Electronic Toy World

Verizon Wireless subscribers are now the latest to officially be able to access MySpace Mobile. To connect, users simply need to tap the connect category on the Mobile Web 2.0 screen and then tap the MySpace category, and they will be brought to the MySpace Mobile web site.

With MySpace Mobile on their phones, Verizon Wireless users who also have a MySpace account can now perform various MySpace activities right on their mobile phones. MySpace users will be able to edit their profiles, view and add friends, view photo albums, post comments and blogs, as well as send and receive MySpace messages.

To access MySpace Mobile, users don’t have to call Verizon Wireless support anymore, all they have to do is to register for Mobile Web 2.0 on their mobile phones. This can be done by visiting the News and Info category under the Get it Now menu in the Mobile Web 2.0 portal. Even sweeter is that the use of MySpace Mobile has no additional charges for V CAST VPak subscribers, because they already have Unlimited Mobile Web 2.0 as part of the $15 monthly fee. Users without the Unlimited Mobile Web 2.0 service can also access MySpace Mobile but will incur usage charges of $1.99 per megabyte, so better limit the time connected with your ‘friends’ or you may just go broke.

Via [SlashPhone]

Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed →

Photoshop Express recently attracted my attention and I signed up. This was a very easy and short process. Include me in that group of digital photo snapping and sharing fanatics. Sharing photos has become the easy part - choosing where to share them is - well, not so easy. Researching the numerous photo sharing sites available on the internet is very time consuming.

Competition is rampant among these photo hosting sites. Kodak Gallery, Snapfish, Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterfly and Picasa are just a few popular drops in the bucket. I wish that there was a giant list of options that could be checked off that would lead to the perfect site for me. My requirements may not be the same as yours but here goes.

I’d rather not pay a subscription fee. Most photo sharing sites offer free albums but extra features will initiate a fee. Editing abilities and uploads to my blogs as well as other sites are huge time savers. For example, photos in Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa can be edited through Photoshop Express. Viewing options for my visitors are also important to me. Whether viewing as a private visitor or as a public viewer, slideshows and videos are fun. 

So, what else does Photoshop Express offer you and me? It may not mean a lot to some but the Flash Player 9 required to run Photoshop Express gives a smooth and good looking page. There are not an over abundance of features that confuse someone just getting started - but the quality of the features keep more experienced users happy. I can choose to display all or some of my photos to the public or to keep all or some of them private. Overall I like Photoshop Express.

Menus are not hard to navigate and some editing can be accomplished by simply placing your mouse over a photo. With a simple click on the photo you will see a long list including options from editing to emailing. Small editing projects are also possible. You can touch up areas that you don’t like such red-eye or a blemish. Change the overall hue of the photo, change areas to another color or change it to black and white. Editing should not scare anyone since the separate thumbnails will show the result of any changes made and you can always return to your original photo. My tip here is to give your changes a second or two to finish. At first I thought that I was doing something wrong and then realized that the screen was telling me that Photoshop Express was “working” and to give it a rest already.

Photoshop Express fills many of my requests. It is still in beta so maybe I will tell them about options that appeal to me. One thing I noticed is that when I upload a photo I am shown the size and date of the photo. Although I can resize it I would rather be able to specify the size rather than to choose a preset adjustment. I like to highlight particular areas of a photo with my choice of colors. I had great luck changing the colors of the screen of my cell phone but not so much with wings of a butterfly. The “Pop Color” feature could be a bit easier to use in my opinion.

Product [Adobe Photoshop Express]

Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed →

Posted Mar 31st 2008 4:53PM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: Misc. gadgetsIt looks like soldiers could one day have their own tab key of sorts to call up detailed, 3D maps at will, at least if the folks at General Dynamics UK have their way. As Physorg reports, they’ve developed a “near real-time” 3D map system that makes use of an array of different technologies including LIDAR, thermal imaging and x-ray backscatter techniques to not only display buildings and streets, but objects and people inside buildings as well. The use of LIDAR also promises to provide measurements of doors, windows, and alleys with “millimeter accuracy.” All that obviously makes the system, dubbed Masthead, slightly less than portable, however, although General Dynamics says it’d be able to be carried in the back of a military vehicle or civilian 4×4, or in a plane for that matter. Of course, like most such projects, General Dynamics isn’t just setting its sights to military applications, with it also touting Masthead’s potential benefits for police forces in planning security measures for large events, to name one example.

[Via Physorg]

Legendary British nature documentary maker David Attenborough (you may be familiar with his work if you saw the groundbreaking and epic Planet Earth has developed an oddly effective new way to film his favourite subjects - reclusive wild animals - in their natural habitat.

