Gadget and Electronics news and reviews.

Flash, Flash Flash! Photography!

The flash has been like the twin brother of a camera. For one, auto-focus feature of a camera works better with a flash and shutter speed is faster if there is an adequate level of light when taking the pic. Another is that not every situation that you will take a picture with your phone has adequate lighting. Even indoor situations need a flash to take better pictures.

Aside from megapixels (which is a distorted view of equating picture quality), users should also take note that having auto-focus and most importantly a flash is a must. Consumers are given two choices, either an LED flash or a Xenon flash. Both can be interchangeably used for regular people but there are difference among them which could be your basis in choosing your next camera phone.

LED Flash

LED flash has long been used in camera phones since they were placed. Putting two LED lights can make things really bright and since it is an LED, it can sustain light for a long period of time such as when taking videos. However, LED flash can make an image softer which is a con if you want sharpness in your photo for the clarity that you are looking for. Most Nokia phones have this type of flash.

Xenon Flash

Xenon flash is more of a recent type of flash present in most of the Sony Ericsson Cybershot camera phones in the market today. It can provide brighter bursts but not for a long time. Having this on your mobile phone can also shorten the battery life if used a lot as compared to using an LED light. Though having a sharper photo output, it can sometimes look a bit overexposed.

Personally, I prefer to have a Xenon Flash on my camera phone. This is because I don’t usually take videos on my camera phone and I like having the peace of mind that my flash can reach a farther distance when needed. Also, I just prefer the output of a Xenon Flash taken photo. Some however disagree saying that a photo taken with an LED flash has a better output and color reproduction is closer to reality.

So whatever your decision is on either a Xenon or an LED flash for your next camera phone purchase, be sure to try it first and decide depending on your preference.

iPhone literally sold millions of units all over the world and even surpassed their estimes. That could fairly well be the reason why a Japanese company called Digital King released a special lens for the iPhone to make the shots have a fisheye effect. The fisheye effect is like having the center part of the picture expanded and less of the periphery. This effect can be achieved through the use of lens or photoshop. Of course, using photoshop or image editing software takes the creativity part experience less which is the exact reason why a person would like to have the fisheye effect.

The lens is simply installed with the use of strong magnets that would make them connect in place. That means no screws, no holes or modifications of any kind to your precious iPhone. The magnets are quite strong so movements would really make them out of place. The lens too are Japan made and are of high quality that are said to get rid of focusing issues which a lot of fixed focus camera phones seem to have.

Creativity is really something not everyone have. So nurture it and let it grow. Grabbing one of this fisheye lens from Digital King wouldn’t be bad for some creative shots of some sort. Having this fisheye lens connected would really make your eyePhone I mean iPhone really cool (and artsy fartsy too).

After a partnership with a known GPS manufacturer Garmin, Asus announced the Galaxy or the P835 smartphone during the Mobile World Congress.

The P835 is equipped with Windows Mobile 6.1 - too bad it isn’t with the 6.5 version which was announced by Microsoft during the same event. The first thing that can be noticed here is the large WVGA screen which is 3.5″ which can display pictures, websites at 5x the clarity of regular LCS screens. Speaking of websites, Opera browser for smartphones is included that can render images fast and smooth as compared to the built in Internet Explorer. Connectivity is also a major edge of this device since it can surf the net at 7.2mbps through HSUPA. The good thing here is that you can use the phone itself as a WiFi access point. Meaning you could share the 7.2mbps glory your phone is having to up to 10 devices - talk about being a modern day Samaritan. Storage space is also one thing that this device isn’t lacking. It has 4GB of internal memory that can be further expanded through a microSD slot which is very popular as phones get smaller.

The P835 also has a 5 megapixel camera that has autofocus and flash which is great for some quick photo of things. An interesting feature that Asus has added is the Glide user interface. The Glide user interface has enhancements that makes the pure touch interface a lot more usable for people who are accustomed in using real buttons. This is like the Touch Flo interface from HTC Touch devices. Virtual keyboard enhacement is also included such as the option for a half QWERTY or a full QWERTY.

Pricing and availability hasn’t been announced but this is a nice smartphone from Asus with their own customization for business people and the like. This thing sure raises the bar for smartphones.

Has it ever happened to you that while you were driving on the street when this uber cool car passed by and all you see are heads turning towards that car? Well we all have that kind of experience too, but placing it in the techie world, nothing more amaze geeks and the like than someone pulling of a sleek piece of gadget from their belongings. Eneter, the Lamborghini VX5.

