Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

The Sharp ASV Premium LCD display panel has a size of 37 inch, 1920×1080 pixel resolution and a brightness of 500cd/m2. The highest contrast ratio reported prior to this was 100,000:1 reached by a SED TV developed by Canon and Toshiba.

In celebration of the 15th anniversary of the spiky fella, Sega has announced the release of four Sonic the Hedgehog titles this year: Sonic The Hedgehog Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 (Late ’06) A New Sonic Adventure (title TBD) Nintendo Wii (Early ’07) Sonic Rivals Sony PSP (Fall ’06) Special Edition of Sonic The Hedgehog Genesis Gameboy Advance (Nov ’06) According to Sega: “Fans will be treated throughout the year to special 15th anniversary events, culminating with the release of three original Sonic adventures shipping later this year, as well as the original Sonic The Hedgehog Genesis for the Game Boy Advance.

Microsoft’s annual European Xbox event (X06) was announced today, and will take place from September 27th to 28th in Barcelona, Spain (Microsoft, I’ll be happy to come and report from there if you invite me!) It’s pretty common for significant announcements to come out of these events as it’s the last major event prior to the busy holiday season.

Ambient Devices, known for their unique radio-data information tools, such as the Ambient Dashboard, have announced the upcoming release of their new Ambient Umbrella. The LED lighted handle of the umbrella pulses at different frequencies to indicate the forecast weather conditions in your area (based on real-time data from AccuWeather.com).

Toshiba just announced the first combination HD DVD burner/hard disk recorder. The recorder has a massive 1-terabyte drive, allowing for up to 130 hours of high-definition recording, with the ability to archive up to 230 minutes of high def content to a single HD DVD disc.

Samsung has unveiled three new phones, the X820 (6.9mm thick), the D830 (9.9mm thick) and the D900 (12.9mm thick). The X820 is a one-piece design, while the D830 is a clamshell, and the D900 is a slider.

The Bose Quiet Comfort (QC) headphone series has always been my favorite of the noise cancelling headphones out there. Now before you start saying “no highs, no lows, must be Bose…” or “they’re totally overpriced…”, I’ll give you my take.

Today T-Mobile announced the Sidekick 3. Upgrades include a 1.3 megapixel camera, EDGE data, Bluetooth, a miniSD memory card slot, and a music player application. They guys at MobileBurn have posted a full review and highlights video and more pictures.

DivX and Sony have partnered up to release a new DVD Walkman player, capable of playing high-quality video content encoded in DivX format. (The player should also support DVD, DVD

Belkin has just announced their new Tunedeck accessory for the iPod Nano. The Tunedeck combines a cassette adapter with a a swiveling iPod Nano mount, so you can just plug it into your cassette deck, and the Nano will sit nicely at eye-level with your stereo.

The folks at Cytonix Corporation claim they’ve got a solution to rainy/snowy-day satellite dish outages with their new WX2100 spray-on coating. According to the company, “WX2100 is a long-lasting, super hydrophobic coating that repels rain, snow and ice, keeping satellite dishes and radomes dry even in heavy precipitation and preventing the buildup of snow and ice.”

Artcoustic offers custom made in-wall speaker systems which can incorporate specially manufactured acoustically-transparent grills. These allow you to hide your speakers behind a work of art without affecting sound quality. Artcoustic offers a variety of beautiful designs or you can even submit your own design for incorporation into your speakers.

For those who absolutely need have to have EVERY channel, DirecTV has introduced its Titanium package The package includes every premium channel, every movie channel, every pay-per-view movie, every sport channel, every adult channel every HDTV channel and up to 10 HD DVRs.

Griffin Technologies, has just introduced their new iTrip for the PSP. For those of you not familiar the original iTrip series, these devices enabled your iPod to wirelessly (using FM) transmit to your car stereo, blending in seamlessly with the design of Apple’s ubiquitous music players.

Apparently, it’s official. Robbie Bach, who oversaw development of the original Xbox, is now working on a device and music store combination to try and grab up market share from Apple’s iPod and iTunes services. Supposedly they’ll be doing more to inject a sense of community into the music/video store experience than Apple has, so that MIGHT be interesting, but it wouldn’t take long for Apple to do the same.

Microsoft’s announcement from E3 that they would be making portions of the XBox Live system available through other mobile devices was cryptic at best. Now, we see exactly what Microsoft was talking about. At the 2006 Qualcomm BREW conference, it was revealed that the Live Anywhere service will be running on non-Microsoft platforms, and a variety of intriguing screenshots have now been posted at QJ.NET.