Lumens PS660 Visual Presenter

Lumens PS660 Visual Presenter

Author JoeDigital | 25.01.2009 | Category Computers

PS660 Desktop HD Visual Presenter may be just the tool for you. t doesn’t come cheap, with an MSRP of US$1995, but that still makes this one of the less expensive HD presenters on the market.

This handy desktop device is packed with features:

• One-touch stand alone audio and vieo recording
• HDMI difital output to HDTV, single cable connection
• SXGA resoltuion of 1280×1024
• 15x Optical zoom
• Internal image storage
• SDHC support up to 32GB
• Auto-backup setting
• USB 2.0
• TWAIN/WIA support for both PC and Mac

This is not a hobby machine, but is intended to make presentations easier to manage and coordinate, and allows a level of interaction not available with many other presenters available.

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Honeywell Dolphin 9900

Author JoeDigital | 25.01.2009 | Category Computers, Gadgets, Telecommunications

Honeywell, targeting the harshest environment uses, has developed a smartphone that is nothing like the ones you’ve seen before- it has a pistol grip design.

But the Honeywell Dolphin 9900 isn’t just designed differently, it is built for impact, tested to survive five foot drops onto concrete, and 2000 drops from a height of about 3 feet. This is a working person’s smartphone, and its built to be able to handle anything that gets thrown at it. It even meets IP64 standards for dust and moisture resistance.

Features of the Honeywell Dolphin 9900:

• Marvell PXA270 624MHz processor
• 256MB RAM
• 1GB flash memory
• SD memory card slot
• 3.5″ QVGA TFT touchscreen display at 240 x 320 resolution
• 43-key shifted alphanumeric keyboard
• GPS navigation
• Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz), GSM release 99
• EDGE multi-slot class 12, PRS multi-slot class 12
• Bluetooth connectivity
• 802.11b/g support
• Barcode scanner
• IrDA
• Internal speaker, microphone, headset

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Samusng Post First Quarterly Loss

Author JoeDigital | 24.01.2009 | Category Consumer Electronics, Technology Viewpoint, world news

Samsung Electronics, the South Korea-based electronics giant, posted the first quarterly loss in its history on Friday. In large part, the loss was due to decreased memory chip and display units sales, which have dropped dramatically during the global economic slump.

The posted loss, through December 31st, 2008, was 14.4 million dollars, a sharp contrast to the 2.2 trillion profit posted only a year earlier. Samsung is not alone in taking losses, either, with Sony Corp. reporting their first annual loss in 14 years on Thursday.

LG Electronics reported a record loss, and Panasonic Corporation has announced shutting unprofitable aspects of their business, and reducing planned 2009 investments by 1.5 billion dollars. This cut is primarily the cancellation of two nw flat-screen TV plants that had been intended.

Business all over the world are feeling the crunch of tougher economic times, but perhaps none more so than the electronics sector, which has long based growth on continuous competitive developments in technology. One consequence of smaller budgets will be less investment into research, which means a complete slow down of the entire technology development process.

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Samsung’s Google Android Mobile Phone

Author JoeDigital | 24.01.2009 | Category Consumer Electronics, Innovation, Technology

Samsung Electronics said it will deploy its first Google Android mobile phone in 2009. The company plans to sell the new touch screen through T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel. Pricing and additional information was not disclosed.

“We are accelerating the development process for Google phone in order to meet the specific need of local carriers,” a Samsung official said in a statement.

HTC Corp was the first handset manufacture to make the G1 Google phone for T-Mobile this year. Other than HTC, there hasn’t been another smartphone company to make the jump to the Google Android platform.

Android is part of the Open Handset Alliance which features several mobile cell phone makers. Handset manufactures including LG Electronics Inc and Motorola Inc could also launch their first mobile phone using the platform in 2009. The alliance has 47 companies to date.

Google’s Android platform is rapidly growing and its goal is to position itself against the Apple Inc iPhone. The platform already has solid support from major companies that either deploy software for smartphones or manufactures mobile phones.

Samsung will feature a full touch screen smartphone and a variety of mobile applications. The new phone will include Google Maps, G-Talk messenger, G-Mail and other Google applications, by default.

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Mozilla Delays Firefox Beta 3.1

Author JoeDigital | 23.01.2009 | Category World Wide Web

Mozilla Corporation has pushed back the release of the third, and possibly final, beta for Firefox 3.1 by a week to February 2. The setback won’t affect the final release date for Firefox 3.1, according to the company, but was necessary to address a large number of remaining bugs – referred to as “blockers.”

Among the unfixed bugs are ones related to Firefox 3.1’s new privacy mode, dubbed “Private Browsing,” a feature that debuted in Beta 2 last December, and several connected with the new ability to drag tabs from the browsing window.

In related news, Mozilla also announced a subtle but significant change to the way tabs work in Firefox, tweaking them so that when a new tab is opened from a link it will appear immediately to the right of the one you are working on. Referring to the change, Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla, says that this feature is one of the little things that don’t get a lot of attention when people talk about Google Chrome.

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Mozilla FireFox Adopts Chrome Tabs

Author JoeDigital | 23.01.2009 | Category World Wide Web

Picking up on a popular trend, Mozilla has announced a slight modification to how the tab bar on Firefox will work. Google, when it introduced the Chrome browser, has instituted a new wave of innovation in web browser design, and the way tabs are handled is one that is easily identifiable.

