Broadcom Wi-Fi Chips to Have Skyhook Wi-Fi Positioning Built-In [Location Services]

Broadcom already makes a boatload of the GPS chips found in mobile phones and other location-aware gadgets, and now they’re adding Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning service to most of their mobile Wi-Fi chipsets, spreading the location-based love even without GPS. This is how iPhone regular finds your location in addition to using nearby cell towers (Skyhook IDs your position by comparing to those of known hotspot SSIDs in the vicinity), so look for even more location-based services coming to more phones in the future. [CNet]

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Sony debuts beefed-up 18.4-inch VAIO AW laptop

Filed under: Laptops

Sony’s 18.4-inch Type A VAIO laptop was already impressive enough when it made its debut in Japan earlier this month, but it looks like the slightly revised VAIO AW just announced for the UK has now taken things one step further. Of course, there’s not much room to upgrade that 1,920 x 1,080 18.4-inch display, but you can expect to get a slightly speedier T9600 Core 2 Duo processor and, most notably, a 128GB SSD drive that’s joined by a 500GB SATA drive in a RAID arrary, something Sony describes as a “world’s first.” Also, it looks like prices for this monster actually start at a fairly reasonable £999 (or just over $1,700), but you can pretty safely bet that any “world’s first” features will demand a hefty premium.

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Sony debuts beefed-up 18.4-inch VAIO AW laptop

Filed under: Laptops

Sony’s 18.4-inch Type A VAIO laptop was already impressive enough when it made its debut in Japan earlier this month, but it looks like the slightly revised VAIO AW just announced for the UK has now taken things one step further. Of course, there’s not much room to upgrade that 1,920 x 1,080 18.4-inch display, but you can expect to get a slightly speedier T9600 Core 2 Duo processor and, most notably, a 128GB SSD drive that’s joined by a 500GB SATA drive in a RAID arrary, something Sony describes as a “world’s first.” Also, it looks like prices for this monster actually start at a fairly reasonable £999 (or just over $1,700), but you can pretty safely bet that any “world’s first” features will demand a hefty premium.

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iPhone Will Get Adobe Flash Soon, If Apple Says OK [Same As It Ever Was]

If you’re still clamoring for Adobe Flash support to get Hulu on your iPhone, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Adobe Senior Director of Engineering Paul Betlem says that as soon as Apple approves it, it would be out “in a very short time.”

The bad news is that that’s pretty much what the situation was a few months ago, so that’s not really saying a whole lot. If it’s spiffy enough to match Steve’s criticisms, then maybe there’s some hope, but the ball is in Apple’s court, and it’s been gathering dust there for a while. [AppleInsider]

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Bullet-Shaped Bollinger Champagne Cooler, For 007’s Giant Gun [Bond]

A giant gun that fires bullets containing chilled bottles of Bollinger…sounds like a psychedelic James Bond-theme dream. But at least the bullet bit is nearly a reality. Bollinger has come up with this 007-themed champagne bottle cooler in time for Quantum of Solace that actually is bullet-shaped, though there’s no giant Walther PPK to fire it. It’s fabulously silly, and presumably fabulously priced since it’s a strictly limited edition run of just 207. Maybe Bond should worry about it though: you know, the saying goes “somewhere out there there’s a bullet with your name on it”… [Sybarites via Luxurylaunches]

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Panasonic’s 150-Inch TV In Action: It’ll Melt Your Brain, Empty Your Wallet and Ruin Your Life [Hands On And Sizemodo]

How big is too big? That’s the question that you inevitably ask yourself once you spend any amount of time with Panasonic’s new 150-inch plasma TV prototype. We visited it in Panasonic’s towering warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey last Friday, running it through its paces with 4K footage, Blu-ray movies and Playstation 3 games. After spending a day with it, was it the type of thing I honestly wanted to set up in my living room?

Maybe. Maybe not. The standards that we use to measure other TVs don’t apply here. Have you ever seen a TV taller than yourself? A TV that uses more energy than your washer and dryer? A TV that needs to be carried around on a forklift? I’m guessing you haven’t. This thing is in a category all its own.

Man, is it impressive. If you stand within a few feet of it, it fills your entire field of vision, quickly making you motion sick if you’re playing video games or watching a movie with lots of action. Even standing 20 feet away, you still feel like the TV is the only thing in the room. It’s a 4K set, so if you’ve got the proper ultra-HD footage pumping into it, it makes 1080p look like a second-rate resolution, but even with 1080p, it’s absolutely stunning.

