LG Prada marches over Apple's iPhone

LG Prada the touchscreen, multimedia player GSM phone has taken a march over much publicized Apple iPhone. Difference is iPhone is WiFi, and LG Prada is only Bluetooth enabled.
Both the phones are look-a-like but that's true about every other phone. You don't have much to offer as a unique product in phone design. Both the phone carry along 2 mega pixel camera.

Now Apple's iPhone is still a promise to be delivered, while LGPrada is a reality. Infact people say it is just a rebranded LG KE850 but that doesn't make much difference as long as it delivers what it promises.

The LG Prada Phone will be available with prices starting from 600 Euros in mobile dealerships as well as selected Prada stores in the UK, France, Germany and Italy as of late February, 2007, followed by countries in Asia such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore from late March, 2007. The Korean version of the phone is scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2007.

Complete specs are as below:

- Capacitive Touch Screen
- Music Player (MP3, ACC, ACC+, WMA, RA)
- Music Multitasking (Messaging)
- Video Player (MPEG4, H.263, H.264)
- Macromedia Flash UI
- Document Viewer (ppt, doc, xls, pdf, txt)
- EDGE Tri-Band (900/1800/1900)
- 98.8 × 54 × 12 mm
- 2.0-Megapixel CMOS Camera / LED Flash
- External Memory Slot (MicroSD)
- Innerpack Battery 800 mAh
- Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, USB Mass storage

Sony VAIO TP1 : A Living room PC

That mean number crunching machine on your desktop will no longer be same when you bring it to your home. The problems faced while setting it in interior aesthetics are gone. Yes, the age of designer PC's have arrived and it's no longer monopoly of Apple Computers. Sony intends to bridge the gap between the PC and TV with its VAIO® TP1 Living Room computer.

It's round white chassis will complement your living room LCD TV, providing endless entertainment possibilities. It can record, pause and rewind live TV for ready playback. It can also access Internet television shows and other videos on the Web that means you can watch youtube or google videos on your television.

It connects to you HD TV via HDMI and you can burn DVD's. It also includes the standard interfaces like USB and a multi card reader. A wireless keyboard and remote are standard.

Samsung develops digital television broadcast

You have television in living room, you have another television in your bedroom, a TV in your kitchen but that is not enough. You want a television in your car, in your mobile phone also. Okay, that's not a problem. Today's technology giants or rather 'Jini in the bottle' in consumers sense is ready to help with all his might.

Samsung has announced that, they they have developed technology for digital broadcast of television signals. Samsung's portable TV technology, known as Advanced Vestigial Sideband, could potentially work on cellphones, but it is focusing initially on car TVs and dedicated media players.

Samsung hopes the technology will become a standard in the first half of 2007. It began its efforts to standardize the technology in December 2005 and has been working on the standard with the Advanced Television Systems Committee, which oversees standards for digital

Samsung plans to demonstrate it for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week using content from Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc.

Phone reinvented : Apples iPhone

iPod in 2001 and iPhone in 2007 that's how the story goes on. Apple have claimed to reinvent the your ordinary phone with introduction of iPhone in its portfolio. As you are aware Apple is no longer just a computer company, Mac is just one of the products it has.

iPhone is a convergence device. It combines three products, precisely in apple's words —

a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

Google Earth 4 beta no longer

Google Earth 4 Beta, has achieved whatever stored in its 'Karma' and released officially as Google Earth 4 (actual version 4.0.2722) yesterday. Google Earth was released exactly a year before and Beta version for Google Earth 4 came sometimes six months back yesteryear.

New Google Earth 4 features are:

• 3D Models - GE 4 supports a new format which allows for models which have textures. It also supports the new 3D buildings layer. The official release of GE includes lots of optimizations to improve 3D viewing.
• Time Animation - the new time slider appears when KML content has been stamped with time. Read about the new time feature. And, here is a list of the top ten time animations done in 2006 for GE 4.
• New Look - GE 4 has a much cleaner look than GE 3. It devotes more attention to the main 3D view, and has a new navigation gadget which appears in the upper right corner. There are too many enhancements to list them all. Some notable ones are: Support for radio buttons in KML, network link icons animate when loading, new organized menus, and more GE Options.
• Controllers - Support for joystick controllers and flight simulator yokes. And, best of all, the new SpaceNavigator (Windows only at the moment, but a Mac driver soon).
• Regions - GE 4 supports very large image overlays which can be "tiled" or "regionated" so you can view the full detail as you zoom in. See the "Rumsey Historical Maps" in the "Featured Content" layer for an excellent example of this powerful feature.

You can download it from Google earth homepage link .

Solid state Disk Drive unveiled by Samsung

The first hard disk drive was part of a computer system built by IBM in the mid 1950's called IBM 305 RAMAC, it occupied almost half a room, cost around $50,000, and had only 5 Mb of storage.

Since then, technical improvements lead hard drives to become continuously smaller, cheaper, and their storage capacities have grown over 100,000-times. Although the basic technology has remained the same. Rapidly spinning platters coated with ferromagnetic material hold the data, while a special actuator arm equipped with a read/write head hovers just above it.

Despite the fact that this technology reached a very high level of maturity in recent years, it still suffers from a number of basic limitations due mainly to its mechanical nature. Hard drives are vulnerable to shock, consume relatively high amounts of power in order for the platters to spin, produce a large amount of heat, and take time to start.

Mean while since the advent in 1984 from Toshiba and subsequent introduction of it as a commercial product by Intel, flash prices continue to decline 50% annually and sometimes even at higher rates. Although hard disk drives still have the price edge , analysts agree that the trend in cost reduction is expected to continue. The recent success of MP3 players based on flash memory has contributed greatly to high volumes and, therefore, reduced prices of the media. With the newer technology flash could be able to deliver enough capacity in small footprint.

Samsung has unveiled a consumer Solid State Disk (SSD), which will be tested out on laptops and portable devices first. Releasing 32 GB 1.8” and 2.5” SSDs inside a laptop and an ultra-portable mobile computer, costing $2,430 and $3,700, respectively, in Korea.

Postgres Vs MySQL

Choosing a relational database is not a simple task, if you ask people around their biases towards the tools they are familiar take over their judgment.

Don't hope that one tool fits all your requirements.

Here is a decent comparison of Postgres and MySQL the two top Open source database solutions. Click on the following link.

Postgres vs MySQL