It’s not official until Microsoft says it is, but the image above of the rumored Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse was just snagged off a German online store. Amazingly, the mouse arches its back for comfortable mousing before packing flat for easy transport.

The mouse features touch-scrolling, a battery indicator, the ability to track on most any surface, and a 2.4GHz nano transceiver that no doubt plugs into your laptop’s USB port.

Yours soon for €69.99 ($69.95 rumored)… right, €0.99 more than Apple’s Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad sells for in Germany. Ships in 5 to 10 business days according to notebooksbilliger so expect this to get official real quick.

It’s hardly as small as Thomson’s A1, but it just might be the most diminutive media player in existence to actually handle 1080p without breaking too serious a sweat. Measuring just 175- x 128- x 15mm and weighing 250 grams, this pocket sized player can accept a multitude of film formats from a connected USB storage device or an SD card; once the media’s flowing, it can output content as high as 1080p over HDMI, and there’s also a composite video / audio output and mini-USB port ’round back.

The MP-501 is equipped with an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and the ability to play nice with nearly every file under the sun that’s stripped of DRM, and best of all, it’s purportedly priced at just $49. Did you just stumble upon your next laptop case compartment filler? Yes, yes you did.

Shock of all horrors, Gran Turismo 5 will actually, finally launch in Japan and Europe on November 3. Of course, being more concerned with hardware as we are, our excitement is focused on the rich blue hue that will adorn PS3 consoles bundled with the grandiosely delayed racing game over in Nippon this fall.

The ¥35,980 ($421) Gran Turismo 5 Racing Pack will be composed of a Limited Edition copy of the game plus a repainted skinny PlayStation 3 with a 160GB hard drive. Time to give your old importer buddy a call, eh?

The new COOLPIX S5100 combines speedy performance with sleek design for a stylish, yet convenient accessory for wherever life leads. Sporting a fast start up time, a short shutter?release time and one touch HD (720p) movie recording at 30 fps, the S5100 helps to ensure memories are captured as soon as they happen.

The S5100 plays host to a myriad of Nikon technologies used to capture beautiful nighttime and low light shots with less blur and noise. These features include image processing that results in less noise at high sensitivities, motion detection function, lens shift vibration reduction (VR) function and a new flash control system.

In addition to must have features including 12.2 megapixel resolution, a bright 2.7 inch LCD display, 5x Optical Zoom and a 4 way VR Image Stabilization System with ISO settings to 3200 at full resolution, the COOLPIX S5100 also adds a new tripod detection function found on premium NIKKOR Lenses. This function detects handheld or tripod shooting and automatically selects the ideal exposure, ISO sensitivity and shutter speed in order to reduce image blur and ensure sharp photos.

The stylish design and vivid color options of the COOLPIX S5100 make the camera a perfect outlet to express one’s personality, while user friendly features like 18 scene modes, Scene Auto Selector, Subject Tracking, and Nikon’s Smart Portrait System make the S5100 an easy to use tool for capturing remarkable photos virtually anywhere.
The COOLPIX S5100 will be available in October 2010 for $179.95* MSRP in a choice of attractive colors including black, pink, purple and blue.

COOLPIX Technology
At the core of all new COOLPIX cameras are Nikon’s world class NIKKOR lenses, delivering accurate detail, brilliant color and amazing clarity. For the first time, Nikon’s new EXPEED C2TM high performance digital image processing engine is implemented and custom optimized for each COOLPIX model to ensure high?quality pictures with stunning color and sharpness. The new S Series models embrace the addition of High Definition (HD) video accessible via an ideally located video record button on the back of the camera. Other COOLPIX features include Scene Auto Selector or Easy Auto Mode, which automatically recognizes the shooting situation and adjusts camera settings accordingly for great pictures anywhere.

To help users create better portraits easier, the Smart Portrait System incorporates a series of automatic functions including In Camera Red Eye Fix TM, Improved Face Priority AF, Face Priority AE, Smile Mode, Blink Warning and Skin Softening to flatter even the most camera shy subject (features vary by model).

Building upon its award?winning projector camera, Nikon continues to broaden content sharing with the new COOLPIX S1100pj’s computer connectivity offering a new way to view photos, movies and even presentations.

On the heels of its ground?breaking predecessor, the new COOLPIX S1100pj takes advanced technology a step further with a 40 percent brighter, 14?lumen internal projector complete with a built?in stand and an easy?to?use touch screen interface, allowing the user to share photos and movies in even more environments.

With the computer connection feature, the S1100pj also allows the user to connect the camera to a computer via USB and project whatever is on the computer screen or JPEG image files saved to the camera’s memory card or internal memory. Additional creative features include a built?in slide show function that plays photos with music and one?touch HD 720p movie recording with easy projection playback. Whether sharing family photos and videos with loved ones or presenting an important presentation to a client, users can make a big impression by projecting up to 47?inches from over 7?feet away.

