Thursday, October 4, 2007

Belkin n52te SpeedPad, More One-Handed Gaming

The Belkin n52te SpeedPad is a sexy update of the cult classic Nostromo SpeedPad N52. Meant to replace the keyboard (and even mouse) for hardcore PC gamers, the controller offers 15 programmable keys, an 8-way thumb pad and full ergonomic support for extended play (aka...a regular day in our life). But most of this was already standard, and the n52te boasts some nice improvements over its predecessor.

The new back lighting offering glowy blue keys that will turn your face to alien colors during late night frag sessions, and the addition of onboard memory that can store your settings and custom profiles, making the highly tweakable peripheral truly plug and play for tournaments...Read More

Labels: DVD Auctions, New Video Games

US 3G Costs Nokia N95 a Mere Hour of Battery Life

When you go from the old Nokia N95 to the new US-spec 3G HSDPA version, you lose about an hour of browsing life. That's due to the larger battery, and the folks at WirelessInfo.com were actually expecting even more of a drain, so this is good news. More:

The N95-3 has a 1200mAh battery, which is significantly bigger than the 950mAh battery in the older, non-3G N95. So the 3G battery is definitely affecting the battery life, but the bigger battery is doing a lot to compensate for that.

While the 3G drain is much stronger than EDGE, this implies that there might be even better EDGE performance than on the original. WirelessInfo.com says they may check into this for us.

The bottom line is this:

The new version of the N95 was able to keep browsing over a 3G network for 6 hours 12 minutes. Under exactly the same conditions, the old N95 (using an EDGE connection) was able to keep on browsin' for 7 hours 15 minutes...Read More

Labels: DVD Auctions, New Video Games

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Blu-Ray

Blu-ray Disc (also called BD) is a high-density optical disc format for the storage of digital information, including high-definition video.

The name Blu-ray Disc is based from the blue-violet laser used to read and write this type of disc. Because of its shorter wavelength (405 nm),significantly more data can be stored on a Blu-ray Disc than on the DVD format, which uses a red (650 nm) laser. A single layer Blu-ray Disc can store 25 GB, over 5 times the size of a single layer DVD at 4.7 GB. A dual layer Blu-ray Disc can store 50 GB, almost 6 times the size of a dual layer DVD at 8.5 GB.Blu-ray Disc is currently in a formal war with rival format HD DVD.

Recording 18 hours of 1080p on a single disc is pretty serious stuff, and Panasonic Blu-ray recorders launched at CEATEC Japan do this. They do this via a digital TV tuner, and MPEG 4 compression, and support for 50GB dual layer discs you'd see on a PC recorder, but never before on a home theater box. The players also have HDDs in them, up to $2600 for a 1TB model (There are 5 other lesser models, too, and the phrase product spam (comes to mind). The terrabyte drive can do 381 hours of recording, but using that lowest setting for 1080p seems perverse and wrong. Transferring from HDD to disc can be done at 4x. Japan only, for now, and given the high-endness of this setup and American HDMI DRM, maybe forever. [PC World]