Gadget & Tech

iriver is continuing to spit out the players shown at CES and now it’s time for the Spinn and the Lplayer. Considered to be an upgrade from the Clix 2 the Spinn will continue the AMOLED based players and upgrade the screen size and resolution among with other upgrades. The Lplayer can best be described as a bigger version of the S10 with the framed screen covering the entire player and navigation is handled by the D-click system.

The Spinn screen is now 3.2″ and has a resolution of 480×272 which means it will be very sharp and have better colors than any LCD based player due to the AMOLED screen. It will also have Bluetooth and support Adobe Flash and European customers can expect a DAB radio in there too. Battery life is average at 25/5 hours for audio/video respectively and the player will be available in 4, 8 and 16GB when it comes out in August.

The Lplayer is tiny, small and basically not very big. Imagine a cell phone screen in a plastic frame and that’s the Lplayer. The screen resolution is 320×240 which means it can still do pretty decent video and there’s also a radio in there. Like the Spinn it does 25 hours of audio while video playback is slightly lower at 4 hours. The Lplayer will launch in June according to iriver and will be available in 2, 4 and 8GB.

[Cnet|GenerationMP3 thanks Bhavik]

On May 30 th Samsung will launch a new portal and software called Emodio. This software seems to be just another media player but centered around Samsungs products offering features specific to their MP3 players. Users will be able to share UCI??™s (User Creative Interfaces) with what I’m assuming to be a new UIC generation tool. There is also additional support for Datacasts or basically RSS feeds and the interesting edition of ???Text To Speech??? features that will allow you to convert txt files to MP3.

The site is rather confusing on its true goals and features since it was obviously written by someone whose first language is not English. Buy the whole aim of the site seems to be targeted at ???The Digital Privilege for the Emotional Generation??? (I kid you not that??™s what the site says), yes as in Emo. This is a definite cultural ignorance on Samsung??™s part seeing how bright fun and happy the site has been made, then trying to associate it with the Emo subculture. Regardless, the software looks like it could bring some cool functions to the P2.

It is available but extremely slow on Samsung’s site, so we uploaded it as a Torrent you can download here.

Update: Bluewave 4 Beta is also out.

If you are looking for great sounding equipment a good place to turn to are recording studios since their everyday activities depends on high fidelity sound gear. Usually, studio monitors can cost an arm and a leg compared to most MP3 player docks or the cheap studio monitors don’t have a big sound advantage. But there is a little gem made by KRK that does fall into great sound quality at a reachable price.

The KRK RP5 was routinely popping up as a best buy studio monitor for under $300 so I wanted to see how these would translate into a consumer environment. This review is not geared towards music producers but towards the average MP3 player owners looking for a future proof way to ???dock??? their player to speakers. Additionally, it is geared towards computer user that has a little bit of extra desk real estate for great sounding speakers.

If you recall, not too long ago the Zune 2.5 update added support for games development. The XNA team released their first game (via Got Zune) for those willing to dive into the XNA dev software. If you are willing to spend 5 min or so, it is relatively easy to get these games going on the Zune. There are a few guides out there, but take a look at this video that Cruleworld had made for and see how easy it is to get games onto your Zune. Really you don??™t need any development experience, just a little old fashion pointing and clicking.

While many of these games are more hobbyist creations, they are rather entertaining and give of a taste of what it to come on the Zune in terms of gaming. Personally, im still holding out for my top Zune game picks. In the mean time head over to the abi Zune Forum to check out the video and get some help if you need it.

Remember the rumored Zen Share WiFi player? It’s not coming. In a recent press conference Creative Nordic Product Manager Jan Hvidberg confirmed that there was a device called Share in development at one stage, but this device has apparently been dropped due to technical difficulties. He did however say that Creative is to present a new player within the next two months and design is apparently the key word. There has been a lot of rumors surrounding the Share/X-Fi but this is as close to facts we’ve been in ages.

According to Hvidberg there will also be no more hard drive based players from Creative. Ever. This means that whatever player will be presented in the future will be flash, no matter what type of player it is. Whether or not this information is true or not only time will tell, but one would think that it’s pretty accurate coming from someone that high up. No official word has come from Creative America however so there’s always a 0,1% chance he spoke too soon. Either way, this doesn’t in any way exclude the rumors of an X-Fi based player - possibly with WiFi, Bluetooth or touch screen for all we know - it just means the player won’t be called Share and it will be flash based.

[Amobil.no] (Norwegian)