Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

It was only a matter of time until Blu-ray hit the home theater in a box systems. Sony is taking their HT-SF2000 HTIB, adding the BDP-S300, and throwing in the BD Spider-Man trilogy for kicks. The system is built for HDMI, as the receiver has three inputs and one out, so besides speaker wire, users aren’t going to have many cables to deal with. Plus, all that HDMI allows for auto-setup, in Sony’s parlance: Digital Cinema Auto Calibration. HTIB systems have never been known for their sound quality and something tells us this 1000W system is going to be exactly top-notch, but that said, if priced right, it could be a great option for some with limited budget and a need for Blu-ray. The HTP-BD2RSF is currently announce for the European market only at an unknown sum, but something tells us that Sony is going to drop sometime very similar at CEDIA next week.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Displays, Networking

Samsung announced a few new items at IFA today, but one of the more interesting finds in its treasure trove of mysterious electronic goodness were two LCD displays equipped with built-in 2.0-megapixel webcams, 1680 x 1050 resolution, 10/100 ethernet ports, and four or two powered USB jacks (the 220TN and 225UW, respectively). The 220TN, which you’ve probably seen already, rocks an onboard 500MHz CPU and an embedded version of Windows XP, thus alleviating your need for a PC (even for Skype). Its new kid brother, the 225UW, can’t make that same claim, though the specs are dangerously similar (save for that pesky “look-ma-no-hands” processor action). No word on pricing or availability, but you’ll know as soon as we do.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Cellphones

What a refreshing change of pace! AT&T actually beat its estimate of “early September” for its variant of the Motorola RAZR 2, the V9 — albeit in a rather bizarre shade, “mahogany” (where we come from, that’s called purple, but whatevs). Though it’s not showing up on AT&T’s online store just yet, it’s showing up for their business “premier” customers (note the screen shot above) and seems to be filtering into brick-and-mortar locations as we write this. The premier site shows a rather shocking off-contract price of $749.99, though with a combination of discounts, rebates, and contracts, it should fall into a far more reasonable price range for pretty much everyone involved. Seriously, $750? Sheesh.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Portable Audio

Ok inspectors Engadget, here’s Sony’s Rolly back for an encore. We went frame-by-frame through our higher quality copy of the video to try and understand our little friend just a wee bit better. From what we can tell, this thing really moves. At first we thought maybe, just maybe we were looking at some slick animation of a static device. Not anymore, those two protruding rings provide the locomotion while each end of the egg spins freely of both the rings and that Sony branded trunk. They’ve also stuffed a pair of speakers into each end and covered them by those independently juddering end-caps. The device itself is very clean. A Sony logo is printed front-center; a Rolly logo 180-degrees opposite next to a small, possibly 3-button control panel; a (sometimes) illuminated blue ellipse bottom-center, and some unidentified jacks (or just a lanyard anchor, perhaps) up top. There’s no display anywhere to be found. Take a look at the gallery and let us know what you think: Bluetooth speaker-bot, full blown DAP, a Sony / ZMP hookup, or something else entirely more menacing than even ATRAC?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: GPS

Panasonic expanded its Strada line of GPS navigation/entertainment units at IFA this week, rolling out its new CN-GP50N aimed squarely at the European market. Filling out the face of this unit is a 5-inch QVGA touchscreen, which should give you a decent view of the 37 pre-loaded maps of European countries, as well as the 1.3 million POIs and 3D maps of selected locations and landmarks. The unit also comes equipped with desirable features like text-to-speech, voice commands, speed camera information, and Bluetooth handsfree calling, as well as real-time traffic information with the addition of an optional receiver. No word on a release date just yet, it seems, but it’ll apparently set you back an even €400, or roughly $545.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Gaming

El rei de la casa, meaning “the king of the house” in Spanish, is a video game exhibition being shown in Barcelona, Spain. The aim of the exhibition is to highlight the mainstream media’s misrepresentation of the internet and all its evils(C), and what better way to dispel these daily falsehoods than by putting together a pinball machine with a couple of LCDs mounted flat? There’s even a “Prey of the Net!” level, where kids avoid losing control by aiming the virtual ball at a browser bar. Just make sure to hit the power-up surely contained in that blue E!

[Via MAKE]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Storage

Inventing the dual layer DVD-RW standard may seem like an extreme example of too little too late in the days of 15GB+ HD DVD and 25GB+ Blu-ray, but JVC has gone ahead and done it anyway. Hitting up the same 8.5GB capacity as regular double layer DVD-RWs and dual layer DVD-RWs, the JVC discs come with a specially hardened coating which is apparently “150 times” more effective than the coating on plain old DVDs. Unfortunately, the new format requires entirely new burners, is only available at 2x write speeds, and no shipping dates or details are available. Sounds like JVC’s got a winner on its hands … yeah.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!