Into Tech

titleSome HDTV Technologies Are Better Than Others at Displaying SDTV/titlecategory98/categorypDespite the growing popularity of HDTV and the rising sales of HDTV sets, most of the TV content thats watched on HDTV sets is in standard definition television- the older format thats been around since the dawn of broadcast TV more than half a century ago. [...]

titleHow to Watch Television Online/titlecategory98/categorypWatching television shows online used to be quite difficult, with many websites offering lots of tv shows and movies for download. The problem was that these were illegal, and to download anything from them was dangerous. With the recent release of the BBC Iplayer in the UK, illegal downloading of television [...]

titleMobile Phones - The Future is Here - Part 2/titlecategory98/categorypContinuing on from the easy to use music shop that is Swifts Jukebox, Japanese technology developers have been working on a new mobile phone with a very unique difference!/ppThe idea being developed in Japan has been affectionately dubbed the green phone. Although not released yet, the [...]

titleTime Saving Uses For RSS/titlecategory98/categorypRSS is an underused and underappreciated technology by a majority of internet users. There is a small minority who are just starting to appreciate the benefits RSS can have on there personal and business lives. It is hard to define RSS, you cannot really get it until you see it in [...]

There are those that love Sony’s Rolly dancing robot and those who think the Rolly should be used like the rugby ball it looks like and booted off the nearest cliff.

Well, Sega and Hasbro have teamed up with an unusual Rolly rival which takes a new look at music-themed bots.

The striking looking A.M.P. (Automated Music Personality or Ampbot) stands 2.4 feet tall, making it a much different proposition to the tiny Rolly straight off. It stands on two large wheels and comes with an iPod/MP3 cradle on its back.

Sony Ericsson is launching everything but the kitchen sink this week and with Wimbledon just around the corner, it makes marketing sense to cash in where you can.

That’s why tennis ace, Maria Sharapova was drafted in to launch the Sony Ericsson Maria Sharapova Design Collection last night in London.

That’s phone accessories, to the rest of us. With style, of course.

Time to feel the force that LEGO is planning to exert on your wallet come September when it unleashes the massive, LEGO Death Star.

We are talking over 3,800 pieces of lovingly crafted plastic designed, not just to recreate Darth’s holiday home, but allow you to recreate 14 key scenes from the movies, from the Trash Compactor Scene to getting electrified in the Emperor’s Throne Room.

While it’s great to see other players entering the music download space it’s hard to ignore just how dominant iTunes is, especially when Apple announces that iPod owners have bought over 5 billion tunes.

While that’s a hell of a lot of songs, it’s even more impressive when you realise that iTunes customers have bought more than 2 billion of those songs in the last 12 months alone.

There’s just something about new wireless technologies that seems to make analysts over-estimate their impact. I still remember when people were talking about how GPRS was going to be a real DSL replacement. GPRS, of course, was an incredibly unreliable and ridiculously slow update on GSM wireless technology. Yet, before it was used, there were stories predicting how it would be a wireless revolution. And then people started using it. And pretty much the same thing has happened with each advance in cellular technology. I remember people saying that EDGE, EV-DO, and HSDPA (all network upgrades) were going to be good enough to replace DSL or cable modems. Yet, even though EV-DO and HSDPA get decent speeds (still much slower than your average DSL or cable), the real problem is how these networks simply don’t have the capacity to be a real home broadband replacement. That’s why all of the contracts have ridiculous limits, suggesting you can’t do very much with them, and often placing exceptionally low usage caps on the services.

Of course, don’t tell that to the analysts, who can’t resist making the same exact prediction about cellular broadband replacing home broadband. The latest such report is focused on the UK, and says that cellular based broadband for computers will surpass DSL or cable as the primary connection for users by 2010. That’s not very far in the future. Now, certainly, mobile technology has improved greatly over the years, and there’s still plenty more to come. However, the only really consistency in the mobile world is that many analysts over-estimate both the speed with which these new networks are adopted and the quality of these mobile networks. It would certainly be great, if true, but consider me skeptical.

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Mozilla set out to have the world download 5 million copies of its Firefox 3 browser in 24 hours when it launched on Tuesday, in order to create a new Guinness World Record.

While the Guinness experts are still counting - Mozilla is claiming 8.3 million in 24 hours - that record is probably theirs but downloads are still zooming, now topping 11.5 million.