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A recent announcement from Sony researchers revealed the development on a new type of blue-violet ultrafast pulsed laser for optical disks. Sounds like it might be time to change formats again!
To be fair Sony just announced they were developing the laser, they didn’t actually say anything about bringing it to market yet, or even if it was intended to replace the current Blu-ray format. What they did reveal is that the new laser is capable of reading a disk that has 20 times the capacity of the current generation of optical storage. This means that a blue-violet based player could have more then 50 movies on one disk, or (even more likely) fit an entire season of a TV show on one disk. That would certainly help clean up my Netflix queue!
Sony’s James Thorpe has taken the wraps off the soon to be released PlayStation Plus account. Speaking on the PlayStation blog, the PlayStation Network Product Manager detailed the premium subscription including the features associated with the account as well as the pricing and release date.
image courtesy of pocket-lint.com
Sony is set to take on the Microsoft Surface next month, with their new Sony atracTable prototype, according to pocket-lint. Sony purchased the technology off of a Swiss company, Atracsys, which has been developing the atracTable since 2008.
Atracsys specializes in multi-touch interactive projects,...
High-end home theater systems, 3D-capable Blu-ray players, and camcorders that capture video in 360 degrees are just a few of the products Sony is showing at CES.
The Sony press event was held this evening at CES. As with other television manufactures, the primary focus was placed on the upcoming 3D models of Sony's latest LED TVs. Sony will be launching these televisions later this year. A variety of sizes will be available including a 55 and 60 inch model. As with other 3D TVs, special 3D glasses are required in order to view 3D content. In order to provide viewers with a steady steam of 3D content, Sony has partnered with ESPN to create the ESPN 3D network, expected to launch later this year. A multitude of sporting events and news will be broadcast in a 3D format.
Touchscreen cameras, dual-screen point-and-shoots, even a pocket mega-zoom with a high-speed burst mode: Here are the newest cameras from Panasonic, Casio, Sony, and Samsung.
In a move that baffles and, in a way, excites, Sony has released the Dash, a $199 “personal Internet viewer.” It’s basically a 7-inch tablet that will cost $199. It looks absolutely nothing like the Mylo, which is very good news
Within the device, an internal accelerometer supports vertical flip, allowing for two optional viewing angles: upright, ideal for a table or nightstand; and tilted, perfect for a countertop. It also supports multiple user profiles and channels, allowing several members of the household to create and maintain their own customized view of the Internet.
The device is actually quite thick and works more like a desktop clock than a real, full-bore tablet.
SONY’S NEW “DASHTM” PERSONAL INTERNET VIEWER OFFERS PERSONALIZED WEB EXPERIENCE AT A GLANCE
New product provides instant access to news, weather, Internet radio and other applications. It has a widget-based UI
LAS VEGAS (CES Booth #14200), Jan. 6, 2010 –Sony confirmed its commitment to providing consumers with innovative networked products with the introduction of the new dash™ Personal Internet Viewer.
Featuring a vivid 7-inch color touch screen (measured diagonally) and access to over 1,000 free Internet apps, including news, calendars, weather, sports, social networking and more, dash utilizes an existing home wireless connection to continuously deliver Internet content to its viewers.
“In today’s connected world, Sony continues to look for ways to help enhance consumers’ entertainment experiences throughout the home” said Brennan Mullin, Sony Electronics’ senior vice president of the personal imaging and audio business. “dash empowers consumers with a fun, interactive way to stay connected with their news, entertainment, interests and ultimately, their lives.”
By bundling favorite pieces of the Internet together, dash provides always fresh, personalized content at a glance. The new product offers free access to all apps from chumby industries, inc. as well as the robust audio and video content from Sony’s Bravia™ Internet video platform, including YouTube™, Pandora® Internet radio, Epicurious, Crackle, Livestrong™, Blip.tv and much more.
Other content includes a NAVTEQ® app for easily accessible traffic updates on a customized route, and a Cozi™ app for simple management and synching of family calendars. Further, Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment will be contributing exclusive dash apps for movie trailers, music videos, custom user themes and more, including an app from Dr. Oz offering daily health and exercise tips.
In addition, Sony dash can run multiple sources of content simultaneously, so for example, Internet radio can be enjoyed while browsing through online photo albums. Or, the alarm clock can be set to play selected online videos from music, sports and other news feeds. The device also allows users to choose apps either directly from the device or online through a PC, and new content for dash will continue to be added moving forward.
