Band Hero’s revamped drums coming in November bundle, very limited exclusive for Wii
September 30, 2009
Guitar Hero drummers who wondered whatever happened to that revamped set we spied months ago can finally sleep more soundly at night, although while still probably tapping out “Sweating Bullets” in their dreams. The cats at IGN got some hands-on time with the new gear, and while there’s no physical pics to show for it, they do report being happy with the overall design and its smaller, but still capable frame. The peripheral is reportedly due in a Band Hero Super Bundle for Nintendo Wii this November. It’s a limited exclusive for the console, meaning the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 packages will include the standard Guitar Hero drums until “sometime later this year.” That leaves at most seven weeks of lead time — not too long, but in the precious time before Christmas, it’s probably quite the coup.
$38 Zipit Wireless Messenger receives Linux, becomes $38 netbook
September 28, 2009
Poor Zipit. As a $149.99 instant messenger client nobody got particularly excited about you. Even now, as a $38 IM client you aren’t exactly in high demand — but as a $38 portable Linux machine, well, that’s another story altogether. The machines have been tweaked before, but the latest and greatest is this hack from Hunter Davis, who can turn a virgin Zipit Z2 into a full-featured Linux machine in under five minutes, as shown in the video below. To do the same all you need is Hunter’s hacked firmware and a microSD card to throw it onto. Once completely tweaked you’ll get full mouse support, WiFi connectivity, and even audio output so that you can rock some tunes on the go — though the command-line interface won’t make it the most compelling PMP ever. With only a 300MHz processor and 32MB of RAM we wouldn’t go compiling our COMP-SCI 101 homework on here, but this little firmware refresh certainly makes for a tastier experience than before.
Amazon to release larger Kindle for newspapers and textbooks
September 28, 2009
Rumors have been floating around this week about a new, large-screen version of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader. The New York Times seemingly confirmed that the device is for real, and it could be released “as early as this week,” according to their industry sources. The Times pieces focuses, not surprisingly, on the larger Kindle as a platform for newspapers and magazines, whose pages didn’t quite translate to the current Kindle’s smaller screen.
As much as a newspaper-friendly Kindle might matter to the future of print journalism there is some speculation about other important uses, like textbooks. Some websites are reporting that the new device will be tested at a handful of universities in the fall. It would be phenomenal not to carry around several pounds of reading material for classes, especially if the Kindle versions of the books cost less than the paper editions.
Panasonic’s 50-inch 3D plasma announced
September 28, 2009
True, Panasonic’s 103-inch 3D television is more desirable, but Panny’s new 50-incher will be more affordable when it comes time to buy your first 3D set. The 1080p TV requires viewers to wear special specs, naturally, in this case, Panasonic’s active “shutter” glasses. As the name implies, the lenses switch in sync with the TV so that the right image is seen by the right eye and the left image is seen by the left eye. All that quick image swapping requires new PDP materials and chips to maintain screen brightness. The new prototype will be on display at Ceatec show in Tokyo next week with plans for commercialization in 2010. You know, assuming anyone wants it.
Google explains why Gmail was sad…
September 2, 2009
If you’re a hardcore Gmail user, I don’t need to tell you that Gmail was down yesterday. The Gmail Blog has an explanation of the outage, which officially lasted for 100 minutes. So, here’s the reason you couldn’t get to your Gmail yesterday, straight from the horse’s mouth: apparently Google took down some servers for routine maintenance. This would have been fine, but because of some recent improvements to the way Gmail handles requests, the request routers became overloaded. This caused them to shunt the workload over to other request routers, which quickly became overloaded, too. Oops.
Fortunately, Google has tons of extra capacity just waiting to be switched on in this kind of emergency, so things were back up and running relatively quickly. Google has quite rightly determined that their request routers need some failure isolation improvements to prevent a similar chain reaction in the future, and they promise they’re working on it. Maybe this will quiet down all of the “#gfail” naysayers who freaked out via Twitter the minute the service went down yesterday.
Sony Ericsson Aino’s PS3 Remote Play capabilities get detailed
September 2, 2009
Sony’s got a lot of housekeeping to do before it can quell the infighting long enough to produce a proper PlayStation phone, but the upcoming Aino’s PS3 Remote Play features sound like a tentative first step. According to a Q&A posted on the Euro PlayStation blog, the upcoming slider handset will be able to use Remote Play to connect and control a PS3’s XMB through the internet, but you won’t be able to play PS1 games like you can on the PSP — you’ll be limited to media playback, browsing the PlayStation Store, and chatting on PSN. Yeah, it’s kind of a missed opportunity, but at least we can hope future handsets will expand on the capability a little, just like the PSP had remote PS1 game playback added in after the fact.
Nokia’s X6 - A “featurephone”
September 2, 2009
