 2006
GNER Offer Free On-Train WiFi Trial
GNER is so chuffed by the fact that all its East Coast trains will be offering Wi-Fi by August this year, it’s offering the service free of charge to all passengers, sorry, customers, this summer.
Of course, the announcement might just be a marketing stunt to make more people aware of the service (and hey! it’s working!), but we’ve no problem bigging up freebies when we hear about them.
Although first class passengers already get free Wi-Fi, serfs in ~~cattle class~~, ~~second class~~, standard class usually have to shell out wildly inflated prices for miserly chunks of Wi-Fi access; £2.95 for half an hour, nearly a fiver for an hour and a whopping tenner for just two hours access.
Thanks to GNER’s offer, summer travellers on their trains can trial the service and gorge themselves on a freebie, one-off unlimited 24-hour Wi-Fi session, from Monday 5th June to Monday 31st July.
Punters looking to hook up to their piece of wireless freebie action simply have to flip open their laptops, open up a browser window and let it automatically detect the GNER gateway page to Wi-Fi heaven.
Wi-Fi proves a hit with travellers
GNER has seen strong demand for their in-train Wi-Fi service, bringing forward the cross-fleet rollout from its planned May 2007 deadline to August this year.
The service works via a roof-mounted satellite dish and mobile phone antenna using 3G and GPRS, connected to each coach along the entire length of the train, making a train-long mobile WiFi ‘hot-spot.’
According to GNER, this will make them the first UK train operator to offer a fully wi-fi-enabled service.
Speaking last month, GNER chief executive Christopher Garnett was awash with Wi-Fi praise: “For a business user, wi-fi creates a truly mobile office, while leisure users can shop, keep up to date with news and sport or book a weekend break at the end of their journey.”
GNER
31 May, 2006
FinePix Z3 Zoom For The Laydees
Thinner than a whippet with Montezuma’s Revenge, Fujifilm’s new FinePix Z3 sports a 5.1 million pixel sensor, ISO reaching down to the dim lights of 1600 and a 36-108mm (3x), F3.5 – 4.2 lens.
Apparently created with the laydees in mind, this minor update to the Z2 camera comes with improved resolution, an Intelligent-Flash mode and an improved 2.5-inch screen, with the camera available in silver, metallic blue and girly-girly light pink.
Fluffing up their announcement with a bit of cod-science, Fujifilm reckon that their research has revealed that most photos taken by women are ‘people pictures’* snapped in low light situations and in close proximity to the subject – the kind of photos that are notoriously hard to grab without camera shake or bleaching out faces..
(*A quick straw poll around the office found this claim to be total bollocks, by the way).
We’re sure that the ladies of the world will be lining up to thank Fujifilm for the Super CCD and Real Photo Processor II in the Z3 which combines with the camera’s high sensitivity (up to ISO1600) and Intelligent-Flash system to help banish those low-light photo blues.
Fujifilm’s Intelligent-Flash system claims to work by combining a well-exposed background and ‘natural skin tones’ on subjects in the foreground, with a ‘Dual-Shooting Mode’ blasting off two consecutive shots (one with flash and one without flash) to see which comes out best.
Rounding off the feature set is 14 pre-programmed scene positions, high resolution (230K Pixels) 2.5 inch LCD screen, 10 MB internal memory and ‘TV-quality’ VGA movie recording of 30 fps with sound
Availability and pricing to be announced.
