SAMSUNG HT-X715 HOME THEATRE SYSTEM

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800W RMS
With a powerful 800W RMS output, you can be confident that you will feel the impact of your favourite action movie, and still hear the soft dialogue, and delicate musical scores.

stylish 5.1 Semi-tallboy speakers
Convenient stylish Semi-tallboy speakers allow you experience true surround sound without large imposing speakers dominating your living room

stylish ''Crystal'' finish
SAMSUNG's signature ''Crystal'' finish means that you can perfectly match your new home theatre system to your SAMSUNG 6 Series LCD or Plasma TV for a seamless stylish look.

Bluetooth connectivity
With a Bluetooth connection you can easily (and wirelessly) play music directly from your Bluetooth MP3 player or mobile phone.

www.1staudiovisual.com.au

Xbox 360 follows Wii in rush for the mainstream

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Microsoft is hoping to convert a new generation of gamers to its Xbox 360 console with features that allow owners to interact with one another via the internet and stream movies their TVs.

With a nod to Nintendo - which has enjoyed great success with its Wii device by reaching out to the non-core gaming audience - the software giant said the next range of Xbox games would include an online game show as well as one which allowed players to become actors in films.

It also announced a partnership with Netflix, the DVD rental company, which will allow Xbox owners to stream more than 10,000 films and television shows from their Xboxes to their TVs.

Unveiling a host of new features at this year's E3 video games conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft said it hoped the Xbox could become a general hub for entertainment in the living room, offering something more than the shoot-'em-up experiences that have been at the gaming industry's core.

Chief among the new products to be released this autumn is a version of 1 vs 100, the television game show created by Endemol, the production giant behind Big Brother, which will allow contestants to compete in a quiz against others elsewhere in the world.

1 vs 100 will be supplemented by You're in the Movies, which lets players improvise scenes using the device's built-in camera and transfer them into movie settings, and the latest version of Guitar Hero, the popular music-making game in which players form virtual bands that compete against one another.

Also new is a feature which lets owners create an avatar - a cartoonish character custom-built to represent themselves - which can then be sent to virtual "parties" and other online environments where Xbox users come together via the internet platform, Xbox Live.

“For the last few years we have consciously and continuously fed the core gamer audience, and now we are reaching that inflection point where we have to reach out to the mainstream consumer and bring them into the Xbox 360,” David Hufford, Microsoft’s director for Xbox product management, said in an interview with The New York Times.

“So we have to appeal to the mainstream more than ever now. And what really is appealing to that mainstream consumer is that social experience; whether it’s the older consumer or the Facebook generation, they see games not as a solitary experience but as something you do with friends and family."

The company added that it had not forgotten those enamoured of violent games, previewing a new version of Gears of War 2, the sequel to one of the most popular games of 2006, as well as Final Fantasy XIII, published by the Japanese company Square Enix, which is due out next year.

Separately, Electronic Arts, the publisher, showed off its line-up of games for the end of the year. New offerings included Spore, an "evolutionary" game which lets users fashion their own monsters one body part at a time, and Dead Space, a Alien-style science-fiction horror game which takes place on a space station.

www.1staudovisual.com.au

BlackBerry Bold takes on iPhone

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The BlackBerry Pearl and Curve models began the trend and the BlackBerry Bold, billed by many as RIM's answer to Apple's iPhone, makes its entrance as the all-singing, all-dancing range-topping BlackBerry.

RIM launched the Bold here last week, with stock expected to hit the market in mid-August.

The Bold is the first multimedia BlackBerry to be able to handle the speedier HSDPA 3G mobile data pipes. The more traditional 8707G was the first 3G BlackBerry sold here.

Publicly RIM says it's happy for competitors such as Apple to come in and lift the overall smartphone market and RIM front man Dennis Kavelman has even offered to buy Apple's Steve Jobs a drink for his efforts (blackberry and vodka perhaps). Under the spin, the Canadian smartphone maker is protective of its fat business smartphone market share and wants to lift its game in the consumer market.

RIM feels the new Bold is the gadget that will hold the line against the likes of Apple, and the new phone has some features that surpass the iPhone.

There's a 2.0 megapixel camera with flash and video capability (the iPhone has a rudimentary 2mp camera without flash or video), a separate camera for video calling (the iPhone can't do video calls), a micro SD slot to supplement the Bold's 1GB for storage and 128MB of system memory built in (the iPhone comes with a minimum of 8GB but can't be upgraded) and a long-life, replaceable 1500mAh battery. The iPhone has to be sent back to a service centre if the battery dies.

Unlike the somewhat slippery iPhone, the Bold has a grippy leather backing with a chrome screen surround. The Bold measures 114mm by 66mm by 15mm.

The two phones have a similar footprint, but the Bold is 2.7mm thicker and 3 grams heavier than the iPhone.

