Digital Technology News, Camera, Camcorder and Cool Gadget Reviews

HTC has announced a pair of new smartphones with Facebook branding.The cringe-inducingly named ChaCha and Salsa devices are the first to carry the logo of the world’s biggest social networking site. However, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg stated during the press conference that dozens of branded devices will appear this year.

Both handsets have a dedicated Facebook button under the usual buttons at the bottom of the handset. This smart shortcut button will have myriad uses depending on what you’re doing at the time. For example, it could upload a photo or video, share a web address or location, or post a link to a music track you’re listening to.
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Nikon has revamped its D5000 DSLR to reveal the D5100, boasting an improved vari-angle screen smaller dimensions and Full HD movie mode.

The D5100 repleaces the D5000 and will deliver image quality on a par with the D7OO0, but in a smaller, less expensive body, claims Nikon.
Measuring around 10% smaller than D5000, it will sit the range between the D3100 and D7000 and cost £669.99.

The D5100 measures 128X97X79MM and weights around 560G (without battery or memory card).

The new monitor offers a 170′ angle of view and is 17% thinner than the D5000′s screen, according to Nikon. It carries a resolution of 921,000 dots, as opposed to 230,000 on the D5000. Read the rest of this entry »

A simple setup process, a strong feature set, and excellent throughput make for a killer combination for the Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router (WNDR3700). It will appeal to tech-savvy home users and business IT types alike.

The N600 is a dual-band router with a maximum theoretical throughput of 300 Mbps. In real-world usage, if a wireless router can achieve half its theoretical throughput, that’s superb performance. The N600 comes closer than any router we have tested to that level of throughput in bench¬mark results, hitting a maximum throughput of 121 Mbps. That excellent signal also remained fairly steady whether testing right next to or 30 feet away from the router. Read the rest of this entry »

The EOS 1000D is the camera that refused to die. By tradition, as the low-cost, beginner-friendly D-SLR in the EOS dynasty, it should only have lasted a year in the Canon range before it made way for the next new pretender. But its now time to say goodbye. After nigh-on three years, its successor has finally been announced…

Known as the Rebel T3 in North America, the HOOD is named as if it were simply just a minor update of Canon’s best-selling budget D-SLR body. But don’t be fooled by the badge, and the similar looks – inside this camera has been built completely from scratch.

At the heart is a 12-megapixel CMOS sensor – providing a 20% improvement in resolution over its predecessor – while the maximum sensitivity of the sensor takes a giant two-stop leap to ISO 6400. Read the rest of this entry »

A 7in touchscreen tablet PC running Android 2.2. The Streak 2 will dwarf the current 5in model.

T-mobile said it will be priced below existing tablets but didn’t reveal an exact figure – nor did it say when the Streak will go on sale.

The tablet runs an nVidia dual-core processor and has an SD Card slot to permit storage of as much as 32GB.

Research In Motion (RIM) announced their latest offering, the Blackberry PlayBook. The tablet which RIM CEO, Mike Lazaridis described as “the first professional tablet” has a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 multi-touch screen, a dual-core 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM and either 16GB or 32GB onboard storage capacity.

The PlayBook sports a 3MP front facing camera and a 5MP rear camera. It has got a microUSB jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and an HDMI port. No word on when it will be available and at how much, but it looks quite promising.

Featuring exclusive SonicMaster technology co-developed with audio specialists Bang & Olufsen ICEpower, the new ASUS N series delivers the clearest, richest and deepest sound produced by a laptop.

Powered by an Intel Core i5 processor and Windows 7 Home Premium, it is also equipped with Super Hybrid Engine technology that boosts system performance by 7 percent.

USB 3.0 connectivity delivers 10X faster data transfers as compared to USB 2.0, and Video Magic technology upscales standard definition video to Full HD 1080p.

The successor to the much popular Google Nexus One seems to have finally arrived, although not officially. The phone, which will be called as the Google Nexus S has been recently revealed by the CEO of Google at a recent meet. Even though he has failed to reveal any details about this phone, it has already been speculated that it could be the most powerful phone yet.

The Google Nexus S apart from being tagged as one of the most powerful phones, it also has another huge ace up its sleeve as it is the first phone to be sporting the latest version of the popular Android operating system. This phone will be running on the Android 2.3 or Gingerbread operating system. Unlike most of the other Android phones, this phone will not be using the traditional user interface method that is used to show the Android operating system. However, this phone will be sporting the raw operating system in its full glory. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft released the first wave of Windows Phone 7 handsets. The company’s CEO Steve Ballmer, speaking at a launch event in NewYork, said that there will initially be six handsets arriving in the UK, while nine handsets will be available in the US.

The new devices include three HTC handsets – the HTC 7 Mozart, HTC 7 Trophy and HTC HD7 – as  well as the Samsung Omnia 7, LG’s Optimus 7 and the DellVenue Pro, which won’t be available until December. Read the rest of this entry »

The company’s first  touchscreen/keyboard handset, the RESEARCH in MOTION’S BlackBerry Torch 9800, sports the new BlackBerry 6 OS.

A little thicker than some other top phones out now, the Torch measures 4.4 by 2.4 by 0.6 inches and weighs a manageable 5.68 ounces.

The 3.2inch, 360by480 capacitive touchscreen is fine for browsing the Web, but the colors, text, and detail look slightly flat.

The hardware keyboard slides smoothly and easily.  The Torch also has a software keyboard, but in both portrait and landscape modes it feels cramped. Test shows that the Web browser is slow to load, especially at mediaheavy sites. The handset’s 624mHz processor just can’t seem to handle the new WebKitbased browser technology.

The Torch’s 5 megapixel camera has autofocus, a 2X zoom, and an LED flash and the image quality was better from older BlackBerrys.