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That Google Mobile for iPhone with talky talky search action is now up. Our own impressions of it are good. When you're not in a noisy place (or another phone is ringing in the background) it can pretty much translate anything you say into a meaningful phrase. "Gizmodo" was understood, surprisingly, as was "bear market" and "bare ass". That's right, it was smart enough to tell the difference between the words bear and bare, depending on the context. Also super cool? The jibberish noise it makes when it's searching for something. If you're an iPhone user, you should go get it now right here.

Calling a cellphone a mere phone seems a little silly these days. The little pocket wonders now do so much they are really handheld computers. With extras. The process of mashing one or more gadgets together in the same box used to be called convergence, but that approach quietly died as the mobile phone ate up any and every rival device.

So successful has this been that whole product categories have had the life choked out of their twitching bodies by the phone. The following list is an obituary to five of them, plus a look at the cellphone's next victim.

The PDA

Remember the PDA? Right back to the Psion Organizer in 1984 (above), the PDA has essentially been an electronic calendar, address book and notepad. And right back to the Psion, with its squishy, non-QWERTY keyboard, they've been harder to use than their paper equivalents.

Still, despite this, it took the cellphone to finally kill them off. The fatal shortcoming? The address book. Who on earth would take out their PDA, call up a contact and then tap the phone number into their phone? Nobody, which is why, as the calendaring functions of phones got better, the PDA was quietly retired.

The Camera

We're not saying that the standalone camera is dead. Far from it -- one look in the street will show you how popular is the modern DSLR. But for people below a certain age, the camera-phone is the one they use, and it has already killed off the cheap, junky bottom end of the digicam market. It's easy to see why: although the pictures from the small sensors might not be great, the camera-phone is always in your pocket, and you can snap and send pictures over the network in seconds.

This convenience more than makes up for the noisy pictures. Remember the saying: The best camera is the one you have with you.

The UMPC

The Ultra Mobile PC was a failed experiment, although once in while a company will drag the rotting corpse from its comfortable grave, slap on a bit of makeup and try to sell the idea again. The reason? Cellphones. Think about it: The UMPC was a full fledged computer crammed into a tiny box with an impossible-to-use keyboard, a pathetic battery life and an hilariously high price tag. The phone, in contrast, offers an operating system and interface designed for the modest hardware on which it will run. It's cheap, and the battery lasts for days.

Better still, phones are only getting more powerful. The iPhone and the G1 are both handheld computers which happen to have a phone attached. And if you really do need a bigger screen, you can pick up two or three netbooks for the price of one UMPC.

The Phone

Hands up who still has a home landline with a telephone attached? Now, keep your arm in the air if you ever make calls on it. We don't see many hands.

We still keep these old tethered phones around, for calling the emergency services if nothing else, or because its cheaper to buy an all-in-one package from the local telco. But the main phone for many people is the cellphone. Part of this is the convenience of always having it with you, even in the house.

But we think a bigger part is that the humble telephone just hasn't kept up with technology. The handsets just don't have the features we're used to. And when we do use a landline, we look up the number on our cellphone and then type it in. Small wonder that most people just press the green button on the mobile instead.

The MP3 Player

Almost every phone comes with an MP3 player. We guess that in a few years, even the iPod will be dead, replaced entirely by the iPhone (and the iPod Touch, which is really just a cellphone without a phone). Music playback and a headphone jack is now a standard feature on even the cheapest of handsets (with some notable exceptions). Our prediction? The MP3 player will join the PDA in the gadget graveyard within a few short years.

Next: The Notebook

It will take some time, but its easy to imagine the cellphone completely replacing the laptop for mobile use. Sure, we might keep one at home for work, but the cellphone already does most of what our notebooks do. We can listen to music, play movies, and use the internet. One day, those big old, battery-sucking computers will be an amusing relic.

Ironically, these future phones might be lacking the one thing that gave them their name -- a phone. When fast data connections are ubiquitous, voice traffic will inevitably be sent over the internet.

Photo: Wikipedia

I’ve been playing around with the new Plantronics Explorer 370 Sports bluetooth headset for around 2 weeks now and I have to say that it is the most rugged bluetooth headset that I have seen to date.

