Sony has give their New Product Trumpet a lengthy parp to announce the arrival of its latest super-zoom camera, the Cyber-shot HX1.
Strutting the streets with Sony’s all-new Exmor CMOS sensor – last seen in Sony’s Alpha range of cameras – and packing an effective resolution of 9.1 megapixels, the SLR-style camera employs the powerful BIONZ image processor.
Continue reading Sony Cyber-shot HX1 Ultrazoom Snapper Packs CMOS Sensor
Sales of personal computers are set to tumble by double digits this year for the first time in history of computing.
The claim comes from analyst firm Gartner, who predict shipments of PCs to crash by 12 per cent this year, with sales for 2009 pegged to 257 million units.
The last major dip in PC sales was way back in 2001 following the ‘dot-bomb’ Internet crash, but shipments only fell a relatively modest 3.2 per cent.
They’ve taken their time to join the megazoom digital camera market, but Pentax have just rocked up with their new X70 digicam packing a hefty 24X optical zoom lens in a reasonably compact and lightweight body.
Sporting 12 megapixels and a 1/2.3-inch chip, the X70 bridge camera comes with the usual auto exposure options, plus aperture/shutter priority and metered manual modes for tinkerers.
Continue reading Pentax Goes Superzoom With New X70 Digital Camera
It doesn’t seem that long ago that mobile phones were the sole province of braying city slickers bellowing, “Buy! Sell!” into their handsets, but new research shows that two thirds of the world’s cell phone subscriptions are now in developing nations.
A study by the United Nations agency, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), found that the highest growth rate of mobile subscriptions was in Africa where over a quarter (28 per cent) of the population own mobile phones – a huge leap up from 2000 where just 2 per cent Africans were connected.
Continue reading Two Thirds Of Mobile Phone Subscriptions In Developing Nations
When it comes to facts, stats and figures, you can always rely on research house Forrester Research to serve ’em up by the plateful, and their bods have just unleashed their white-coated bods on the matter of online UK retail and travel sales.
Continue reading Online Retail UK Sales To Hit £56bn by 2014
Buckling under blistering criticism from the Author’s Guild, Amazon has made it possible for their controversial text-to-speech feature to be disabled on its new Kindle eBook reader.
The online book-shifting behemoths have now promised to modify the Kindle 2 so that authors, publishers or any holders to a novel’s rights can decide whether the feature will be available for their work.
Continue reading Kindle 2 Text-To-Speech Feature Blasted By Authors Guild
New figures for the operating systems used to access the web show Microsoft registering a rise while Apple’s share takes a bit of a downward shimmy.
Continue reading Microsoft Gain Browser Market Share, Apple Dip
Looking rather dapper in its sleek, shiny modern finish, the Philips SE6552B cordless answerphone seeks to impress with its modern looks and colour screen – but will it push our buttons?
One of the unexplained mysteries of modern technology is why mobile phones get slimmer, smarter and more stylish while home cordless phones continue to look like chunky, lumbering Stone Age slabs of plastic with Neanderthal interfaces and squinty screens.
Continue reading Philips SE6552B Cordless Answerphone Review (32%)
A new UK based survey has found that nearly half of web users have used illegal file sharing sites to help themselves to free content.
A study involving over 1,000 consumers by Tiscali.co.uk and music site DrownedinSound (DiS) found that 46% of users had used peer-to-peer sites (P2P), with Limewire (34%) and BitTorrent (25%) being the most popular.
Continue reading Nearly Half Of UK Web Users Have Illegally Downloaded Music
Billed as the ‘UK’s biggest ever upgrade,’ Virgin Media has announced that it will putting all its 2Mb broadband customers into the fast line, ad hooking them up to to a 10Mb line.
Self-proclaimed as a move that will continue ‘its role as the pacesetter for high-speed broadband,’ Virgin say that the upgrade comes courtesy of some nifty leveraging of increased network capacity to ensure that all its lower level customers can bathe in the speedy glory of a 10Mb line (or thereabouts).
Continue reading Virgin Media Upgrades All 2Mb Broadband Customers To 10Mb