One for the holidays

Casio has some plans for the holiday season and has loaded its new EXILIM Z-2000 camera with a host of customised features and modes. The range sports the upgraded EXILIM engine 5.0 with dedicated multiple CPUs for faster image processing. Plus,there is the Dynamic Photo function that creates “moving photos” by cutting moving subjects from one background and combining those images on a different still image. The model will also make it easy to upload images and videos to YouTube using the in-built software. The 14.1 megapixel Z2000 comes with a wide-angle 26 mm 5X optical zoom and a 3.0-inch super clear LCD screen with a resolution of approximately 460,000 pixels. Rs 14,995.

The keyboard PC
The idea of containing an entire computer on what is essentially just a keyboard has been in the fermenting stage for some time at Asus. This month,the company is finally shipping its Eee PC Keyboard for $600. Not particularly radical,it looks like a silver-finished keyboard. The centerpiece,which is to the right of the full-size keys,is a five-inch,rectangular,800-by-480 LED-lighted touch screen,which looks a lot like an iPhone. Asus found spots for a 16GB solid-state drive,a gigabyte of RAM,Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips,plus video outputs (including HDMI) and USB ports. Processing power comes from an Intel Atom chip. The computer runs Microsoft Windows XP version,not Vista.

An ‘affordable’ OLED
DuPont says it has developed a printing process,as opposed to the conventional shadow-mask method,that can put out a 50-inch OLED display in less than two minutes,thus drastically cutting costs. DuPont’s partner developer is a Japanese company,Dainippon Screen,which manufacturers semiconductor screening equipment. The target date for mass production is the end of 0f 2012,said William Feehery,global business director for electronics and communications for DuPont. “Without being too specific,I’d say that it would take about a year to scale them up to a volume that would make them competitive with LCD sets,and even replace them eventually,” he said.

A jazzier flash
With few exceptions,mobile phones today can’t show much Adobe Flash content,even though,according to the company,it helps deliver approximately 75 per cent of online videos worldwide. But that is about to change —first for people who own Android phones,to be followed by other operating systems. A new version of the software,Flash 10.1,will run on an updated Android operating system called FroYo. And it will let you see almost all the videos from the web that you can’t see on your phone now,as well as animations,and give you the ability to play Flash interactive web games. One phone that won’t have 10.1 is the iPhone as Apple is backing a different standard.