Literally speaking, this is the Lamborghini of laptops. It is made out of cool chrome accented body with a leather wrist area. The body construction is also very solid and looks great and the Lamborghini logo just tops it all. Of course, this piece of hardware also has some serious muscle under the hood. It is equipped with 1TB Solid State Drive, the first laptop to have such a huge capacity SSD, Intel Core 2 Quad processor, 4GB of RAM, 1GB DDR3 GT130 graphics card, backlit keyboard, blu-ray hard drive and a full HD 16″ LCD display to accompany it.

Expect this laptop not to come cheap though as can be seen by the superb specs. But if you happen to get one, expect to get a lot( i mean a lot) of heads turning the moment you pull this out of your bag.

The Dell Adamo is a new laptop line from Dell which is deisgned for people who cares about style in their laptop and who are willing to pay a premium for aesthetics and performance. These two were the two things considered in creating the Adamo laptop since that market seem to have been dominated by Apple.

Product Specification are as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo processor which is very much capable of runing the latest applications, DDR3 system memory which is twice the capability of its predecessor DDR2, 13.4inch LCD display which has a widescreen ratio of 16:9, perfect for watching movies and running productivity applications as this ratio has bigger work space, solid state drives also are the main storage device of the Adamo which is great for sleek, fast and quiet operation. This use of SSD drive also help in achieving the 5 hours battery benchmark which is always a good thing when it comes to laptop since portability is always the factor.

The Adamo’s weight is just 4 pounds or a pound over the MacBook Air which is still pretty light in spite of its loaded specs.

According to Dell, the Adamo line of laptop was inspired by fashion, luxury brands and timeless design. Wow, such distinct words to describe the line. This is manifested too by the product’s positioning in its marketing campaign. Just judging by the product design, it is really sleek and sophisticated thanks to the aluminim body. The packaging too of the laptop is in clear plastic which is very minimalistic but still flaunts the sophisticated design.

The price for this laptop sure wouldn’t come cheap at $1,999. Available in Onyx and Pearl color (that’s black and white for you and me), this would surely suit every fashionista’s taste and using it will make you feel the experience of falling in love.

Point and shoot compact cameras are very basic and is suited for just some regular, well, point and shoot. But, manufacturers want to make their cameras have something special in an effort to make it better than others. For example, Sony has smile shutter which takes photo when the subject smiles, and some cameras have a long shutter speed for some creative photo work.

Casio introduces its latest compact, the EX-FC100. The main features that the camera has is its burst mode and slow motion mode. The burst mode enables the camera take up to 30 pictures per second at 6 mega pixels. This feature is perfect to capture the perfect moment that is happening real quick. The slow motion mode on the other hand is for video mode that makes the camera shoot 1000fps of video! That will make things verryy slooow on video, perfect for making simple happenings into extraordinary videos like spilling a glass of water or a skateborder do some tricks.

Aside from its quick shooting aspect, the EX-FC100 also has a 9 mega pixel sensor, 5x optical zoom, 2.7″ display, and image stabilization. Its dimensions are 97mm wide, 59.43mm tall and 6.2mm thick.

This camera will cost $400. For this price, it could be a little expensive since other big name cameras offer something cheaper. But of course, taking photos that happened in 1/30 of a second and only you caught it - priceless.

A browser’s main purpose is to take you to the internet. Different plugins such as radio, uploaders, dictionary and others were introduced by Firefox made it quite popular aside from being a fast internet browser. However, competitors are always around such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.

It has been days since Safari 4 made its beta debut. I have tried it from the day it went out due to its promise of giving a much faster internet experience than any browser available. Apple said that this is due to Safari’s Nitro javaScript engine that makes it render webpages easily and lightning fast. Being a speed freak, this caught my attention and made me download Safari 4 immediately.

Things that users immediately see upon running Safari is the Top Sites menu which is like the speed dial on Opera and that the tabs are located at the top of the window. Being a long time Firefox user, closing a tab by clicking the X button is something that is automatically done by my fingers, but doing it in Safari is having to relearn that the X button is at the left of the tab. The interface is also nice and clean just like iTunes and as what can be expected from Apple.

As far as speed is concerned, indeed Safari is fast. I haven’t gone into testing it by milliseconds but there is a slight noticeable difference. For existing Firefox 3 users, the speed change isn’t really that much but having it compared against IE 7, it is like the Jetsons against Flintstones. The coverflow view really looks nice but it takes time too. I prefer the regular text view since it is faster.

A major drawback of the UI improvements done on Safari is its memory consumption. A tab opened in Safari is like having 5 tabs open in Firefox in my computer ( I am using Windows by the way). Also, I noticed that while Safari is opened, there is a slowdown in operation of my other applications like when switching from Word to Safari or iTunes to Word and the like.