Within the device, an internal accelerometer supports vertical flip, allowing for two optional viewing angles: upright, ideal for a table or nightstand; and tilted, perfect for a countertop. It also supports multiple user profiles and channels, allowing several members of the household to create and maintain their own customized view of the Internet.
dash also features built-in stereo speakers as well as a USB port for simple connection to a variety of external electronic devices. An headphone output jack gives users the option to listen privately through headphones or through external speakers.
Sony’s dash will be available this April for about $199 at www.sonystyle.com, Sony Style® retail stores and a variety of authorized dealers nationwide.
Gamers who’ve always wanted to own a PSP in pink, here’s your chance: Sony Computer Entertainment Japan today announced [JP] exactly that, a limited edition of their handheld system in so-called blossom pink. Needless to say that technically, this pink PSP 3000 isn’t different from a standard model.
The new PSP will hit Japanese stores on March 4 as part of Sony’s spring product line-up (price: $180).
Sony also made an announcement regarding the PS3 today: Michael Jackson is huge in Japan, and he used to have strong ties with the company. The Michael Jackson documentary This Is It, for example, has been distributed worldwide by Sony Pictures Entertainment. And Japan’s Jacko fans can soon lay their hands on a special PS3 bundle [JP] that includes a Blu-ray of said documentary.
Priced at $350, the “Michael Jackson – This Is It Special Pack” will be available in Japan starting January 27.
Just like clockwork more companies are announcing its plans for a 3D TV stations. ESPN’s plans were just announced and now we hear that Discovery, IMAX, and Sony have form a joint venture to develop a 3D station.
Discovery will launch the station sometime in 2011 under its name and will be a sort of showcase for 3D. It will likely be a lot like what Discovery HD Theater was to high definition a few years back. While ESPN 3D will only be up during live events, this station will be running 24/7. Now all we need is more affordable 3D HDTVs. Hopefully some will be announced at CES this week.
Sony’s new Walkman A845 is as slim as four SD cards. That’s slim, indeed. But even at 7.2mm, it’s still beat by the anorexic iPod nano at 6.2mm. Sorry, Sony. That’s all we care about these days. We’re that shallow.
It doesn’t matter that the A845 has a slightly bigger 2.8-inch OLED screen or comes with noise cancelling headphones. It also doesn’t matter that this Walkman works with iTunes via included software or that it can output standard-def video. All the tech world cares is about is that Apple has a thinner iPod than your Walkman, Sony. This makes you the loser once again. Oh, and let’s not forget that the iPod nano can record video too. But that’s a moo point in this argument.
Sony Music Japan has announced a pretty unusual product today, the so-called bdporter [JP]. It’s essentially a roll-front cabinet with a set of devices that’s geared toward home theater fans who look for a unique piece of furniture. Buyers will get a Sony Blu-ray player, a WXGA projector, surround headphones, active speakers and a 60-inch projector screen.
Sony Music says the bdporter is ideal for presentations in companies (which can move the cabinet from conference room to conference room). But the company is also marketing the cabinet for private use, as you can see in the picture above. Buyers can choose between four design patterns to make sure the cabinet fits nicely with their existing furniture. The cabinet is sized at 500mm×840mm×750mm.
Sony Music is offering the bdporter for a whopping $7,700. It’s Japan-only at this point.
This is an interesting development. The latest Vaios leaked out a little while ago, and for the most part they were what one would expect: improved performance, better battery life, that sort of thing. But there’s an interesting feature that wasn’t on the leaked spec list (and isn’t confirmed to be, either): a “quad” SSD composed of four SSD drives working together in RAID 0. If the chipset and other hardware are designed with something like this in mind, it really could be extremely fast.
Of course it’d be fast whether they designed for it or not, but if they made sure to have the right motherboard, fast RAM, special storage controllers and so on, it could blow away the competition. Laptop had drives are traditionally low-power 5400RPM HDDs, though SSDs are becoming more common, and this multiple SSD setup could be the next step in luxury mobile computing.
It’s unclear whether the “64GB/128GB x 4″ quoted is, for instance, four 32GB drives making up 128GB or four 128GB drives making up 512GB. I’d lean towards the former, since the latter would be incredibly expensive. Sure, SSDs are already expensive, but four high-capacity drives would put the raw storage cost at over $1500.