Iron Man looked like he was going to jump out of the TV. Robert Downey, Jr.’s baby blues were the size of watermelons in anything closer than a medium shot. Everything was just so big. Seeing a shark leap fully out of the water to devour a seal in Planet Earth becomes even more mindblowing when the shark approaches life size.

And video games? Forget about it. You haven’t lived until you’ve played Call of Duty with life-sized enemies. As I decimated Mahoney over and over again (note to Mahoney: you suck), I felt my hands getting slick with sweat on the controller, my head whipping back and forth to try to see him around corners. My body felt a dissonance because I wasn’t moving my legs or having my body jolted with recoil from my automatic weapon.

I’ve played video games on big TVs before. I visited Panasonic last year to do similar, uh, “tests” on their 103-inch plasma. And while that was awesome, it still felt like playing games and watching movies on a really big TV. The 150 transcends regular TV to become something more. It’s like something out of a sci-fi movie, a living wall, a form of primitive virtual reality. It’s so overwhelming that you can’t really fathom putting it in your house because you can’t see it fitting into any kind of reality you inhabit.

Inside the warehouse, we placed a 42-inch plasma next to it that looked pathetic, like something you’d put over your toilet to watch SportsCenter while you take a leak. I wanted to put it in my pocket. Even the 103-incher looked sad and small next to it. And trust me, a 103-inch TV doesn’t look sad or small in too many situations.

If this were a true review, I’d have to complain that, since a 4K TV does to 1080p what your new HDTV does to standard-def, you’re bound to watch a lot of crappy looking TV on this. If 1080p looks bad, think about all of the channels that come through in standard def. And if you’re planning on streaming Netflix movies via your Xbox onto this TV, be prepared for digital artifacts the size of your head.

But you know what? This TV isn’t designed for you to put in your living room. Sorry. It’s a TV from the future, generously time-teleported back to the present by our friends at Panasonic. You aren’t going to hook a VCR up to this thing, and neither are they; it is designed to run with precision-mastered footage, and our current lack of worthy video doesn’t diminish the ridiculous potency of the thing.

Believe it or not, Panasonic will begin selling the 150-inch plasma sometime next year, probably for about twice as much as the $70,000 103-incher. Will it be snapped up by anyone? Probably. There are always sultanates and NBA stars looking to have the biggest and most expensive TV in the world, and this definitely fits that bill. But again I’ll ask: Is it something normal people would benefit from having in their living room?

I’d say no, but not out of broke resentment and the fact that this would quadruple my energy bill and require me to knock down most of the walls of my home to even get it inside. I don’t think people should put this in their living rooms because, when you get down to it, this isn’t a TV. I don’t want to imagine people watching Two and a Half Men on it. To check the weather on The Weather Channel on this thing would be an act approaching sacrilege. It’s more than a TV: it’s a glimpse into the future, it’s a brazen display of hubris and overkill, and it’s a visceral, skin-searing experience. It belongs on spaceships and in museums, not in living rooms. It’s only right.

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Bar2D2, the R2-D2 of Failed Space Operas [Robots]

Remember that time in Star Wars when R2-D2 shot out the lightsaber to Luke Skywalker? Yeah, well the only problem with that scene was that lightsabers don’t freaking exist. And until they do, robots of the future must be retrofitted with the next best thing—copious amounts of booze. (Which, as we see in this picture, is something that certain cast members of the ill-fated show Firefly can appreciate).

Bar2 is radio controlled and runs about 8 hours on a single charge. And as you can see in our gallery, he’s great with the ladies.

The robot is a fully stocked bar on wheels with compartments for ice, beer and mixed drinks. Grab a beer from Bar2 and its carousel system automatically rotates to present you with the next bottle (15 max capacity). The top carousel holds up to six bottles of hard alcohol and mixers that is programmable to mix the perfect drink.

And Bar2D2 sounds like his fictional counterpart, stocked with the soundboard of an R2-D2 toy. See the full process of building Bar2 over at Jamie Price’s flickr page. [flickr via Gizmowatch]

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TDK Crams 260 GB Into 1.8-inch HDD, Sets A New Density Benchmark [Storage]

TDK has announced a new hard drive at CEATEC that manages to fit 260 GB of data into a 1.8-inch form factor. Using their prototype TMR head, TDK is able to attain a surface recording density of 803 gigabits per square inch, besting Toshiba’s previous 378 gigabits per square inch. The leap was possible by combining the TMR head with recent perpendicular magnetic recording techniques, and TDK personnel still think its possible to reach 1 terabit per square inch. [Techon Nikkei via SlashGear]

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