April 16th, 2010 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | 
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“What is an iPad? An iPad is basically a big iPhone”, argued Nick Smith, Elonex CEO at last week’s The Gadget Show Live.
“Err, it’s a bit more than that”, I replied, before politely indulging in a product pitch for the company’s iDock XL, a portable 10inch screen that houses an iPhone (or iPod touch) and displays any video content coming from the device. It’s available for pre-order and costs £149.
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April 12th, 2010 | Posted in Mobile, Other | No Comments
At last week’s The Gadget Show Live, Elonex showed off a new eBook reader, which will retail for £99 and features WiFi and a 7 inch colour touch screen. It doesn’t utilise eInk for the display, of course, instead it’s plain old TFT and as a result won’t be as easy on the eye for long reading periods and won’t offer eInk’s amazing battery life.
On that note, I suspect the Elonex rep featured in the video below got his wires crossed when talking in terms of page turns when describing power consumption, and the device on show wasn’t a working model either, so overall we’re holding our judgment.
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April 12th, 2010 | Posted in Net TV | 2 Comments
OK, so I’ll admit that television remotes aren’t exactly the most exciting tech products. But 3view’s newly announced Wii-like remote for its HD and Internet-connected set-top box is still noteworthy.
And although I already new of its existence after my recent visit to the company’s offices, I got to actually see the product up front at last week’s The Gadget Show Live. The remote feels really comfortable in the hand and its motion sensor and cursor-based operation should be a perfect fit when utilizing the Opera-powered web browsing capability of the 3view set-top box. It won’t come as standard, however, but will be an optional extra I’m told.
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April 11th, 2010 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV, Review | No Comments
In our review of the original Flip MinoHD, I was critical of the point-and-shoot camcorder’s tiny 1.5 inch viewfinder/screen, which made it fiddly to frame shots accurately. The fact that it has a 4:3 aspect ratio despite shooting in 16:9 widescreen, reduced the visible preview even more.
It seems that Cisco – makers of the Flip – have been listening. The newly revamped Flip MinoHD, which I got a hands-on with at last week’s Gadget Show Live, has a 2 inch screen with very little letter-boxing. It also sports a much nicer body, with the back utilizing aluminum, and also adds up to double the storage (8GB) and a HDMI port for connecting to a High Definition television.
The software remains largely unchanged I’m told, and it’s not clear if the company has added any image stabilization, which was another complaint of mine. But hey, you can’t have everything.
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April 11th, 2010 | Posted in Audio, Mobile, Net TV, Other | No Comments
As is becoming a tradition at last100, I was away for the best part of last week at The Gadget Show Live (2010) in Birmingham, UK and generally taking a bit of time out to recharge my batteries, or at least that was the idea.
Aside from clocking up multiple Foursquare check-ins and quite a bit of mileage, I got to check out some of the latest consumer tech, which compared to last year’s show, was a little underwhelming. It just seemed that there wasn’t much new – and a lot of products were noticeably missing in action (Apple iPad anyone?)
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December 7th, 2009 | Posted in Other | 1 Comment
It seems a bit early to be talking about an event that doesn’t take place until April next year, but I wanted to give UK readers a quick heads up that The Gadget Show Live 2010, which takes place from 8 to 11 April, is currently running a pre-Christmas promotion.
The expo is a spin-off of the popular Channel Five TV show of the same name and takes place at the NEC in Birmingham. This year’s The Gadget Show Live was a lot of fun and I got up close with products from Sony, LG Mobile, Flip, Swap, BeBook, and more – shooting some video along the way. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do the same again next year. I’ve already bagged a couple of press passes so with a bit of luck (and budget) we should be good to go.
Talking of budget, here’s how to qualify for that early bird discount. Go to www.gadgetshowlive.net and insert the code VH22 for the special £11.95 Christmas discounted ticket, available only until 24 December 2009. Apparently 36,000 tickets have already been sold (around 50,000 is the capacity over the four days) and that Saturday is already fully booked.
And for a bit of reminiscing, here’s the highlights of our coverage from this year’s event…
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April 20th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | 4 Comments
I’ve got to hand it to the guy from LG’s stand at The Gadget Show Live, if it wasn’t for his genuinely enthusiastic pitch for the company’s new ‘Arena’ KM900 touch screen phone, I might too easily have dismissed it as just the latest iPhone wannabe. He talked up the Arena’s 3 inch WVGA (480 x 800) screen, 8GB of on-board storage (expandable to 40GB via MicroSD), “S-Class” User Interface, and FM transmitter functionality – a feature that I recently suggested all portable media players should carry. Having said that, the Arena does take a number of design cues from the iPhone; the industrial design and the UI’s art work borrows more than a little from Apple’s iconic device.
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April 19th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | No Comments
One of the first products that I got to check out at The Gadget Show Live last week was the Mino HD from Flip. The updated version of their popular ‘point and shoot’ camcorder – a product category that the company practically invented – supports 720p HD video (H.264) and has 4GB of on-board memory (non-expandable), which provides enough storage to shoot about an hour’s worth of footage. The really neat feature of the Mino, however, is the slide-out USB connector, together with pre-installed software (Mac/Windows) that enables basic editing of any captured video and upload to YouTube, MySpace, and a number of other video sharing sites. In terms of picture quality, I didn’t get a chance to compare the Mino HD with other similar or more expensive camcorders – a review unit should arrive this week – but what I will say is that Flip’s latest device is incredibly light weight and small despite all that High Def goodness.
Video of the Flip Mino from The Gadget Show Live after the jump…
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April 18th, 2009 | Posted in Other | No Comments
Just a quick post to say I’ve just arrived back and safe from visting family and attending The Gadget Show Live in Birmingham in the UK, which explains why blogging, aside from on the show floor twittering, has been almost non-existent this week (limited WiFi and patchy 3G coverage also didn’t help). The better news is that we’ve bagged lots of video and images from the show where I got to check in on the latest news and products from Sony, LG Mobile, Flip, Swap, BeBook, and more – the best of which I’ll be posting over the next few days.