It’s Vodafone ringing in some good news for music fans this time around. Well in its latest attempt to popularize its music store Vodafone has plans of offering free music to its users this Friday. In keeping with the plan the Vodafone music store has undergone a total overhaul and is planning to provide the users with ten free tracks from a variety of artists. Along with the free music Friday Vodafone is offering a pack of 10 tracks at a price of  £5. Also the company can cash in on this idea by plugging in the Real Time Top 40 site. The users can tweet which ever track their listening to and based on the most popular tracks a chart of the top songs will be jotted down.

Vodafone has signed a contract with Warner Music to supply DRM-free tracks to the music store which now means that the store has all four major music portals under its hood at the moment.

Panasonic has come up with their latest addition to the face detection technology. With this addition it is possible too detect faces even in the dark as well as in overly bright surroundings. Apart from this, it can even detect faces which are behind the glass and also when the faces are totally covered with reflections. It works on the basis of  a LED modulated light source light source for near infrared light. The logic is that when the light from sun is captured, only the near-infrared illumination which is reflected back from the individuals face is processed and only that is processed. It can easily pass through windshields of car and detect the face of the individual in the car. According to the company this system can produce near monochrome pictures with QVGA resolution. The system can easily the faces of individuals who are around 10m away. The company is still in the plans of launching this somewhere during  next  [...]

Toshiba has announced the launch of two mini SSD’s which are almost a seventh the size of the 2.5 inch drives which we come across nowadays. These new SSD’s have been specially developed keeping netbooks in mind. The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) mentioned that these SSD’s will feature a mini SATA interface connector. Toshiba plans to launch two models a 30 GB SSD and s 60 GB SSD and both of them have reading speeds of  180 MB/s and writing speeds of  70 MB/s. touted to be lightweight these SSD’s  weigh 9g and  measure around 30×4.75mmx50.95mm.

Toshiba has plans of starting mass production as early as next month and if the buzz doing the rounds is to be believed then both the SSD’s will be made in Japan. Also news is that the 62GB drive will cost $330 and the 30GB drive will be priced at $220.

Finally Acer has confirmed that its baby F1 will see the light of the day in U.K in the upcoming couple of weeks. So the launch of this one marks the entry of the Brand into the Windows Mobile 6.5 race. Earlier during the launch of the phone, this one was introduced with the codename F1 but now it looks like Acer is going to stick to the codename for the release of this one. What’s interesting about this one is the price. Apparently this one is being released with a price tag of  just 295 pounds which is like peanuts for a phone which has Windows Mobile 6.5, 5 megapixel camera, 1 Ghz processor and a brilliant WVGA display. This one with all the goodies that it has to offer is definitely the most powerful phone being made available at the launch itself.

The company has confirmed that the phone will be sold through Technology Blog Clove, the online retail store.

Ahaa... change the way you listen to music... well like it was reported earlier this one was just another gimmick by Sony to launch a new pair of headphones. Damn, and everyone almost got into a tizzy after having having a look at the teaser site which blared the words “ change music forever”. Dampening everyones expectations of a new range of walkman, Sony has finally launched the MH907s which make use of the ears to control music. Getting into the details of how this one works… the music player is activated when the two buds are inserted into the ears and when you take one of them out to do some other work, the music switches to the pause mode. Also when you get a call all you have to do is simple pop one in a lughole and the phone will answer the phone will hang up when u remove it. Apparently this one works by sensing the presence of the ear. What we can conjure by this is that the sensor gets activated when it is sheathed by skin.

This one has a 1000 entry phonebook which can store around five numbers and an email address per entry. Apart from the basic features like the vibrate mode, calculator, alarm clock, calendar and a tip calculator, this one has Bluetooth with file transfer protocol, voice dialing, USB support and a variety of other applications. This one comes with an iinternal memory of 40 MB, but can be spruced up with an external memory card. It comes loaded with a 2- megapixel camera which can be used to take pictures in almost five resolutions. The quality of the photos was pretty much impressive for a 2 megapixel camera. It didn’t display much noise and the photos were pretty much clear and vibrant. The multimedia videos removed with the help of the camcorder are capped at 30 secs. The quality of the videos is pretty much mediocre though. It’s got the standard Samsung music player which is pretty much easy to use. The toggle can be used to scroll over  [...]

The speakers of this one were loud and clear quite contrary to what I expected it to be. Anyways the volume of the speakers even at 50% volume can easily fill up a small room and even when the volume was at maximum it did not create any kind of blaring sounds. This one probably is one of the very few laptops which come along with some real good speaker quality. The video quality of this one is pretty much average. Streaming a video of the famous ‘70’s show’ was not much of a problem. The video quality though not a total ace was pretty decent. Still I would advice downloading the videos and then watching them for better performance. It comes loaded with a 0.3 megapixel webcamera which again is not that efficient. During video calls there over Skype this one exhibited some video stuttering and the videos were a bit grainy and  choppy. This one produced average results in our overall system performance test and I would definitely attribute this to the underpowered 1.3-GHz Intel  [...]

The latest buzz doing the rounds here in San Francisco is that there is a Windows 7 version being launched for the netbook which in all probability will not be trickled out of most of its functionality. This means that in all there will be seven versions of the windows being launched. The news doing the round in the first half of the year was that Microsoft was likely to cut down on quite a few applications in its Windows 7 version for netbooks just because with the charge of the entire OS the pricing of the netbook would also rise to a totally new level. What is left to be seen is how Microsoft manages to adjust the Windows 7 pricing when it comes to the netbooks. However there is pressure being applied by Intel and the Original design manufacturers who build the machines and are in a tizzy over the fact that the machines would be considered inferior if the functionality is reduced. So let’s just wait n watch  [...]

Google’s plans of coming up with a registry wherein it will pay the authors whose books it scans and searches for online has received another jolt with the U.S government ruling against it. The entire plan of creating an online digital book library has suffered a huge setback because of this judgement. According to the Manhattan Court that is considering the whether the agreement abides by the laws or not and the Justice Department, the proposal should be rejected in its present form and the negotiations with different parties should be continued in order to adhere with the antitrust and the copyright laws. According to the settlement Google will pay  $125 million into a registry which will in turn pay the authors whose books are being used and reused. Google has already received a lot of criticism saying that it is trying to look for a crooked advantage in putting its plan into action and now to top it all  [...]

Expect the Japanese to come out with stuff that hardly anyone else can ever think of. This time what it has got in its kitty is a post card printer –cum- digital photo frame. It’s called the Colorio Me E-800 and can easily print images of about 89 x 127mm without resorting to the computer. It’s got a 7 inch screen with a resolution of  800×480 pixels. Text and extra icons and drawings can be added to the postcards or photos with the help of the wireless keyboard which comes along with it. This one also comes loaded with 2 USB ports and also a remote control. Going by the claims that Epson has to make, this one should hardly take 30 secs to print a full colour postcard costing a measly price of  $0.20. The company plans to sell the printers at a price of $600 from 7th of October in Japan . However Epson hasn’t confirmed if the Colorio will see a launch outside Japan as well.