Technology Nirvana

Well, here's a novel concept. Rather than bothering with turning up the volume on your ancient television, just crank up the volume on this here remote. Asahi Electric's block-shaped remote is about as unergonomic as it gets, and it sure won't bring along any advanced functionality, but we suppose that's sort of the point. The 30mm speaker connects to a wireless transceiver in order to blast out the audio, and while most everything else is lost in translation, do you really need to understand any more?

[Via OhGizmo]

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Curious ELPA remote sports built-in speaker originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Asus' out-of-nowhere P835 smartphone is packing some pretty decent specs, from an 800x480 touchscreen to HSPA support for lightning-fast downloads, but it's still packing Windows Mobile 6.1. Still, it's worth a look.

Here's the rundown:

• HSPA (DL: 7.2Mbps, UL: 2Mbps), UMTS 900/1900/2100
EDGE/GPRS/GSM 850/900/1800/1900, Class 12
• Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1
• 3.5" WVGA (800x480), no word on resistive or capacitive
• 4 GB internal storage plus MicroSDHC slot
• WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0
• Push email is supported
• 5 MP camera
• Looks like it's packing Flash support
• 1100mAh battery, which sounds a little underpowered

It's a pretty nice-looking piece of kit, and there's no word on a US carrier or price yet, but we'll keep an eye on it. [Wireless and Mobile News]

Anyone over the age of 30 may fondly remember Earl Weaver Baseball for Amiga, DOS, and the Apple II. I myself had an Apple IIc and split most of my time between Earl Weaver Baseball and Hardball! during my formative elementary school years. Now we’re hearing that one of Earl Weaver Baseball’s original designers, Eddie Dombrower, is porting the game to the iPhone.

According to an interview with Dombrower on Game Stooge, the game will be called “EWB Baseball” — pronounced “yewb” since Earl Weaver still retains naming rights — and will contain the original game engine, which is owned by Dombrower.

The game will be released with a relatively simplistic design at first and, assuming it makes enough money, will be followed by a more advanced version later. Says Dombrower:

For the first release, I intend to leave them pretty much as you see them in the screen shots. If time allows for the initial release, I’ll begin to add texture mapping to fill in the stands, improve the look of the grass and dirt. The animations are, in my opinion, strong enough for the resolution of this device.

Now, assuming that the game gets some traction and proves to generate some “real” revenue, here’s the second phase of the plan:

• convert the hand-created flat polygon renderings of the field and stadiums to openGL technology (which I can use elsewhere too)
• spend some time re-engineering the “Director” to pick better shots
• provide users with additional options for visual playback using the camera (the engine supports user defined camera positioning, but this was turned off for igiBall)

The “background” behind the stadium uses photos to provide city scapes and mountain scapes, and so on, and I plan to allow users to put their own photos behind the stadiums (currently 2 photos per stadium). That should allow us to, as a community, create the feel of the actual cities these ballparks live in.

Some beefed up graphics would be nice, yes, but it’ll only cost $4.99 and it oughta provide enough nostalgia for anyone who like the original game.

Here’s a shot from the DOS version:

 

And, of course, the original box. Who could forget the box?

A Baseball Classic Hits iPhone [Game Stooge via Kotaku]

A

Well done to the Authors Guild! Amazon revealed last night that the text-to-speech feature in the Kindle 2 will now be optional for publishers. The guild had been tenaciously fighting this feature, arguing that it had the potential to turn the Kindle 2 into a de-facto audiobook player. Right or wrong, Amazon has caved, and now publishers will be able to dictate whether or not the Kindle 2 is able to read aloud their books.

Yeah, your PC sucks. That video card you "borrowed" from your brother two years ago makes an exasperated sigh every time you fire up The Sims 2, and you're pretty sure your power supply is one Cheeto crumb away from giving up the ghost. Not this thing, however. Cooler Master has built an utterly ridiculous setup, with five separate quad-core computers running simultaneously under one roof, off of one power supply. The whole thing, which Cooler Master dubbs the 53GHz, is basically a showcase for various Cooler Master components, and will be displayed at CeBIT in Germany next week. Personal grid computing here we come? Video is after the break.

[Via Make]

Continue reading Cooler Master's 5-CPU monstrosity has your craptop cowering in a corner

Filed under: Desktops

Cooler Master's 5-CPU monstrosity has your craptop cowering in a corner originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re moving to a two- or three-display setup, one of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether you want two “equal” displays or a “primary-secondary” setup. A smaller monitor like this Westinghouse is a good option for a secondary, being cheaper and smaller yet still reasonably sharp and bright. Whether this particular Westinghouse is for you depends on a few things.

