Seiko Instruments has announced their first Bluetooth watch, known as either the BT Watch or the rather less snappy, CPC TR-006 ver.1.0.
Although the thing appears to be in its early stages, there’s some interesting technology on show here which we may find filtering into our everyday lives in a year or two.
Designed to be an extension of your phone, the hi-tech watch promises to integrate fully with your phone’s functionality.
If you get an SMS or email on your phone the watch can alert you, and if your phone’s ringing, you won’t have to rummage about in your bag or pockets to see who is calling – the number will appear on the watch.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be the ability to talk into the watch, Dick Tracy-style, but the display will warn you if you lose the Bluetooth connection.
Now, much as we like the idea of cool high tech toys buzzing away on our wrists, we have to say that this watch looks more than a bit silly – it’s so big you may as well strap your mobile onto your wrist and be done with it!
But unlike those rubbish pens that light up when you get a call on your mobile, we can actually imagine this gadget being quite a handy thing to have – if it was shrunk down to about a tenth of the size, of course.
We reckon it would be cool to have text messages, news headlines, RSS feeds, football scores and other short bursts of info appear on your watch – particularly when you’re stuck in a dull meeting.
But no matter how cutting edge the technology, no one in their right mind is going to strut about with this ten-ton brick on their arm, so we’ll wait for a bijou version before we can take it seriously.
You can see a Real Video demo of the brick in action on WBS TV Tokyo’s Website
BT has announced that some of its users should be able to obtain broadband speeds of ‘up to’ 8 Mbps by the end of March.
All good news you’d think, but the new connectivity comes with a bag full of caveats related to physical factors, with only those lucky enough to live or work close to their local telephone exchange able to scoop up the maximum 8Mbit/s speed.
Paul Reynolds, BT’s Wholesale chief executive, was keen to big up his company’s commitment to broadband availability in the UK “Thanks to BT’s continued investment in the broadband network, the UK now boasts the highest level of broadband availability in the G8. We’re now building on those efforts in becoming the first operator in the UK to commit to a national service which is capable of broadband speeds of up to 8Mbit/s.
Those clever Koreans at LG are at it again, releasing the ONE PHONE II, a smart new Bluetooth home/mobile phone and the XNOTE TX, a tiny laptop with a built in DMB module.
It appears that this phone, however, uses the technology to automatically switch to a landline and not a Wi-Fi home network like the Fusion.
Packed inside its ultra-thin body is 12.1-inch, 1366×768 pixel LCD, a 1.3GHz Intel Pentium-M processor, Geforce Go 7300 graphics, a healthy 60GB disk with support for up to 2GB RAM.
Battery life is quoted around a disappointing 2 hours (up to 8 hours with additional battery), although this plummets down to just 1hr 12 mins if you’re using the attached optical drive.
We have to say we’re mightily impressed with the desirability factor of the so-small-you-want-to-pat-them-on-the-head XNOTEs and it’s great to see LG coming up with design to rival Apple/Sony’s finest.
Samsung has announced the world’s first 8GB Hard Disk embedded smartphone, the SGH-i310, which is expected to start shipping in Europe during the second half of this year.
The smartphone seems pretty pocketable too, measuring 111.9 x 48.5 x 19.8 mm and weighing 120g.
Almost 60 per cent of Britons rely on the Internet to do their banking, according to new research commissioned by the Alliance and Leicester bank.
Designed to cut down on identity theft and online fraud, the two-factor authentication compels users to provides two means of identification.
Other banks are also jumping on the security bandwagon, with Barclays running a new chip card reader trial involving 5,000 customers and staff, while Lloyds TSB is close to completing an exhaustive six-month test of a keyring type device.
The story we’ve 
The problem is that BT staffers are unhappy at being bundled in with the sale and have worries that long term they could see a reduction in the conditions they enjoy. One of their unions, the CWU, has now after balloting, threatened strike action, hoping to change BT’s management’s attitude to those described as ‘in scope’ by the potential deal.
Now to us here at Digital Lifestyles, this threatened action seems to have a bit of a King Canute/70’s vibe about it. The truth of the matter, is that the competitive landscape has changed in telecommunications and broadcasting. BT is answerable to their city shareholders, and a move to tackle some of the entrenched attitudes within the company’s workforce might be looked on favourably by the number crunchers around the London stock exchange.
Before you start reading this review, let’s get a few things straight.
And if you like your cameras to look mean’n’lean with big shiny lenses, all-swivellin’, flip-out LCD screens with hi-tech add-ons like optical image stabilisation and bleeping bells’n’whistles, walk on by.
Although this approach may not appeal to the point’n’shoot brigade, for enthusiasts fed up with the endless button pushing and dial spinning that comes with most compact digicams, this camera is a revelation.
Sadly, there’s no built in optical viewfinder, although the big 2.5″ LCD 210k pixel screen performed well in bright light and can also display a live histogram display.
The camera is one of the smallest digital cameras with ultra-wide angle lens, and fits easily in a pocket, measuring 107 x 25 x 58 mm (WxDxH).
Shooting in RAW and spending a little time in post-processing produced some stunning results, but shooting at low ISO/high quality JPEG should prove fine for most users.
Because of its niche appeal, the Ricoh’s a tough camera to unreservedly recommend, but for keen street/landscape photographers looking for a rugged, flexible, high quality camera capable of the very highest results, we’d put the GR Digital right at the very top of the list.
Big glasses-toting Buggles sang about ‘Video Killing The Radio Star’ back in 1979, but new figures from Ofcom suggest that the while Internet may not exactly be killing TV, it’s certainly giving it a bit of a duffing behind the bike sheds.
Industry pundits are collaring the Internet as the reason for this decline, along with DVDs and gaming.
Consumer broadband continues its exponential growth, exploding from zero to 10 million connections in just over seven years, with some 70,000 new connections being added per week.
You’re thinking of doing your own podcast, I can tell. You were getting all excited about the new generation of digital microphones.
Digital array microphones, however, are as good as the data stream they’re poured into. Imagine my delight to find that the default setting for OneNote audio recording is eight kilobits per second, mono. I found this out AFTER recording an Important Person at a press conference. I have no idea what he said; all I have is a recording of people coughing and creaking their chairs. I’m sure fellow-recorders have found the same.
The English version of Wikipedia has now notched up more than one million articles, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the fellas who run the free online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia’s reach is truly global, with versions of the encyclopaedia currently available in 125 languages, containing a total of 3.3 million articles.
With the million-article mark passed and the Wikimedia Foundation estimating that new articles are coming in at a rate of 1,700 new articles every day, our back-of-a-beer-mat calculation reckons they’ll be hitting 2 million sometime 2009.