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Register Hardware: If you’ve recently splashed out on a new digital SLR, then you’ll need some where to show off your snaps. Sony knows this, so it’s unveiled two LCD photo frames.

The main difference between the D80 and the D100 is display size. Whilst the D80 has a decent 8in viewing area, the D100 boasts a more spacious 10.2in screen. Another disparity is that the D100’s only available in a glossy black frame – the D80 comes in black or brown.

Both frames display images on 800 x 600 pixel resolution screens and in 4:3 formats. Users can flip either frame to sit horizontally or vertically because, much like many existing digital frames, images can be displayed in either orientation.

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MarketWatch: Worldwide sales of mobile phones rose 12% in the second quarter, research group Gartner said Wednesday.

Sales of handsets in the mature markets of Western Europe and North America slightly recovered after a difficult start. Western Europe reached 42 million units and North America surpassed 44 million units.

Still, Gartner said that the economic environment continued to hurt mobile phone sales in both mature and emerging markets. Among the mobile-phone makers Nokia top dog with a market share of 39.5%.

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TechRadar: The start of this year’s IFA consumer and trade fair has kicked off with the standard amount of hype. There’s no doubting the size of the event as it spans over 30 halls in order to encompass everything from the tiniest MP3 player to the world’s most expensive sound system.

The opening press conference is mostly about flat screen TVs; the UK has had negative growth thanks to things like the falling value of the pound over the Euro, and the lack of qualification for the summer’s football tournament. However, Europe and indeed the rest of the world is showing swift growth, with over 92 per cent of all TVs sold HD ready or better.

Things that are exciting us are: Sony and Samsung going to head to head in OLED demonstration TVs. The Koreans have been beavering away at this tech for a number of years now, but Sony beat them to the punch to launch the world’s first OLED TV.

But it’s not all about TVs. Home appliances makes its debut as a category here this year at IFA, and there’s a lot of excitement about what will be unleashed. The big buzz words appear to be convergence and energy efficiency…there appears to be a big push to make people pay more money for more environmentally friendly goods, so perhaps making them do more is the way to go, with things like refrigerators with built in TVs likely to be popular.

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TimesOnline: Dragging the internet away from the family PC and putting it on the television set has become one of the technology industry’s greatest challenges. After years of watching others fail to achieve it, Samsung believes that it is about to succeed.

This week the company will tell the IFA industry fair in Germany that it is partnering Yahoo! to provide content for a new integrated internet access service in its televisions. The InfoLive service will provide news, finance and weather information from Yahoo!, directed from the remote control.

Samsung plans to provide the service on Series 7, 8 and 9 televisions in Canada, Australia, and Singapore and in selected countries in Europe by the end of this year.

Samsung believes that it has surmounted the problem of navigation by not swamping the big screen but by adding bite-sized interactive choices. Users will be able to watch a programme while a tickertape of news items, share prices or weather forecasts runs in tandem with it.

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TrustedReviews: We’ve seen a great many sat navs come and go over the years but this one looks like it may last in the memory…

Navigon has clearly gone to town with the ’7200T’ an ultra widescreen 16:9, 4.3in screened device which offers up potentially photo realistic 3D mapping thanks to a pair of swanky techs it is dubbing ‘Reality View Pro’ and ‘Landmark View 3D’.

General roadside beautification is handled by the former while 3D buildings are created for more famous landmarks. Yes, we’ve seen the latter before but when combining the two the effects are certainly dazzling.

Impressively Navigon is also offering free real-time traffic updates over FM in the US (we’ll have to wait and see how that one works out in Europe) while the SiRF GRF3i+ GPS chip is a virtual industry standard.

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TechRadar: Panasonic has revealed details of six new TVs, which will be released in two series – the LCD ZR900 and the plasma screen PZ800 ranges.

The ZR900s will come in 42-inch, 46-inch and 50-inch sizes and feature a 1TB internal hard drive, a built-in digital TV tuner and the ability to stream YouTube videos through the huge screens.

The PZ800 series features 30,000:1 contrast ratio, Network TV, 4 port 1080/24p HDMI and VIERA Link compatibility to ease connection with other Panasonic equipment.