Specs
The L1916HW has a 19″ diagonal and a 1680×1050 resolution, which is good for that size; most at that size are 1440×900 or 1280×1024. I tend to game at 1680×1050, so it’d be a convenient size for me if I didn’t already have a large display I use for that. It’s so close to being able to show 1080p and yet — not quite. Oh well.

It advertises a 2ms response time, and I noticed nothing to contradict that, although I did have some serious trailing when dragging windows around on a black background. Sharpness was okay but nothing great, text was perfectly legible and details were just fine in high definition video. Color balance tended towards the warm side, but of course that’s adjustable. I found the viewing angle tolerance to be quite good, so you don’t have to worry about aligning this thing up perfectly with your head if it’s your second display. I have to do that with my little Dell, poor thing.

Touchy
The monitor’s controls are probably its most noteworthy feature. There is nothing on the front, if you’ll notice, and all the “buttons” are on the right hand side. In fact, they aren’t buttons but a long touch-sensitive panel. Good or bad? Well, a little of both. The different button areas aren’t well defined — there are little nubbins but if you go by those, you’ll hit every button while you search for the one you want. It’s a pain in the ass to use the menus, but you don’t do that very often once you set up a monitor.

What’s nice, though, is turning the thing on and off. At first I was groping along the side like a nervous virgin, but I shortly learned that nothing worked better than giving it a little slap on the side there on the lower right. It worked almost every time, and it was a quick, convenient, and satisfying way to shut down a secondary monitor.

Shi-shi
The styling I could do without: it looks a bit too much like a monitor you’d find at the concierge’s desk at a nice hotel or something. The clear plastic bits are a bit precious, and the logo glows at you all the time. You get used to it like anything else, but it’s bigger and brighter than other power indicators.

A minor gripe: in the box there was only a VGA connector. Come on!

All in all, it’s a solid little monitor. I personally needed something a little bigger, but if 19″ is your sweet spot, you could do a lot worse than this one. The high resolution is handy for a lot of things, obviously, and if you’re not doing any serious graphics work on it, you’re not going to notice the image quality shortcomings. If the styling and the idea of touch-sensitive buttons don’t offend you, give it a shot. Right now you can get it for $160 or possibly less.

In an effort to cut costs wherever possible, some consumers are going back to the cheaper, crappier-in-every-way dial-up we all cast aside years ago. This recession has just gotten serious.

Sales of the often sub-$10 dial-up subscriptions have increased after the stock market crash and many report that they've switched from broadband, though NetZero CEO Mark Goldston was quick to note that "this is not the iPod crowd we're talking about." Chances are if you're reading this, you're more likely to try to pawn your oven than give up broadband, but where exactly does it fall on your list of priorities? Would you give up a cable TV or Xbox Live subscription first? Let us know exactly how poor you'd have to be to go back to dial-up in the comments. [Orlando Sentinel via Crunchgear]

Last we saw of this thing, it was also being called the Galaxy 7, but all of the specs were already in place. Well, Asus has finally granted the P835’s wish and made it a real boy. Wait, no — they’ve just made an official announcement.

We knew all this stuff months ago, but it’s good to check in: last-minute tweaks to the UI or, say, built-in storage can have a serious effect on price and availability. It looks like nothing has been changed this time, but if you don’t believe us, feel free to compare this Russian review with the official spec sheet or the phone’s page.

We powered up ye olde NAM 5800 XpressMusic today, and the weirdest thing happened: it worked on 3G. This comes after a day of frustration trying to get it hooked up to UMTS yesterday -- a sentiment echoed by several others who took the plunge. The only theory we can come up with is that we were in Chicago yesterday at the Nokia flagship store -- a place where many of the "defective" units were sold -- and today we're elsewhere, so it's conceivable that there's an issue with AT&T's 3G network in Chicago. We've noticed an uptick in 3G loss on other devices in Chicago the past few days, so it's possible that the 5800 is just particularly sensitive to crappy networks; then again, there seem to be others in New York that have the same issue, so it's anybody's guess. All we know for sure is that we're showing a big, fat "3.5G" logo in the upper left corner of our unit at the moment -- and we're going to cross our fingers that it stays that way. We have a request out to Nokia for official comment on the issue, and we'll let you know as soon as we have more.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Our Nokia 5800 magically starts working on 3G originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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