You might be able to squeeze a little more storage into those Blu-ray discs soon. Sony and Panasonic have been working on increasing the maximum capacity per-layer from 25 to 33.4GB, and the new version might be ready for market in the near future.
Hopefully this doesn’t mean you’ll have to buy another drive, and there’s one hell of a lot of science content involved (regarding something known as an i-MLSE), but the gist is that there is new technology coming.
If you like pink, you can save a heap on Sony’s 10.1-inch VAIO W netbook. The Microsoft Store is selling it for just $374.25 with free shipping. The same netbook is available in white for $499.
You’ll recall that the VAIO W features a 1368×768 resolution screen despite being only 10 inches, as well as a 1.66GHz Atom N280 CPU. Other specs include 1GB of RAM, 250GB hard drive, Windows 7 Starter, two USB ports, Bluetooth, six-cell battery, VGA output, webcam with face tracking, and a weight of just under three pounds.
The 1.5-pound, half-inch thick Sony VAIO X Series notebook is easily one of the most impressive portable computers I’ve seen in quite some time. I can’t convey how light it is. It seems to defy logic. My brain doesn’t understand that it’s seeing my hand hold up an 11.1-inch notebook that weighs less than half of what most other notebooks its size weigh.
It’s not a super powerful computer. No sir. But Sony’s managed to stuff a nimble 2GHz Atom CPU (Z550) under the carbon fiber hood. It’s not cheap either, starting at $1299. If you can mentally get past the whole $1300 netbook thing, you get a nice array of features – solid state drive, GPS, Bluetooth, Verizon 3G, Wi-Fi, 2GB of RAM, standard 3-hour battery and an unbelievably lengthy 12+ hour battery that doesn’t seem to add much weight at all. Perhaps best of all is that unless you’re doing some relatively aggressive multitasking, using this computer doesn’t feel much like using a netbook at all.
The screen is an 11.1-inch LED backlit affair at 1366×768, there’s a tiny but relatively functional island keyboard, multitouch trackpad (it’s too small to effectively use the multitouch features), webcam, Windows 7 Home Premium, Ethernet, memory card reader, VGA out, and two USB ports. And again, it’s unbelievably light.
I’ll be putting the machine through its paces and will have a full review up shortly.
Sony's PlayStation 3 got a boost from last week's launch of "Final Fantasy XIII" with its best week of sales in months, according to data released on Friday.
Should Santa leave a Sony Reader Daily Edition e-reader under your Christmas tree (or maybe you just like to buy fancy things on your own), you’ll be pleased to know that you’ll have a few more sources of content to choose from. Sony has agreed to deals bringing The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, and The Baltimore Sun (among others) to the device. And there was much rejoicing. Presumably.
A deal with The Wall Street Journal was announced a few days ago, too. That will run you $14.99 per month.
Basically, Sony realizes that vanilla e-book readers can only do so well. One, who reads anymore? Two, readers are weird and probably love the paper book as an end to itself (see: Devin). Three, newspaper are dying (get it?) for more sources of revenue, and hitching their wagons to the future in electronic readers may seem like a pretty swell idea.
This is cutting it close. Sony had previously promised to make the 3G-equipped Reader Daily Edition available before Christmas and the company just announced it’s shipping out pre-orders placed before December 20th. The rest? Well, you’re SOL like some folks that ordered the Nook.
But don’t expect to order one right now and get it before Friday. The $399 flagship Sony is currently backordered, which reinforces our thought that ebook readers were this year’s hottest gifts. Besides those damn Zu-Zu things.
SONY’S READER DAILY EDITION NOW SHIPPING
SAN DIEGO – December 21, 2009 – Delivering on its goal of getting the newest edition of its Reader family into customers’ hands for the holidays, Sony today announced the Reader Daily Edition™ is now shipping. Pre-orders placed on SonyStyle.com through December 20 should begin arriving to customers within the next 48 hours.
The Reader Daily Edition has garnered intense interest since its unveiling earlier this year, with pre-orders exceeding expectations. The device gives consumers wireless access to Sony’s Reader™ Store from most of the U.S., via AT&T’s 3G mobile broadband network. Book lovers can browse, purchase and download books as well as select newspapers on the go. There are no monthly fees or transaction charges for the basic wireless connectivity and users still have the option to side load personal documents or content from other compatible sites via USB.
