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Will Kinect be bigger than Windows Phone 7?
James Dyson Award winner announced
Sony glasses-free 3D TV incoming!
Tony Curtis: iPhone fan to the death! What gadget would you be buried with?
Palm Mansion: webOS 2.0 touchscreen phone incoming?
Nokia N8 LIVE: HD entertainment live Q&A. Watch it back!
Stat clash: BlackBerry PlayBook v iPad
Call Of Duty Blacks Ops 3D on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360!
Sky 3D review
Sky 3D review: What to watch

Will Kinect be bigger than Windows Phone 7?

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 09:04 AM PDT

This morning, Steve Ballmer told a crowded lecture theatre at LSE that he was more excited about Kinect than Windows Phone 7, the latter of which is launching next week. The Kinect is further off, but Ballmer certainly seems to want to up the ante with the hype for the Kinect, even if you do need to tidy up for it to work properly.

Ballmer was enthusiastic about both the Kinect and Windows Phone 7 (“I LOVE my Windows Phone 7!”), and said that tablets had to wait until Microsoft had cracked the smartphone market second time around. He also said that the Kinect was the device he was “most keen on”. When asked what his favourite Kinect game is, he bellowed: “BEACH VOLLEYBALL BABY! BOOM!” simultaneously leaping into the air, walloping back down onto the LSE lecture stage floor, red faced and sweating.

Because it wouldn’t be appropriate to leave you with an image of Steve Ballmer leaping around his living room playing Beach Volleyball, we’d like to know what you’re putting your money on: Windows Phone 7 or the Kinect? Do you agree with barmy Ballmer, or is Windows Phone 7 where it’s at?

Click and tell…

James Dyson Award winner announced

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 07:31 AM PDT

The James Dyson Award winner has been crowned today, anointed with efficiently and accurately directed air by James Dyson himself. The winner for the 2010 James Dyson Award is a buoyancy bazooka called Longreach, a device that shoots an emergency buoyancy aid up to 150m out to sea. A red and white life ring this is not. It’s packed with flares and expands to forty times its original size when it hits the water.

The designer of the buoyancy bazooka is Samuel Adeloju, 24, an industrial design graduate from Sydney. He’ll receive a £10,000 cash prize, and his engineering faculty at the University of New South Wales will also receive £10,000. Best of all, he’ll be popping off to see where the magic happens at the Dyson research, design and development centre.

Samuel said: "After learning about propulsion technology in grenade launchers, I had to find a chemical that would expand to forty times its size in just fifteen seconds upon hitting water. After four months of testing I found that hydrophobic foam worked and soon after the concept for Longreach was developed.”

Samuel may also be crossing his fingers: last year’s winner is now employed in the Dyson fold as an engineer, and Dyson is on the lookout for 350 new recruits.

Full video of the winner of the James Dyson Award, Longreach: the buoyancy bazooka, below…

Sony glasses-free 3D TV incoming!

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 07:03 AM PDT

Added to the line up of companies rolling out the first batch of glasses-less 3D TVs is Sony. So far, we’ve seen two glasses-less 3D TVs from Toshiba that will be rolling out to early adopters in Japan. We’ve also seen glasses-less 3D TV demos from Sharp and Samsung, among others.

We’ll get a look at a Sony glasses-less 3D TV next week, at the opening of a new exhibition at The British Library, where Sony will be showing off its “360 degree Autostereoscopic display”. In other words, some sort of 360 degree 3D display. Autostereoscopic means the display transmits stereoscopic, or 3D images, without the need for glasses, and can work in a number of different ways.

As well as the Sony glasses-less 3D panorama, there’ll also be a chance to have a play with a 273ft long Microsoft Surface table, live crowd sourcing tools from the BBC, plus UCL projects Twitter Dials and Galaxy Zoo.

We’ll be headed to the opening on Thursday 14 October, next week. Drop us a line in the comments if there’s anything you’d like to know!

Tony Curtis: iPhone fan to the death! What gadget would you be buried with?

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 06:30 AM PDT

Tony Curtis was buried on Monday with a selection of his favourite possessions. Along with a Stetson hat, an Armani scarf, a copy of his favourite book (Anthony Adverse – which inspired his stage name), was his trusty iPhone. That got us wondering: what gadget would you take to your grave with you?

Appropriately, the reception after Tony Curtis's funeral took place at the Egyptian-themed Luxor hotel in Las Vegas. Egyptian Pharaohs were buried with a collection of their worldly possessions (and often a few of their favourite slaves). Thankfully Curtis didn't go that far but choosing to take his iPhone to the afterlife is the mark of a truly committed gadget lover.

