Son of MP3
Watch out MP3. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding), widely tipped as its successor, will be coming to the UK early next year. Two manufacturers have announced that their new MP3 players will also be compatible with the new format developed by Dolby andSony, which offers higher quality music reproduction at lower bit rates. Its backers claim it is 30% more efficient than MP3.
Due in the stores in December is the AAC/MP3 Aiwa MM-EX300. The tiny £200 player features 32MB flash memory, sports a Multi Media Card upgrade slot and comes with rechargeable batteries, a neck strap and a USB connector.
Aiwa is also promising MP3 enabled CD players, ghetto blasters and in-car products for early next year.
S3 is also readying its range of players for the new format. Its Rio 600, which is on sale now, and the Rio 800, which is due in January, can both be upgraded to playback files encoded in AAC.
Late call
Philips is finally ready to join its rivals in offering Wap-endowed mobile phones. Due on sale next week is the Az@lis 238 pay-as-you-go model, while a contract model the Xenium 9@9 Wap will follow later in the month.
Pitched at business users, the Xenium 9@9 is a small dual band model with a talk time of seven hours and standby of 600 hours.
The phone features Philips' voice command function which can be used to access Wap sites as well as call numbers stored in the phone's address book.
Other facilities include a vibra alert, personal organiser options and emotion icons (smiley faces, beer glasses etc) which can be sent to other Philips phone owners as short text messages.
The phone will cost £100 and is available via BT Cellnet.
The pre-pay Az@lis 238 shares many of the Xenium 909 facilities, notably voice activated dialling and Wap connection, emotion icons and vibra alert. It has a talk time of up to six hours and 500 hours standby time.
Also new from Philips is a digital cordless phone sporting many features traditionally associated with mobiles. The £180 Zenia has a 200 name phone book, voice dialling and vibra call.
Snap and print
Canon unveiled its secret weapon in its campaign to dominate the digital camera market last week - a digital camera with an integral bubble jet printer.
Due in Japan next year and the rest of the world the year after, the Micro Bubble Jet Camera prints credit card sized images in under 60 seconds. It can store up to 300 images on its accompanying 48MB CompactFlash card and has a picture resolution of around 2 million pixels.
Snappers can also record sound with the image which is then stored on the actual print. The camera's UK price is expected to be in the region of £400.
At its expo in Paris, Canon also demonstrated a host of Bluetooth enabled products including a digital camera, PC card and printer, but refused to give any details of prices and availability.
Other prototypes on display included a 3D scanner, which features software that can take 12 2D images and re-configure them as a 3D colour image. Canon also highlighted its UCanTalk voice recognition software by showing voice-activated fax machines and PCs. (AN)
Macster ahoy
Apple Mac-toting music fans can now download a test version of the controversial music sharing program, Napster, and experience the MP3 phoenomenon first hand.
Napster is a catalogue of MP3 music files held in individuals' hard drives around the world. The service makes it easy to "share" music files between computers, putting a vast catalogue of music within a few mouse clicks.
But much of the music available via Napster is illegally copied from CDs, and that has lead to major record companies' continuing attempts to have the service closed down for copyright violation.
Mac users had, offically, been denied the pleasures of of Napster, although a clone called Macster did give them access to the service.
Macster has now been adopted as the official Mac client for Napster, meaning faster updates for Mac users.
You can download the Mac software from www.napster.com/mac. (NM)
Bluetooth arrives
Toshiba claims it is the first vendor to make Bluetooth wireless products commercially available In the UK - it has certainly been the first to ship working samples to Online.
The Bluetooth PC Card is a network card that enables a notebook PC to be linked wirelessly to other Bluetooth devices, including computers, mobile phones, handheld organisers and printers, when these become available.
It costs £125 plus VAT.
Toshiba was a founder member of the multi-vendor group that developed Bluetooth as an industry standard.
Chips chopped
Intel has slashed the price of its top-end processors to prepare the way for the Pentium 4, which is expected to appear later this month.
The price of Pentium III chips running at 800MHz to 1GHz has been slashed by more than 30%. Prices of low-end Celeron processors have also been dropped, the 700MHz Celeron version falling by 36% to $88, so now all Celerons cost less than $100 in quantities of 1,000 or more.
However, the prices of some low end chips were only cut by 5-7%. Intel is expected to announce 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz Pentium 4 chips costing $625 and $795 on November 20.
Lower processor prices should result in cheaper PCs in the shops.
First video cellphone
Geo Interactive Media, from Israel, and Samsung Electronics, from Korea, have announced the world's first commercial MPEG4 streaming video cellphone.
The phone uses Geo's Emblaze A2 video chip to play video streamed over GSM and CDMA mobile phone networks.
The speed, image size and quality depend on the network bandwidth available but Geo says the phone will work with "2G, 2.5G and 3G technologies". UK mobile phone networks are at the 1G (first generation) level with the first 2G systems based on GPRS (general packet radio service) just coming into use.
Notebook camera
Sony has launched a 45g video camera that will enable notebook PC users to take up videoconferencing, if they can plug it into a USB serial port.
The CMR-PC1 camera is designed to slot on to the top of the LCD screen and can be swivelled through 210 degrees to face away from the user.
It offers VGA resolution (640 by 480 pixels) and delivers up to 30 frames per second for only £99.99 including VAT.
See www.sony-cp.com/camera (JS)
