Gadgets

You’re an aspiring Peter Jackson. You scoured Craigslist to find the next great Andy Serkis, and the actor is ready to mime his way into your movie through the magic of motion capture. When it’s time to finally shoot the scene, you take a deep breath, mainly because there are no pro movie cameras around.

The iPhone 3G/2.0 launch suffered many problems, from activation issues through availability to a buggy OS. And although there were few customer problems with the App Store — where users can get software to run on the iPhone and iPod Touch — developers tell a different story.

Apple’s insistence on secrecy meant that developers were cut off from their air supply: a large and vocal group of beta testers.

AppleTV and Vudu are going to have to make room in the online-movie boxing ring for two more rivals offering similar services. Strangely enough, they’re both gaming consoles.

Sony on Tuesday announced that an online movie rental and purchase system would be available on PlayStation 3 by end of day. The move is in direct competition with Microsoft’s recent announcement that users with Netflix accounts will soon be able to stream Netflix movies from their Xbox 360 consoles.

Reports from around the web concerning a slightly yellower tinge to the new iPhone 3G’s screen have resulted in an uncharacteristic official response from Apple. Speaking to Macworld, Apple’s product marketing boss Bob Borchers said that the new 3G iPhone has a warmer, sunnier yellow tint to the display, against the cool blue bias of the first-gen handset.

Richard Baguley of Wireless Info actualy measured the color temperature of the screens, and the new ones are indeed warmer. The first generation iPhone came in at 8294ºK; the new one measured between 6800 and 7270ºK. With matters of color temperature, lower is redder (the Kelvin scale measures the light emitted by a body at certain temperatures: think of a piece of metal heating and it goes through red, yellow etc.

You’re a telco, and you are launching probably the most important cellphone ever. You have been advertising for months, paying possibly millions on publicizing your new product line, of which are rightly proud. On launch day, what do you do?

If you are Spain’s Telefónica, you open two hours later than expected, having allowed a big queue to form.

MSI’s oft delayed Wind has finally started to ship. At least, pre-orders have started to ship. Those of you who didn’t have the foresight to order early can have the little $500 machine in “3 to 5 weeks”, according to Amazon.

MSI’s email also mentions Newegg, Fry’s and Buy.com, amongst others, but they have either already sold out, or the machine simply doesn’t appear in a casual search (and really, what other kind of search is there?)

The XP equipped ultra-mobile features MSI’s three-cell battery.

One of the problems with GPS is is that it uses a lot of power. Locking onto satellites, talking to them and then processing the answers can be a battery drain, which is, we presume, the main reason that cameras don’t have the technology built in. The little Eye-Fi card gets around this by ignoring the satellites and instead triangulating its position based on wireless access points.

This loupe on a loop is an attempt to answer a question we have never asked, namely “How can I turn my camera’s LCD screen into a viewfinder?”

The PRO-MC monitoring with two straps (to unfairly quote its machine translated name) is a $50 widget which sits over any LCD screen up to 3″ and magnifies it.

Julius von Bismarck’s ‘Image Fulgurator’ projects stealth images into the photographs of strangers, while keeping those images invisible to human eyes. Depending on whom you ask, it’s either a clever hack or an obnoxious intrusion. Naturally, we had to find out more.

Yesterday, von Bismarck’s device made its premature debut on the internet. Today we met him in his hometown, Berlin, to talk about the device, the thinking behind it and the inevitable deluge of e-mails from viral marketers wanting use it to smash their way further into our brains.

Over at Popular Photography, Zach Honig has taken $200 of company cash and blown it all on AA batteries, splitting the money evenly between single use and rechargeable cells. He then tested the bejeesus out of them to determine the lowest cost per shot in a digital camera, and came up with some surprising results.

With rechargeables, it’s hard to know the real cost per shot until the end of their life, but the standout product is the Energizer 15 Minute Charger, which actually does charge fully in just a quarter of an hour.