Truly putting creativity at the user’s fingertips, the COOLPIX S1100pj features a 3?inch 460,000?dot touch LCD screen with Clear Color Display. A new Paint function allows users to write and draw on projected images in real time, while a wide range of new Retouch functions allow users to add stamps for an entertaining effect or rate their favorite photos for a more convenient search. Other new functions in the S1100pj’s in?camera Retouch Menu include Soft, Selective Color, Cross Screen, Fisheye Effect, Miniature Effect and Makeup Effect, giving the user creative freedom without the need for a computer.

The 14.1?megapixel COOLPIX S1100pj includes a 5x Wide?Angle Optical Zoom?NIKKOR glass lens (28? 140mm) and a 5?way VR Image Stabilization System with ISO settings up to 6400 to ensure incredibly sharp, crisp images in low light or while shooting handheld. To further help users capture stunning photos easily, the S1100pj also features 17 scene modes, Subject Tracking, Easy Auto Mode and Nikon’s Smart Portrait System all packed into a colorful, compact design.

The COOLPIX S1100pj will be available in September 2010 for $349.95* MSRP in a choice of colors including black, violet, green and silver.

FUJIFILM North America Corporation today announced a new addition to its FinePix REAL 3D system – the FinePix REAL 3D W3 digital camera. The FinePix REAL 3D W3 steps it up from its predecessor with the ability to shoot high-resolution 3D photos and movies in 3D HD at 720p, with the help of a new RP (Real Photo) Processor.

It also sports a new Mini HDMI port for easy playback on most 3D television systems and an Autostereoscopic 3D Widescreen 3.5″ LCD. All components make for stunning 3D still photos and movies that can be viewed and enjoyed through an easy connection between the FinePix REAL 3D W3 and their 3D TV, or printed in stunning 3D quality.

After introducing the world’s first consumer stereoscopic 3D shooter to dismal reviews, FujiFilm chose door number two, replacing the camera with a thinner, lighter, and easier-to-use version that addresses a host of complaints and costs $100 less to boot. The FujiFilm FinePix Real 3D W3 adds a larger 3.5-inch, 16:9 LCD screen, a 720p video recording mode, and HDMI 1.4 out for dropping images and videos right into your 3D-ready TV.

Surprisingly enough, FujiFilm didn’t start from scratch with the W3, as the FinePix Real 3D system inside hasn’t changed one bit: you’ll find the same 3x zoom lenses, the same 10 megapixel CCD sensors, and the same RealPhoto processor under the hood. If you weren’t happy with the horrendous noise and limited low-light sensitivity of the W1, you won’t find better image quality here, but for most every other physical feature Fuji went back to the drawing board. Gone are the wonky controls and guesswork menus, replaced with the standard dial-and-directional-pad and UI identical to Fuji’s other models.

Viewed from the rear, it’s practically indistinguishable from a standard pocket cam, and if you’ve ever used another Fuji you’ll be right at home with the W3. From the front, the camera’s a dead ringer for the original, but less glossy and chunky, though it’s still quite the lump in a pants pocket and weighs over half a pound. Making the camera smaller involved a tradeoff, too — the camera now uses a smaller (but admittedly more common) NP-50 battery pack rated at 150 shots sans flash.

We’ve known that proper Xbox Live gaming (powered by XNA) was coming to Windows Phone 7 devices, but we’d yet to see any of that thumb-spraining goodness in action besides a brief demo and a few developer videos. Well, Microsoft has finally come clean with details about its launch strategy for the platform, and from where we sit, it’s definitely looking pretty promising.

First off, the company has announced a full list of launch titles for WP7 handsets, including some familiar names and franchises like Castlevania, Halo: Waypoint, Star Wars, Crackdown, and Guitar Hero, alongside a handful of newer properties like the ultra-cute ilomilo, produced in-house by Microsoft Game Studios.

In total, the company will launch with over 60 game titles, with new offerings appearing every week in the Xbox Live Marketplace, just like its big brother console version. We’ve got all the details, a full list of the launch titles, and our hands-on preview after the break.

We had a chance to sit down and play some of the new games (Rocket Riot, Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst, The Harvest, ilomilo, Bejeweled, Max and the Magic Marker, and Uno) as well as check out the Live feature-set

Besides just standard gaming, it looks like Microsoft will try and leverage some other components of the platform. In the aforementioned Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst, the game utilizes Bing maps to create levels (not unlike the PSN title The Last Guy), and logic in the software is able to recognize things like roads for enemies to make their way down. A unique concept for sure, and the kind of thinking we hope we’ll see more of on this platform. Though we didn’t get to see a lot of titles (we particularly would have liked to see something like Castlevania), the polish and speed of the games we played was definitely competitive with iPhone or Palm Pre gaming.