The Reader Daily Edition is optimized for newspapers and offers periodical content in an elegant, easy-to-read format. The Reader Daily Edition’s responsive, menu-driven, seven-inch touch screen lets readers quickly and intuitively navigate newspapers, turn pages, highlight text and take notes with the swipe of a finger or by using the included stylus pen.
The following newspapers are currently available for wireless delivery to the Reader: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. Sony has agreements in place with a host of additional magazine and newspaper publishers, including exclusive offerings from The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, that will be available soon.
Key Facts
· The new Reader Daily Edition is now shipping and pre-orders placed on SonyStyle.com through December 20 should begin arriving to customers’ homes before Christmas.
· The Reader Daily Edition provides wireless access to Sony’s Reader Store from most of the U.S.
· Wireless access is provided by AT&T’s 3G mobile broadband network.
· The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are currently available on the Reader Daily Edition.
· Sony has agreements in place with a host of additional magazine and newspaper publishers that will be available soon
· The Reader Daily Edition’s seven-inch wide, full touch screen display provides intuitive navigation and comfortable layout of content, including newspapers and magazines, in portrait or landscape orientation.
For more details on the Reader Daily Edition please visit sonystyle.com; Sony’s online destination for book lovers – wordsmoveme.com; or the Sony Electronics Community, which includes a corporate blog, video, photos, polls and profiles.
Sony hasn’t given up on Home, its virtual world filled with avatars and overall weirdness. It just launched Sodium One, which is the latest Home world you and your avatar can spend the day in. There’s a game to go along with it, one that looks an awful lot like Wipeout, which isn’t bad at all.
The actual game, Salt Shooter, does have a ludicrous premise, but it’s hardly the only one with that affliction: “This entertainment event, set in a future of advanced technology where man and machine meet on a vast salt plain to turn deadly battle into extreme sport [lol wut?], resides only in the ever-growing world of PlayStation Home.”
Like I said, ludicrous. My guess is that once you play it you won’t pay any attention to the story.
Sony’s giving away 1,500 vouchers for full Salt Shooter unlocks, so best to login as soon as possible for your chance to win.
Would you buy a video game out of a vending machine? I certainly would, if only to avoid the phony human contact thrust upon me at GameStop. So these POP247 whiz-bangs are great. Too bad I’ve never seen one here.
They’re starting to appear in the UK, home of formerly good football team Liverpool FC. Sony and Universal are behind the machines, and they dispense, yes, titles from said studios. It’s not just video games, either, but DVDs and Blu-ray discs, too.
In the future, they may even provide a way to push downloadable content, like PSP Go games.
Let’s be honest: the most exciting part about this post was the completely unnecessary dig at Liverpool FC. Without Torres and Gerrard that team would be fighting for top-flight survival this year. Fact.
Do you ever find yourself firing caviar cannonballs from your yacht, thinking "Man. I want to buy a really, really basic phone, but only if it costs me an absurd amount so that everyone knows how much money I have."? Sony Ericsson and Saks Fifth Avenue have you covered.
When the PS3 was first launched, Sony was losing about $200 for every console sold. As time has passed, Sony has worked out cheaper ways to manufacturer the console, but they are still losing money on every sale.
Now, with the release of the PS3 Slim, the amount lost has dipped down to an estimated $31.27 with each console sold. Not a huge amount, and definitely an improvement over the $200 they started at. Still a loss, sure, but assuming they sell a few games and accessories, it’s becoming a much more realistic loss leader.
A recent announcement from Sony researchers revealed the development on a new type of blue-violet ultrafast pulsed laser for optical disks. Sounds like it might be time to change formats again!
You might be able to squeeze a little more storage into those Blu-ray discs soon. Sony and Panasonic have been working on increasing the maximum capacity per-layer from 25 to 33.4GB, and the new version might be ready for market in the near future.
If you like pink, you can save a heap on Sony’s 10.1-inch VAIO W netbook. The Microsoft Store is selling it for just $374.25 with free shipping. The same netbook is available in white for $499.
Do you ever find yourself firing caviar cannonballs from your yacht, thinking "Man. I want to buy a really, really basic phone, but only if it costs me an absurd amount so that everyone knows how much money I have."? Sony Ericsson and Saks Fifth Avenue have you covered.
When the PS3 was first launched, Sony was losing about $200 for every console sold. As time has passed, Sony has worked out cheaper ways to manufacturer the console, but they are still losing money on every sale.