Specifications:
Sensor – 5.1 million effective pixels
Image sizes – 2592 x 1944, 2736 x 1824 (3:2), 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, 640 x 480
Movie clips – 640 x 480 @ 30fps, 320 x 240 @ 30fps, Mono sound
File formats – JPEG Exif v2.2, DPOF, AVI Motion JPEG
Lens – 36 – 108mm equiv, F3.5 – 4.2
Image stabilization – No
Conversion lenses – No
Digital zoom – up to 5.7x
Focus – Auto focus, Normal: approx 60cm – infinity, Macro: approx 8cm (wide)
Metering – TTL 256 zone
ISO sensitivity – Auto, ISO 64 – ISO 1600
Shuttter speed – 4 – 1/1000 sec
Aperture – F3.5 / F5.0 / F8 3 steps
Modes – Auto, Anti-Blur, Scene Position, Macro, Movie, Burst / Continuous
Scene modes – Natural Light, Natural Light with Flash, Portrait, Landscape, Sport, Night, Fireworks, Sunset, Snow, Beach, Museum, Party, Flower, Close-up, Text
White balance – Auto, Manual (Fine, Shade, Fluorescent Light (Daylight, Warm White & Cool White), Incandescent Light
Self timer – 2 or 10 sec
Continuous shooting – Top-3 (max 2.2 fps up to 3 frames), Final-3 (max 2.2 fps up to 3 frames), Long-period (max 0.7 fps up to memory card size)
Flash – Auto, Red-eye reduction, On / Off, Slow sync, Red-eye reduction + slow sync
Range – Wide approx 0.3 – 3.0m, Tele approx 0.6 – 2.3m
Viewfinder – No
LCD monitor – 2.5-inch, 230,000 pixels
Connectivity – NTSC / PAL, USB 2.0 High speed
Storage – xD-Picture Card, 10MB internal memory
Weight (no batt) 130 g (4.6 oz)
Dimensions 92.7 x 56.7 x 27.8 mm (3.6 x 2.2 x 1.1 in)
Fujifilm
31 May, 2006
LG’s KG810 Announced
LG has unveiled the KG810 clamshell phone; a super slim, quad band GSM handset which will be sold in Asia, China, Europe and CIS markets.
Although we’re not generally fans of the clamshell phones (our attempts to casually flip the things open one-handedly invariably saw the phone flying off into the distance), but the KG810 is certainly a bit of a looker.
Like the slider KG800 chocolate phone, the KG810 features the same external “Infrared Sensor” buttons on the front for controlling music playback.
These work by heat detection, so there should be little chance of you activating the controls when the phones in your pocket – unless you’re in the habit of carrying hot coals around in your pants, of course.
Under the screen there’s a touch-sensitive keypad and a fairly healthy 128 MB of internal memory.
Naturally, the phone comes with all the usual multimedia widgets we expect to see on ‘lifestyle’ gadgets, with a 1.3 megapixel camera with video recording, bluetooth, FM radio, voice memo and music player bringing up the feature set.
It’s a pipsqueak of a phone too, measuring a handbag-unbulging 14.6mm thick. Pricing and availability is not known yet.
There’s been wide confusion over this, so let’s clear it up for you. The KG810 isn’t part of the Black label, design-driven phone line. The KG800, the ‘Chocolate phone’ is – and is currently the only phone in the Black label range. Thank to LG for getting in touch about this and clearing it up.
Barrel scraping celeb-fest
LG have been keen to insist that their ‘Black labal’ range of phones will lead punters into a world of impossible glamour and sophistication, with a recent glitzy London launch seeing freebie phones dished out to schlebs like Pierce Brosnan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Claudia Shiffer (our invitation must have got lost in the post).
Although these stars were clearly happy to scoop up any expensive freebies coming their way, when it came to electing the UK’s “primary Chocolate phone ambassador,” LG found the celebrity cupboard somewhat bare.
Finally settling on a barrel-scraping Z list ‘celebrity’ – whom we suspect wasn’t their first choice – LG awarded Colleen McLoughlan the ambassador’s job, enthusiastically insisting that she is a ‘fashion icon.’ LG _insist_ that Colleen was their choice numero uno, seeing her and her recent transformation to a ‘girl of style’ as perfect for the phone.
Just in case you’re not in tune with the world of ‘fashion icons’ we can inform you that Ms McLoughlan is in fact the girlfriend of nobbled England footie star, Wayne Rooney.
We can see that impressed you.
“The LG Chocolate phone is working as an accessory for any outfit. It’s unique, sleek and exactly the right size to pop into any handbag for any occasion. The black and red theme really makes this phone stand out and the touch sensitive buttons make it beautiful,” she enthused to anyone who would listen.
LG UK
31 May, 2006