Toshiba just released the world’s first HD DVD player for sale in Japan, the model HD-XA1.
The device performs output up and down-conversion among and between 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i.
Compatible with most optical media, except Blu-ray for some reason.
Toshiba Brings World’s First HD DVD Player to the Japanese Market - Toshiba Press Release, 31 [...]

Samsung announces a new GPS-enabled slider phone, the SCH-V850. The phone has the usual-ish 262k 2 inch QVGA LCD screen, 1.3 MP camera, MP3 player, EVDO as well as video recording and playback.
The GPS system is Korea-oriented, provides route guidance, real-time traffic information. The underlying functionality is provided by means of the NATE Drive service [...]

We’ve made note of the those nicely designed gadgets from Ambient Devices in the past. Now, Ambient has on offer the Forecasting Umbrella that incorporates a weather forecast data-radio in the handle. If the probability of rain is 100% the light in the handle of the umbrella will flash 100 times per minute. A 60% [...]

The Economist weighs in on the Open Source phenomenon, and finds it wanting. In a recent article entitled Open But Not As Usual, the Economist outlines some of the achievements of Open Source, some dubious on-goings and concludes with some cautionary notes.
The shining stars of the open source movement are portrayed as Apache, which [...]

Samsung tries very hard to be the world’s first in many categories, and mostly succeeds in those endeavors. In the category of music sticks, Samsung now claims that their new music phone, the SPH-S4300 is the “world’s smallest music stick”.
There are in fact smaller music sticks available, such as the GPX MW-3805 128MB MP3 [...]

Here’s a striking view of the business end of that Airborne Laser (ABL) intended to shoot down ballistic missiles during lift-off. The main laser is a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser, aka COIL, with output at a wavelength of 1.315 µm. A good system overview can be found at Operational Implications of Laser Weapons, with [...]

A new survey in the UK by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising reveals the extent to which those old standbys of pen and paper are falling into disuse. The IPA survey shows that almost all written communication today is electronic. Email is is by far the most popular way of communicating, making up half [...]

Korean cell phone maker KTF Technologies has developed the the world’s flattest phone. The new model EV-K100 measures 4.1 x 1.9 x 0.3 inches … that’s a mere 103.9 x 48 x 7.9 mm.
This CDMA phone weighs 60 grams, has a 1.8 inch screen, 165 MB of memory, an MP3 player and a 1.3 MP [...]

Samsung announced the general availability of it’s 32GB NAND Flash SSD at the Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taiwan yesterday. The company sees a bright future for these replacements for hard disk drives. Hwang Chang-gyu, head of Samsung Electronics made the following remarkable prediction at the event: “SSD will take over 30 percent of the [...]

Motorola renamed its A1200 smartphone to “Ming”, for its recent launch into the China market. The phone’s full feature set is available at Motorola Taiwan, and includes a 2.4-inch QVGA touchscreen, low weight of 100 grams, sized at 96 x 52 x 21.5 mm, PXA270 processor, Linux operating system and a 2 MP camera, [...]