May 25th, 2009
HTC Magic (image courtesy of www.three.com.au)
3 Australia have announced that the second HTC phone running Google’s Android software, the HTC Magic, is coming soon to a 3 store near you!
No date, nor plans and pricing have been announced yet, but 3 have said it will only be available in black (Vodaphone seem to have the exclusive rights to the white Magic).
You can register your interest with 3, and they promise you will be the first to know once there is more information. It will be interesting to see just how much this will cost and what the the pricing and plan structure will be. Also, I for one am hoping existing 3 customers can upgrade their handset to the Magic, and keep their old plan/cap and pay off the handset over 24 months.
The Magic is skinnier than it’s older brother, the Dream, as it is not a slide phone. This means it does not have a physical keyboard like the Dream, as it makes use of Android’s on screen keyboard. This is a big plus for me – I have a dislike for slide phones, and I have always felt the Dream was a little bit like a small brick!
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May 21st, 2009
In preparation for my first trip overseas, I decided that it was time to demote my Sony DSC-P100 (I have the fast red model) to party/fun camera, and upgrade to something a little more powerful.
Trying to decide what camera to replace it with was a world of hurt with so many makes and models and features to choose from. I wanted the ability to shoot video, SD memory card support, lots of control (shutter speed and aperture priority, among other things) and it had to cost me less than $1000.
What I quickly realised was that I was after a certain type of digital camera – a bridge digital camera.
After some research, I narrowed down my choice to the Panasonic DMC-FZ28 and the Canon SX1 IS. I won’t compare the two for you – plenty of other sites do that already, but because of the better (and stereo) microphones and the longer zoom, the Canon won the battle.
Canon PowerShot SX1 IS (image courtesy canon.com.au)
The Canon PowerShot SX1 IS
The SX1 IS packs a 10 mega pixel CMOS sensor, 20x optical zoom lens, and records movies at the full high definition resolution of 1920×1080 pixels.
It features optical image stabilisation, a 2.8″ articulated LCD (’vari-angle’ – the LCD swings out and can be rotated), RAW image capture out of the box (the firmware update for RAW support is already applied), face and motion detection and the Dig!C 4 image processor.
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May 2nd, 2009
The Kogan agora netbook is very impressive on the hardware side, but open the lid and gOS is not as ‘good’ as the name suggests.
With an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, 160GB hard disk drive and 10.1 inch matte finish LCD, the agora is well equiped. Coming in two versions, the agora and the agora pro, they differ by the amount of memory (1GB vs. 2GB) and the battery size (3 cell vs. 6 cell). The agora is priced at $499 and you will pay $539 for the agora pro.
Screen
The 10.1 inch LCD meets the ’sweet-spot’ size that most speak of in netbook land. After a consultative process on the Kogan blog, it was agreed that a matte finish was best, and I have to agree.
The agora’s LCD is very usable outside, where a gloss screen would often reflect the sun into your eyes. The native resolution is 1024×600.
Keyboard
The keyboard is easy enough to use – and didn’t take too long to adapt to. The only issue I had at first was the location of shift key in relation to the double quote key – it sits centered above the right shift key, whereas you would normally find it to the left of the shift. Not a deal breaker in the least, but programming on the agora at first resulted in some colons appearing where a double quote should have!
It is also worth noting that the blue function keys are well laid out. Page up and down, along with home and end are function keys placed on the arrow keys, and there are plenty of other function keys along most of the top row of the board, allowing you to sleep, turn on and off the wireless adapter and control the volume and brightness – just to name a few.
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