After seeing Buried, I'd like to have a Maglite and an HTC Legend (appropriate name, see) with a couple of spare batteries popped in the coffin with me, just in case I'm not really dead after all.

Hit the comments and let us know: what gadgets do you love so much that you'd be buried with them?

Out now | From £free on contract | Apple (via MSNBC)

Palm Mansion: webOS 2.0 touchscreen phone incoming?

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 06:02 AM PDT

Palm hasn't released a new smartphone since the HP/Palm deal saw it gobbled up by the big PC-creating beast. Most of the talk since then has been about the now near-mythical Palm Pad. But now rumours are ramping up that a totally touchscreen webOS 2.0 smartphone is on the cards. Tipsters are talking up a device with the codename, the Palm Mansion. Sounds classy!

Whispers suggest the Palm Mansion will have a 800×480 touchscreen and will not have a physical keyboard like the Palm Pre or the newly PAYG Palm Pixi Plus. Code pointing to a virtual keyboard was recently spotted in the webOS 2.0 code but most people thought that would be used for the Palm Pad.

Hints that a new Palm smartphone is on the way have also popped up in a US regulator's database and rumours persist that we might see the Palm Pre 2 this month. Could the Palm Mansion be the Palm Pre sequel by another name?

Hit the comments and let us know: do you want to get your hands on a new Palm smartphone? We know there's a hardcore of webOS fans out there so shout up if this rumour excites you.

Out TBC | £TBC | Palm (via Pre Central)

Nokia N8 LIVE: HD entertainment live Q&A. Watch it back!

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 05:47 AM PDT

UPDATE: Our Nokia N8 HD entertainment Q&A is over, but don’t worry, it’s embedded below for you to watch back at your leisure!

Our latest and greatest Nokia N8 live Q&A session is happening right now, folks! This week, we’re talking about the Nokia N8 Symbian 3 smartphone’s HD entertainment skills. If you want to find out about its media and gaming prowess, all you have to do is drop us a line in the live chat, or through one of the many other ways listed here, and we’ll endeavour to answer it ASAP. Come on in!

Pre-order the Nokia N8 at Vodafone

Maybe you want to know what sort of Flash support the Nokia N8 offers, how it handles music, and what video pumped out through HDMI looks like. Whatever you want to know, you can ask us about the Nokia N8 in several ways: drop us a line in the comments, send your question to Electricpig on Facebook, Twitter or email (editor@electricpig.co.uk), or just join in the live chat going on at the same time as the live feed below.

Regardless, we’ll do our very best to answer your questions, and if you can’t make it, don’t worry: we’ll have the whole thing for you to watch back shortly after too. Enjoy!

Stat clash: BlackBerry PlayBook v iPad

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 05:46 AM PDT

Last week BlackBerry announced its BlackBerry PlayBook, a 7" tablet device running a dedicated BlackBerry Tablet OS. It has no price yet, and nobody has touched it. It’s been dubbed BlackBerry's "iPad killer", but who would win in a fight, the BlackBerry PlayBook or the Apple iPad?

Portability
The weight of a tablet could mean the difference between you leaving it on the sofa or sticking it in your bag every morning for the commute into work. In the case of a tablet, lighter is better. With the larger screen size, the iPad is heavier, and weighs in at 680g for a Wi-fi only version, or 730g for a Wi-fi and 3G version. The BlackBerry PlayBook on the other hand, is a decidedly lighter 400g. Size wise too, the iPad is clunkier than the BlackBerry PlayBook. Think of it like this: where the iPad is the September issue of Vogue (the biggest one of the year), the BlackBerry PlayBook is a little bigger (but much slimmer) than a standard quality paperback.
Winner: BlackBerry PlayBook

Screen
One of the most important features for a tablet has got to be its screen. We want to watch movies on a tablet, to read newspapers and magazines on a newspaper. Shoot, if the iPad screen was no good then all those crisp adverts in the iPad version of GQ would serve absolutely no purpose! The iPad has a 9.7" LED screen, and 1024×768. The BlackBerry PlayBook has a 7" LCD screen, at 1024×600 resolution. In effect, this means that the pixels in the PlayBook screen are closer together, as the same number of pixels are on a smaller screen. The PlayBook will be sharper, whereas the iPad may have a softness to it. To the naked eye though, there won't be much difference. Neither can be said to have poor screen quality.
Winner: Everyone's a winner!

