Focal corp Japan has announced the IBoom HiFi a curvy iPod dock. Compatible with all iPods from the Mini to the Touch the dock plays music and charges the iPod as well. True to its name it does create a boom with two speakers, one three inch woofer and one tweeter which deliver 5W×2ch. It does not come with a remote control but you can use the ‘Apple Remote’ which comes with Apple TV, Macbook etc. The unit measures 300×190×240mm, weighs 2kg and goes on sale by late June for 29,800 Yen ($ 300).

From www.newlaunches.com

NEW YORK (May 23, 2008) - Calling all shutterbugs! Nikon today announced the “Nikon D60 Moving Moments Photo Contest” in conjunction with the D60 D-SLR advertising campaign featuring Ashton Kutcher. Beginning May 23, 2008, consumers can upload an image with an accompanying description to www.ashtonsd60.com for a chance to win the grand prize of a trip for two to Los Angeles to attend The Hollywood Style Awards sponsored by Nikon and a new D60 camera kit to capture all of the action.  Sixty first prize winners will also receive a new D60 camera kit allowing them to capture their “moving moments” with incredible ease.

“We are very excited to engage consumers through the ‘Moving Moments Photo Contest’,” said Lisa Baxt, senior communications manager for Nikon Inc. “This contest is a fantastic way for people to share their favorite memories and the moments that move them for a chance to win some great prizes.”

One-hundred and twenty semi-finalists in the “Nikon D60 Moving Moments Photo Contest” will be chosen beginning June 21 by a panel of judges based on the interpretation of the “moving moments” theme, their accompanying description and photo quality. The sixty D60 winners will be determined by consumers visiting and voting on their preferred picture on ashtonsd60.com between June 25 and July 15, 2008. The image that receives the most consumer votes will win the grand prize.

In addition to the photo contest, visitors to ashtonsd60.com can view images taken by the D60, learn more about the D60 with Ashton and watch the television commercial.

  For more information on the photo contest and the D60 D-SLR camera, please visit www.ashtonsd60.com.

From www.imaging-resource.com

Using an on-device app, MO-Call is offering cheap voice calling worldwide. Now available on a bevvy of BlackBerry devices, this sounds like a much smoother approach than dialling through a lengthy calling card processes, and who doesn’t want to save some coin on international calls?

From www.blackberrycool.com

Just when you thought Acer couldn’t come up with another beastly laptop, the Aspire 8920G “Gemstone Blue” series emerges to wow high-definition aficionados. The Aspire 9805WKHi—Acer’s first effort at a wow! laptop—had a glamorous 20-inch screen but weighed a backbreaking 17 pounds. The Aspire 8920G ($2,600 street) finds the sweet spot by putting an 18.4-inch widescreen on a system that, at 8.8 pounds, weighs as much as some 17-inch models, like the Dell Inspiron 1720, do. Though still bulky, it doesn’t seem like a nightmare to lug around. Altogether, the 8920G is a nice, albeit expensive, Blu-ray–equipped media center that delivers 1080p content.

For more information visit www.pcmag.com

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The GPS smartphone Mio were showing back at CES earlier this year, which uses Qualcomm’s new QST1100 combined app processor/GPS/cellular radio chip, has acquired a name and a likely release; called Lovebird, the touchscreen Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro handset has both GPS and A-GPS, quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 2GB of ROM to store Mio’s mapping data.
With a Samsung 400MHz 2443 processor, 320 x 240 QVGA display and 64MB ROM, the Lovebird doesn’t look to be an especially high-end device, but the promise of Dash GPS-style instant traffic updates over the cellular network should impress plenty of people. Mio are claiming up to 5hrs of talktime, but there’s no suggestion of battery life when navigating.

