eK-gadgets info

The four new Vaio notebooks are the 16.4 inch Vaio FW, the 15.4-inch Vaio BZ the 13.3 inch Vaio SR, and the 13.1 inch Vaio Z. Let’s take a brief look at these Centrino 2 powered new Vaio lines.

The Vaio FW is a 16.4 inch laptop. Weird size you say? We might see it more often. This screen size will get you that 16:9 aspect ratio for HD Blu-ray content. This laptop weighs a little over 6 pounds which is quite remarkable given the bigger screen. The FW will be available later in July with prices starting from $1,000.

The Vaio BZ is a 15.4 laptop designed for business. It weighs a little under 6 pounds but it offers some smart business solutions. You get a hard drive shock protection system, a spill resistant keyboard and a magnesium-alloy case. The BZ will be the only Vaio to include Intel’s vPro management software and the Vaio Care support package. The pricing will start at $1,000 and you will get one by the end of July

The Vaio SR is a 13.3 highly portable laptop. It comes in five colors and weighs about 4 pounds. There’s a backlit-LED display, a webcam and microphone and a hard drive shock protection system. You will get one starting from $1,400 by the end of July.

The Vaio Z is a 13.3 laptop. It must be even more portable than the 13.3 inch SR model. It weighs a little over 3 pounds and features hard drive shock protection system, a fingerprint reader, the Trusted Platform Module and a password protected hard drive. All you need is a password protected sleeve that might perfectly fit into the password protected bag of your choice. Optionally you get an 128 SSD, WWAN, Blu-ray drive and HDMI-out port. The prices start at $1,800 or $2,300 depending on whether you chose the SSD or not. The Vaio Z is going to be customizable from August, if that’s what you want.

Which model do you like best?

It was about a year and a half ago that Apple’s original iPhone appeared on the scene and we did the Top Ten List of iPhone Killers. This time around, we pit the second-gen iPhone 3G against some of the best technology we have seen from other leaders in the mobile industry during the last six months. While all of them look drool-worthy in their own right, most of them lack one functionality that the original iPhone and iPhone 3G still boast about: multitouch. We will ignore this vital fact and continue on with the list for now, as most of the devices on the list have much more to offer in other areas compared to iPhone 3G. So without further ado, I present to you the top ten iPhone rivals that have surfaced over the past year, in no particular order.

LG Viewty KU990

While lack of a proper operating system might push this down the list for many, the Viewty KU990 has other qualities like 3G, a 5-megapixel camera, and a humongous 3-inch touchscreen display to watch those videos recorded in DivX format. A winning combination of pure style and some sensible technology for LG, but we would have like it a bit more if they had included GPS and some more goodies into the neat package.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

Announced during MWC 2008, this one has it all with an awesome 3-inch VGA display, Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional magic, a slide-out QWERTY keypad, and every connectivity options that anyone could ask for. We are still waiting for this to get out, but this surely marks a new start for Sony Ericsson on the smartphone front.

Nokia XpressMedia 5800

Also known as the Tube, this seems to be the only entrant from the leader in handsets for this year, but their promise of bringing in touchscreen cell phones to all price segments gives us a hope that there’s more in the future. The Nokia XpressMedia 5800 has all the good stuff including GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, and a 16-million touchscreen display with tactile feedback. Add Symbian to the mix and you have a great, if not perfect, iPhone killer.

Meizu MiniOne

The famous clone from China made it to the list last year and still looks to be hot, even though it only supports the Chinese version of 3G, TS-CDMA. Other than that, a 3.3-inch 720×480 display, a 533MHz processor, DMB TV tuner, WiFi, and GPS makes this a worthy competitor for the iPhone, 3G or otherwise.

HTC Touch Diamond

The Touch Diamond has been getting some well-deserved praise since it started doing the rounds on the interweb. This WM6.1 Pro powered device has a cool 2.8 inch VGA display, 4GB of internal flash memory, and a fast 528MHz processor along with a bevy of connectivity options. Clearly designed to kill the iPhone in mind, don’t you think?

BlackBerry Thunder

With its rumored multitouch touchscreen, this one is far from a proper release but what we have heard until now sure has us stoked to await its arrival. With RIM’s experience in business-oriented touchscreen smartphones and OS 4.7, this could shape up to be a nice little killer in a business suit.

Samsung Omnia

Ah, yes. The jewel in Samsung’s crown currently, Omnia or the i900 has all that the Touch Diamond boasts of and more. The bigger 3.2-inch touchscreen display and the 5-megapixel camera sure do play in Omnia’s favor but only the future will tell us whether this will emerge as a true touchscreen competitor, not just the iPhone 3G.

OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner

This latest iteration of the true “open-source” is already on the streets. Although it has all the base components needed to be a top-notch 3G smartphone with a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen, aGPS, WiFi, and a 3-axis motion sensor among other things, it is now left to see what the developers will be able create for this Linux-based cell phone.

Samsung Instinct

With features like GPS, digital TV, and a large touchscreen display with haptics, it is no wonder the Samsung Instinct proved to be a bestseller for both Sprint and BestBuy. This along with the Omnia should keep Samsung above the iPhone for a year at least.

Philips X800

Although not exactly a stalwart in the touchscreen arena, X800 is worth a mention for the big edge-to-edge screen and its superb battery life of 35-day standby and 8 hours talktime. While Apple may not have anything to fear from the X800 in the States, it might have a very good competitor from Philips when it comes to the Asian countries.

How do you like your current camera? What is it? A 3.2 megapixels phone? A 5 megapixels 5 years old camera? A new 8 megapixels Sony Ericsson mobile phone? A whooping 12 megapixels camera? Do you need more megapixels? How about the 50 megapixels camera from Kodak?

The KAF-50100 image sensor is the natural follower of the KAF-39000 which was a 39 megapixels made by Kodak 3 years ago. The new CCD has the same dimensions like its predecessor but the new model will have a total of 51.6 million square pixels which measure just 6.0 ?m x 6.0 ?m while the KAF-39000 has 6.8 ?m.

This new Kodak chip will be used in the new Hasselblad camera of the H3DII series. The H3DII-50 will shoot 65MB RAW or 150MB of TIFF image files at a rate of 1.1 images per second or 33 images per minute. The images will be stored on U-DMA CF cards, a 100MB hard drive solution or directly to your PC/Mac.

The camera will weigh 2290 gram or four pounds and it will be available somewhere in October for just $39,995.

We have more leaked photos of RIM’s Javelin. The BlackBerry Javelin is supposed to be one of the newest addition to the Berry family. While we still don’t have an official release date or a price, we can fantasize about it just by looking at its specs. That’s of course if we aren’t Apple people!

The BlackBerry Javelin as spotted in this picture will have some of the following features:

• QWERTY keyboard
• 480×360 LCD
• Quad-band GSM/EDGE
• GPS
• WiFi
• 3.2 megapixel camera
• 4.6 OS platform
• BES 5.0 support
• ArgonV processor.