Apps
There's an easy winner here. The Apple App Store has over 250,000 apps available to date, with over 3,000 of those being for iPad (as of August), whereas the BlackBerry AppWorld only just passed the 10,000 mark. To put this a little more in perspective, Android passed the 80,000 mark recently. In terms of content available for the device, the BlackBerry PlayBook pales in comparison to the iPad.
Winner: iPad

Under the hood and extras
Both the BlackBerry PlayBook and the Apple iPad have a 1GHz processor. Battery life has not been stated for the BlackBerry PlayBook, which isn't a good sign, and it's not sounding too good given what's packed into the operating system. The Apple iPad gets around 10 hours on a good day.
Winner: Too early to say, but Apple is the safer bet

Operating System
The BlackBerry PlayBook runs a new OS, a BlackBerry Tablet OS. This OS is powered by QNX, a company that powers all sorts of odds and sods and very important things too (like tanks and flash cars). It's got proper multitasking, whereas the iPad multitasking is an illusion of sorts. A 1GB RAM sounds hopeful, and it supports both Flash 10.1 and HTML5, the former of which Apple does not. before the BlackBerry PlayBook gets into our hands, it's unfair to judge the operating system, and impossible to get a proper handle on how the UI performs in day to day usage. What we do know though, is that Apple's UI is top of the tree, and BlackBerry will have to pull something special out of the bag to beat it.
Winner: Only time will tell

Conclusion
We won't get a full picture of whether the BlackBerry PlayBook can topple the iPad from its throne until BlackBerry sets the PlayBook loose. For now, it seems there are some battery issues that BlackBerry has to resolve with the PlayBook. By the time it arrives, in 2011, there may be a second generation iPad on the horizon, and an Apple iOS update may have been rolled out. on top of this, the Android tablet explosion will be gettng into full swing. If and when all these things happen, there could be whole new set of factors for the PlayBook to compete with.

What do you think? Could the BlackBerry PlayBook really be the iPad killer it purports to be?

Call Of Duty Blacks Ops 3D on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360!

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 05:27 AM PDT

UPDATE: Activision confirms that 3D support is in fact for Call Of Duty Black Ops on PC, PS3 and even Xbox 360. Three cheers all around! You’ll need a 3D TV for the console versions of course.

Call Of Duty Blacks Ops is coming next month, and in a surprise twist, it’s going to support active shutter stereoscopic (3D) gaming. To play Call Of Duty Blacks Ops in 3D on a PC you’ll need a supported Nvidia 3D Vision graphics card (Nvidia GeForce series), while 3D TVs that use active tech will support it in 3D on both PS3 and Xbox 360. Yay or nay? Have your say in the comments below!

It’s a pity Call Of Duty Blacks Ops on the PS3 doesn’t get the same treatment, and we’ve asked Activision if support is planned in the future. We’ll update if and when we hear back, but if you have a choice, is this more likely to make you play Call Of Duty Blacks Ops on a PC? Let us know in the comments.

Sky 3D review

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 05:15 AM PDT

Sky 3D, the UK's first broadcast 3D channel, is here. Is it truly as revolutionary as the hype suggests, or is it merely an empty gimmick? We've been feasting our eyes on a weekend's worth of pop-out-of-the-screen content, so read on for our considered verdict here in our Sky 3D review.

Read the rest of our Sky 3D review:
Sky 3D review: Worth the money?
Sky 3D review: What to watch

First, let's explain exactly what Sky 3D is. It's a single channel, essentially an add-on to the broadcaster's Sky HD service, and free to anybody who subscribes to the Sky World HD package. This channel features a selection of 3D content including sport (both live and pre-recorded), movies, documentaries and live music/dance performances.

You will also, of course, need a 3D TV hooked up to your Sky HD box in order to watch the 3D pictures. Both main types of 3D TV technology – active shutter and passive polarised glasses – will work with Sky 3D, although as it uses the side-by-side broadcast method, you shouldn't see any real advantage to picture quality when using active shutter specs. While active shutter TVs can deliver 3D in full 1080p with Blu-ray, this won't work with Sky 3D, because the pictures for both left and right eyes are shown on the screen at the same time, rather than one after the other.

Sky furnished us with a passive LG 47LD950 3D TV for the purposes of this review, and it provides an effective 3D image. The picture is darkened slightly when viewed through the polarised glasses, which takes the edge off its vibrancy, but detail remains sharp and some of the 3D content on the channel, such as the CGI movie Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, looks glorious in 3D.

