by Steve O'Hear
December 7th, 2009 | Posted in Other | 
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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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by Steve O'Hear
April 20th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | View 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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by Steve O'Hear
April 19th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Net TV | Comments Off
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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by Steve O'Hear
April 18th, 2009 | Posted in Other | Comments Off
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.
