Wize Blog

What's N-Gage All About?

Nokia launched the N85 today, a cell phone that includes a 5 MP cam, GPS, 8GB of storage, WiFi, 28-hour battery life for music playback and N-Gage compatibility. Game-players are the prime market for phones with N-Gage compatibility. Other phones that are N-Gage compatible are Nokia N73, N81, N81 8GB, N93, N93i and N95.

N-Gage is a game playing system that lets you connect with other mobile phone users to play games. Some of the games available are: Brain Challenge, Bounce Boing Voyage, Reset Generation, Brothers in Arms, Pro-Series Golf, Midnight Pool, The Sims 2 Pets and Snakes Subsonic. If you've already got a N-Gage compatible phone, you can download the games here.

One game, Dirk Dagger, Digging Deeper, just arrived for the platform. There's an in-depth interview with the creator of the game at the N-Gage Web site. The game has you playing Dirk Dagger, a gumshoe detective. At DirkDagger.com, there's an interactive preview of the game, which explains the characters and cases. It's a lot of fun and will have you wanting a N-Gage compatible phone so you can play it.

Palm Launches Treo™ Pro Smartphone

Palm officially announced the new Treo™ Pro smartphone by Palm after being leaked earlier this week and spreading like wildfire across the web. The Treo™ Pro smartphone is 4.4 by 2.3 by .5 inches, and it weighs 4.6 ounces, making it small, sleek, and light. Available only in black, it has a bigger full keyboard and a 320x320 color flush touch-screen with crisp resolution. The Treo™ Pro comes with 128 MB of memory that can be expanded up to 32 GB via a microSD slot.

The Treo™ Pro offers many features such as built in Wi-Fi, push e-mail capabilities, Windows Mobile 6.1, 2 Megapixel camera, video and music capabilities, rechargeable 1500mAh lithium-ion battery with a 5 hour talk time, and Bluetooth Wireless Technology.

Palm is selling the smart phone at $549 without a carrier.

Printer for Laptop: Canon Pixma iP100

If you've ever thought about making prints with your laptop while you're on the run, there's a new 4.4-pound portable printer from Canon that might be just the device you need. The Canon Pixma iP100 has a slew of features that will give you picture perfect photos at high resolutions on the spot.

The device has a 5-color ink system that can print out photo-lab quality photos (4"x6" borderless print) in 50 seconds. That's faster than previous models of the printer. For about $50, you can get a bluetooth adapter (Canon BU-30) to print your photos wirelessly. The printer is PictBridge compatible, which means you can also print directly from your digital camera with a USB cord connection from your camera to the iP100.

Cost of Printing

Just about everyone knows that its not the printers that cost so much money, it's the accessories such as ink cartridges and paper. The iP100 itself is not all that expensive. It costs $250 when you buy it at the Canon web site, but you can get it for $175 at newegg.com. The printer takes two ink cartridges--color and black. Color ink (CLI-36) is $17 and black (PGI-35) is $12, or nearly $30 a pop for ink. The printer has a compartment for a rechargeable battery, but the battery is extra. It's $100.

The printer and accessories are probably worth the price as the printer gets high ratings. Newegg.com gave it a 5/5. CNET rated it a 8/10, saying that the device has the "highest resolution available in the mobile printer market." PCmag notes that the printer is fast, but you don't get much bang for your buck with regard to how many copies you get per ink cartridge.

Sony Introduces Cyber-shot with Built-In Memory

Sony’s new T700 camera is making news. It’s thin—less than 5/8-inch thick--the thinnest model Sony makes. It has 10MP of resolution and, most interesting, it has 4GB of internal memory. The memory can hold up to 1,000 full resolution images or up to 40,000 VGA-quality photos (VGA means Video Graphic Quality, or images you’d use on the Internet that are about 640x480 pixels). The camera offers sorting and search functions to make finding images easy. If you need more memory, the camera takes a Memory Stick media card.

Other features of the camera include a 5X optical zoom Carl Zeiss lens with image stabilization (35-140 mm, 35 mm equiv); 8 scene modes;  movie mode (mpeg format); 5 different auto-focus modes including 9-point autofocus; 3 light metering modes (multi-pattern, center-weighted and spot);  up to 3200 ISO; EV compensation; 1 to 1/1000 second shutter speed; self-timer; rapid-fire shooting mode and a 3-inch touch-panel LCD screen. Clearly, this camera is mostly for snapshots, as its lens isn’t wide enough and its shutter speed isn’t slow enough to take professional photos.

The camera’s predecessor, the T300, didn’t get very good reviews so that buyers should proceed with caution before purchasing the T700. CNET.com reported that the T300 didn’t take very good pictures. They didn’t like the “soft, noisy photos.” They rated the camera a 7.6.  Some reviews from Wize.com reported that a similar model, the T70, didn’t take very good pictures either, although it rated 4.5/5 overall. Even a few reports of “soft,” or blurry photos and bad picture quality can cause concerns. The press release put out by Sony said, “Both cameras feature updated intelligent scene recognition technology that can now select up to eight different scene modes, including macro, portrait and landscape modes.” Perhaps this model’s updated technology will clear up the problems with unclear images of other models. Reviews will be out soon.