The format war rages on. Price-concious numpties who don’t know any better will be picking the HD-DVD format when faced with a wall of high-def spinners. Eager to close the gap, Sony launched their budget Sony BDP-S300 player to try and beat Toshiba’s wonderkind at its own game: the bargain-end of the market.

The BDP-S300 is a quantum leap ahead from the BDP-S1E spinner: Sure, it costs about half as much as its big brother, but it weighs much less (a blessing if
you’ve ever tried lugging the S1E anywhere). It can play audio CD’s, and looks
pretty tasty to boot. There’s not a cheap bit of plastic in sight, and it feels as professional and high-end as the S1E did.

Sony have stripped off a couple of functions, including the Dolby True HD and
various other high-end audiophile grubbins, but that’s not really a problem: If you’re into audiophilia, you’ve probably grown accustomed to being charged both of your arms and your leg from the kneecap down for your A/V gear.

For the rest of us, this is a phenomenal Blu-Ray player: Full-on, glorious 1080p video with jaw-droppingly good picture quality when playing Blu-Ray discs: We dare-say the picture quality is actually on par with the vastly more pricy S1E player. If you’ve got a library of plain-old DVDs, you’ll be pleased to hear that it copes perfectly with them as well, up-scaling them to sexy hi-def with rather good results.

We found that the BD-S300 isn’t exactly the Speedy Gonzales of the spinner world. Menus took a painfully long time to load, and the loading screens were
buggy (Dear sony: When you use a progress bar, people expect to be done waiting when the progress bar fills up completely.). They didn’t make much sense and would sometimes freeze up for up to a minute at a time… Put differently: Having to go a full several minutes from inserting a disc until starting to enjoy a movie is a complete joke.

In short, it’s a very capable high-quality player all around. Sadly, all of
the praise we are prepared to pour over the S300 are conteracted by a couple
of silly choices from Sony’s side: Without internet connectivity the Sony
BDP-S300 will find itself struggling. Whereas HD-DVD is a finished format with
a load of upgradeable players, Blu-Ray are still polishing its repertoire and
are making changes to the format as they go along. This can be a good thing,
of course, but it also means that the hard-earned cash you shelled out for your entry-level Blu-Ray spinner might be a waste of money sooner rather than later – in fact, seeing as how the BDP-S300 player is a so-called Profile 1.0 player, there are already discs out there (such as the ones that use picture-in-picture commentary) this player can’t play properly.

Don’t get us wrong, the Sony BDP-S300 is a great little player, and generally we don’t give a hoot about forward compatibility in our gadgets. It’s just that it’s a bitter pill to swallow for a tech-loving gadgeteer, when you discover that you may have to upgrade sooner than you like to stay au fait with the blue-lasered warrior in the format war. Our top tip? Save up another fifty quid and buy a PS3 instead…

It’s not often big, ‘orrible mobile networks get it on. But 3 and O2 have just announced their coming together to launch an all new mobile video site that gives its contributors cash.

It’s called EyeVibe and fuses 3’s SeeMeTV and O2’s LookAtMe at the hip. The new offering will follow the same principle of fronting up 10% of the revenue of each clip to the vain, mobile-loving, makers.

Both sides say the plan is to make video sharing as uniform and ubiquitous as texts and MMS, with each download only costing 10p to 3 and O2 punters.

The snag is that if you’re on another network, you’ll get clobbered for the data transfer too, unless you’re on a flat rate data package.

While 3’s representative told us that, “…fundamentally we’d love it to be available to all” and that they were, “…encouraging plans to make it cross operator,” it seems that their dreams of SMS style domination are a long way off.

Still, the new site looks pretty neat and is a cool way to claw some cash back, You’ve Been Framed style, from your shaky N95-made vids. You can get involved by texting your masterpieces to 60300 and quoting clip. Off you toddle then.

Filed under: Cellphones

The run-up to 3GSM GSMA Mobile World Congress has begun with the announcement of LG’s KF510 slider. Launching February 11th in Barcelona, the new 10.9-mm thin phone features a metal frame and tempered glass touch interface. LG primarily touts the phone’s “advanced touch technology” (incorporating VibeTouch haptic feedback like their Voyager, we presume), 3 megapixel camera, and MP3 player. Available worldwide in March in Stardust Dark Gray or Sunset Red. How sweet.

[Via AVING]

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

We first head of Intel’s quad-core Tukwila back in 2006. Now, it’s launching at the International Solid State Circuits Conference. Expected to arrive in the second half of the year, the 2GHz Itanium processor packs in more than 2 billion transistors. Unfortunately, it’s headed straight to the raised-floor room, not your consumer-class desktop. The good news for IT types is that the proc doubles the performance of Intel’s enterprise-class, 9100-series Montvale processors with just a 25% increase in power consumption. So, we looking at 4 billion transistors by 2010 Mr. Moore? Probably, Tukwila is still using 65-nm processes as opposed to Intel’s new 45-nm technology.

[Via ZDNet Australia]

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Filed under: Portable Audio

Yahoo! Music Unlimited (and its customers) is the latest victim of the digital media shakeout. However, unlike the shutdown of Sony’s Connect service which left customers stranded with DRM-laden tracks, Yahoo has struck a deal to send its existing subscription customers to the PlaysForSure-friendly Rhapsody music service from RealNetworks. The shift will occur sometime in “the first half” of 2008 and leave Yahoo Music Unlimited’s payment plans and music libraries in tact for customers “for a limited time.” Eventually, Yahoo’s legacy customers will be required to sign up at Rhapsody’s relatively higher rates of $12.99 per month (Yahoo charged $8.99 per month or as little as $5.99 per month for a year paid in full). So, do you still think that the subscription model is a good thing? Just wait, the shake-out has only begun.

Update: To be clear, Yahoo Music will continue to offer streaming audio, music videos, web radio and other advertising-supported music offerings and integrate Rhapsody into its online portal. Only the subscription service is being shut down.

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