For his new program, Tiger - Spy in the Jungle, currently showing on BBC1 in the UK (and no doubt in America and the rest of the world soon), he got exclusive footage of tiger cubs, and was able to follow them from newborns to adulthood thanks to an inventive new filming technique. Trunk cams.

Yes, somehow Attenborough and his team got elephants to film the action in India’s Pench National Park, using cameras made to camouflage with their trunks. (I swear this isn’t an April Fool).

You can read more about this revolution in nature documentary making here, but I still don’t understand how the elephants were persuaded to participate. I hope they at least got union rates.

Verizon Wireless has finally announced the availability of RIM’s blackberry Curve 8330. Sporting a new liquid-silver colored finish with chrome highlights, the BlackBerry 8330’s capabilities will be enhanced by Verizon Wireless’ high-speed EV-DO network. The 8330 will also have Verizon’s location-based services that will give customers mapping, audible turn-by-turn navigation and access to information on more than 14 million points of interest.

All the goodness and eye candy that previous BlackBerry Curve owners enjoyed in other Curve models will be in the 8330. Measuring 4.2 x 2.4 x 0.6-inches and weighing only 4 ounces, the BlackBerry 8330 will be easy to handle and use. Boasting of a noise cancellation technology that offsets background noise, and speaker independent voice recognition for voice activated dialing, the Curve also sports a large 320 x 240 display, with light sensing technology that automatically adjusts brightness depending on whether the user is outdoors, indoors or in a dark lit environment.

Beginning in May, Verizon subscribers will be able to grab the Curve for $269.99 after rebates and a two-year agreement. In addition, users would also get a 2.0-megapixel camera with support for video recording, easy access to Facebook, an advanced media player and enhanced desktop media manager for easy file management between your PC and the Curve, microSD/SDHC memory card slot for storage expansion, 3GPP streaming protocol over EV-DO through rich HTML, and of course all the Blackberry Internet Service – 10 supported POP3 and IMAP corporate email accounts.

Read [Market Wire]

Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed →

Just yesterday, we mentioned that the Nokia N96 will have a Xenon flash. Unfortunately at the time is was based mostly on rumor, so what better way for us to be able to follow that up, with nothing less than a leaked picture of a Nokia N96 with a Xenon flash. While this is far from official confirmation, it certainly seems this rumor has been proven true.

Looks like the Nokia N96 excites as it features a generous 2.8-inch QVGA display, impressive stereo speakers, Wi-Fi, HSDPA, and the much awaited Xenon flash, similar to what Nokia N82 currently has.  Now, I’m pretty much convinced that N96 will be worth the wait. So Nokia, when can we finally get our hands on your new baby?

Via [Just Another mobile phone Blog]

Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed →

A new web 2.0 service dubbed Tagcow has sprung out of nowhere a couple of days ago. Tagcow, so far has managed to create quite a stir and although Tagcow maybe a cool and useful application, some are questioning the new service, emphasizing on the accuracy of tagging, its usefulness and the never ending question on privacy statements.

In brief, Tagcow is a photo tagging service that automatically assigns descriptive tags to photos that users upload into Tagcow. The service identifies the objects in a given photo, and then assigns generic descriptive tags based on photos subject.

At first glance, it would seem a great tool, a work of magic even. For how can an automated system identify the objects in a given photo to come up with identifier tags for those objects? Some questions that came out were who does the tagging, human or some automatic algorithms? And based on the current flow of tag request that come into Tagcow, it would seem that humans maybe tagging the photos after all. The influx of request caused the site to disable the tagging feature for the moment. The human taggers probably could not cope up with the influx of request. 

But whether Tagcow used automatic taggers or human taggers is not the point of all this, but on the accuracy of tagging photos. From the owner’s point of view, would they rely on others to tag your photos their photos? Isn’t it more useful and efficient if photo owners are the one who’s going to assign descriptive tags into their photos?

Despite of these questions, Tagcow in itself is a pretty cool and useful service. Some minor tweaking on its TOS and privacy statements must be done first.  Plus a more detailed explanation of how Tagcow “really” works would be a welcome addition in understanding the service clearly.

