HDD Based Player

With cheaper and mass produced Blue Ray Disc players not showing any signs of moving towards, well, mass production, it was time that I started looking for something to use HD content freely available at various forums. In this search, I finally landed on something that caught my eye as innovative and future ready. Forget PS3, XBox or even PSP. Tvix from DVICO is a device that is made for junkies like me. A gadget wit drool factor quite high and with most digital ports implemented, TVix brings idea of a video or audio server quickly into a living room.

Amongst a host of features, it is capable of playing Matroska container files, alongwith your usual run of the mill AVI, WMV 9 files, h.264 or even AVHCD files from your camcorder. Equipped with a HDMI 1.3 port, these players (available in various configurations) can seemlessly bring HD content live on your spanking new HD LCD panel. With HDTV tuner and wireless LAN, the metamorphosis to a video server is near complete. If you want digital audio options, well, you got them in TVix. Overall, a great product, although priced a little high, it still suits a many purpose and is a value addition to any living room.

BlackBerry Pearl Flip

It is official. The "Kickstart" is here! Also known as Pearl Flip, BlackBerry Kickstart is the latest offering and first of its kind from Research In Motion (RIM). This is the first flip clamshell handset in the BlackBerry stable. If you thought it was anything inferior, you are wrong. It works just as sweetly as its candybar form factor siblings.

Extaernal display is light sensitive and is used for functions like preview of messaging, email and phone calls. Nothing is concrete about pricing as of now. Here are the main features of the elegant Pearl Flip.

• Light sensing external LCD display
• 240 x 320 resolution internal LCD display
• MP3 playback support
• Speaker Independent Voice Recognition
• Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity
• SureType QWERTY keyboard
• microSDHC memory card slot
• Wi-Fi connectivity with support for UMA

Microsoft's Midori

A long gap between two posts. It is not lethargy, but absence of any new technologies that can change computing dramatically. All that has been happening was in the form of updates of older and already existent technologies. be it Nintendo, iPhone 3g or Macbook Air. Essentially, these all have been upgrades of previous products and not path-breakers like iPod. A new thing on the horizon, however, sounds interesting and too complicated to me. If we are to believe, there may be future for desktop computing sans Windows or any Microsoft OS.

According to a report, Microsoft isn't just looking at the next version of Windows for future OS possibilities, but is looking beyond the Windows architecture altogether with a project known as Midori. The new OS is still in the "incubation" phase (which puts it slightly closer to market than R&D projects), but Microsoft has admitted to its existence, and the Software Daily Times says at least one team in Redmond is actively working on the new architecture.

The basis for the platform centers around research related to Microsoft's Singularity project, and envisions a distributed environment where applications, documents, and connectivity are blurred in a cloud-computing phantasmagoria which can be run natively or hosted across multiple systems.

Says the SD Times, "The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places."

Nano Technology To Rescue

Wouldn’t it be nice if your first aid kit has something that could stop bleeding instantly? Fear not! Nano-technology provides a solution. Sounds too good to be true? Well, future is here and now because Arch Therapeutics have made a nanohealing gel that does just that, it stops bleeding.

Clinical trials are expected to begin shortly and it might not be too long before we see this miracle gel being used instead of gauzes or tourniquets. Made with "naturally occuring amino acids", this gel has the ability to cluster together in a warm aqueous environment, just like it is found on human skin. It is not something like band-aid! You will not have to worry about removing it, as the gel will dissolve like a amino acid into the skin. How cool is that! Future is arriving pretty thick and fast.