From http://mobilecatcher.blogspot.com

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SAN JOSE, Calif., May 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — LogicVision, Inc. (Nasdaq: LGVN), the leading provider of semiconductor built-in-self-test (BIST) and diagnostic solutions, today announced that it will showcase the latest release of its Silicon Insight(TM) Desktop product at DAC 2008 using a customer performance board for a 65 nm SoC device. LogicVision will also demonstrate its SerDes BIST solution with Silicon Insight characterizing a 6.2 Gbps SerDes high-speed I/O. Silicon Insight is a key component of LogicVision’s recently announced Dragonfly Test Platform(TM). Silicon Insight and the new Dragonfly Test Platform will be demonstrated at Booth 1620 at the Design Automation Conference 2008, June 9-12 in Anaheim, CA.

About Silicon Insight

Silicon Insight Desktop provides comprehensive, at-speed, SoC device-level debug and characterization using a PC laptop connected to a device performance board through a USB-to-JTAG cable interface. The latest release of Silicon Insight adds support for GPIB-based benchtop equipment, enabling design and test engineers to also perform voltage and frequency based characterization from the same laptop PC environment. Silicon Insight now makes it possible to perform full device debug, diagnostics, and characterization without the need to access or tie-up expensive automatic test equipment.

On the production floor, Silicon Insight now adds the option to perform automated production data logging, enabling product engineering teams and their foundry partners to analyze detailed failure and performance data. The production data log can be used with LogicVision’s Yield Insight(TM) tool to identify systemic yield-limiting issues and help accelerate product yield ramps.

For more information visit http://money.cnn.com

Philip’s X800 touchscreen handset has breezed through the FCC’s tests, though the extensive Chinese support hint that it may not be sold in the U.S. The handset comes with a stylus, but the menus in the user manual show a seemingly finger friendly user interface.

The candybar handset only features dedicated end/send buttons, but it does sport a 2 megapixel camera, paired with a microSD card slot for extra storage. Bluetooth is also available on the Philips X800, but the FCC filing does not give any other details.

You can check out the FCC filing, with user manual, here

From www.mobileburn.com

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The shots of 4.5’s BlackBerry Desktop Manager have already been sighted, but 4.6 due to launch with the BlackBerry Bold hasn’t been seen until now. The big feature is the iTunes media syncing promised to come with the BlackBerry 9000, but aside from that, everything looks more or less like the unreleased 4.5 DM.

From BlackBerry Cool

DM 4.6

Gigabyte have launched their MS800 (on the left) and MW700 in the UK today under the GSmart name. The handsets do look fairly similar, and indeed both are powered by the Marvell PXA270 520Mhz CPU with GPS, WiFi, 2 megapixel rear camera, FM radio and Bluetooth. However, the MW700 has GPRS / EDGE connectivity whilst the MS800 offers up faster 3.5G HSDPA.
The GSmart phones also come with the new “Smart Touch” technology - a new UI to bring finger-friendly navigation that is customizable. We saw a little of that earlier and we’ll be reviewing both these phones very soon indeed.
Read on for the full press release and how to get one.
Link - gigabytecm.com/uk/

GSmart MW700   GSmart MS800

From www.coolsmartphone.com

Hamrick Software, the developer of VueScan, the world’s most widely used scanning software, has released VueScan 8.4.73 which now includes support for multi-core processors.
PHOENIX, Ariz. May 29 — Hamrick Software, the developer of VueScan, the world’s most widely used scanning software, has released its latest version 8.4.73, which now includes support for multi-core processors.
Many scans are up to 50 percent faster when using a dual-core processor. No other scanning software has multi-core support and for users working with very large files this will result in a significant time saving. The largest performance improvements are with infrared cleaning, grain reduction and descreening.
Many people use VueScan for scanning large numbers of images and documents and this is often very CPU intensive. I’m always looking for improvements to VueScan that improve productivity. Other scanning programs such as NikonScan and Silverfast don’t use multiple cores and aren’t universal binaries on the Mac, so scanning can be painfully slow with these programs.

For more information visit www.imaging-resource.com