We know you love it when people port software on to unlikely platforms, so thought you’d like to see this video of the old (pre-osx) Mac operating system running on an Sony PSP.
How real it is, isn’t 100% clear, but it appears to be running a PSP version of Basilisk II, an open-source Macintosh Emulator project, called, unsurprisingly, Basilisk II PSP.
(Video follows) Continue reading Basilisk II PSP: Running PSP Mac 7.5 OS: Video
Touted as a “business and personal journal for the Palm OS or Pocket PC,” DayNotez is a powerful companion to your handheld’s built in diary application.
Tailored for documenting and organising daily notes, thoughts and memos, the program lets you add multiple entries every day and add photos and voice memos to your text notes, with the option to synchronise the content with your desktop.
Continue reading DayNotez v3 For Palm And Pocket PC Review (76%)
The adage “Everything comes to those who wait” will ring true for punters who have been umming and ahhing about getting a new MacBook.
Apple have announced the rumoured update for the MacBook range, giving them faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 1GB of memory and larger hard drives in every model.
Those of us still languishing with iBooks, will have even more reason to finally get around to upgrading to the 1 inch high beauties, especially as the new range now covers the sleek white 2.0 GHz and 2.16 GHz MacBook models, and a mysterious black 2.16 GHz MacBook model. All of them have a 13-inch glossy widescreen display that Apple non-modestly describe as “gorgeous.”
The breakdown on the UK prices are 2.0 GHz (80Gb H/D and slot-load Combo (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) optical drive – £699; 2.16 GHz White (120GB H/D and slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) optical drive) – £829; 2.16 GHz Black (160GB H/D and same SuperDrive) – £949.
All come with iLife ’06 (until the new version comes out, we guess) and are available NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!
When I travel, I always look for ways to try and reduce the bulk of what I have to carry.
My Apple Mac iBook laptop has a bug where the track pad randomly freezes when it’s plugged into the mains (despite digging I’ve never found an answer as to why, including from Apple), so I’m forced to carry a mouse.
Currently I use a mini optical mouse that I’ve been pretty happy with to date, but that could change having seen the Slim G4 optical mouse that KJ Global is stocking.
Continue reading Slim G4 Optical Mouse – Very Cool
You can always rely on Brando to bring a smile to your face with some completely daft USB gizmo, and once again they haven’t disappointed with the release of their USB Roll-Up Drum Kit and keyboard.
Ginger Baker on a mat
We can’t imagine many people sitting at home and thinking to themselves, “You know what? I could really use a plastic roll up drumkit to hit”, but if you are one of those strange people, prepare to get percussin’
Continue reading USB Roll-Up Keyboard And Drum Kit
It’s been a long time coming after being announced way back at CES in January 2007, but word is that iRiver’s B20 is finally about to start shipping.
It’s a lovely looking thing too, packing a ton of functionality into its diminutive dimensions, with the business end dominated by a 2.4inch 260,000 colour TFT-LCD display.
Inside there’s a feast of techno-gubbins taking care of your every multimedia need, with the device ready and willing to play about with movies, music, pictures, videos, text and digital broadcasting.
There’s support for MP3, WMA, OGG, AVI (MPEG4), WMV9, JPG playback, as well as an onboard FM radio with programmable FM recording, T-DMB recording, a voice recorder and alarm.
Battery life is claimed at up to 17 hours for MP3 playback, 4 hours for video, 7 hours for DAB, dropping down to just 4 hours for DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting).
The player comes in 2GB and 4GB flash memory flavours and there’s a Mini SD card slot for expansion.
Pricing should be around €164 for the 2GB version and €206 for the 4Gb jobbie.
Specs:
Display: 2.4inch 260,000 colour TFT-LCD display
Triple-band support (Band 3 + Band L + Analogue FM)
Frequency: 174MHz~240MHz(Band 3), 1.452GHz~1.492GHz(Band L)
1GB/2GB/4GB flash memory capacity, with Mini SD card expansion slot
Built in T-DMB recording
Integrated FM Tuner, voice recorder and alarm
Supported file types: MP3, WMA, OGG, AVI (MPEG4), WMV9, JPG
Battery life up to 17 hours (MP3), 4 hours (Video), 7 hours (DAB), 4 hours (DMB)
iRiver D-Click System navigation
Built in speaker
To old school computing bods like us, it doesn’t seem that long ago that floppy disks were the main way you lugged your data around.
With its feeble 1.44MB storage space, that often meant you had to cart around great boxes of the things.
And with its gnat-like storage capacity, installing programs like Photoshop meant a lengthy spell sat by your machine, patiently feeding in a vast amount of grinding floppies and hoping that the last one in wouldn’t display a dastardly disk error.
Come 1994, the hi tech hotshots around town were sporting Iomega Zip drives, which served up a comparatively capacious 100MB of storage space (rising to 750MB in the final versions).
Although we felt the love for the increased capacity, the drive was quite a bulky beast, the disks weren’t cheap and folks lived in fear of suffering the dreaded click of death.
By the late 1990s, recordable CDs, cheap flash memory and external hard drives had become the modus operandi for portable storage users, although bigger and bigger files meant that the things soon filled up.
