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Thursday, July 30, 2009

Panasonic robot to tackle 24 Hours of Le Mans; Nissan car monitors GPS for road dangers ahead

Nissan car monitors GPS for road dangers ahead; Hitachi cell phone shoots HD video
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Spotlight Story
Panasonic robot to tackle 24 Hours of Le Mans

The 20cm high Evolta robot will attempt an endurance record powered by 2 AA batteries. Read full story

Related News:

Nissan car monitors GPS for road dangers ahead
A new safety system in the car will automatically slow it down if its traveling too fast into an oncoming curve

Hitachi cell phone shoots HD video
The cell phone, available in Japan, is the second handset to feature high-def video recording

Reviews

Sharp's solar-panel cell phone
An hour in the sun will provide 6 minutes of talk time and 6 hours of standby time. The phone has just gone on sale in Japan.

Motorola Evoke Q4A Cell Phone
The Motorola Evoke Q4A ($280 with no contract; as of 7/28/09), from pay-as-you-go carrier Cricket, has a sleek slider design and a few smartphone-like features such as a full HTML browser and a widget-based user interface. Unfortunately, unlike a more advanced phone or a smartphone, the Q4A doesn't have a whole lot of room for customization, and its performance can be painfully slow.

MSI Wind U123 Netbook
It's been a year since the Wind U100, the "big" sibling to the MSI Wind U123, came out--and the similarities between the two netbooks are eerie. Both run Windows XP Home Edition, and both carry 1GB of RAM, a Webcam and mic, and essentially everything else, except the U123 features a bulbous nine-cell battery and the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N280 processor (versus the U100's N270 CPU). In short, same stuff, different day.

Canon PowerShot SD990 IS
As a fan of Canon's Digital Elph cameras, I was a bit disappointed by the current flagship model of the series, the 14.7-megapixel PowerShot SD990 IS. That may be surprising, given that this camera dominates most other point-and-shoot cameras in terms of image quality.

Kodak EasyShare Z980 Point-and-Shoot Camera
As manufacturers produce more megazoom cameras with similarly astounding capabilities (the 26mm-to-624mm-equivalent lens that's now de rigueur comes to mind), pinpointing the features that make a camera unique becomes more difficult. For the Kodak EasyShare Z980, the standouts are ergonomics and battery life.

Fujifilm FinePix F200 EXR
The Fujifilm FinePix F200 EXR ($400 as of July 27, 2009) is an excellent pocket camera for relatively advanced photographers, either as a more-portable backup to a digital SLR camera or as a versatile primary point-and-shoot. The basic specs are nice: You get a 5X optical zoom lens with wide-angle chops (28mm to 140mm), optical image stabilization, a bigger-than-most 12-megapixel sensor (1/1.6 inches), and ISO levels of up to 12800 at reduced resolution. But the biggest draw for photographers is the sensor itself.

Pentax X70
The 24X optical-zoom Pentax X70 is one of the lightest, smallest megazoom cameras on the market, but it maintains "bigness" where it should: in the lens.

T-Mobile myTouch 3G
The T-Mobile MyTouch 3G is T-Mobile's second smartphone running Google's Android mobile operating system. And while the MyTouch 3G ($200 as of July 22, 2009) has much going for it-- a lightweight design, a gorgeous screen, and the 1.5 update to the Android operating system, it's not without its flaws -- the on-screen keyboard is far from perfect, for example.

Dell Latitude XT2 Tablet PC
Go on, grab the Dell Latitude XT2--it just feels good. The rugged metal-alloy casing gives it a solid, substantial frame. Pick it up, and the 13.3-inch machine is deceptively light (3.8 pounds). Put all of that together, and you seem to have a premium choice for mobility-minded businessfolk in need of a tablet PC. It has style in spades and a host of great features. But is this $2653 (as reviewed, as of 7/23/09) ultraportable package good for the long haul?

Asus Eee PC 1005HA
I can sum up the Asus Eee PC 1005HA in one sentence: It's a slightly thicker, slightly cheaper version of the Eee PC 1008HA. Hey, it's only fair. At this point, Asus releases more netbooks than Baskin Robbins has flavors. I won't recap all the versions we've reviewed--or are about to review--but the netbook maker continues making nips and tucks with designs, making just enough variations to warrant a separate take of the same micromachine. Is the 1005HA for you, though?

AssaultCube: FPS Fun, Unburdened by Plot
If the thought of free frags makes your trigger finger twitch, take a look at AssaultCube. This open-source first person shooter doesn't offer much in the way of snazzy graphics or major frills, and there's no storyline or plot. Just a selection of maps where you can hunt or be hunted by other players or computer-controlled bots. But the multi-platform AssaultCube can run on Windows, Linux or Macs, and its minimum system requirements are so low that just about any computer should be able to run it (Pentium III 500Mhz and nVidia GeForce 256 or equivalents, 128MB RAM). Plus, the entire game fits into a compact 40MB download.

Explore Oz Noir in Emerald City Confidential
Ah, the joys of public domain! With the Oz books out of copyright, everyone can spin their own tales, from the subversive "Wicked" to this intriguing and well-acted adventure game. In Emerald City Confidential, you control Petra, a former member of the City Guard turned Private Detective. Forties film-noir meets talking ragdolls and pompous wozzlebugs. Does it work? That is the mystery we'll explore in this review.

July Giveaways
Cisco Subnet is giving away 15 copies each of books on Enterprise Web 2.0 and Building a Greener Data Center; Microsoft Subnet is giving away training from New Horizons to one lucky reader and 15 copies of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Unleashed. Entry forms can be found on the Cisco Subnet and Microsoft Subnet home pages. Deadline for entries July 31.

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July 30, 2009

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