Noise Reduction Good
As soon as I got it, I wanted to test the noise-reduction physical design of the headset and sure enough, people who I spoke to via the headset commented on the clarity of the call despite being in windy and traffic-noisy conditions. Wasn’t too impressed with the ear-tip though; found it hard to maneuver it into my ear.

Tough Design
I see this headset more for people who spend a lot of time outdoors - environments where the bluetooth headset is going to get knocked around a bit. It features extra rubber padding to cushion it from accidental drops and is large enough so that it’s not easy to lose. It’s 20 grams so chunky if you’re into that. Plantronics claims that it’s water resistent and dust-proof too; I was too scared of fully submerge the review unit into a glass of water, so perhaps you want to try that with your own

Ease of Use
The Plantronics Explorer 370 has easy-to-find and use controls to adjust the volume and answer/reject calls.  Both of the aforementioned control attributes are important especially when trying to manipulate a gadget on your ear.

Specifications
It’s powered by a lithium-ion battery which gives it up to 7 hours talk time and 8 days standby time.

Close at Hand
I like the lanyard that holds your headset for convenient access.

Superb headset for the outdoors! 8/10

Plantronics Explorer 370 Bluetooth Headset Video [CNET]:

Features of the Plantronics Explorer 370 Bluetooth Headset

• Bluetooth-enabled technology
• Built water and dust resistant for outdoor work and play
• Innovative filter blocks wind noise
• Sporty lanyard holds your headset for convenient access
• Talk on the phone without using your hands
• Simple setup with most Bluetooth phones
• Contoured eartip offers a better sound experience

Plantronics Explorer 370 Sport

After some months of saving my pennies, I blew them this week on a Nikon D700. Remember our post about buying old, full frame lenses and using them on your small-sensor DSLR? There was a reason for it -- those cheap old lenses will last you until you move up to full-frame.

There are plenty of reviews and incredibly detailed spec-sheets for the D700 already online, so here I'll just cover a few of the quirks and delights I have found so far. In short, though, the D700 kicks ass. It's easy to use, and takes an incredible picture, even in the dark.

That Sensor

The headline feature of the D700 is its full-frame sensor, which is the same one you'll find in the flagship D3. You only get 12 megapixels, but they're big pixels, and their light-gathering ability is extraordinary. The top ISO available on the D700 is a staggering 25,600, a full eight stops faster than ISO 100. At that setting, though, the pictures are terrible. Convert them to black and white and they look exactly like they have been through a photocopier. A photocopier that is running out of toner. That said, even this is better than the results that the Canon G9 gives at just ISO 1600.

Drop just one stop, to ISO 12,800, and things are a lot better. The pictures are still noisy but Nikon has tweaked its noise reduction algorithms to mimic film grain, or so it seems. The EXPEED processor has no mercy with color noise, but is a little easier on the luminance noise. What does that mean? It means that the nasty stuff is cleared out, leaving a grainy but pleasing result.

Drop the ISO to 6400, the highest setting with an actual number (Nikon uses names like H0.3 for the more sensitive settings) and you'd never know you were shooting at more than 800. This, combined with a fast lens (a 50mm ƒ1.8, for example) means you can shoot in ambient light, handheld, at night. And coupled with the heavy body, which steadies things, you can handhold to some pretty slow shutter speeds, too. If you were to add a shake-reducing lens into the mix, you'd likely have no trouble with shooting 2001's monolith in a black hole. At midnight.

The Knobs and The Aperture Ring

About that heavy body. The weight is reassuring (body only and without the battery it weighs 995g, or 2.2 lbs.) but the feel in your hand is what counts. I used to own a couple of Nikon F100 bodies and the feel is similar, if a bit chunkier. The biggest change for anyone moving up from a cheaper DSLR is the manual controls. Instead of all the functionality being hidden away in menus, most of the important functions get their own knobs, dials and switches.

Those of you who remember our post "History’s 5 Best Interface Designs" will know I'm a big fan of knobs:

Its strength is its simplicity. Once you have twisted one knob, you know how every other knob works. If it is marked, its position provides visual feedback. If not, our brains easily associate the amount of twist with the level of the knob’s effect. And best of all, it’s the only controller we know of which can go up to 11.

Better still, many of the knobs can be customized to do different things. Part of the fun is digging through the custom settings inside the menus to figure out just what you can tweak. The short answer is "almost everything."