With this in mind, Toshiba – the world’s fifth-largest hard drive manufacturer – has decided to elbow its way into the portable drive market with its 2.5-inch USB 2.0 portable external hard drive offering a positively palatial 200GB of storage space. That works out at 57,000 digital photos, 52,000 MP3 songs or 88 DVD videos all wedged into its slimline case (approx 6″x4″x0.9″).
Claimed to offer the highest capacity of any backup solution in the compact 2.5-inch hard drive class, the 200GB beastie comes clad in a sleek vented black aluminum exterior, backed by a patent-pending shock mount system for extra protection.
The USB 2.0 drive also comes bundled with the NTI Shadow software which makes it a cinch to set up a back up schedule.
The full range of drives come in 200GB, 160GB, 120GB and 100GB capacities and the pricing looks good too, with suggested retail prices running from $229.99 (£115) for the 200GB model down to $129.99 (£65) for the 100GB.
Intel is getting ready to release its own version of the mini-tablet, with CNN reporting that it will be announcing a new Linux-based ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) platform at this week’s Intel Developer Forum in Beijing.
Dubbed a ‘Mobile Internet Device’ (MID), the devices will sport 4.5 to 6.0 inch screens offering resolutions up to 800 x 480 and 1024 x 600 pixels, with the target audience described as “consumers and prosumers” and not mobile professionals.
There’s clearly some work to do on the platform name, with the devices currently codenamed ‘McCaslin’ while teams of whiteboard scrawlin’, flipchart flippin’ brainstormin’ types work on a more user friendly name.
Expected to be released next year, the UMPCs are tipped to be an extension of the successful Centrino mobile brand, with the CPU components (codenamed Stealey) packing dual-core processors clocked at 600-800MHz.
Although capable of running Windows XP and Vista, Intel is looking to kit the devices out with an embedded Linux OS supplemented by a mix of open-source and proprietary code.
Who’s it for?
Intel’s new gizmo is looking to woo punters with a seductive mobile mix of email, web, entertainment, information and location-based services, including the trusty Google Maps application and Web-based “office and enterprise applications.”
Connectivity will come in the shape of Wi-Fi and 3G HSDPA.
Interface
The new MID tablets will offer a simplified “finger-friendly” user interface, tweaked for big fat fingers on diddy screens. Based on the Gnome desktop, the OS will come with a “master user interface” desktop layer developed by Intel.
Developers will be given a peek at the first MID-specific OS next week (an updated version of China’s RedFlag Linux known as RedFlag MIDINUX), and slides of the interface have already made their way on to Engadget
If you’re the kind of person that thinks to themselves, “Hey, I’ve already spent hundreds of pounds on a load of different proprietary memory formats, and I’d love some new ones,” then you’ll be cheered by today’s announcement from Sony and Sandisk.
The two companies have revealed details about their Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop a new SxS memory card format for professional camcorders.
Designed to replace the long serving CF card, the SxS memory cards are half the size of their predecessors (width: 34mm, height: 5mm, length: 75mm), can hold much more data – up to 16GB so far – with Sandisk and Sony optimising transfer protocols up to a blistering 800 megabits per second.
So comparing the two formats is a bit like putting Torquay United up against Man United then.
This SxS technology is basically a PCI Express memory card using flash memory with the card connecting directly to computer systems through the high-speed PCI-Express bus.
Although the card is too much of a heffalump to fit into digital compact cameras, it may appear in some high end medium format still cameras and other specialised snappers.
For camcorder users owning laptops with PCI Express memory card-compatible slots, we can see the SxS cards being a real boon as they’ll be able to whip the memory out of their camera and slap it straight into their lappie.
Sony is expected to adopt this high-speed SxS memory card specification for its XDCAM EX series professional camcorders, with the memory cards available later in 2007.
Palm has unveiled a new beta app for Palm Treo users letting them back up their data over the air to Palm’s secure servers, without the need to connect to a desktop computer.
The Palm Backup Beta service can be downloaded from here and lets users back up data from the core handset applications; Contacts, Calendar, Memos, Tasks, Blazer (web browser) bookmarks, quick dials and the call log.
Once the app is downloaded on to the Treo (a 300k .prc file), users are prompted to open a new account with Palm, and select their resident country (only the US and Canada were listed as being currently available, so – sssscch! – we lied and still managed to set up an account with no problem).
An activation letter is sent to your email account, but you can start the back up on your Treo straight away (but you must activate your Palm account within 7 days otherwise your account will be closed).
The first screen asks you how often you want to schedule your Treo back ups (daily/weekly/monthly or manual) and at what time of the day or night.
A back up of your data will then be saved to Palm’s secure server as scheduled – so long as there is wireless data coverage available (if it fails to find a connection, it will try again at the next scheduled time).
Palm warns that if your Treo is stuffed full of data, the initial back up might take quite a while – something we discovered with the process taking something like 20 minutes over GPRS – but then we have over nine years worth of contacts, calendar and memo data filling up our much-used Treo 650. Subsequent backs up should be quicker.
Note that with all that data flying about, you’ll need a generous data allowance with your mobile service provider otherwise you might face hefty bandwidth bills.
With its obvious benefit to business users, this new backup service reflects Palm’s determination to start clawing back sales from high flying competitors like Blackberry and Windows Mobile.
Palm Backup Beta service currently supports Palm Treo 700p, Treo 680 and Treo 650 and there’s no news yet about release date or pricing.