Ever peered up in a dimly lit parking lot only to spot a smattering of cameras peering at your every move? Now you too can have such a sophisticated monitoring system right around your own home thanks to QNAP’s NVR-1012. The network surveillance kit is designed to provide “professional grade” live video recording abilities in homes and offices where hoodlums and malefactors tend to linger.
The entire system is Linux-based and comes with a single NVR-101 server and a pair of IP cameras; reportedly, the solution is a breeze to install and every recording function can be carried out via an Internet Explorer window. Best of all, you’ll even find 2-way audio capabilities, so you can have a quick chat with any caught-red-handed crooks or mischievous youngsters right before the fuzz / man of the house swarms in for capture. Talk about a thrilling way to spend a Thursday evening.
In the green conference yesterday, many computer manufacturers have unveiled many conceptual computer products to meet the conference theme, and express their loves to the environment. Michael Dell is no different: a bamboo-cased eco-desktop computer, named as “eco-PC”, is claimed to smallest desktop is the history, with 81% smaller in size and 71% less in energy consumption when comparing to normal desktops.
I am so curious what have been installed inside such small PC, but Michael Dell didn’t reveal it, and just said it will be available in market at the end of this year. Selling price will be USD$500 - 700.
Have you ever experienced that you want to go home fast to switch on the Wii immediately? Now, you have a cool solution - “Chinavasion”, which has 7″ 480 x 234 LCD, built-in loudspeaker, AV ports and adjustable brightness/contrast button.
Compare with Wii LCD, this model is even more posh and cool in its appearance, it uses infra-read in top of LCD to receive signals from Wiimote. The selling is only USD$100, and is not too expensive.
It seems that no one is going to satisfy with the speed of CPUs, and still want them to be faster and faster. “Shanghai” CPU is an upgraded version of “Barcelona” of AMD with 6 cores, and is used to pit the chip up against Intel’s upcoming six-core Dunnington chip. What become more interesting is that AMD plans do release a twin-die version, with 12 cores of happiness connected by HyperTransport 3.0
What does all that mean? Beats us, but we hope it’s fast.
Using gesture control to control mobile phones is a very creative and cool, which is a similar concept come from Wii. Have you ever used a Firefox plugin that, once you have completed a drag with your mouse, a specific execution will be done. Reinforcing the concept from Wii, Samsung is now researching a franchised visual gesture control called “Instinct”.
In “Instinct”, different gestures are captured by the camera in the mobiles. For example, if you are flipping your hand over, the menu in mobiles will also be flipped.
From Wii and “Instinct” of Samsung, it is clear that mobiles in the future will become more gesture-control oriented. But will it be weird when you continuously your hands over and over in the underground or metro?
Dell just recently launched three different models of laptops. The selling prices of 13.3″-monitor 1310 and 15.4″-monitor 1510 are USD $749 and $599 respectively; while the big-screened 1710 has not been tagged with price yet. These three models have been adopted with a super slim design which helps in losing the weights.
Pocketables is so lucky to get a marvelous iriver W7 to toy and review with. Straight out of the packaging, critics found the design to be attractive enough, albeit a tad chunky; particularly with this device, we’d say opinions on sexiness will vary widely depending on what floats your boat. Nevertheless, reviewers found the touch panel easy enough to navigate, and thankfully, the perceived audio quality was dubbed “great.”
Those interested in the video capabilities will be delighted to know that all was well on that front too, as the slew of welcome extras (FM tuner, text viewer, e-dictionary, etc.) were all praised. Now, if only this critter would show up in America, we’d have yet another solid choice when it comes to pocket-friendly media players.
