I am staring at the box of the SteelSeries Xai. It has been packed up after my review, so we can give it away to one lucky reader. Then I look back at my Microsoft Sidewinder X8 gaming mouse. A mouse that is wireless and fracking glows RED! Yet I am so tempted to deny someone the chance to enjoy the Xai mouse – I want to crack open that package and go back to it right now. I won’t of course, but that feeling shows how much of an…
Read MoreFido has added the Acer Liquid e to their smartphone line up. When we took a look at the phone on Rogers in the bygone era of earlier this summer, we were suitably impressed with the performance, for a relatively low cost. On Fido, the phone is even cheaper, at only $30 with a 3 year contract. For that price you’re getting a fairly clean Android 2.1 install on a 3.5 inch 800 x 400 resolution screen. When we reviewed it, we summed it up thusly: The Acer Liquid E…
Read MoreResearch In Motion’s developer event’ is still underway, but they’ve kicked it off with a bang, or so co-founder Mike Lazaridis is hoping. The PlayBook is RIM’s push into the tablet space, sporting a 7 inch display, a 1GHz dual core Cortex A9 CPU and sport a ‘flash-loving’, ‘app-rocking’ platform designed by QNX, called the BlackBerry Tablet OS. When the PlayBook was still expected to be called the BlackPad, it was rumoured that one of the big differentiators for the device would be it’s pairing capabilities. Sure enough, the preview…
Read MoreIt looks like Sharp is the latest to enter the tablet game, announcing their new Galapagos 5.5 inch and 10.8 inch tablets e-book readers running Android. Galapagos is also the name of the e-book/newspaper service that will come with the devices, which will delivers over 30,000 newspapers, books and magazines when the service launches in December (Japan only for now). Sharp’s decisions to not mention the Android operating system in it’s press release, as well as marketing these as e-book readers, and not tablets, are both curious to say the…
Read MoreFrom the realm of cool news, Adobe recently demoed a radical technology involving a Plenoptic Lens and a new software that will find it’s way into Photoshop eventually. Basically, this new lens (with software help) allows still pictures to be focused and re-focussed AFTER the picture is taken. That’s right! AFTER the picture is taken, you can manipulate the depth of field to pretty much anywhere within the picture. How does it do this? The Plenoptic Lens is basically made up of a whole bunch of tiny little lenses. The…
Read MoreAs a follow-up to our review of Clifford Nass’ book, The Man Who Lied to his Laptop, we were offered a chance last Friday (Sept. 17) to interview Professor Nass via telephone. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. RGB Filter-I must confess that I’m daunted by this interview because your book has got me thinking… “Should I sequence my criticism following your suggestions in The Man Who Lied to His Laptop? Should I play the personality type “Critic” or “Side Kick” in my presentation? Should I alternate…
Read MoreVideotron’s new Ultimate Speed 120 Internet is rolling out in Quebec City today, making it the fastest residential internet access in Canada. At $159.95 (or $149.95 with a TV bundle), it’s not cheap, but for that price you’ll be getting 120Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload, which rightly sounds impressive. What’s not so impressive is that your monthly download capacity is limited to 170 GB, which is lower than some $30 DSL plans in the country. When you look at the numbers, that boils down to almost a dollar a…
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago, before the craziness of Fan Expo and TIFF, Sony Ericsson was kind enough to send us the new Xperia X10 Mini for us to review. In the video above you can see our un-boxing of the phone, and a short review, where I go over the main features of what they claim is the ‘The worlds smallest Android phone’. The X10 Mini was also recently awarded ‘European Mobile Phone 2010-2011’ by the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA). Please note that while shooting the video…
Read MoreWith Windows Phone 7 just around the corner, it’s no surprise that Microsoft finally announced their first round of international expansion of the Zune service, providing digital entertainment services to more than 20 countries. Not all countries are created equal however. The much vaunted Zune Pass will be available in the UK, France, Italy and Spain, for 9.99 euros. The Zune pass allows users to have unlimited access to the Zune music library from Windows PCs, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live. Unlike the US version, which costs $14.99 US,…
Read MoreNewtek has long been one of the most innovative digital content creation companies out there. Originally an Amiga based company, with products such as DigiView, the first colour digitizer for a computer, and the Video Toaster which gave users the power of a live switching studio via an add on card , they’ve continued to innovate through the years. This year at SIGGRAPH is no different, as Rob Powers, VP of 3D development took the stage to demonstrate the virtual cinematography capabilities of Lightwave 3D 10, the latest version of…
Read MorePhotographic experiments can often yield some pretty interesting results, especially when you mix the old and the new. In a mashup of old and new camera tech, photographer Timur Civan put a 1908 (that’s the year , not the model number) Wollensak 35mm , F 5.0, Cine-Velostigmat lens on a Canon 5DmkII and walked out into the streets of Manhattan. The results are on view at Colt + Rane. Enjoy.
Read MoreWhile reading about the new Nikon D7000 and its initially unimpressive sounding HD video modes, I’ve come across a lot of opinions by many people who are disappointed about it’s possible 19.3 Mbps (Megabits per second) data rate. This includes many indie filmmakers thinking that rate may be too low for their purposes, myself included. We’ve all heard much about what are the good bitrates to look out for are, which ones are broadcast ready, which ones are crap and so on. Well, I stopped and asked myself, “Wait-a-minute, just…
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