Fans of Star Trek keen to feel like their communicating with the Xyrillians when they’re hoverbooting walking down the street may be interested in Sony’s new EX90SL in-ear headphones.
Looking like a slimmed down version of the shiny chunk of metal that resided in Lieutenant Uhura’s lughole, the ‘bud’ style phones have encapsulated, inner-ear-speakers attached to a space-age shiny metal casing.
To ensure that the sound gets right down yer earhole, the EX90 sports an articulated design that swivels to get in deep and dirty amongst the ear wax.
The high quality ‘phones sport a pair of large, 16 Ohm, 13.5mm (CCAW) speakers serving up 106dB/mW on a wide 5 to 25kHz frequency response (not that any human is likely to hear the extremes of that quoted range. Unless you’re an owl or something). Output is rated at 200mW (IEC).
Aimed at the mobile MP3 listening market, the Sony’s look to offer a real improvement on the standard cheapo headphones that get bundled with players, but we strongly recommend users give this style of headphones a try out first before whipping out their wedge.
When we reviewed the MDR-EX71SL Sony Fontopia in-ear headphones we found that the air-tight seal made us go over a bit funny – although we were wowed by the sound quality. And if you’re listening to music and eating at the same time, the sensation can be distinctly odd!
The EX90SL’s appear to be only available in Japan at the moment, retailing for around 10,000 Yen (£48). We’ve no idea when they’ll be beaming units into the UK.
Rolling off Sony Ericsson’s well-furrowed product slipway this morning is the W700i Walkman Phone, the company’s eighth addition to their Walkman range.
Like the W800, the W700 comes with a full complement of onboard gizmos, including a two megapixel camera, 1.8 inch 262k 176×220 colour TFT display, dedicated music buttons and Bluetooth and Tri-band connectivity.
Details of a snazzy new range of Sony flash memory MP3 player/FM radios with a colour display have appeared on Sony’s Chinese site.
Sporting attractively bijou dimensions of 75.5mm x 45.5mm, the CE-P is smaller than a credit card (but not as thin, natch) and is designed for carrying around your neck, gangsta-stylee.
The CE-P series will come in three flavours, offering storage capacity from 256MB to a 1GB.
As voice recorders go (and, let’s be honest, they’re not the most exciting of gadgets) Sony’s new CD-U70/ U50 devices look to be quite natty numbers.
Battery life is listed as an impressive 140 hours for voice recording and 6 hours for MP3 playback, with the unit offering Digital Pitch Control, Digital VOR (Voice Operated Recording) and 5 message folders to keep your perambulating wafflings filed away neatly.
In a reflection of the growing convergence between phones and digital cameras, Sony Ericsson have declared their new K800 and K790 phones to be worthy of the Cybershot brand.
To help share your photographic masterpieces, Sony Ericsson have struck a deal with Google to enable easy photo blogging with the search engine’s Blogger service.
Sony Ericsson have also announced two additions to the K series along with a new phone in the Z range.
EntertainmentMusic Player (MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ support)
In a flurry of press announcements, Sony have announced no less than four shiny new cameras to add to their popular range of digital compact cameras.
Both cameras come with optical zoom lens offering a huge range of 36-432mm (35mm equiv) at F2.8-3.7.
The DSC-H5 camera will be available in May for about $500 (~£287, ~€420) and the DSC-H2 a month earlier for around $400 (~£230, ~€337).
Featuring 8.1 and 7.2 million pixels respectively, the DSC-W100 cameras offer a 3x zoom (38-114mm), eye-level viewfinder and a 2.5-inch screen.
Battery life is an impressive 360 shots on a single full charge, with the W100 coming with 64MB of internal memory and the W70 58MB. Both cameras use Sony’s Memory Stick storage.
Sony Ericsson has slipped out is slimmest-ever 3G handset at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Naturally, there’s an integrated music player lurking inside the rounded lines of the K610, with supported formats including MP3, AAC and e-AAC+.
Sony Ericsson K610i Specs:
Ahead of the big PMA (Photo Marketing Association International) show at the end of the month in Florida, Sony has announced two new 6-megapixel cameras in their ‘W’ range.
Looking somewhat reminiscent of the Canon Ixus / Elph range, the miniaturised, re-engineered W-series offers a compact, highly pocketable design (89x59x23mm) with a price that’s easy on the pocket too, with the DSC-W30 retailing for $230 (~£132, ~e193) and the DSC-W50 for $250 (~£143, ~e209).
At higher ISO ratings noise can become a real issue, but Sony are claiming that their Clear RAW imaging technology keeps the multi-colour snow-storm effect to a minimum.
To help fumbling newbies and the easily baffled, Sony has added a new function guide which displays a short onscreen text explanation whenever a shooting mode is selected. This can be turned off once the user becomes familiar with the icons on the mode dial.
Scene modes Twilight, Twilight Portrait,Landscape,Beach,Snow,Soft Snap
Sony has announced the new VAIO VA1 Series, a wireless home entertainment desktop computer.
High definition audio is provided by Sony’s Direct Stream Digital (DSD), a technology developed by Sony in conjunction with Philips.
Sony Ericsson have announced their new M600 handset, a tri-band (900/1800/1900 plus UMTS 2100 for 3G data outside the US) jobbie, with Symbian OS 9.1 and UIQ 3.0 operating systems.
Touted as a “fully-specified email tool and mobile phone”, the handset offers true multitasking, so a user can, for example, browse the Internet while chatting away on the phone.
For road warriors and shuffling suits, there’s the facility to read and edit PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents and Adobe PDF files on the move, with the popular Opera 8 browser provided for surfing the Internet.
In line with its business focus, there’s no built in camera, and Wi-Fi is an unfortunate omission too.