All 4 Toys

You won’t find this trio hitting US shores anytime soon, but those situated in Japan have a new gaggle of Sharp BD decks to ogle. The BD-HDW65 and BD-HDW63 both include a pair of TV tuners, BDXL support and compatibility with Blu-ray 3D titles, with the only difference being the hard drive — there’s a 500 gigger in the former and a 320GB drive in the latter. The BD-HDS65 goes with a single digital tuner, a single analog tuner and a 500GB hard drive, which might prove useful for storing copious amounts of drama from Sky TV. You’ll also find WiFi integrated throughout, not to mention an Ethernet jack, HDMI output, component jacks and DLNA support. We’re told that the first two should ship in around a month, with the last fellow going on sale in Japan this November; as for pricing, we’re hearing a range from ¥90,000 ($1,066) to ¥120,000 ($1,422), which ain’t cheap no matter how you slice it. Read more »

Attaboy, DoJ! Out of (almost) nowhere, the United States Department of Justice announced today that it was requiring six well-known technology outfits to stop entering into “anticompetitive employee solicitation agreements,” and we’re guessing you will have heard just a few of these names: Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar. As the story goes, these six companies were all mixed up (but not all together, mind you) in agreements that forbid each other from cold calling employees from a rival firm in order to offer them a different job.

According to the DoJ, those arrangements acted as a “significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees,” and it has now filed a civil antitrust complaint today along with a proposed settlement that, “if approved by the court, would resolve the lawsuit.” We’re also told that some of the agreements were put into place as early as 2005, and they were “formed and actively managed by senior executives of these companies.” Yikes. Hit the source link for the full report, and feel free to call back that “Unknown” caller that keeps hitting you up on your Adobe line — it’s probably Pixar with a seven-figure offer. Read more »

Unless our eyes deceive us most cruelly, the Samsung phone we see above looks identical to the i917 Windows Phone 7 handset we’ve been seeing all over the place. Curious then that it bears the title of SGH-i916. We can only surmise that there’s some minuscule difference between the two phones, with this i916 seemingly set to ride Rogers airwaves up in Canada — purportedly with none of Samsung’s own branding anywhere on its shell. Another common feature it seems to share with the i917 is an AMOLED screen, judging by the deeper than deep black color it’s capable of pushing out. See a much larger picture of the i916 after the break, and if you want an even better idea of how a 4-inch Samsung handset compares to the iPhone 4, visit our screen comparison test starring the Galaxy S. Read more »

Amazon has release an update version of the Kindle App for Google Android devices, where it will features full text search, voice search, the ability to ad highlights and notes and synchronize these with other devices, and much more. The latest version of the Amazon Kindle app for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

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Yes, you read that correctly. The fevered dreams of crime scene investigators up and down the country are being brought to reality by Adobe, with just a single extra lens and some crafty software knowhow. Basically, a plenoptic lens is composed of a litany of tiny “sub-lenses,” which allow those precious photons you’re capturing to be recorded from multiple perspectives. The result is that you get a bunch more data in your image and an “infinite” depth of field, meaning you can toggle at what distance you want your image to be focused after the act of taking it. These plenoptic lenses are inserted between your shooter’s usual lens and its sensor, though commercialization is sadly said to still be a fair distance away. Never fear, you can get hold of a video demo much sooner than that — you know where it’s at. Read more »

It seems that though just about everybody’s getting the Samsung Galaxy Tab, few know how much it costs, but Australian customers can expect to pay AUD $999 if they’re buying off-contract. Several Australian media organizations are reporting that’s what the seven-inch, 16GB Android 2.2 tablet will cost, when it arrives at the country’s three major phone carriers for a slated November release. Smarthouse points out that the price reveal surprised Australian executives as a comparable iPad 3G 16GB costs just $799, though a Samsung VP told the publication, “we believe this is a fair price.” We’ll just let the market decide on that one, okay? Read more »

Apps are funny things. They tend to provide narrow utility — focusing intensely on one specific thing — but once you get used to them, you wonder how you lived without them. Take this Awareness! app, for example: it gauges environmental noise levels, sets up a threshold, and then pipes in anything louder than that into your skull alongside your music. Reasons why you’d want that to happen include oncoming SUVs, mothers screaming because their babies are in peril (from oncoming SUVs), or something as benign as your teacher yelling at you for not paying attention in class. There’s a nice set of options too, such as manually adjusting how loud a sound must be to be allowed entry into your cranium, as well as pausing of the app or of your music. Awareness! is available for five bucks on the iPhone and iPod touch, and will soon jump on to the iPad, Android, Symbian, and even the Mac and PC. Read more »

Not a lot of details to be had, but NVIDIA wants you to know Fermi isn’t the company’s be-all, end-all GPU — “hundreds of engineers” are already hard at work on Codename Kepler, expected to go to production this year and ship in 2011. Kepler’s based on a 28nm process, we’re told, and will thankfully deliver an estimated 3 to 4 times the performance per watt compared to Fermi, and hopefully run cool. If you built your last PC to last, however, you might wait for Maxwell in 2013, supposedly bringing a sixteen-fold increase in parallel graphics-based computing just two years after that, including advanced features like the ability to autonomously process some content independent of a CPU.

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Just because film is dead doesn’t mean that companies are at a loss for schemes to profit in the digital age. Take Kodak’s PYNK smart print system as the perfect case study. Consumers buy PYNK branded photo frames and mats at $15 and $4 a pop, respectively. They then scan the goods into one of Kodak’s 100,000 imaging kiosks and the machine will print photos (at further cost) into a perfectly cropped, sized, and aligned collage suitable for framing. A pretty smart solution for craft-less dummies like us. Read more »