First Skype Certified Videophone Unveiled

Asus, of cute little netbook fame, are at it again, this time with the world’s first Skype Certified standalone videophone. As you probable know Skype, the free PC to PC phone VOIP service has a built-in videophone facility, but it can be a bit of a pig to set up, so why not remove the PC from the equation and make it a simple one-box product, and here it is. It has a 7-inch display, there’s an integrated webcam and because it’s dedicated to the task, picture and sound quality should be as good as it can get. It works on both cabled and wireless links to your router and it has it’s own rechargeable battery, so you can walk around with it. The price, when it reaches the shops in the next few weeks will be around £220.

Fruity PC Comeback

Those of you who have been around computers for a few years may well remember the Fruit Wars of the early 1980s, indeed one of the very first home computers I wrote about was the Tangerine, back in the late 1970’s. In fact it was little more than a very large printed circuit board, smothered in logic chips, and you had to add your own keyboard and light bulbs, but it was a start… Anyway, soon afterwards we had more useable machines from the likes of Apple, and Apricot, not to mention quite a few lemons, though to be fair I don’t remember anyone actually using that name. But the rest, as they say is history, with only one fruity PC maker managing to survive.

Anyway, this preamble is by way of reintroducing the Apricot brand, last owned by Mitsubishi though by the late 1990s it had all but disappeared. Read more

A Wii world with a webcam

How about playing the Wii without the Wii? As intriguing as it may sound, we have the technology and it has already been put to good use for those that want an alternative to Nintendo’s Wii console. The cheaper alternative to the wireless gaming console is named CamSpace, and comes under the form of an executable that can be installed on Windows platforms.

The application boasts with allowing you to play any computer game without abusing the mouse and keyboard, as long as you are also the possessor of a webcam and of the game you want to play. Sounds like a Sci-Fi movie but it is as real as can be and, although it is currently in beta stage and not available to the general public, it is in continuous development – right now, the fifth beta is out. Read more