Engineers at the University of Washington are testing a tool called MobileASL that uses motion detection to identify American Sign Language and transmit images over U.S. cell networks. Sometimes, words alone just don’t cut it.

“Sometimes with texting, people will be confused about what it really means,” says Tong Song, a Chinese national who is studying at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C., and participating in UW’s summer pilot test. “With the MobileASL, phone people can see each other eye to eye, face to face, and really have better understanding.”

Eve Riskin, a UW professor of electrical engineering, says the MobileASL team’s study of 11 students is the first to examine how deaf and hearing-impaired people in the U.S. use mobile video phones. The researchers plan to launch a larger field study this winter.

The engineers are now working to optimize compressed video signals for sign language, increasing the quality of the images around the face and hands to reduce the data rate to 30 kilobytes per second. To minimize the amount of battery power, the phones employ motion sensors to determine whether sign language is being used.

Of course, phones like the HTC Evo and Apple iPhone 4 already offer video conferencing, but broadband companies are now blocking the heavy-bandwidth conferencing from their networks and introducing tiered pricing plans to account for heavy data usage.

Meanwhile, the UW team estimates that MobileASL uses just a tenth the bandwidth of the iPhone’s FaceTime video conferencing and could be integrated into any phone that has a video camera on the same side as the screen. In other words, you don’t have to be able to afford an iPhone 4 and the bandwidth charges to use MobileASL.

“We want to deliver affordable, reliable ASL on as many devices as possible,” Riskin says. “It’s a question of equal access to mobile communication technology.”

So far Riskin’s team has learned that of the 200 phone calls made so far in the study, the average lasted about 90 seconds. “We know these phones work in a lab setting, but conditions are different in people’s everyday lives,” Riskin says. “The field study is an important step toward putting this technology into practice.”

The sample size of 11 students is undeniably small, and each student has been deemed an academically gifted deaf or hard-of-hearing pupil interested in pursuing computer careers, so the researchers may not identify user interface issues until a larger study of more than just tech-savvy users is conducted.

The Samsung S8500 Wave is the first smartphone to sport the brand new Bada mobile OS.

Salient Features:
* Vibrant Super AMOLED Display
* Responsive Touch UI
* Wi-Fi, 3G and GPS Support
* Good Camera
* Very Good Music Playback

The S8500 Wave represents a bold move from Samsung. Instead of coming out with another smartphone based on Symbian, Android or Windows Mobile, Samsung decided that through the Wave they would debut their very own OS- Bada (and not just a UI like TouchWIZ).

Although, with all the various mobile OSes floating about, what we needed least was another OS fragmenting the smartphone ecosystem, Bada seems determined to impress and so does the Samsung Wave.

The Bada OS- Larger Than Life?

Although the inception of a brand new OS seems like a risky move, one look at Bada suggests that Samsung wanted to work from what they already knew.

Therefore, if I was to casually generalize what the OS was, I would say it was a mix-up of Android with Samsung’s own TouchWIZ interface. There are many small and noticeable touches that Bada shares with Google’s mobile OS, the primary being the notification bar. Like in Android, the top of the Wave’s screen hides a notification bar that displays if you have a missed call, a message/e-mail and the status of the battery, Wi-Fi etc. You can slide it down to get further details and the bar remains constant throughout the UI except when you are in certain apps and games.

Another similarity is the homescreen (or should I say homescreens). Like in Android, Bada allows you to have multiple homescreens which can host your widgets, shortcuts, favorite contacts etc. There is even a slowly panning wallpaper that slightly shifts as you flick between homescreens. Even the settings menus are arranged in a clean and organized manner that’s similar to Android. And finally, most apps will throw up a context sensitive menu from the bottom just the way Android does it.

(From l-r) the Samsung Wave’s Homescreen, Main Menu & Task Manager.

The TouchWIZ touches exist in the form of a side scrolling main menu that can span out to multiple pages. Also, the widgets bar is similar to other Samsung phones such as the OmniaHD and the Monte except for the fact that it has moved to the bottom of the screen rather than on the left side.