Ordinarily, you can get the PZ800s in 58inch or 65inch flavours, but, just in time for IFA, Panasonic has unveiled the daddy of all PZ800s – its third generation 103inch plasma TV.

The TH-103PZ800 has much the same features of the others in the range, except it only has 10,000:1 contrast ratio. The payoff is that you get this 103-inch behemoth of a television which weighs 343kg.

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VNUnet: HTC has added a new slider phone with GPS support to its range of Windows Mobile handsets for business users and professionals.

The HTC S740, available from September, is a compact handset with a slide-out qwerty keyboard for messaging and features the striking styling seen on HTC’s Touch Diamond consumer phone, introduced earlier this year.

“The HTC S740 combines a powerful, premium phone with a full slide-out keypad in a compact and sleek form factor. Clearly, one size does not fit all and the S740 will play an important role in expanding our growing portfolio of devices, ” said HTC’s European vice president, Dr Florian Seiche.

With its 12-key keypad and full-slide-out Qwerty keyboard for messaging, the S740 follows in the footsteps of the earlier S730 and S710 models, but features a four-row keyboard for easier text entry.

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Electronista: M-Audio has announced the addition of two new reference monitors to its line of tools for musicians, the Studiophile DSM1 and DSM2.

These new monitors include DSP engines for crossover and EQ control. The DSM1 features a 6.5-inch aluminum cone low frequency driver, while the DSM2 uses an 8-inch driver.

Both monitors support analog XLR or 1/4-inch inputs and digital signals up to 24-bit/192kHz.

Both monitors use a 1-inch ferrofluid-cooled neodymium magnet tweeter with a Teteron soft fabric dome, pushing frequency response to 27kHz.

The DSP allows for a variety of equalizer and filter settings, and compensation for phase differences found at the crossover point. Each speaker can be tuned individually.

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Gadgetell: In efforts to showcase the best looking portable media player’s and digital audio player’s at IFA, iriver has announced a new PMP and a GPS with media capabilities.

The first device announced is the iriver P20, which was originally shown off at the past CES in January 2008.

It sports a 4.1-inch AMOLED touch screen, which is a bigger screen than most PMP’s these days. In addition, the battery life is pretty good, 12 hours for music, 9 hours for video, and up to 8 hours with DMB TV.

The other device that iriver will be announcing is the M3, which is a GPS and media player combined.

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Register Hardware: In these days of megapixel madness, manufacturers don’t last long if they fall behind the benchmark – which currently rests at about eight-megapixels for phones.

So Hitachi and Casio have teamed-up to create an 8Mp phone, according to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) documents.

The phone’s based on a clamshell design and called the W63CA.

It’s branded as a Casio Exilim device on the back and, according to the phone’s description, will be a mobile for “the CDMA method of 3G”.

The phone will offer FeliCa services, which is a contact-less smartcard payment system that’s commonplace in Japan.

Unfortunately, this suggests that the talker may initially be targeted at the Japanese market only.

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NetworkWorld: Sanyo Electric is bringing full high-definition video to the entry level of the projector market with its PLV-Z700 that launches in Berlin this week at the IFA consumer electronics show.

The projector delivers 1080p widescreen resolution (1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels), which is the highest of several video modes that qualify as high-def, Sanyo said Monday.

It’s based on the 3LCD system that is backed by Sanyo and a handful of other Japanese projector makers as a rival technology to Texas Instruments’ DLP (Digital Light Processing) system.

A lens shifting system that can adjust the equivalent of 3 screens vertically and 2 screens horizontally sits in front of the panels and there is a 2X zoom mode.

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Electronic House: So many companies have been talking about putting Blu-ray into other CE devices. Panasonic is getting in that game—with a VHS combo?

Yes, it seems that old technologies never die… at least not if you pair them with newer technologies. The DMR-BR630V has a VHS/Blu-ray recorder combo.

Gizmodo says the unit has a 320GB hard drive and can write BDRs at six times speed.

It also has the latest “MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoder” chips, HDMI and analog connections, and Panasonic’s Viera link technology.

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