Safari 4 isn’t just window dressing Safari 3 as can be seen by the improvements in real usage performance. I guess Apple based their tests with Core 2 Duo machines or equivalent processors so people with older computers will have some issues in addition to its being a memory hog.

The browser sure is something to try (if you still haven’t, it’s free anyway) but couldn’t be a real replacement for people who depend on Firefox’ extensions for their daily internet browsing. After all, Safari 4 is still in its Beta stage and things will still change as the final product is released.

Asus first entered the netbook arena with their Eee PC 701 which was probably the most basic netbook that time and was certainly the most popular too. Then come these other manufacturers that made newer and better netbooks that seem to chip away Asus’ market share in the netbook market.

The Eee PC 1004DN is another step forward for netbooks since this is the first to have an integrated Super-Multi optical disc drive which can read and write on optical discs for backing up of data on DVDs. This is really something new actually since an optical drive among others was the main difference between a netbook and a notebook, and now they seem to be slowly merging which I also see in the future that netbooks and notebooks will come as one meeting at some point or another.

It has the new Intel N280 processor which is faster than the commonly available N270 processor on older netbooks for enhanced processing power so watching the HD video will be a lot smoother on this device as compared to other netbooks. A 10.4″ LCD display is probably the next biggest size for netbooks since Dell has a 12 incher already. This 10.4″ screen estate seem just to be the fine balance between having an appropriate sized screen and power consumption. Speaking of power consumption, it has a 6 cell battery which is good for 5.9 hours of usage. The 5.9 hours of usage of course is the manufacturer’s estimate but even thought that it can only last for up to 4 hours, that would be good enough for me since a DVD movie is just around 2 hours and even with the power hungry DVD drive, I don’t think it can finish up the 6 cell battery pack of this netbook.

Other netbook characteristics are still present like it being easy on the back at just 1.45 kilograms that is really light on the bag and small enough to carry anywhere like a short trip to a coffee shop. WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 1.3 megapixel web cam are also present for connectivity and chatting purposes. Asus marks the keyboard 92% as that of a regular sized one and are designed to maximize every centimeter to avoid pressing other keys which always happen to people who have big fingers.

Versatile, Intuitive and Elegant - those are the words that Asus promises with this new netbook in their Eee PC line. I wonder though what happened with the easy to learn, work and play tag line.

Even with all the bells and whistles that the PlayStation 3 have especially the “core” thingiemajig that they kept on saying, let us not forget that good old PS2 is still in the market - for almost 9 years now! I just can’t imagine that the PS2 is nearing to a decade in about next year. That long period of time justifies the almost 1,900 titles available to be played from different game studios. A PS2 could still be a good buy since some of the popular games today like Guitar Hero is available on the PS2 and some games are still going to be released on this console. Not only that, you could also just use this console as a CD/DVD player if you don’t want to play games with it.

The less than a $100 price tag of the PS2, $99.99 exactly will be implemented tomorrow, April 1. What a nice announcement this is since it could be either Sony is really wanting the PS2 to be maximized for all of the development cost they incurred and to squeeze every penny on the aging device or maybe Sony is quite a joker and would love to give everyone a good laugh at themselves readying to use a $100 bill to buy a PS2 when in fact it is just an April Fool’s joke. Whichever way, I would love to see the reaction of the masses.

Looking for the perfect camera can be hard. You have to choose if you would buy a compact camera for you to bring anywhere you go, or a dSLR camera for some serious photography. But remember that there is also a line dedicated to be in between. These are usually called prosumer camera. These cameras usually have a high megapixel rating, dslr like processor, or high amount of optical zoom. The X70 from PENTAX have all of them.

The X70 packs 12megapixels CCD for some ultralarge photos, 24x wide-angle optical zoom which can capture things even at way way far away, 2.7″ high resolution screen which can display photos at any lighting condition even at direct sunglight, Triple Shake Reduction feature that can take blur free photos even without a tripod, Super Macro Mode which enables shooting objects even at 1cm close! Taking photos this close really unlocks a whole new world for photography hobbyists. High continuous shooting can also shoot 11fps which can be handy to get that perfect shot even at fast moments like during a race, and advanced Face Detection that can prioritize faces and make sure it is bright and focused which is handy during wide group shots even at dim conditions.

The PENTAX X70 wouldn’t up for sale until March 2009. Whichever might be your decision for purchase either an SLR or a compact camera, having a prosumer camera might be the best option actually. And all of the prosumers available, the X70 is defintely a must for a quick list of choices.