There's also a snappy 624MHz processor, a loudish speaker, GPS navigation, WiFi and a universal 3.5mm headphone socket.

Both the iPhone and the Bold have Bluetooth but the Bold can double as a tethered modem - which is very handy for supplying bandwidth to a notebook on the road - while the iPhone can't do the Bluetooth modem trick.

The Bold sports a small but high-res 480 by 320 pixel screen with a trackball for navigation and full QWERTY keypad for input, while the iPhone sports a much larger, 3.5in, 480 by 320 pixel touchscreen.

Here is where the two diverge sharply in design and philosophy.

With its much larger screen, the iPhone is a terrific handheld viewing platform for text, pictures and movies, especially for those with ageing eyeballs, and its clever touchscreen-driven user interface is state of the smartphone art.

The Bold's much smaller screen and trackball-driven user interface are functional enough but I found the iPhone easier to drive and better to watch. When it comes to text input, the BlackBerry has the edge, with its more positive mini-keyboard surpassing the iPhone's pop-up touch keypad.

The Bold syncs up through the simple-to-use BlackBerry Desktop Manager and can suck down unlicensed iTunes music through the new Media Sync tool.

Onboard applications range from media players, GPS mapping, calendering, email and web browsing to productivity apps such as the Word To Go and Sheet To Go document handlers.

There are a few games such as Texas Hold 'Em and, like Apple's App Store, supplied applications can be supplemented with free and pay programs, which are available online.

When it comes to hooking into enterprise email and applications the Bold supports Microsoft, Lotus and Novell servers and there are BlackBerry versions of many enterprise apps.

RIM claims the data compression used by the corporate-only BlackBerry Enterprise email server chops expensive 3G data usage five-fold compared with other smartphones.

RIM's service came under fire last year when a major server outage in the US disrupted BlackBerry communications worldwide. RIM has been spreading its server infrastructure around the world to boost redundancy, but RIM could not say when it would build a data centre in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Bold may be parsimonious with data, but RIM says the latest BlackBerry is designed to create handset envy among high achievers. "Our job in recent years has been to disguise this tool as something fashionable."

www.1staudovisual.com.au

lcd tv plasma tv dvd player dvd recorder home theatre laptop projector wall bracket

There have been a bunch of great gadgets that supply people with portable music. Surprisingly the first portable music gadgets were available about one hundred years ago. These devices played records and were powered by springs that could be wound up. Since these early devices were spring powered, they didn't require electricity, and that went a long way toward offsetting their bulk in making them portable.

There have been a bunch of great gadgets that supply people with portable music. Surprisingly the first portable music gadgets were available about one hundred years ago. These devices played records and were powered by springs that could be wound up. Since these early devices were spring powered, they didn't require electricity, and that went a long way toward offsetting their bulk in making them portable.

When audio devices switched over to being electrically powered, they took a break from being particularly portable. Part of this was created by the need for vacuum tubes in audio devices- radios specifically. In fact, the first radio sets were huge affairs that were built into wooden cabinets and generally stationary fixtures in people's living rooms.

The invention and wide spread adoption of the transistor- which replaced the vacuum tube- made audio devices portable again. These audio gadgets came in a wide variety of shapes and styles. For example, there was the battery operated radio that has varied throughout the years from being simple, single speaker devices to the massive boom boxes of the nineteen eighties. There have also been a number of portable tape recorders and players (also built into boom boxes), as well as portable CD players.

One particularly popular idea for portable audio gadgets has been the portable cassette deck, often referred to as the Walkman after the name that Sony gave to its version of this device. These gadgets could play audio cassettes and generally had AM/FM radios built into them as well, and played their audio over headphones. Portable CD players like the Discman, also followed this same general concept, only with a CD deck replacing the cassette deck.

Then, in the late nineteen nineties, portable MP3 players became available. MP3 players, or more accurately digital music players because of their ability to play more audio formats than MP3's, have the advantage of using flash memory to store audio rather than audio cassettes or compact discs. This allows a single portable audio playing gadget to hold hundred of songs that can be played back either in a preprogrammed order or a random sequence. The audio tracks for these gadgets are generally purchased on the Internet and then downloaded to the digital audio device. This has also caused a different kind of dynamic in the music industry where the album is becoming obsolete as people buy songs individually.

Newer gadgets that use flash memory have moved beyond audio playback. Some of these devices can also play video on built in LCD screens and most can display digital photos on their screens. The pictures can be downloaded from the Internet or a digital camera and the video is often bought online and then downloaded in much the same way the music is. These devices can also display video that was recorded on a digital camcorder and then loaded onto a computer before being downloaded to the gadget! Some of these gadgets have gotten so sophisticated that they can even record video themselves- either through a digital camera or off of TV signals.

Portable gadgets that are capable of entertainment just keep getting more and more functional!

www.1staudiovisual.com.au