Now that all the similarities have been pointed out, how does the actual OS work? Well, I’m happy to mention that the OS worked smoothly without any major hiccups. The Wave displays its multi-tasking capabilities front and center and all you need to do is press and hold the central hardware button and a simple task manager opens up that lets you either close running apps or switch to them. I came across a couple of minor issues with multi-tasking; the most irritating of which was the absence of a permanent back button. Although many apps have a virtual back button, many still don’t. In the case that there isn’t a back button, the Wave expects you to either kill the app by pressing the Call End button or press the central button to go back to the main menu. There is no “one-step back” button, which was missed. Also, in many of the games and apps I installed on the phone, there was no exit button, which meant that after jumping to the main menu, I was being forced to open the task manager and end the task from there. Another issue is that all homescreen widgets exist as one application in the task manager which means that if by mistake you press the end all applications button in the task manager, you will have to re-organize all the widgets on the homescreens. Fortunately, the phone runs smoothly even with multiple applications running in the background and I noticed no slowdown issues.

The Samsung Wave is supplemented by the newly built Samsung Apps store. Although there aren’t that many apps in the store to speak of, the fact that there are close to 500 apps already present paints a rosy picture.

Design & Usability

The Samsung’s 3.3-inch capacitive touchscreen offers a very smooth touch experience. In fact, this was probably the best touch experience that I have had on a phone after the iPhone 3GS. Of course, the screen itself is marvelous to look out. It’s a Super AMOLED display capable of 16M color output at a resolution of 480×800 pixels. Colors on the screen look very rich and vibrant and it even maintains visibility under sunlight making the Wave’s screen one of the best smart phone screens in the market today.

The Wave itself is a sleek phone with the right mixture of glass, matte metal and glossy plastic. It offers solid build quality, is quite slim and has a slim profile.

Features

The Samsung Wave ticks all the right boxes in terms of connectivity features. It offers support for Wi-Fi, 3G and GPS. The Wave also has a 5MP camera (capable of recording 720p video) with an LED flash and internal storage of 1.5GB, 390MB of which is usable by the user. It comes bundled with a 2GB microSD card and its slot can accept cards up to 32GB.

Multimedia, Browsing etc.

When it comes to multimedia performance, the Samsung Wave is an exceptional performer. Its 5MP camera takes good looking (albeit color-wise slightly dull) pictures with very low noise levels. Its LED flash is really powerful and you will definitely have no problems taking night shots. As mentioned before, the camera can shoot 720p videos. The videos I shot were crisp and were comparable to videos shot by many entry-level cameras.

An outdoor image and a close-up image shot with the Samsung Wave’s 5MP camera (click on images to enlarge in new window).

Predictably, the Samsung’s music playback is also very good. Music (especially acoustic, jazz and classical tracks) sounded natural with no unnatural sound coloring. The Wave offers plenty of sound enhancements and EQ options and comes bundled with a high quality pair of in-ear phones. The external speaker could have been louder and looking at how plenty of phones nowadays come with external stereo speakers, I’m surprised Samsung didn’t pack the Wave with a pair.

The Wave supports playback of plenty of video formats including DivX/XviD. So, I popped in plenty of DivX movies and even some 720p .MKV movies and the Wave played them all without fault. The video player also has a cool feature which splits a video into multiple segments letting you choose and jump directly to that segment instead of blindly dragging the timeline around. Of course, the screen makes even full-length movies watchable in spite of the relatively small size.

The Wave sports a WebKit based browser that has features such as multi-tab/window support, bookmarks manager and Flash support. Unfortunately, the browser doesn’t fit text on webpages automatically to the screen so you will be forced to use your fingers to zoom in to the text. Apart from that, I had no complaints with either the browser’s rendering or speed.

The Samsung Wave’s battery is surprisingly powerful and although the phone heats up after gaming for about 45 mins, the battery had just gone down by a bar. The Wave’s call quality was also good except that at times voices on the line tended to go a little soft.

Lemon Mobile has launched a 3-inch TFT Touchscreen phone, iT 717 in India. The Lemon Mobile iT 717 is a GSM+GSM Dual SIM phone and has the dimensions of 101.4×49.5×15.5mm.  Lemon Mobile has equipped this phone with the 1100 mAh, which provide a talktime of 5 hours.

In terms of memory, the Lemon Mobile iT 717 has 20 MB of internal memory, which can be further extended up to 8 GB. The phone can store up to 2000 phonebook contacts and 500 SMS. It also has a MP3 player, FM Radio and plays video formats like 3GP, MP4 and AVI.

The phone is also capable of video recording. For connectivity, the Lemon Mobile iT 717 supports Bluetooth, USB drive, 3.5mm Audio Jack and can act as a modem as well. The phone supports GPRS and WAP for internet connectivity. Users can also connect the phone and sync it with PC.

The Lemon Mobile iT 717 also supports regular mobile functions like alarm clock, world clock, stop watch and calculator. Lemon mobile has bundled software like Opera Mini, and Nimbuzz Instant messenger in the phone.

The Lemon Mobile iT 717 is available in India at the price of Rs. 4,499.