Sky says 2012 London Olympics could be in 3D

by Darren Murph,

Europe still isn't the place to be for limitless HD content, but London in particular could be a 3D extravaganza come 2012. The host city for the next Summer Olympics may be coming to your living room like never before, as Brian Lenz, head of product design and innovation at Sky, proclaimed that "there is a very good chance you'll see the London Olympics in 3D." The satcaster has already confessed to filming events in 3D, and given that the wide distribution of the 2008 Beijing Olympics in HD was all the rage, we suppose the third-dimension is the next logical step forward. Mirroring our own hopes and dreams, Lenz stated that what it really wanted was "glasses free technology." Here's hoping we inch closer to that at CES 2009.

engadget.com

A hard drive hack for turntablists

Whether you're a budding mix-master banned from touching your mom's old LPs, or a full-fledged master of the cross-fade looking to get some bodies movin', you need a turntable of some sort. Sure, a couple Benjamins will get you into a decent setup, or you could also make do with a webcam and a flat surface, but, if you're looking for something with a smooth feel on the cheap, the solution is the hard drive sitting in your closet that's too small even for backup duty. A group of students at universities in the UK, Austria, and New Zealand all worked together to come up with a homebrew digital DJ interface, and the above HDD-cum-turntable sits at the center. The weight of the disk plus the quality of its bearings won the crew over, and with "a few op amps, resistors and a programmable microcontroller of some kind" you too can be mixing in no time. Full instructions are at the read link, and check out the video below for a little platter-scratchin', oscilloscope-watchin', "wicky wicky" action.

[Via Hack A Day]

engadget.com

HTC Touch HD Reviews Pour In (Verdict: Best Win-Mo Phone Yet, But Still Win-Mo)

HTC is not releasing the Touch HD in the United States. Which still seems a little crazy to me, because few other phones have received such a favorable and envious reaction online recently. Despite the fact that you probably won't ever want to import one (no US 3G pretty much seals the deal), the Touch HD is still a useful indicator of where HTC, one of the biggest mobile players there is, is going. Now that the phone is available in the UK and Europe, the reviews are starting to hit, and while pretty much everyone continues to be wowed by the hardware, there's that pesky little Windows Mobile thing that keeps coming up.

Hardware wise, there is of course the 480 x 800 screen which is the centerpiece—everyone says what the pictures and videos have been telling us since the beginning: it's beautiful. Less fantastic, though, is the resistive touch screen (which is cheaper and less-responsive than a capacitative touchscreen like the iPhone 3G's). HTC goes with resistive on almost all of its phones to ensure they'll be accepted by the Asian market, in which recognition of complex characters written with a stylus is key (styli are the only thing that doesn't work quite as well on a capacitive screen).

TouchFLO, HTC's custom Win-Mo GUI has a ton of room to be awesome on this screen, and makes Windows Mobile look as good as any other phone out there now. But there's one huge problem: unless you stick with making calls, taking photos and using a few of the built-in widgets like weather and stocks, you'll often find yourself dropping back into Win-Mo 6.1's default interface, which looks MUCH less pretty on the HD's beautiful screen. That means getting your media on the phone and accessing it is still just as painful as on any other Win-Mo piece. Ahem, HTC? Android? Think it's about time.

So yeah, given that this phone is useless on all of the US 3G networks, the import market will be next to 'nil. But here's hoping the Touch HD is merely a prelude to a similar device running Android, complete with luscious US 3G bands, sometime soon.

[Mobile Tech Addicts, CNET UK, Slash Gear, Phone Arena]

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