The Connected Circuit

Is all this gadgety news coming out of IFA in Berlin making things hard to keep up? Well no worries, here are highlights and what you may have missed.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1

For those who want a camera that’s as powerful as a dSLR in a compact package, take a gander at the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1. The second micro four third digicam that won’t break your wallet. The GF1 features a 12.1 megapixel Live MOS sensor, 720p HD video recording, a 3-inch live view LCD, built-in flash and an HDMI out all in a small and compact size. The downsides: it’ll costs you $900 for each of the two kits, a 20mm/f1.7 lens and a 14-45mm/f3.5-5.6 zoom lens. You also won’t find a viewfinder here, but you can purchase one sold separately. Check out ther presser here and the product page here, as well as a nice first impressions from dpreview here.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2

The much rumored and quite leaky XPERIA X2 is now official, successor to the wild unpopular, but amazing XPERIA X1 the X2 will feature WinMo 6.5, 8.1 megapixel camera and that infamous panel UI that Sony Ericsson concocted. Check it out here at Xperiancers and their flickr stream here for more gadgety pr0n.

The Sony VAIO X

Not much is actually known about this, since Sony really just pre-announced this thing to be announced later this year. All that’s know is that it has a carbon fiber shell, a half-inch thin, has an 11.1″ display, weighs under a pound and a half, has battery life that “lasts all day” and may or may not come with an Atom. What I do know for sure is that this “ultraportable” with netbook specs will be guaranteed to costs more than twice the price of the most expensive netbook out. Check it out here on Engadget.

Canon EOS 7D

Priced at $1,699 (body only), this 18 megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor full manual control, 1080p HD recording monster from Canon is coming this September.Presser here, spec page here, and a hands-on from Dpreview here.

RS 180

Think A2DP stereo bluetooth is awesome, well take a gander at Sennhesier’s first Kleer wireless 2.4GHz ‘phones, the RS 180 (pictured below), RS 170 and the RS 160. Expect CD quality tunes with the industrial over the head look. Sennhesir, also announced the successor to the popular, PX 100 and PX 200, the PX 100-II and PX 200-II.

Nokia X6

A capacitive touchscreen device (other than the N900) finally makes it out of Nokia with the X6. With a dual LED flash, 32 GB of storage, 5 megapixel camera, 3.2″ touchscreen, TV out, and a mere 0.55″ thin. Did I mention that this “comes with music”?

Other mentions:

For you photo buffs: Leica M9 and the Leica X1 was officially leaked. Nokia’s less notable other announcement the X3, an S40 series non-touchscreen slider phone, equiped with a 3.2 megapixel cam, 16 GB storage and decicated music keys.

--written by Peter To--

The iPhone has made many strides to bringing the true desktop web experience on mobile devices, but there has been one glaring omission to its arsenal, Flash. For those who don’t know what Adobe Flash is, it’s essential the backbone  of that media experience that you find so dear on the interwebs nowadays. From streaming video sites like Youtube to all those addicting games, whether you like it or not, the whole web community has embraced Flash to the point where it has become an integral part of any browsing experience. However, there isn’t a mobile device or platform out yet that has taken course and attempted to port these experiences to the ever growing mobile web world. Enter Adobe, who has   finally taken strides to bring Flash to a plethora of smartphones, with two glaring exceptions, Apple and RIM.

Adobe’s Open Screen Project is seeking to fill the void. With an alliance of companies, Palm, Nokia, Google and Microsoft are working to port Flash 10 to their various mobile platforms. So what does it mean to you the user? Well it means that before, where there was no hope of bringing those web applications without significant reduced functionality to your phone, now with the concerted effort of almost all the big guns working together, we’ll most certainly be able to view native youtube, hulu and many of the other applications that run entirely in Flash, mirroring that desktop browsing experience almost 100%. As a word of caution though, bringing Flash to mobile devices almost means bringing those Flash ads you see to mobile devices as well, but I for one would gladly take that punch in the gut to be able to watch my favorite show on hulu on the go.

Read more here and here. Watch Adobe’s press conference here.

--written by Peter To--