Latest Technology News

Those of us who like to gesture at the television while watching news and sporting events are going to have to watch it, thanks to Hitachi.

This week at CES 2009, Hitachi is demonstrating a prototype television that is controlled by hand gestures instead of a remote.

Two major CE retailers released news about how they're coping with the economic downtown, with Best Buy doing considerably better than Circuit City -- which might cease to exist before the month is out.

Best Buy released its sales figures for the 2008 holiday season, and there was good news and bad news. According to the Financial Times, though December sales dropped 6.8% in U.S. stores, the retailer's overall business actually went up 4%. The company also said in its statement that its Web sales had grown 34% in the month of December. The segment which did the best was home office -- which actually went up year over year by 6.5% -- and the segment which did worst was appliances, which went down 24.5%.

Download Windows 7 Beta from Fileforum now (or at least try).

Huge public turnout online for a beta package that flirts with the 3 GB mark, forced Microsoft Friday afternoon to suspend distribution of its Windows 7 beta.

Yahoo is trying to bounce back from its financial woes with the announcement at CES of blue-chip partnerships around its TV widgets, a technology pointed to by some pundits as something that will transform television as we know it today.

At CES press conferences packed with reporters from all over the world, top manufacturers like Sony and Samsung unveiled plans to include Yahoo's widget technology in future HDTVs so as to help consumers customize their converged TV/Internet experiences.

At CES, RIM is introducing a smartphone touted as the thinnest full-QWERTY BlackBerry to date. The BlackBerry Curve 8900 is one of several new phones from various vendors now being added to T-Mobile's US network.

RIM's new Curve 8900 is both thinner and lighter than older Curves in the 8300 series, which are available for T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, and other networks, a RIM spokesperson said, speaking with Betanews at the show in Las Vegas. RIM has upgraded the Curve's built-in camera to 3.2 megapixels.

Click to view images of the Palm Pre

It's a phone. It's a phone that didn't even arrive on Earth shooting out of Steve Jobs'... shirt pocket. So what about the reveal of the Palm Pre proved so intoxicating on Thursday to CES attendees and press?

Navigation services company Telenav will be powering Ford's newest in-car GPS navigation system with the very long and unwieldy name: "Ford SYNC with Traffic, DIrections and Information."

SYNC was a big announcement for Microsoft and Ford in 2007, giving Bluetooth-connected personal media players and phones in SYNC vehicles voice command-ability. At last year's CES, SYNC received HD radio as a standard option, exportable performance analytics, and 911 Assist. Today, Ford announced that Telenav will be giving SYNC some much-needed navigation features, including turn-by-turn directions, live news, weather and traffic reports.

For the last decade, Casio Computer has kept a sharp focus (no pun intended) on digital imaging innovations. This week, the company is showing off its latest feature, a sort of on-the-fly greenscreen capability in point and shoot cameras.

Last year, Casio's big development was the high-speed digitization process in the EXF-1, which makes 60 fps still photo imaging and 1200 fps HD video possible. This year, the company has taken that technology and used it in a new way.

The system that could render the next 3D game for cell phones and handsets may not even reside on those devices, if AMD has its way.

Easily AMD's most important announcement from a corporate survival standpoint was its Phenom II X4 platform, which could earn the company some bragging rights in the important enthusiast market. But AMD also needed a psychological boost, something which could represent the company's goals equally among everyone, not just system builders.

Left out of its press event yesterday, Sony today launched a new Wi-Fi enabled camera, the 10.1-megapixel DSC-G3. Most notable about this slim digicam is a built-in Web browser for connecting to public hotspots.

While Wi-Fi in a digital camera can make it possible to upload while on the go, many hotspots require a login or registration using a Web page. To get around this problem, Sony simply embedded a browser into the camera, which can be accessed by pressing the WLAN button on the back.

For the first time in the United States, mobile phone users can now download a "lite" version of Skype that can be used for making calls to other Skype members and to landline and mobile phones at a low rate. Unlike Truphone, Skype lite doesn't require Wi-Fi and instead utilizes the phone's data plan.

Skype has been beta testing a version of its software for a limited number of mobile phones since last year. The new beta release works with the Android based T-Mobile G1, along with 100 other handsets that run Java applications.

Sling Media has released a beta version of its SlingPlayer Mobile software for BlackBerry smartphones, currently supporting six devices. Blake Krikorian, Sling Media's CEO, said BlackBerry support has been one of the top requests of customers since 2005. SingPlayer Mobile is a mobile version of the company's software for watching and controlling TVs hooked up to a Slingbox.

SingPlayer Mobile works with the BlackBerry Bold, Curve 8900, 8820, Curve 8320, Pearl Flip 8220 and the Pearl 8120. It requires BlackBerry Device Software 4.5 or greater, and Sling Media says it will further expand supported handsets as it continues to work with Research in Motion. To download the beta, which is free, BlackBerry users can visit mobile.slingmedia.com in their browser. With the final release, SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry will cost $29.99 USD.

Up until now, the ultimate CE consumer has been the young 20-something male with money to burn and something to prove. With the credit market drying up, that fellow has to prove something else now.

Now that the carnage of the Christmas shopping season is over -- whether you're thinking of the pile of non-recyclable wrapping paper and bows under the tree or the success (or failure) of retail sites -- Consumer Electronics Show manufacturer attendees are bracing themselves and figuring out how to restructure themselves to make it through the rest of the recession.

Sling Media has announced a new product at CES designed to enable remote scheduling on DVRs made by its satellite TV parent company, EchoStar. SingGuide offers much of the same functionality as TiVo Central Online.

Currently in beta testing, SlingGuide users can browse, search and record programs via their Web browser for Dish Network DuoDVR 722k, 722 and 622 models, as well as the new 922, which was just announced at CES 2009 and features built in SlingLoaded technology that works like the separate Slingbox device.

A roundtable panel on Thursday afternoon at CES was one of the show's briefer events so far, but we picked up some interesting tidbits from the forthright Samsung executives present. We have highlights of the stuff we would have loved to have heard during yesterday's big event, but better late than never:

- Ding, dong, the DLP is... Samsung is one of the last two companies to offer DLP televisions. (The other is Mitsubishi.) The Digital Light Processing technology was quite clever, using microscopic mirrors rapidly repositioning to create the image, but that battle was won by LCDs. But after hanging in there for years, Samsung is out, according to Senior Vice President SangHeung Shin, who told reporters that "We've already internally made the decision to drop the [DLP] line." Sets will most likely continue to be available for some time.