Although luxury hotels are, in every respect, incredible and conspicuous wasters of resources (in the name of comfort), at least that means they’ve got nowhere to but green. So although you may safely blast the Sheraton, W, and Westin hotels among others for things like washing clean towels, throwing away used card keys and so on, at least you’ll know that when you turn on the tube for a little late-night decompression, you’ll be turning on a nice energy-efficient “green” TV. That’s because Philips struck a deal with the Hotel meta-company Starwood to outfit all its hotels with Smartpower2 TVs, a line intended for this exact purpose and which boasts power savings of up to 40%. It may be that Starwood was looking at the bottom line: $12 million in power savings over the life of the TVs. Sure; as I read once, “corporate responsibility” may be a myth, but if we can make the “right” choice at the very least not cost them too much, they’ll be happy to do it for that more intangible benefit: the illusion that they care. → Read More
I like Sonicare brushes. They don’t tear up your gums – too badly – and they make funny noises when you brush your teeth. Philips updated their Sonicare line with this interesting new system which is much more like traditional motorized toothbrushes although it does offer considerably more vibration and three buzz settings – regular, gentle, and the erotically-themed massage. → Read More
Philips, the progenitor of PSV Eindhoven in Holland, has released a few new digital audio players that may please the Sansa-loving crowd. They’re names are forgettable, with a hodgepodge of seemingly random numbers mixed together in a blender, but know that they’re all part of the GoGear family. GoGear, if you remember, had a heck of a showing at CES in January. As for these particular players, they’re about what you’d expect from a small, inexpensive line of flash DAPs. Anywhere from 2-4GB of storage, built-in FM tuner for listening to “Stairway to Heaven” win best rock song at the end of the summer, and so on. An honest-to-goodness display differentiates it from the likes of the iPod Shuffle. Nothing too crazy, in other words. via Boing Boing Gadgets → Read More
The Philips X800 that Peter told us about last week has been confirmed according to GSM Arena. It’s a tri-band GSM/GPRS device running Windows Mobile with a 2.9-inch display that covers most of the face. It’ll also have a 2-megapixel autofocus camera, Bluetooth, and memory will be expandable via microSD. Battery life looks okay, too, at 850 hours of standby time and 8 hours of talk time, according to Philips. Pricing and availability are unknown, other than the device should be here sometime soon. The Xenium X-Connect was also confirmed (photo below), although details are even more murky. It’ll apparently run WinMo 6, have a 3-inch display (resolution unknown), GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA connections, GPS, Bluetooth, and microSD expansion. → Read More
[photopress:scaled.IMG_1398.JPG,full,pp_image] Every year at CeBIT they have a special hall dedicated to cool design. This year we found a lot of great medical gadgets including this odd finger prosthesis made of wire and plastic. You’ll also find a hands-free faucet and two baby scales made of balloons. Most of this stuff won’t really effect our daily lives but it’s cool to know babies get little bubblewrap things to lie on when they’re born. [photopress:scaled.IMG_1400.JPG,thumb,pp_image][photopress:scaled.IMG_1396.JPG,thumb,pp_image][photopress:scaled.IMG_1401.JPG,thumb,pp_image] → Read More
With HD DVD out, manufacturers are free to release Blu-ray products without fear of the format dying. It still could and probably will, but that’s neither here nor there. Philips & Lite-on Digital Solutions will be the first to bring a stand alone Blu-ray disc drive to the PC/laptop market with the Lite-On DX-DX-4O1S in Q2. The drive will read Blu-ray discs at 4x, single-layer DVDs at 12x, dual-layer at 8x and CDs at 32x. No word on price or street date for the USB drive. “Due to recent market developments we can expect an increasing volume of movies to be released in high definition on Blu-ray Discs,” said Jelmer Veldman, European Marketing Manager at PLDS. “The market adoption of Blu-ray as the optical disc standard for High Definition content results in a growing demand for Blu-ray playback solutions. The portable external Lite-On BD-ROM drive allows users to playback their Blu-ray discs on any PC via a USB 2.0 cable.” Lite-On, Philips Introduce First External Blu-ray Disc Drive [Daily Tech] → Read More
