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Cell phone lessons from Hong Kong

I returned recently from a trip to Hong Kong and found a cell phone lover's paradise just waiting to be explored. Cell phone shops line almost every street, and no, I'm not talking about stuffy carrier stores with a limited selection of only what they want to sell. Rather, I'm referring to full-fledged gadget shops with an untold selection of manufacturers and models, many of which I'd never seen in the flesh. It goes without saying that the offerings are light years ahead of what we get in the United States, but also the entire cell … Read more

Designer e-book reader: Whatever

Talk about a niche within a niche. While we've become resigned to the persistence of designer special editions, no matter how eGregious, we've got to wonder how well this one can possibly do.

From the outset, the leather-bound Dooney & Bourke Sony Reader eBook has three disadvantages. First, Dooney & Bourke doesn't have the cachet of higher-end labels; second, e-books in general have yet to take off; and third, it's being marketed as a "special Valentine's Day edition."

An e-book reader for Valentine's Day? How utterly romantic.

Where are all the Wiis?

Well, it's been a nice couple of months since the launch of the Nintendo Wii and the PlayStation 3. After the predictably massive crowds and instant sell-outs of the systems on launch day, stores have had plenty of time to restock and get the new next-gen systems back on their shelves. Unfortunately, that hasn't quite been the case.

The Nintendo Wii is still almost impossible to find, and this is a surprising frustration for guys like me who decided not to wait in line for hours to get one at launch. After some legwork and a number of … Read more

A bounty of budget Sony shooters

Sony has some new cameras on the way, and they're all strangely similar. The company just announced the Cyber-shot DSC-W35, W55, S650, and S700, four sub-$200, 7-megapixel point-and-shoot cameras. They're simple, inexpensive models with the standard complement of snapshot features, including a top sensitivity of ISO 1000 for low-light and high-speed shots.

The Cyber-shot DSC-W35 and W55 replace the DSC-W30 and W50 in Sony's Cyber-shot W-series of ultracompact snapshot cameras. At just more than five ounces with battery and memory card, they're light and easily pocketable. They both use 38 to 114mm-equivalent lenses and include … Read more

Phones you can smell as well as hear

As Apple made clear with the iPhone last week, touch screens are the next evolutionary step in the development of mobile handsets. But Sony Ericsson is going after another one of the human senses: smell.

The company is making a line of aroma phones for Japan's NTT DoCoMo, according to Reuters, "to relax the users while making calls." (So Japanese in so many ways.) The handsets come with your choice of nine "scented sheets" accompanied by different designs.

Why, one might ask, would anyone want a scented phone? Perhaps it has something to do with … Read more

Console browsing: Not there yet

Is it possible to have a positive Webware experience on something besides a PC? Cell phones and small handheld Internet devices don't cut it with their tiny screens and awful browsers (at least until the iPhone arrives). So what if you could use that nice bandwidth you get at home and combine it with that large HDTV sitting in your living room? That question has recently been answered with Nintendo and Sony's more recent gaming consoles: the Wii and the PS3, respectively. Microsoft's Xbox 360 doesn't have a browser, likely because of the company's failure … Read more

Champagne PSP makes a toast

Normally, just adding new colors to a product isn't necessarily reason to get excited (unless you're Bono or Oprah). But given all the attention--and bidding--around the recent red and white Playstation 3 mod cases, we thought it might be worth mentioning that Sony is planning to release a champagne-colored PSP next month in Japan, according to Newlaunches. Sony has always been open to new colors for the PSP and, perhaps because of the success of custom cases on eBay, it'll get the message and take a paint brush to the PS3s as well.

Four new car stereos from Sony

In all the brouhaha of Sony's announcements on Blu-ray burners and Internet-connected TV, it's easy to miss the real news from the technology giant at CES: the unveiling of four new single-DIN stereo head units. Following the trend to USB inputs we've seen elsewhere, three of Sony's new stereos come with USB 2.0 ports built into the faceplates. Although, unlike new stereos we have seen this week from Pioneer, the Sony players will only play back files from a thumbdrive or from a digital walkman (not from iPods, Zunes, or other digital music players, according … Read more

Sony Ericsson's low-key Z310

Sony Ericsson is taking a cue from Kyocera this CES by keeping things simple. Besides its low-end W200i Walkman phone, the company is showing its Z310, which it introduced last month. Bearing a very basic flip phone design with a small external display that disappears when the backlighting is off, the Z310 almost appears to be a Samsung phone from afar. It's available in black, bronze, and pink, and because no carrier has been announced, it will run you a steep $219.

Features are mostly midrange, with a 65,536-color internal display, a VGA camera, text and multimedia messaging, … Read more