Originally, when you right-clicked, and selected “open in new tab,” that new tab window would appear at the very end f your list of tabs. Logically, this creates a chronological order for your tabs, but doesn’t reveal any sort of organization.

The new tab method, introduced in Google Chrome, and copied first my Microsoft, and now by Firefox, groups tabs of similar type together. If you right click in a tab, and open a link in a new tab, that tab will appear immediately adjacent to the tab window you are currently working in. For research, this allows you to open groups of related documents, and keep each part of the research isolated.

Admittedly, the new way that tabs works will take a little getting used to. Another feature that will definitely come in handy during the learning process is the “undo close tab” feature, which can re-open tabs from the session history.

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Asus Eee Keyboard Computer

Author JoeDigital | 23.01.2009 | Category Computers, Innovation, Technology

The universe of Asus Eee products will soon be expanding to include a keyboard housing an integrated computer that could serve as a home theater PC. How? Well, the Asus Eee Keyboard is going to be equipped with wireless HDMI, which not only means you can use your HDTV as your monitor without physically connecting the two, but it could also beam media files you have stored on the device’s built-in solid state drive.

The two-pound PC-in-a-keyboard, based around Intel’s ubiquitous Atom processor, comes with a 5-inch touchscreen display that will come with a library of widgets you can access; the prototype shown at CES was also running Windows XP. The device also has built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi, a pair of USB ports, a multi-format memory-card reader, integrated speakers, and HDMI and VGA outputs.

Some specs still remain a mystery, including the amount of storage and RAM the Eee Keyboard will ship with. Pricing has also not been revealed. However, an Asus rep has told me the company is “targeting a Q2 release,” so this doesn’t appear to be vaporware product.

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What sets Google Apart

Author JoeDigital | 22.01.2009 | Category Computers, World Wide Web

Google, while it is considered to be the leading internet search engine, uses far more than search queries to draw people to use their services. Google, perhaps more so than any other provider of its type, has endeavored to make Google the one-stop home page of its members. Google Reader, the Google answer to MyYahoo, is one of many generalized and customizable services available from most search engines. But nobody else has Google Docs, which provided a cloud version of popular office productivity software, such as spreadsheet and document creation.

And even the people who design the next generation of websites make extensive use of Google’s unique monitoring services, such as Google Trends and Google Analytics, which help them position themselves for tomorrow’s business, and push their customers into the 21st century version of the outdoor shopping mall.

Very few competitors, even Microsoft, are able to mimic the depth of services provided by Google, which allows more than just searches in its query bar. Complex mathematical formula, if typed in properly, can be solved, as well as immediate access to a plethora of library functions, such as dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia services.

Google’s appeal comes from it providing a single location with all of the tools needed for both business and relaxation online, including message forums, chat systems, and VOIP telephone services. Google’s approach, which seemed rather benign a few years ago, can now be clearly identified as the online version of walmart, providing just the services that keep people coming back, and making them easy enough for even a totally new user to figure out.

As cloud computing, or computers that use the internet for operating programs, making them less expensive machines, grows through web 2.0 applications, only Google is poised for the masses right from the start, and that is a strategic edge that puts them into competition with software giants, such as Microsoft.

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Lycos to Drop Lycos Mail, Tripod

Author JoeDigital | 22.01.2009 | Category Technology Viewpoint, World Wide Web

Lycos (latin for spider), is one of the wordwide web’s oldest search engines, rivaling Yahoo as one of the original search monsters. From there, it grew into a free email site, and provided website urls to anyone interested in setting up their own web page, using theiur Tripod services. In February, LYcos email and Tripod will be discontinued.

Lycos, which is still a major search engine and internet directory, is feeling the crunch of tough economic times, and cutting corners by cutting back on free services, it seems. To many, this is almost like the end of an era, as we watch the commercial push to populate webspace give way to the larger and more commercialized world of web 2.0. Just as Netscape gave way to fresher Mozilla packages, so do the old school websites and email providers fall to wayside as it becomes easier for such services to be provided on an as-needed basis by site who capitalize on the earnings potential of keyword oriented click-thru campaigns, and on-page advertising.

Remember, if you have any old data at these Lycos services, you only have a few weeks to remove it, or you’ll risk losing it forever.

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Century 21 Moving Moves Toward Online Advertising

Author JoeDigital | 21.01.2009 | Category Technology Viewpoint, World Wide Web

The affordability of online promotion is appealing to more and more businesses, as the economic crunch rolls on. Large advertising budgets are being cut into fractions, and companies, looking to make the most for their investment, are turning to Internet Marketing to make that happen.

The newest big player to make a major commitment to their online presence was one of the nation’s largest realty companies, Century 21, which has announced that a large part of their 2009 TV advertising budget would be redirected into online pursuits.

Beverly Thorne, Century 21 senior VP-marketing, remarked that, “the company’s research and testing revealed that its online investments in 2008 were substantively more productive and efficient than its offline efforts.”

One key attraction for moving online is that the advertising budget reaches much farther through online channels, and more effectively targets prospective customers. For a company such as Century 21, which spends as much as 10% on advertising, that equates to reaching a far higher number of intelligent and interested individuals, and meeting those people in ways that are more casual and provide more immediate information than was ever possible before.

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