Read [Tagcow] Via [Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection] Via [TechCrunch]

Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed →

If you were an early Windows Vista adopter, you might have had a rough time with Microsoft’s newest operating system last year. Crashes? System hangs? BSODs? Shockingly, Microsoft isn’t at fault for your less than perfect experience. Ars Technica has reported that a 158-page bundle of email correspondence (PDF) regarding the ongoing “Vista Capable” lawsuit has been made public. The data reveals that NVIDIA accounted for 28.8% of Windows Vista crashes last year. In total, 1,663,748 system crashes had been reported to Microsoft in 2007 and NVIDIA was the problem in 479,000 of those cases. In comparison, Microsoft was responsible for 19.9%, ATI took 9.3%, and Intel with 8.8%.

Microsoft was quick to release a statement:

“Microsoft takes exhaustive steps in testing hardware compatibility internally, as well as by working directly with our partners, to address compatibility long before customers experience an issue,” the software maker said. “However, testing can only be conducted under so many different circumstances, particularly with such an exceptionally complex code that graphic drivers have. Understanding this, Microsoft has set up a system to help quickly identify the problems, work to fix them and, if warranted, potentially push them through to customers via Windows Update. NVIDIA has taken similar steps, and since launching Windows Vista, Microsoft has seen great progress in addressing potential issues by NVIDIA.”

I find it quite in good faith for Microsoft to retain itself from blasting NVIDIA for possibly being the root of Vista’s public impression of being unstable. But who is really to blame here? NVIDIA or Microsoft? I place fault equally between the two companies: NVIDIA for releasing drivers that lacked proper testing and Microsoft for their failure to provide adequate support to its third party vendors. While the data is an eye opener, it is important to note a few points:

1. Companies are pretty much guaranteed to suffer issues whenever they launch a new product, particularly software. NVIDIA is no exception and their eager venture to make drivers for Microsoft’s newest operating system was impossible to be bug free early on.
2. Before the ATI fanboys rave in, NVIDIA owns a larger portion of the graphics card market than ATI. So, it shouldn’t come to a surprise that NVIDIA has caused the most problems.
3. The information released is a year old. NVIDIA, as well as the other vendors, have since made significant improvements to their drivers. In fact, NVIDIA has responded to the news by creating a website that allow users to easily report any driver issues they come across.

The information came into light after a federal judge gave the green light for a class action suit to continue against Microsoft, which was filed in April 2007. The lawsuit argued that the software giant misled consumers with its “Windows Vista Capable” promotion program. In 2006, the program placed “Vista Capable” stickers along with a “Premium Ready” phrase on various retail computers that gave the impression to consumers that the machines were capable of running Vista, including the top-of-the-line version of the OS. However, that proved not to be the case, as consumers began complaining that their Vista-capable machines could not run more than Vista Basic—a clear misuse of the company’s use of the “Premium Ready” notation. The early emails that were submitted as evidence revealed that Microsoft caved in to Intel by lowering Vista’s graphics requirements, making it easier for computers integrated with Intel’s weak graphics chip to get the Vista Capable sticker.

Read [Ars Technica]

Keep up with the latest gadget goodness! - Subscribe to our feed →

Filed in archive Photoshop by jim on March 31, 2008

<!– <rdf:Description rdf:about=”http://www.digital-shot.com/50226711/free_adobe_photoshop_express_graphics_program.php” trackback:ping=”http://www.creative-weblogging.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.pl/118300″ dc:title=”" dc:identifier=”http://www.digital-shot.com/50226711/free_adobe_photoshop_express_graphics_program.php” dc:subject=”Photoshop” dc:description=”" dc:creator=”jim” dc:date=”2008-03-31T00:00:05-08:00″ /> –>

If you ever wanted to try one of Adobe's famed "Photoshop" graphics programs here's your chance to test drive their latest "light" version.

I have several versions of Adobe Photoshop that I got for free with various printers, scanners and other gizmos that have come and gone over the years and I have a full blown Photoshop program as well.

The learning curve is steep, that's for sure, even with some of the simpler versions, but the results are worth the effort.

In any event all digital camera owners will want to manipulate their images to some degree so why not give as many graphics programs as possible a whirl, especially when the cost is zero.

Check out this free Adobe Photoshop Express graphics program and take note of the 2 gigs of free online image storage they're also offering.

Take a camera with you whenever possible, and look around, you'll find a picture somewhere.

Source:www.images.macworld.com

Posted Mar 31st 2008 1:20AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Robots
Sony just turned out the Rolly music player in black. A surprise blown by the FCC just last week. At least we can wonder at the colorful end-caps at a cost of ¥1,500 (about $15) per. Of course, if you scoffed at the original Rolly, then the April 19th, Japanese release of the new ¥40,000 (about $400) dancing-speaker bot won’t likely tug at your pawnshopped heartstrings either.

[Via Impress]