CIARA O'BRIENlooks at some technology gadgets
APPLE iPOD NANO
THE iPOD Nano may be a great music player, but it’s always been missing one feature: an FM radio. A couple of weeks ago, Apple finally remedied that with its new line of the compact device, which not only includes the radio, but also a video camera. The FM radio has live pause, so you won’t miss a second of your favourite music or radio show should you be interrupted.
Apple didn’t stop there. It also put a microphone and a speaker in there. While they probably won’t rival a dedicated recording device or surround sound speakers, they make the Nano just a little more appealing. The screen has been made bigger too, probably a smart move with the inclusion of the video camera.
http://www.apple.ie
SONY BRAVIA VPL-VW85 HOME CINEMA PROJECTOR
TALK OF projectors may turn your thoughts to the office but home cinema projectors have been around for some time now. If your wide-screen TV isn’t really enough for you any more, and you want a more cinema-like experience, a projector might be just what you need.
Sony has unveiled its Bravia VPL-VW85 SXRD home cinema projector, a full HD device that promises 1080p picture quality.
Without delving too deeply into the technology, it uses Sony’s High Frame Technology 3SXRD panel to improve fast-action display, effectively doubling the number of images displayed on the screen per second.
For the true cinema purists, you can use the “anamorphic zoom” mode with an anamorphic lens to create a 2.35:1 image ratio, like you would get in the cinema.
For those of us who aren’t quite as knowledgeable about home cinema, the projector has been designed to be easy to use and it will allow you to control multiple devices from a single remote, powering up the system, playing discs or shutting it all down.
http://www.sony.ie
NOKIA N900
THE NOKIA N900 is, strictly speaking, not a mobile phone. It’s an internet tablet with phone capabilities. This could explain why it’s a little chunkier than your average handset. The N900 will do it all – allow you to browse the web on a reasonably sized touch-sensitive screen, multi-task like you would on a PC and make calls at the end of it all. It runs on a Linux-based platform – Nokia’s Maemo software – and will be open to developers who want to create applications for it. It also has full Adobe Flash support, which is missing from some other handsets. That means webpages will look exactly as they would on your PC – only a little smaller.
The N900 won’t be available for a few weeks yet. http://www.nokia.com
