CES 2010: Final Thoughts

The Consumer Electronics show, the behemoth of tech, the Valhalla of gadgetry, has come and gone for yet another year. But this time, rather than arriving with a bang, it slinked into sight with something more like a whimper. CES…

CES 2010: Day 3 Round-Up

Another day, another Tech Digest CES 2010 round-up. Fancy Tweeting hands-free in your car or controlling your PC by breathing? Check today's top stories below and find out how. Twitter coming to Ford cars The digital equivalent of drink-driving? Motorola…

Should I buy an OLED TV or stick with LCD and plasma?

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There’s a new display technology in town — OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) — and it could be coming to a large TV near you very soon.

Plenty of big-name manufacturers have already produced OLED TVs, and others are promising to have sets available within the next couple of years.

OLED has a lot of very attractive characteristics meaning it can has the potential to power large, bright, thin, energy-efficient televisions. Then again, LCD and plasma TVs currently rule the roost and are no pushovers when it comes to features.

Should you buy an OLED TV? Let’s take a look…

Behind the scenes at the British Music Experience

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There are condom machines in the toilets of the British Music Experience at the O2 in Greenwich. I’ve no idea why – perhaps they think their visitors will be overwhelmed with emotion after seeing Ziggy Stardust’s ‘Thin White Duke’ outfit, or Dave Hill’s “Superyob” guitar. But in actual fact, it’s gadget fanatics that are likely to be the ones excited, because the BME is one of the most gadget-filled museums in the UK.

Almost everything in the museum is interactive. Your ticket comes equipped with an RFID tag that you wave in front of exhibits that interest you. These are logged in a central database, and after your visit you can go to the BME website and view all the exhibits that you looked at online.

There’s also the option to play along on real instruments with songs you know, or record a video of yourself dancing to one of several famous historical dances. That content will be stored and can also be viewed on the website later on, so you can share your embarrassment with people across the world. You get three free iTunes downloads too, to further investigate music that you don’t know very well.

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Although it’s a great and well-connected experience, and anyone remotely interested in popular music since 1945 will find something interesting, there’s an ever so slight sense of a lack of use of the technology to its full effect. The tagging system is great, but it’d be nice to be able to explore extra content from home, rather than just reviewing the content you saw.

It’d also be great if you could do more with your recordings, getting the content out of the website. For copyright reasons, it’s impossible to do anything but stream the recording you make in the ‘Gibson Studio’ section. The British Music experience is technologically ahead of any other museum in London, but it’s still got unrealised potential.

Skype gives away its SILK speech codec for free

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Skype has just announced that it’s giving away its SILK speech codec, which is the bit of software that processes your voice into a small enough stream of data for you to be able to communicate over a slow internet connection. A codec is basically a balancing act between file size and audio quality.

The SILK codec has been in development for three years at Skype and was finally bundled with the most recent release of the software – Skype 4. It’s a major step forward in audio quality and scales depending on the bandwidth available.

So if it’s so great, then why is Skype giving it away royalty-free to its competitors? Good question. My best guess is that Skype has the VoIP market so firmly tied up that it wants some competition to help grow the whole market. Then, I suppose, it’s confident enough that those users will switch to Skype thanks to its fantastic software.

It might also be a sign that Skype’s considering offering an API. Opening up the service, which is famously closed, would mean that other programs could be able to make Skype calls natively, without people having to open and install Skype itself. It could mean that you’ll just be able to highlight phone numbers on websites and right-click to call them from the browser.

More information’s available on the SILK website, and TechCrunch has an interesting take too.