If you’re on the market for a phone that costs more than a down payment on a Honda and does nothing other phones can’t, luxury clothing retailer Christian Dior has the phone for you!
Jumping on the mobile bandwagon with rival luxury lines Prada, TAG Heuer, and Dolce & Gabana , Dior has announced their own cellular offering. With the base price of the phone set at around $5,500 bucks, I’m willing to wager we won’t be getting a review unit.
What does $5,500 bucks get you? The device’s touchscreen and camera certainly don’t cost that much, so what’s the killer feature? Surely, it must do something incredible. Something other phones simply can’t. Get this: It comes with a second, miniature phone. This mini-phone, branded My Dior, connects to the main phone in case it’s ever just out of reach. Revolutionary! You can answer and receive calls with — Oh, wait. That’s just a bluetooth headset that you can’t wear.
[Via WSJ]
In the above screenshot of this help page, T-mobile is kindly helping visitors figure out how to navigate through their Sidekick LX’s menus to determine how much memory is available for pictures and videos. Thing is, the Sidekick LX doesn’t support videos at this point. Nor does the Sidekick Slide, which now has a similar mention of video on its help page.
While it could well be a mistake, video recording, playback, and messaging are oft-requested features of the Sidekick/Hiptop community, and the device does have over-the-air update support. With video features being pretty much a standard thing at this point and the list of comparable devices growing rapidly, it’d be crazy for Danger not to do everything in their power to add support.
[Via Hiptop3]
Whether you believe in evolution or creationism, it is hard for technology to beat the natural world when it comes to design and function. Often it is best to study nature and try to emulate its wonders. That’s what Audience has been doing for its voice processor that can be found in NTT DoCoMo’s new mobile phone, Sharp SH705iII. Audience created the A1010 Voice Processor and based it on the intelligence of the human hearing system.
The Audience A1010 supports Sharp’s Triple Kukkiri Talk by providing noise suppression, voice equalization, and voice stretch performance. It doesn’t matter if annoying noise comes from the caller’s environment, or over the network from the other end of the call, Voice Processor reduces multiple noise sources to make for a clearer call.
The Audience Voice Processor is the first custom IC to be modeled on the human hearing system. By understanding the auditory pathway, from the cochlea to the brainstem to the thalamus and cortex, Audience is the first company to create a commercial product based on the science of Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA). The Audience Voice Processor is able to deal with a complex mixture of sounds and handle the signals the way the human brain actually perceives specific sounds. This allows the technology to identify and suppress noise sources that would otherwise interfere with a call.
There is similar technology out there, but it makes sense to start with how we hear and tailor the technology to that, instead of ignoring the human hearing system and focusing simply on the electronics.
Audience
