Black and Blue
Can’t afford a Blackberry? Well, you might just be able to run to a Blueberry @9500, just don’t expect it to be compatible with Blackberry’s email service or apps. Yes, it’s a fake, and a pretty shameless one at that, and it’s not the first time the Malaysian company CSL has had a pop at Research in Motion, the Canadian manufacturer of the genuine article. On paper the spec is quite impressive, it has dual SIM slots, a Micro SD card reader, camera, optical trackpad, a number of ‘Islamic’ features, wi-fi and the cheeky beggars have even fitted it with an analogue TV tuner. It’s priced to sell, at around £120 but there’s not much danger of you getting hold of one in your local high street, at least not above the counter…
World’s Smallest Camcorder
Over the past 30 or so years I’ve written ‘World Smallest Camcorder’ so many times that it’s set in Word AutoComplete. Here’s the latest, it’s from Shenzen AEE Wireless Technology and it’s called, rather confusingly, the ‘Mini DV’. In fact it has nothing to do with the camcorder tape format of the same name, it records in AVI format on Micro SD cards.
Whether or not it is the ‘World’s Smallest’ is open to debate but it is teensy, measuring just 55 x 20 x 118mm and it tips the scales at just 50g. Up front there’s a fixed focus lens and behind that a 2 megapixel image sensor, image resolution is 640 x 480 at 30fps. Power comes form a rechargeable Li-Ion battery that lasts for up to 2 hours. Read more
DivX Goes Mobile
If you thought the highly compressed DivX multimedia format was only for PCs and DVD players then you might be interested to know that it has now made its way onto mobile phones and one of the first outings is on the new shiny, slidy LG Secret. Video on titchy screens tends to be a bit jerky and blurry and quite frankly a pain to watch for more than 30 seconds but on this very neat and well-featured 3G phone it is truly immaculate. The picture is clean and crisp with vibrant coilours and fluid movement. The Secret has a neat iPhone-like trick and when you turn it on its side the image automatically rotates, so you get the full benefit of the phones’ 640 x 480 widescreen display. Getting video onto the Secret is pretty straightforward too. DivX files can be uploaded by a USB cable from a PC or copied to a Micro SD card, (conversion software is included with the phone) or there’s the DIY method as the Secret has a built-in encoder, and you can shoot DivX videos on the phone’s camera. Read more
