Filed under: Features, Gaming

We got a chance to check out the first functioning games for Zune and were able to answer a few — but not many — questions about how this thing’s bound to play out.

• For starters, first-gen Zunes don’t appear to be ruled out by any means, but it’s going to be dependent on the game controls. Zauri, the sample space shooter game demoed today, uses the Zunepad, thus wouldn’t work (as well) on a Zune 30. Nothing has been decided as to whether games will universally require 2nd-gen Zunes, though.
• Use of the Zunepad in Zauri was as a trackpad and omnidirectional — it wasn’t just up / down / left / right, as in the menus.
• Right now the system partitions a mere 16MB for storing games, although this might change.
• Right now there isn’t a professional-grade SDK to announce; all titles should initially be done up in XNA Studio.
• Means of distribution (i.e. games loaded through an installer, through the Zune desktop app, or through Zune Marketplace?) has not yet been decided.
• The first beta development tools will be out this Spring.
• There are no plans for Zune game sharing (yet), so to play with a friend wirelessly you both must have the game on your Zune.

There was plenty more we wanted to know but Microsoft definitely stressed that this is an incredibly early announcement, and many of the details we’re all lusting after are still being hammered out. Again, we’ll know more in Spring and Summer.

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

After the European PR agency seemingly jumped the gun, we finally get some actual hands-on shots of Sony’s newest video Walkman. The NW-A820 series as it’s known in Japan does everything its other NWZ-A820 brother can do in Europe (and presumably the US) only with that icky ATRAC and SonicStage baggage in tow. Sony also announced a new ¥20,000 (about $186) VRC-NW10 cradle with video-out and trick little video-in capability for real-time MPEG-4 recordings straight back to your A820-series player. A SRS-NWT10M external speaker is priced low enough at ¥3,000 ($28) that every teen-age jackass riding the subway will have one. Japan will see the new players in black, white and pink and in 16GB and 8GB models priced at ¥38,000 ($354) and ¥28,000 ($260), respectively. Check the gallery for hot A820 on iPod touch action.

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Filed under: Displays, HDTV

It’s a dilemma faced by nearly every photo / video editor on the planet — stick with a huge CRT for that precise color accuracy, or make the jump to LCD for aesthetics sake? Fret not, dear worriers, as Panasonic has supposedly crafted a miracle solution with the BT-LH1760. This April-bound production monitor is essentially devoid of attractiveness, but it does offer up a 120Hz refresh rate, an IPS panel with a 1,280 x 768 native resolution and “faithful color reproduction with twice the response speed of other currently available professional LCD monitors.” Furthermore, you’ll find a built-in waveform monitor and vectorscope, pixel-to-pixel matching capabilities and a slew of inputs including DVI, auto-switching HD-SDI / SDI, component and VGA. Yeah, it’s a pretty impressive array of specs for a 17-incher, but then again, most 17-inchers don’t demand just under five large, either.

[Via BroadcastBuyer]

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Ricoh has widened its range, dropping all new compact snapper with a massive 7.1x wide-angle zoom.

The all new R8 is the successor to the R7, and comes in the wake of a slew of new peepers offering punters ever-wider angles to take their holidays snaps.

Olympus’s SP-570 offers 20x zoom, but in a far heftier bod’ that it’d be rude to call compact. This new Ricoh model is far better suited if you’re a snap and go type photographer like us.

You’ll get 28 to 200mm from the R8, with 10-meg, snap focus and a 2.7-inch screen slapped on the back so you can see exactly what you’ve taken, whether it’s a super close up, or a vast panoramic.

Looks wise, we’re not talking Lily Cole: but then this bad boy makes your current digital memory box look pretty damn obsolete.

Price and release date are still to be confirmed, but keep it here for news as we get it.