After you’re done with the gym and you’re ready to hit the showers, do you hate it when you have to remove your headphones and music player? Sony’s latest Walkman product could follow you into your shower for the rinse off. Yes, a Walkman product, just when you thought that they’ve all died.
Sony today unveiled the Walkman W260 Series, which is a headphone band that has an integrated MP3 player. The water-resistant frame ensures it can withstand sweat from intense workouts in any weather condition. Keep in mind that it’s water-resistant, not waterproof – so no swimming with this on!
The W series Walkman comes with Content Transfer software for users to drag and drop music files from iTunes for Windows, Windows Media Player or Windows Explorer (DRM free content only).
The NWZ-W260 series Walkman player also offers a convenient quick-charge function. With only three minutes of charge time, the player can run for up to 60 minutes and full battery life is up to 8 hours.
It will be available in August in the following configurations:
The latest Batman: Arkham City trailer has landed on Gamespot, giving us our first look at The Penguin. Rocksteady’s vision of Cobblepot pegs him as a squat cockney chap. It’s hard to judge whether this makes him more or less threatening, so to tip the scales he keeps undead hulk-thing Solomon Grundy chained up in the basement.
Grundy is an almost-impossible-to-kill zombie villain who appeared in an old Batman story called The Long Halloween, which was a heavy influence on the recent Christopher Nolan Batman films. Hopefully fighting him will be less monotonous than the boss battle with Bane in Arkham Asylum. We’ll find out when Arkham City is released on October 18 in the US, and October 21 internationally.
Market analysts at IDC released its quarterly report on the state of PC sales in Europe last night, and the results make bleak reading for manufacturers. Total shipments of PCs across the Europe, the Middle East and Africa were down by 8.9% compared to last year.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, that figure was held high by lots of PCs sold in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. In Western Europe shipments were down by more than a fifth overall, and by 32.2% in the consumer sector.
IDC highlighted the rather booming trade in smartphones and tablets as the cause of the decline, along with the ongoing debt crisis in Southern Europe and ‘high inventory’ at the start of the quarter.
In other words, there were lots of unsold PCs in shop warehouses three months ago, and there aren’t so many now – so actual sales figures might not be as bleak as these headlines suggest. But people are buying a lot of phones and tablets.
It’s especially bad news for Acer, who sold 40.3% less PCs than they did last year. Not so much for Apple, which – as they told investors– are selling more Macs like the proverbial warm cakes, as sales go up 28% globally on this time last year.
According to The Detroit News, Toyota is working on a new pre-crash system that will actually take control and steer the vehicle to minimize impact in the event of an unavoidable collision. The system combines super-sensitive radar with a camera array in the front fascia to detect possible impacts. The on-board computer then calculates the correct levels of braking and steering required to avoid the crash. And if the driver fails to act, the automatic system will take over.
Like most manufacturers, Toyota has the admirable goal of reducing injuries and fatalities in its products to zero, though The Detroit News reports that the automaker wouldn’t comment on when we could expect to see the innovations on the road. The pre-crash steering is specifically designed to reduce the chance of a vehicle-pedestrian impact, and Toyota is also working on systems to accommodate drivers who have heart attacks while behind the wheel.
It’s true that vehicle fatalities have seen a steady decline over the past few years thanks to improved safety technology, but as cars get safer, drivers become even more detached from the task at hand. Economists call it a Jevons Paradox; drivers have effectively consumed the safety benefits supplied by car companies to become lazier and less safe than they would be without the tech. Maybe Toyota should find a way to force drivers to put down their phones, shut off their infotainment screens and simply drive.
Few circuits in the world have gained as much notoriety as the Top Gear test track in Surrey, England. The show’s private playground plays host to the best performance machines and biggest celebrities. But Clarkson and company didn’t design the track themselves; it was set up by Lotus.
Now, Top Gear has again turned to Lotus to design two new tracks for the Top Gear Live traveling show. The courses, B20 Raceway and Docklands GP, will be set up at the NEC in Birmingham and the ExCel center in London, respectively, where thousands of fans will gather for the veritable automotive circus. Each circuit is set up differently, and the corners will be individually named, with an opportunity for fans to vote on the names of one at each track.
Clarkson, Hammond, May and The Stig will perform, of course, as well as Ring-mistress Sabine Schmitz, rival presenter Tiff Needell and five-time Le Mans winner Derek Bell. An array of celebrities will battle for the top spot in the on-site Star in a Reasonably Priced Car competition. The highlights of the show, however, are sure to be supercars like the McLaren MP4-12C, Lamborghini Aventador and Ferrari 599 GTO, classic Group B rally cars and F1 racers past and present.
In an interview with the Guardian, Assassin’s Creed creative director Alexandre Amancio explains Ubisoft’s mindset when creating Revelations and the caution his team is taking with Altair, Ezio, Desmond and their combined Body Mass Index.
“Well, Assassin’s Creed has been going since 2007 — the narrative is very rich and complex, so to avoid collapsing under the weight of our own mythology we needed to wrap up a few mysteries and set things up for what is to come. That’s what this game is about: we’re giving players some answers from Assassin’s 2 and Brotherhood, we’re completing the destiny of Altair, and we’re tying it in to what’s coming in 2012. And obviously, our over-arching storyline has to do with the end of the world in 2012 – we need to set up everything for the conclusion of that narrative. In this game, you’ll get to understand why Ezio is so important and how his destiny his aligned to Altair’s and to Desmond’s.”
It appears Amancio is focused on completing the first arc of the Assassin’s Creed series with an emphasis on character development and clarifying the franchise’s future, which can’t be very vast considering he’s counting on the world to end next year.
Sony has launched its second digital PlayStation Store in Latin America, in beautiful Brazil. Following Mexico, Brazil now has access to 200 items of first- and third-party digital content, including Assassin’s Creed II and the demo for LittleBigPlanet2. Sony is also extending the Welcome Back program to Brazil, offering two PS3 and two PSP titles to everyone affected by the hacking blackout, through August 21. Sony also established a PlayStation Blog and PlayStation Website for its users in Brazil.
Market analysts at IDC released its quarterly report on the state of PC sales in Europe last night, and the results make bleak reading for manufacturers. Total shipments of PCs across the Europe, the Middle East and Africa were down by 8.9% compared to last year.
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