About Electronics

SlashGear: If you ever find that your headphones get smashed into your ears when wearing a hat in the winter, then you’re problems are about to be over. The iLogic Sound Hat will put an end to your headphone problems and cold ears. I guess.

Now that I’ve gotten over laughing at the name “Sound Hat” I can tell you what this thing does.

This beanie hat has headphones built right into it. These headphones have a 3.5mm jack and will work with most MP3 players and cell phones.

Apparently, since the headphones are encased in fabric, the sound will be even better and you won’t annoy anyone sitting next to you on the bus with headphone audio overflow.

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T3: Is there no end to Jean-Michel Jarre’s talents? Not content with bringing bland electronic lift music to the masses, it turns out he’s also something of a gadget designer with his AeroSystem iPod speaker now available to buy.

Going for the ‘more is more’ concept, Jarre has knocked up an imposing metal and glass tower with 60s-style graphic decoration and more importantly, 2x 20W speakers and 45W subwoofer for blasting out that old school electronica.

Of course it also charges your player and does have connectivity for other players, although where said players will balance is open to question.

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HDTV UK: Sony talking up Blu-ray is not a new concept, but the company’s marketing and public relations manager, Mark Levitan, has said that Blu-ray will be a decisive factor in promoting the PS3 over other games consoles.

“…you have to say to yourself, if you’ve bought an HDTV, 1080p resolution is important to you so maybe you want a Blu-ray player. If that’s something you’re considering, then obviously you’re going to pick a PS3.

You can go to any chain store and pick up a Blu-ray player but for an extra 100 bucks, you can get a PS3,” he said.

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T3: Denon hopes to set the standard for quality Blu-ray playback with the launch of the DVD-3800BD.

Packing the 10-bit Silicon Optix Realta chipset, it promises the highest resolution high-def video available, adding pixel correction and noise reduction to remove any unwelcome pops and crackles.

Still got loads of old DVDs? Denon has that covered too with the Realta scaler, translating standard definition DVD images to high-definition 1080p.

As you might expect of Denon, the audio is top-notch, using the best of Denon’s audio processing technology as well as offering full support for the latest HD audio formats – which means super-clear cinematic sound.

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Techradar.com: Organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays are the best bet to replace LCD screens in the years ahead – if it wasn’t for their habit of fading and colour-shifting after just a few thousand hours.

But last week Kodak announced that it has succeeded in making a new type of OLED – the snappily-monikered “Kodak OLED Material EK-GD403″ – with a lifetime of over 65,000 hours.

OLEDs contain special organic thin-film materials that emit light when stimulated by an electrical charge, with no need for a backlight. This means they are much more power-efficient and lighter than today’s liquid crystal displays.

OLEDs are viewable across almost 180-degrees and don’t suffer from motion blur like most LCD screens. The new material uses ‘green dopant’ technology to boost lifetime, luminance and efficiency.

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Electronista: Philips has hoped to boost its GoGear portable audio player line with the GoGear LUXE, a unique player built expressly to tie in with a phone.

The device is designed to be wearable as a fashion item and to serve as a Bluetooth headset; the LUXE not only pairs wirelessly with a phone to warn of incoming calls but carries dual microphones of its own to answer the call with active noise canceling.

A one-line display shows incoming calls without having to fetch the phone from a pocket. In its core role, the LUXE holds 2GB of music and carries an FM tuner to pick up radio; the absence of a large display gives the small device about 10 hours of audio playback. Philips offers its own in-house audio enhancement technology to clean up audio compression artifacts.

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HD News: The dust has hardly settled on the High Definition format war but already new forms of digital technology are threatening to further revolutionize the way we acquire and watch movies.

The dominant High Definition DVD format, Blu-ray, has had a cool reaction from consumers and its market position is under increasing threat from services and technologies offering on demand films.

Coming to the forefront of digital download technology is DivX, a digital compression technology which prepares media files for high speed, high quality Internet distribution. Consumers can watch content on their pc or distribute to a whole host of DivX enabled portable devices and recently more notably HDTV’s.

DivX and Samsung have jointly announced that high-end Samsung HDTVs will soon be able to support DivX files through USB devices or DLNA-certified Ethernet connections.

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Register Hardware: LG has finally taken the lid off of the biscuit tin and revealed the specifications and price of its latest cost-conscious caller: the KP500 Cookie.

First announced last month, the KP500 has a 3in touchscreen display and haptic feedback technology to ensure you’re always aware of which key you press on the phone’s virtual Qwerty keypad.

Images can be snapped on the phone’s three-megapixel camera and an integrated accelerometer will ensure that pictures are always displayed in the correct orientation. Video can also be captured at 12f/s.

The Cookie also allows users to place their favourite widgets, such as the MP3 player icon, on the phone’s home screen for speedier access.

Phones with a stylus may be a dying breed these days, but the KP500 includes one to let users take full advantage of the phone’s handwriting recognition tech.

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Electricpig: Near-field communication hasn’t become mainstream just yet, but the latest digital photo frame from Parrot might go some way towards increasing its popularity – hold your NFC-equipped phone next to it and your snaps will transfer over automatically. No wires!

NFC is the tech behind Oyster cards on the London Underground, and because it doesn’t require Bluetooth-style pairing or any fiddling with Wi-Fi networking, it’s ultra-simple. The downside is barely any gadgets are equipped to use it just yet – it’s just too new.

Nokia’s 6212 Classic is the best-known NFC phone around at the moment, but more are certain to follow in the not-too-distant future – and then we’d expect to see devices like the Specchio become much more widespread.

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NaviGadget: Samsung is expanding its touch screen high resolution camera phone line up with Samsung PIXON M8800.

It is expected to hit the shelves in many European countries as early as this month or early November for an unknown price but you can expect to pay around 550 € for this slim ( 13.8mm to be exact) phone with a really sharp 3.2″ touch screen.

It is not just the 8MP camera that makes the Samsung PIXON M8800 really high-end.

It is loaded with features. Take the integrated GPS receiver for example, or the accelerometer, or the crazy connectivity you get with Quad-band GSM, tri-band HSDPA, bluetooth, and FM radio.

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Electricpig: While other brands took a shine to the iPod, Sony was one of the few to pretend not to care. How times have changed. Now Sony’s embraced Apple’s ‘Podlike genius with its new speaker range.

The fruit-friendly line up includes a hi-fi, speaker system and a couple of dock stocked alarm clocks all coerced into playing nicely with your ‘Pod.

Top of the Sony Apple tree is the LBT-D2ji hi-fi system complete with disc jockey talents to mix songs from your iPod. Think of it as a turntable for your MP3 player. It’ll even let you record your tubthumping mix via USB to save onto your PC.

The SRS-GU10iP speaker system on the other hand is pretty much a speaker with a dock packing 20W to free your tunes from your iPod. Completing the range are the ICF-C1iPMk2 clock radio and ICF-CD3iP clock radio docks.

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HDTV UK: Disney’s CEO, Bob Chapek, has stated that Blu-ray “is going to make the family room relevant again”, because of the quality of releases and their interactive features.

It’s a similar story to some who said that high definition TV itself would help to bring families back together, centred around the home entertainment system, as everyone gathers to watch blockbuster movies and TV shows.

A Disney executive has already gone on record to say that Blu-ray will eclipse DVD by 2010, and Chapek reaffirmed his company’s commitment to the high definition disc format.

“Blu-ray sales have picked up dramatically since a year ago, and I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg relative to what’s going to happen this fourth quarter. Because now the retailers have their stores set with not two formats but one format, and that just started happening this summer,” he said.

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