There's a real sense of depth and distance with the majority of the 3D programming, although the pre-recorded material tended to be more "impactful" than the live Ryder Cup golf we watched, because it has been edited or shot to fully show off the 3D effect.

How does it compare to 3D Blu-ray? Well, it all depends on the individual show or movie, but in general Blu-ray seems a little cleaner and sharper – just as you'd imagine. The 3D effect is roughly the same on both technologies.

There are one or two rough edges on show with Sky 3D however. While you can record 3D content in exactly the same way as 2D material, the EPG doesn't work properly when you're watching in 3D mode. That means if you want to consult the guide or set a recording, you have to exit 3D first. Sky is fixing this via an update soon.

Does Sky 3D transform home entertainment? Well, to a degree it does, but in our eyes not to the extent that the introduction of HD did – the leap from standard definition to high definition was immense, while 3D doesn't seem to deliver the same punch to the eyeballs. In much of the content Sky 3D offer, it comes off as little more than a gimmick – although we do like what it adds to sport and, in some cases, movies.

Sky was at the forefront of the HD revolution, launching Sky HD four years ago, and it has built its initial skeleton service into one of the best HD packages (47 channels strong!) in the world. If it can increase the quality of 3D content in the same way as it has done with HD, it will have something truly special on its hands. But for now, it feels like a niche service for early adopters.

Read the rest of our Sky 3D review:
Sky 3D review: Worth the money?
Sky 3D review: What to watch

Sky 3D review: What to watch

Posted: 05 Oct 2010 05:14 AM PDT

Sky 3D launched properly on Friday, replacing its looped demo reel of 3D clips with some proper content to get your teeth (or rather your eyes) into. So was Sky 3D's selection an apt showcase for the charms of 3D, or did it, well, fall flat? Read on for our thoughts in this part of our Sky 3D review.

Read the rest of our Sky 3D review:
Sky 3D review
Sky 3D review: Worth the money?

Without a doubt, Sky 3D's main attraction this weekend was the Ryder Cup, golf's bi-annual US versus Europe tournament. It's one of the biggest sporting events in the world, and on paper the ideal way to show off 3D. Unfortunately the golfing gods weren't smiling on Sky 3D last Friday, as torrential rain saw play suspended for almost the entire day. Well, if you will hold it in Wales…

It wasn't the most auspicious of beginnings for a swanky new "look at me" channel, although Sky did have the presence of mind to have prepared an extensive selection of backup material (interviews with players, behind-the-scenes segments etc.). Much of this was in 3D, which meant we at least got to see something while we waited for the skies to clear – but the weather certainly put a dampener on Sky 3D's launch.

When the golf finally got going, it proved an effective showcase for 3D (something Sky's commentary team were keen to point out time and time again – some nice Christmas bonuses coming their way, we hope). While it might not be the most dynamic of sports, Sky 3D's carefully chosen camera positions meant that we were often treated to some wow-worthy shots with a clear sense of depth and distance: golfers, caddies, flags, spectators and the landscape of the Celtic Manor course itself all arranging themselves like a moving pop-up book.

One thing 3D adds to golf is the ability to see the undulations of the green. 2D TV broadcasts often leave the putting surface looking fairly flat, but at times Sky 3D's pictures really showed what the players were facing with the putter in their hands.

So on the whole, the Ryder Cup was a good choice for the Sky 3D launch main event – although we do feel that Sky missed a trick by not showing Sunday's Chelsea versus Arsenal Premiership match live in 3D (we understand why they did it, though – it would have meant an interruption in their golf coverage). We did get some 3D football over the weekend, but it was only a repeat of last season's Champions League final.

Other than sport, Sky 3D's selection came off as distinctly lacklustre. A short 3D live show by gran-friendly indie dullards Keane, a couple of middling CGI movies, some wildlife documentaries, a dance show and a dollop of showreel stuff is not the level of content we were hoping for, and Sky usually fares much more impressively in this regard. We feel like, as with 3D Blu-ray, the quality of content is simply not available yet, at least in sufficient quantities. Sky would probably have liked to serve up something truly spectacular but, decent Ryder Cup coverage aside, the opening weekend came off as a bit of a damp squib – and that's because there isn't enough grade A 3D stuff available.

Looking at the EPG for the days ahead, the content seems to remain in the same vein: showreels, average quality films, football repeats, the odd documentary and the occasional live sporting event. It gives us the feeling that Sky 3D is something sports fans will appreciate more than, say, movie buffs. At least in its present form.

Read the rest of our Sky 3D review:
Sky 3D review
Sky 3D review: Worth the money?