But the one thing I really love, the discovery of which actually brought a small tear to the corner of my emotionally suppressed eye (hey, I'm English. We don't do emotions) is the aperture control. You can choose to use the aperture ring around the lens to set the size of the hole, shifting it away from the finger-dial on the grip (custom function f9, page 326 in the manual).

For someone who has this muscle memory baked in since childhood, this is huge. You lose the fine grained control of the 1/3 stop adjustments available with the command dial, but the shutter speed takes care of this. You also lose the Live View function, but you can always switch back temporarily (and quickly).

Live View

It works, and the high resolution screen means it looks great, but the live view is janky as hell. Here's how you use it: Turn the dial on the top to the LV setting (it's the same dial that chooses between self timer, single and continuous shooting). Then press the shutter release all the way down. The mirror flips up and live view is on. To refocus, press the shutter half way. The mirror flips down, the camera focusses, and the mirror flips up again. And when you actually take a picture, the mirror flips again.

You can choose the "tripod mode", which uses contrast detection like a compact camera, but it is slow as molasses. To me, Live View is little more than a gimmick. You can, however, zoom in on the live view image to see a 100% rendering for easy manual focussing (if holding a two pound camera plus lens at arms' length and twisting the focus ring is your thing) and there's a semi-useful level that can be superimposed on the image, but still: Gimmicky.

Built-in Flash

Really. Why? C'mon, Nikon.

Full Frame

The full frame sensor means that all your DX lenses are useless. If you were hoping that you could use your 18-55mm DX zoom as an ultrawide objective, you're out of luck. You can force the camera to treat the lens as a full frame one, but you'll get heavy vignetting at the wide end and a drop in image quality away from the center at all focal lengths.

The D700 defaults to reading just the central part of the image area, which means that an 18mm lens will act just like it does on a DX camera and give the equivalent view of a 27mm lens. The rub is that you are then shooting at just 5 megapixels. Even my D60 doubles that. For Lomo-style fun and frolics, though, those extreme angles, low-definition edges and black corners can be useful.

Auto Focus

The D700 has 51 focus points, all of which can be individually selected, and 15 of which are cross-type sensors which are faster and more accurate. There are several modes, from single point AF to a 3D tracking mode which remembers the color of the thing you first focus on and then locks onto it like a junkyard dog on a schoolkid as it moves around the picture.

But all you really need to do is to set it to auto and forget about it. The D700's autofocus is uncanny. It seems to know what you are taking a picture of and it locks on almost instantly. If you ever saw the Clint Eastwood movie "Firefox" (or read Craig Thomas' book), you'll remember the thought controlled weapon system in the plane. I believe Nikon took this and built it in to the D700. It really is that good.

Should You Buy One?

There's so much more to this camera that we have no chance of covering it here. But if you're thinking of buying a D700 (and especially if you are weighing it up against the more expensive D3), go ahead. I haven't had this much fun taking photos since I sprung for a Leica M6 some years ago (yes, I saved long and hard for that one, too. I then sold it to pay the rent). Bonus: Stick the 472 page manual in the bathroom and you'll have your morning reading taken care of for weeks. $3000, or thereabouts.

Product page [Nikon]

Review [DP Review]

Review [Imaging Resource]

Review [Ken Rockwell]

We have heard about the new Sony VPL-VW80 being released in the UK. Recently, Sony announced that this projector is now available in the Middle East. The VW80 features 800 ANSI lumens, a 60000:1 contrast ratio, and full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution. This projector also uses Sony’s patented SXRD display panels to deliver resolution and color like no other. The VW80 comes with two HDMI connections as well as a component, s-video, VGA, and a composite connection. This projector was designed to disappear while being used. The black chassis seems to fade away when the lights are turned down and the movie starts to play. Also the projector’s noise level is a very quiet 20 dB, which means the family can enjoy a movie with out being distracted by a noisy cooling fan. Unfortunately, Sony has not released price information for this release. There is also no word yet when the VPL-VW80 will be released in the US.

[via Zawya]

Continue reading Sony announces new CMOS sensors, 12+ megapixel cameraphones coming soon

Sony announces new CMOS sensors, 12+ megapixel cameraphones coming soon originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.