Sony’s slander

Sony have been accused of being a little arrogant this week. First they cheerfully claimed that they “put Sega out of the hardware business” in a press release celebrating the PlayStation’s 15th birthday, and now they’re having a blatant dig at the Kinect by launching promotional website YayButtons.

On the site you’ll find a Move controller that tells the world that games without buttons suck, and without buttons you won’t be able to snipe or control a weapon. It’s pretty pedantic, to be fair.

The PlayStation Move hits store at the end of this week alongside Sports Champions, Start the Party, Racket Sports, Kung Fu Rider and Eyepet: Move Edition.

Pentax gives us the power of personalisation

Pentax have teamed up with Japanese Lego-alike block manufacture Diablock to bring us a rather novel looking camera – one that you can stick Nanoblocks to.

If you’re thinking that the NB1000 nothing more than a kid’s toy then think again as the specs aren’t too shabby, boasting a 14 million pixels, 720p video recording and a 4x optical zoom.

Too immature for your tastes? Then you can always go for the standard RS1000 which is identical to the above minus the Nanoblock tomfoolery. You dullard.

Right (write) on! It’s the uDraw GameTablet

The upcoming Kinect and Move accessories will no doubt extend the shelf-life of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But what about Wii? Well, a new and rather exciting peripheral is coming but not from Nintendo but rather third-party game publisher THQ.

The uDraw GameTablet connects to the Wii through the Wii Remote and lets gamers scribble on its surface. Images will then appear on the TV screen.

uDraw Studio will come bundled with the device while Pictionary and platformer Dood’s Big Adventure will also be launched alongside it.

It’ll be available in the US in time for Christmas but it won’t be appearing under European Christmas trees – Europe will have to wait until early 2011.

Although not an official Nintendo accessory, Nintendo has given the uDraw GameTablet a big thumbs up. I bet their just jealous that they didn’t think of it first.

Pleco Chinese Dictionary app amazes

The Chinese language barrier is about become a whole lot smaller – Pleco are launching their real-time optical character recognition (OCR) app on iPhone this September.

It can translate text via  images presented on your phone’s camera display. As the video below shows – which uses text from Lord of the Rings – there’s no lag or loading times and you can even save words and phrases:

This Sony Walkman has got legs

Sony’s new E350 Walkman range is proof that not every gadget or gizmo has to be full of fancy new features in order to be desirable.

The 4GB version is priced at $70 while the 8GB version will be $80. Double the memory for only $10 more? Only a loony would turn down that offer.

For your hard earned cash you’ll get what appears to be a simple but decent MP3 player that can offer up to 50 hours of music playback and up to ten hours of video. The use Sony’s own Clear Audio technologies, for clear, deep sound without distortion while Sony’s SenseMe software will automatically categorise music tracks.

Keep an eye out for them on www.sonystyle.com next month, as that’s when and where they’re due to go on sale.

Toshiba’s Nintendo DS doppelganger netbook

This week (11^th August, to be precise) will see the release of the Nintendo DS-alike Toshiba Libretto W100 dual screen notebook in Japan.

The touch-screen  is used as a keyboard and the device also has an accelerometer hidden inside. It’s powered by a 1.2GHz Pentium US400 processor, has 2GB RAM and 62GB solid state drive (SSD). A microSDHC card slot is also present, as are a webcam and one single USB slot. A few more details can be found on the Japanese website.

Toshiba is saying that it will cost $1,099 when it launches in the States this summer.

This is the droid you’re looking for

Last week Samsung had a laugh at Apple’s expense by mocking their iPhone 4 woes via an advert printed in the daily newspapers. This week Motorola are at it with an advert for the Droid X:

The “jacket”, for those not up to speed, refers to the plastic case required for the iPhone 4 to maintain a strong signal.