[via Wireless Goodness]

I love how Sony pretty much ignores the rest of the world, and does whatever they want. Take memory cards for example. Rather then use the industry standard compact flash or SD cards, Sony creates a new format in the memory stick. No one but Sony uses it, and they continue to use the memory stick to this day. Sometimes, admittedly, they win (Blu-ray) and sometimes they lose (Betamax), but they are never afraid to ignore what other people have done and do their own thing.

That brings us back to the latest example of Sony’s particular brand of crazy: music streaming. Despite the fact that there are other perfectly good music streaming applications out there, Sony has created one of their own. The new service, called Music Unlimited, is designed to work with many of Sony’s existing products to provide access to millions of stored tracks via the internet. I can’t really see a widespread adoption of Music Unlimited, unless they make it the only option to purchasers of their products. Sony announced this new service last night at the IFA show, just hours before Apple announced their latest and greatest. Brilliant.

[via DeepTech]

Man, this is why I play Super Nintendo.

There’s not too much to say: 12 megapixels, 5x optical zoom, ISO 64-3200, 720p video. The main thing, though, is the ruggedness. It looks to be about as rugged as those in our roundup a few months back: 5m underwater, 2m drop, dust and chemical sealed.

Nice touch: you can use the regular rechargeable battery pack, but you can switch to AAAs if you find yourself away from an outlet. I like Ricoh. Not sure why, I just like those guys.

I’ve only had this little guy for long enough to charge him for a few hours and give him the run of the living room once, so this is just a quick overview.

So how is it? It’s cute! And compact. I’m always surprised by how big Roombas really are; the Mint is about the size of a big book or a couple netbooks stacked on top of each other. This means it can get into corners and edge around things easily. It’s three inches tall, which means it’ll go under most furniture and some couches. It fits under my couch just fine, but a low-hanging bookcase hits it on the “forehead,” which to be fair it figured out right away and worked along the edge of.

It’s extremely quiet. If you’re not paying attention, you won’t notice it until it’s bumping into you. But it still has enough torque to push my garbage can around a bit (it wasn’t sure what to make of that).

Very easy to set up. It uses little cloths or Swiffer wipes, which are very easy to install. Then just put its little base somewhere in the room and it syncs up and off it goes. I thought it would restrict itself to the room it’s in, but it found its way into my bedroom through a hallway, and came back after a few minutes. Bonus!

I just wanted to put these pictures up with these first impressions; expect a full review once I try it out for a week or so, get a feel for its battery life, shortcomings, and so on. But I like this little guy. It costs $250, which is a lot more than a broom, but hey.

Skeptical? Enraged? Singularity believer? Read first, then flame.

Sure, you could tie a string to a bolt and use that to steady things, but why not buy one already put together for $30? This little thing might actually be pretty handy, and it’s travel-sized.

The VPC-PD2 (or just PD2) shoots up to 1080p at 30FPS, and takes 10-megapixel photos as well. It’s also got a 3x optical zoom, and those little ears on it mean some seriously decent stereo sound. It’s got a 3″ LCD with… not very high resoultion. 150,000 dots means less than 320×240. Boo.

It has a built-in USB thing, which you can use to get your media off it and recharge its little battery. It records to SD cards (including SDXC) and has a mini-HDMI out for putting the signal right on your TV.

Of course there isn’t much we can say before we get our hands on it, but Sanyo has a good track record so I’m going to give this one a preemptive thumbs up.

[via Notcot]

It’ll set you back $745 without drives, so it’s not exactly an impulse buy, but that’s really not a bad deal.

[via MacNN]

[Via LifeHacker & ByteArray]

Asus is testing the waters with two models, the B43 (a 14-inch) and the B53 (a 15-inch). You’ve got to love how creative Asus is with their model names. Here’s a few specs to whet your appetite, the two models will be available in four different configurations:

• Intel Core i5-520M or i7-620M
• Both 14 and 15 inch screens are 1366×768 resolution
• ATI Mobility Radeon 5470 GPU or Intel GMA HD
• 320GB in 5400 or 7200 RPM speeds
• “Spill Proof” Keyboard
• Fingerprint reader

Asus also mentioned something called a Sonata Long Life Battery. Apparently, this battery is guaranteed to work at at least 80% of its initial capacity for 3 years. Quite impressive. Of course we don’t know how much it’s going to cost, but we’ll let you know as soon as we find out.

[via Laptop]

That 250GB bundle was recently spotted in Australia and appears to be a shiny, rather than matte bundle. In addition to the larger hard drive, the 250GB bundle will also include a headset, and come pre-installed with demos and apparently a game. No word on pricing of course or an international release schedule but it is probable they’ll have something for us by the holidays.

[via Joystiq and SlashGear]