Ashley Norris 

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Ashley Norris looks at the latest gadgets at the Electrical Retailing Show
  
  


The Electrical Retailing Show, held annually at Birmingham's NEC, may be small beer compared with CeBit and Comdex, but it still manages to throw up a few innovative gadgets.

Toshiba's new digital camera, the PDR-T10 due on sale next month for £250, is the first of its kind to feature Nokia mobile-style interchangeable faceplates. It is also the first camera to come with a stylus to operate its touch-screen menu system.

The stylus is attached to the camera via a wrist strap. Image quality is a maximum of 2.1 megapixels, the camera has a 2x digital - but no optical - zoom. Shots are saved on to an 8MB Secure Digital (SD) card. Over at the Samsung stand, the Korean company paraded a host of Plasma and LCD screen sets including a 63in Plasma - the largest made. The models feature a TV tuner and a PC input. So thanks to a picture-in-picture facility, users can monitor Beckham's performance in Japan while working on an Excel document.

Four sizes are available - in 15, 17, 24 and 40inch models, ranging from £1,300 to £8,000. Rival Korean company LG is offering the £700 LE-15A15, a 15in LCD monitor that has a TV tuner but no picture-in-picture. Samsung also confirmed that its Nexio S150 smartphone will be launched in the summer. The Nexio's trump card is its 5in LCD screen, significantly larger than rival products.

The unit uses Microsoft's Windows CE operating system, features 64MB of Ram and is compatible with a host of accessories and add-ons including a wireless Lan card, digital camera and a GPS system. Other products unveiled included, from LG, a pair of talking VCRs that uses a human voice to guide the user through set-up and operation, inflatable speakers from Ellula Sounds, and a joint hard disk/DVD-RAM video recorder from Toshiba.

 

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