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Sony Japan's aluminum VGP-BMS10 Bluetooth laser mouse
You know, we thought this Vaio mouse that Sony Japan just introduced looked a little familiar -- that's because it's almost a metallic doppelgänger of the company's mouse / VoIP phone combo first spotted way back in the heady days of 2006. The VGP-BMS10 Bluetooth mouse features an aluminum case and a sliding cover (which does double duty as an on/off switch) meant to protect the buttons and jog wheel. And no, you can't place any phone calls with it.[Via Akihabara News]
Sony shows that 'C' stands for Crocodile with skinned VAIO Type C
Shattering misconceptions that crocodiles only come in various shades of dark, menacing green, Sony has managed to genetically engineer crocs in girly pink, luscious red, and chocolaty brown colors exclusively for the sake of wrapping its CS series VAIO notebooks in organic texture. Mind you, textures are all those crocs sacrificed, as like the company's earlier Crocodile-themed machines these lappys are still made entirely of plastic and bits of silicon -- just grooved and pigmented to look like prehistoric, genetically modified reptiles (check out the detail pic after the break). The crocette devices, which are otherwise identical internally to those sporting myriad of other hues, hit Japan on the 18th for ¥104,800 (just over $1,000), and while Sony hasn't announced any plans for an international release, we're thinking if you head on down to Florida you could find yourself a good 'ol boy who could whip up one of these in no time and make a rib-stickin' stew with the remains.[Via Sony Insider]
Sony debuts beefed-up 18.4-inch VAIO AW laptop
Sony's 18.4-inch Type A VAIO laptop was already impressive enough when it made its debut in Japan earlier this month, but it looks like the slightly revised VAIO AW just announced for the UK has now taken things one step further. Of course, there's not much room to upgrade that 1,920 x 1,080 18.4-inch display, but you can expect to get a slightly speedier T9600 Core 2 Duo processor and, most notably, a 128GB SSD drive that's joined by a 500GB SATA drive in a RAID arrary, something Sony describes as a "world's first." Also, it looks like prices for this monster actually start at a fairly reasonable £999 (or just over $1,700), but you can pretty safely bet that any "world's first" features will demand a hefty premium.
Sony's VAIO R Master splits the tower
Come young grasshopper, it's time to meet the Sony VAIO R Master. Now, instead of looming over your desktop as a giant tower of yore, Sony has wisely spilt the VAIO R's innards into two smaller slabs connected via some USB/PCI Express magic. This allows you to arrange the clutter to your liking with up to 1.8-meters (about 6-feet) of tethered separation. The smaller of the boxes contains the most frequently accessed components such as BD drive and various memory card, USB, and Firewire slots while the fatter base holds the rest of the computing guts configurable with up to 4x 500GB SATA disks, a 2.96GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU, 256MB nVidia GeForce 7600GT graphics, a suite of analog and digital TV tuners, up to 3GB DDR2 RAM and plenty of PCI/PCI Express expansion slots to get you through a couple of product release cycles. All that and a bundled 24-inch, 1920x1200 pixel LCD connected over one of the base unit's two DVI outputs, one of which is HDCP-enabled, and plenty of software from Adobe and Sony to make the most of this multimedia powerhouse. And if you're quick, you can snatch the new R from the hand of Sony Japan starting October 28th for ¥192,000 (roughly $1,632) or more than ¥555,000 (about $4,717) fully equipped.[Via Impress]
Sony gets theirs: flaming Vaio brings the firefighters
Exploding Dell laptops get all the press, but that doesn't mean other honest, hardworking laptops can't get their 15-minutes of fame if they play their pyrotechnics right. And who better than Sony to produce an exploding Vaio featuring one of their very own infamous power cells? Today's story comes from Shawnee, Kansas where firefighters were called after the Vaio burst into flames twice. The first incident, which happened while the computer was idly charging, was quickly snuffed by its owner's fire extinguisher, but after the laptop burst into flames a second time a few minutes later, the fire department was called in. By the time the firefighters arrived they found the persistent Vaio on the driveway out front, fully contained by the fire extinguisher and its soul already ascending up to laptop heaven. So what's it going to be Dell, are you going to sit back and let Sony beat you at your own game, or do you have a triple explosion planned to take back the crown?[Thanks, Jason Taylor]
Copy-Protection shield for Blu-Ray, HD-DVD cracked
The next generation of optical media is riddled with safety and anti-piracy mechanisms (think the AAC encoder on Sony's music program Sonic Stage ...what a pain). With this encryption in mind, movie producers felt they could rest easier, knowing their works of art (debatable at times) could not be plundered by CyberPirates, or Cyrates.But avast, mateys! A loophole has been discovered and it's fairly elementary. The first Blu-Ray enabled PCs have the ability to take a lovely full resolution screenshot whilst a movie is playing. Manipulate that Print key (Prt Sc for the hunt n' peck typists out there) so it takes pictures to match the frames per second of the actual movie and you've got a pirated video track! Snag the audio separately and voila -- a super HD movie free for distribution.Sony and Toshiba are going to counter this with updates for the video players and graphics card that will close the loophole before too much damage is done. Still, kudos to the magazine c't that found said loophole and Heise Security for bringing it to our attention.
Sony's VAIO RC desktops with Blu-ray get (more) official
We already saw an official Sony preview of the VAIO R series desktops last month. Now in addition to announcing their AR laptop and UX micro, Sony completes the hat trick by coming clean with full specs on their Type R desktops. At the top of the heep is the RC72 Blu-ray spinnin' model which maxes out with Intel's top of the line 3.6GHz Pentium D960 processor, up to 3GB of DDR2 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT graphics with 256MB of VRAM, either a 20-inch DVI-D (HDCP) 1680 x 1050 display or 23-inch 1920 x 1200 DVI-D sans HDCP display, and 2 freakin' TB (4 x 500 giggers) of SATA disk to record television from the included terrestrial analog or digital hi-vision tuners. At the moment, these are announced in Japan only but we're sure a US press release of the similarly spec'd VAIO RC300 series with NTSC/ATSC tuners is just around the corner. Don't worry, we have time since these won't be dropping for Nippon until about mid-June.[Via Akihabara News]
Sony's AR11S 17-inch Blu-ray Vaios due mid June?
We've already heard of Sony's plans to pack a Blu-ray drive into one of their Vaio notebooks by the middle of the year, and that looks to be coming to fruition with this new AR11S 17-incher. A tipster gave us this ad clipping from the UK, and the details look pretty solid, as does the laptop's design -- if only a little bulky, which we suppose is to be expected. From this ad and from looking around a bit, the laptop looks like it will have a 2GHz Core Duo processor, dual 200GB HDDs, a TV tuner, 1920 x 1080 WUXGA 17-inch LCD, NVIDIA's GeForce Go GT 7600 256MB graphics, Bluetooth, WiFi, dual S-Video out, and Windows Media center. We're not quite sure why the ad lists the laptop as "Full HD (1080i)" when the LCD is capable of 1080p, and after Sony has so clearly stated that "True HD," at least, is 1080p. The bigger story, literally, is that the laptop will weigh in at a hefty 8.4 pounds, and cost an even heftier chunk of change: $3732. It's UK bound for now, but crazy price or not, we hope it makes it over to the US by mid June if only as a reminder of the incredible bargain that is the PS3.[Thanks, Gaurav]
