Logitech’s budget Harmony remote

Logitech’s Harmony universal remote control series has been expanding a bit lately – today the Logitech Harmony 300 Remote enters the fray, the least expensive Logitech remote to date. The Harmony 300 retails for just $49.99 (or £29.99 in the UK), which is quite a price gap compared to the high-end Harmony One which goes for $249.99. Unlike the Harmony One, the Harmony 300 lacks an LCD touchscreen and although a ‘universal remote’, is limited to control a maximum of four devices. We’re not overly keen on Logitech’s artificial feature limitation, but if it means they can sell their budget Harmony remotes at a fraction of the cost of the fully featured ones, it makes a sort of sense.

For those who find the Harmony 300 too crippled but don’t want to stump up $250 for a remote control, Logitech also introduced the Harmony 650 earlier this month – at $99.99, it has a little LCD screen similar to the higher-end Harmony One (although noticeably smaller), but generally has fewer features (no internal rechargeable battery for example) and again, is artificially limited to control a maximum of five devices. Engadget reviewed the Harmony 650 a couple of weeks ago, generally praising it for its balance of features and value, although understandably moaning about the forced limitations.

Korean girls holding things

The first in our series of not particularly subtle photos of Korean girls holding tech-related things. Here we can see some Korean girls holding cameras made by Canon.

iPhone and Android rule the roost

If you care about mobile phone market share and the smartphone operating system ‘war’, then you might find AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report for February 2010 mildly interesting and insightful.

Their full PDF report download covers all the fine details, but we’ll summarise the basics; the iPhone OS now accounts for 50% of smartphone operating systems worldwide (at least based on the sites that AdMob actually targets), with Android gaining on it with a 24% share. Unfortunately for Symbian, its share of the smartphone OS market dropped from 43% last year to just 18% this year.

Within the US, Android browsers now account for 42% of the market, just a tiny bit behind the iPhone, with all other browsers fading into insignificance.

It’s a little bit different on the overall hardware front though – Samsung are clear winners with 32% of the market, Nokia a little behind with 24%, whilst the likes of HTC only manage a footnote under the general banner of ‘others’. Of course, this covers all phones with internet access, not just ‘smart’ ones.

Do take the report with a pinch of salt, as it’s all based on traffic generated on AdMob’s network, so it’s fairly US centric. Also keep in mind that Google own AdMob, for whatever that’s worth. Still, AdMob’s quite a good sample, as they serve 7 billion adverts a month within the US, and another few billion across the rest of the world.

HTC HD2 running Windows Phone 7

What we love about the gadget culture is the seemingly limitless energy and creativity that people will expend and express and how this often results in things that awaken our gadget lust in ways that can only be described as ‘worrisome’.

Once again a group of Russian hackers is the cause of our ongoing descent into lust frenzy, and this time it’s in the form of an HTC HD2 phone running Windows Phone 7 Series, despite the hardware apparently not supporting this OS.

HTCPedia, where the images first appeared, is reporting that pretty much everything works – WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth – with the ‘pretty much’ part of that statement including only the graphics driver, which isn’t quite there yet and so is causing things to lag somewhat.

Still, we weren’t expecting to this so quickly. Expect a ROM soon.

Sunday Girl

This week’s girl, and in fact our first, is Korean race queen and model Hwang Mi Hee. She likes Porsches and Bentleys apparently. Good stuff.

You can find more Hwang Mi Hee goodness over here.

A peak at OpenPeak’s OpenTablet 7

With the iPad, Joojoo pad, HP slate and a hundred other tablet PCs, it looks like 2010 is going to be the year of the tablet. So you may as well get used to seeing lots of new tablets that are all quite similar to one another. Today, say hello to OpenPeak’s OpenTablet 7.

Engadget have a little hands on with the device, which packs a 1.9GHz Intel Atom-based Moorestown CPU, a 1080p video camera on the front, a 5 megapixel camera on the back and HDMI connectivity, all on top of a Linux-based OS running Flash. The device is supposed to be quite polished already, with a smooth UI experience.

No word on price or release dates yet, but the OpenTablet looks worthy enough to stand out from the crowd.

Word’s first 3D TV shown (in 2D for now)

The world’s first full LED 3D TV was revealed in Seoul today, marking the first serious attempt at bringing the 3D experience out of the cinema and into the home. And to think that it’s only really just popped out in workable form from the pages of sci-fi. Things move fast.

The 55” version of LG’s LX9500 makes use of 1,200 LEDs, providing a dynamic ratio of 10,000,000:1. The 1080p resolution and 400Hz refresh rate should also go some way towards convincing you that you’re not watching a flat surface in front of you but actually engaged with action all around you, and its slim size (22.3mm) and minimal styling will help it look the part in the unlikely event of it ever being switched off. The USB-powered glasses don’t look as silly as we thought they might, either.

Reuters reports that the 47” launch model will be priced at 4.7 million Won when it’s released in just under a week, so around £2750 or $4100 depending on your territory.

Boomer goes surfing

This is one for the Battlestar Galactica fans – snaps of Grace Park (aka Boomer) in a bikini, on the set of CBS’s new Hawaii 5-0. Not really a great deal more to elaborate on… more photos can be seen here.

Introducing HTC’s God Phone

This sounds like a tech geek’s wet dream. The HTC EVO 4G is reality though, and Sprint will be releasing it in the US this summer.

On the surface, it’s just another Android phone, much like Google’s Nexus One or HTC’s Desire. However the HTC EVO 4G is the first phone to support WiMAX, hence the 4G title. It’s possibly the next generation of smartphone, and definitely a great leap forward in hardware.

Aside from WiMAX, the phone features a lovely 4.3″ 480×800 TFT LCD screen, an 8 megapixel camera with 720p video recording, HD video playback, and to make the best use of those video capabilities – HDMI output, so you can effectively hook this up to your TV and watch a HD movie. Over the top, perhaps, but pretty amazing. Under the hood there’s a 1Ghz snapdragon CPU, like most of the recent new Android phones, and of course HTC have put their own Sense UI on to the Android operating system.

There’s no word of a worldwide release yet, as the phone is currently USA only on Sprint’s CDMA network. It will almost certainly come out everywhere though, possibly with a name change.

Apple will have to come up with something pretty stunning to trump this with their new iPhone.