TechTalk

Oregon's Flash-based Camera

Oregon Scientific's DV100 is the latest flash memory-based video/still camera to be launched in the UK. The 4-megapixel camera costs £200 and has 16MB of internal memory as well as an SD/MMC slot. It can record video footage as MPEG4 or ASF files at 30 frames per second. Other features include automatic white balance, various exposure and focus settings and a 6x digital zoom.

3Com Mini Hotspot Creator

3Com's OfficeConnect Wireless Travel Router lets you create your own little wireless hotspot while out and about. The size of a pack of cards, the 802.11g router plugs into a broadband connection via an Ethernet connection, providing wireless access to up to 16 computers. It costs £47 and can also work as a client supplying wireless connectivity to computers that aren't enabled. Wi-Fi Protected Access accompanied by Wireless Equivalent Privacy encryption services and a firewall keep the hotspot nice and secure. A neat little idea that lets you commandeer other people's offices for your own purposes.

IRiver's N10 goes up to 1GB

IRiver's N10 necklace music player has just been bumped up to 1GB over in Korea. The mugger-friendly jewellery MP3 player is already out in the UK, so we're expecting the 1GB version will reach us pretty soon as well. We've had one of the 256MB models in to have a go with and were pleasantly surprised. It's nice looking, small and does a pretty good job of pretending to be a pendant - although you'd have to be into big, bold, chunky jewellery if you wanted wear it just as a necklace.

Still, we're not quite convinced that people will be sporting these things as a fashion accessory. Then again, what do we know? We write about technology, not fashion.

Ergonomic Laptop Stand

Fantastically important as they make you look in coffee shops, laptops aren't much fun to work on day in day out. With the Ergo Station from PORT you can raise your laptop up on its pedestal to get the screen up to the right height. Presumably, you won't want to attempt using the keyboard in this position, but the Ergo Station has also been designed to act as a dock so you can plug in USB devices such as a keyboard and mouse and leave them plugged in when you take your laptop out. The company has also come up with the CoolStand, which raises your laptop off the table to keep the air flowing round it so it doesn't overheat, and the LapDesk which is a lighter, more portable version for travelling laptops. We like the neat little extra bit on the LapDesk for using your mouse.

MONACO Sixty-Nine

TAG Heuer, the inspiration of modern invention

The launch of the MONACO Sixty Nine provides an opportunity to pay tribute to the foundations of the TAG Heuer legend: its sense of technical performance and its pioneering spirit. Since its creation in 1860, TAG Heuer has demonstrated its daring and avant-garde approach by tailoring its products to the aspirations of the contemporary world. In 1916, the world was stunned by the launch of the Micrograph, precise to the nearest 1/100th of a second. A half-century later, the Microtimer set a 1/1000th of a second challenge, and three years later, the Chronomatic, the first ever automatic movement with microrotor, represented a huge technological leap for the entire watch industry. TAG Heuer performances have earned it the role it serves since 1992 as official timekeeper for the Formula 1 World championships. However, one cannot reduce the TAG Heuer brand to its technological performances alone. Its admirable reputation is also built on its constant concern with perfect design. TAG Heuer has successfully asserted an audacious and singular aesthetic appeal that places the brand firmly among the great luxury houses. Revealing this avant-garde spirit in 2002, the Micrograph Formula 1 earned the highest distinction among its peers by winning the 2002 Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève, in the design category, the first time this accolade was awarded to a digital watch!

Review of Motorola’s 5GB M500 MP3 player

Nah, we didn’t ever expect Motorola do a line of MP3 players, either, which is why it was such a surprise when we spotted two models, the 5GB M500 and 256MB M25 at their press event back in June. It took a few months, but both players are just coming out and we managed to get our hands on the M500 for a quick review.

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DIY gramophone kit

Skip the DVD-Audio player and just buy this: a Japanese DIY kit that let’s you build your own old-style gramophone out of styrofoam, a motor, thumb tack, a couple of sewing needles (and some other stuff, of course). Best part: you can use the gramophone to “record” audio. They give you a few plastic discs, but Adam over at Kempa.com found that CD-ROMs work, too (which is handy since we have stacks of them we’re never going to do anything else with). If you’re really punk you can skip the kit entirely and make a functioning gramophone just out of a needle, some tape, and a piece of printer paper. This is especially punk because it will destroy whatever records you play on it

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Music Download Vending Machines Set for Britain

The first vending machines to sell music downloads are to be introduced in London next month as Britons continue to turn their backs on traditional methods of buying singles.

Customers will be able to download a single for about one pound onto a mobile phone or personal music player and the company launching the project said on Monday they hoped to initially offer two million songs.

The move follows continuing poor sales for traditional, over-the-counter singles.

In October the chart compilers said they recorded the worst ever sales for a song reaching number one -- just over 23,000 -- compared to sales of hundreds of thousands in the 1980s and 90s.

Inspired Broadcast Networks will open two music kiosks in Waterloo and King's Cross stations next month and plan to have up to 20,000 others in high-street shops, service stations and pubs by the end of 2005.

Between 200-250,000 singles are bought via music download services every week, rapidly approaching physical sales that regularly drop below 400,000, the Official UK Charts Company said.

In response, the Charts Company started to produce its own download chart to reflect the growth in the market and is now planning to merge the two.

The piracy-hit music industry is also desperate to promote legal digital music services to convert file-sharers into customers.

Pentax Optio X

Did we ever mention how lustily we’ve gazed at the Optio X, Pentax’s new five megapixel digital camera with a 3x optical zoom lens and a 2-inch LCD screen? Pocket Lint was lucky enough to play around with one, and digs the styling, but says that picture quality suffers way too much because of the JPEG compression Pentax uses in the camera. Too bad, because there was just something about that swivel…

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PlayStation Portable billboards — So close, yet so far away…

Seriously, Sony, how badly do you want to torture us? 3Yen has some pics of a bunch of billboards they’ve just installed in the Toyko subway with actual working models of the PlayStation Portable behind plexiglass. And yes, they already anticipated that someone might be tempted to do a smash-and-grab, and so despite Japan’s notoriously low crime rate they’ve hired three security guards to keep an eye on things just in case.

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