Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Pictures have popped up of what looks to be Samsung DSLR - the GX-1. The model appears to be a re-branded Pentax DSLR. In October Pentax and Samsung agreed to collaborate on DSLRs. The collaboration between Pentax and Samsung will take Pentax further into the Korean market and is of obvious benefit to Samsung as they suddenly have themselves a DSLR.

Read [Digital Photography Blog]

This link has a great comparison chart of the size differences between gaming systems. This includes XB0x 360, PS3, Revolution, PS2, GameCube, and Xbox.

Check it out

Audio company SRS Labs today announced they will debut a new audio enhancement technology at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. Dubbed SRS WOW HD, it is targeted towards televisions and consumer electronics products. SRS WOW HD, said SRS, will allow consumers to adjust the mix of the phantom center image relative to the background audio. The digital compression of music, and the audio processing techniques used in broadcast transmission paths reduce the clarity of reproduced audio (most apparent in products such as digital audio players and televisions). To address this challenge, SRS has developed SRS WOW HDTM, an advanced version of its SRS WOW audio enhancement technology. It is the industry’s most comprehensive solution from a single provider. SRS WOW HD adds new user-selectable high frequency contouring as well as definition enhancement to SRS Labs’ WOW technology, further improving the perception of clarity and acoustic space.

Consumers can now easily position the dialog and vocals to their taste and playback environment. It also features high definition audio enhancement for added clarity of high frequency content along with advanced bass processing for superior low frequency sound quality. We continually hear from consumers that dialog and other key audio elements get buried or muddy while they are watching TV or movies,” said Alan Kraemer, chief technology officer at SRS Labs. “WOW HD enabled TVs and set top boxes allow consumers to mix the sound and overcome these issues.”

Read [SRS Press Release]

For all of our international readers; Microsoft has opened a contest on their Beta Vista site asking contestants to guess the Vista Launch date. All legal residents of Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, UK who are 18 years of age or older will have the chance to win.

The official launch date of the new operating system Windows Vista has not yet been set. When will the final product be launched? Enter your guess now and win an exclusive invitation to the international Vista launch event in the USA!

Prizes include:

• 1st Prize: Be live at the Launch Event in the USA: the full package with entry, flight and 3 nights in a 4-star Hotel


• 2nd–4th. Prize: New XBOX 360


• 5th–10th Prize: XBOX Core System

Enter the contest

The iTunes Library Updater syncs iTunes with the music folders of your choice, always keeping your library updated and correct.

As iTunes doesn’t provide a function to update / synchronize your music collection with it’s own database, I’ve written a small utility for that purpose. Well, you may use ‘Consolidate Library’ of iTunes, but this is a typical Mac’ish behaviour letting one application control almost your whole life. I don’t like that too much, so better let my app control your life…

If you have music on your computer that, for whatever reason, you didn’t get through an iTunes rip or purchase, the iTunes Library Updater can automatically add those new tracks to your iTunes database. Look for our full review in the next few days.

Download [iTunes Updater]

We’ve gotten in touch with Kevin Rose of digg.com and we’re going to hold an interview with him.  We’ve decided to open up the floor to you, the readers, to come up with some good questions.  So if you have a question that you’ve been dying to ask Kevin, post it down in the comments.  You can ask as many as you want, and hopefully we’ll get some answers for you.

This is the ET980 phone that will be available around March of 2006. The phone will run on Windows Mobile 5.0, have a 312MHz processor, 64MB of RAM, miniSD expansion and sport a 4-megapixel camera. For now this will only be in Asia but our fingures are crossed for a stateside version.

More info as it arrives.

Read [Gizmodo]

The CEO of EMI says he thinks Steve Jobs will agree to price changes at the iTunes Music Store: lower prices on unknown artists, and higher prices for super-popular songs. Kind of weird that he believes this despite Jobs calling record labels “greedy” for wanting to charge more for online music.

What do you think? Let the comments begin to roll.

Surprisingly, Microsoft has stepped up to solve Sony’s root kit problem. The company says that the root kit that disguises Sony BMG’s DRM software is a threat to Windows’ security, and Microsoft security tools will now detect and remove it. Man does it hurt when your enemy walks in to save your ass.

Read [News.com]

Pioneer has just unveiled a Blu-ray DVD disc drive for the PC.  Aimed mainly at professionals, specifically high-end content users, it will also be marketed towards people who have a TV tuner in their PC and want to record HD content. And of course, those who just want to watch next generation DVD movies. The unit is half height model number BDR-101A. This Blu-ray Disc/DVD writer will read BD-ROM/R/RE, DVD-ROM/DVD-R/DVD-RW and +R/+RW discs. It offers the following write speeds: BD-R/RE (2X), DVD-R/+R (8X), and DVD-RW/+RW (4X).

Nice specs… still waiting on a price.

Read [Reuters]