OLED screens, Blu-ray players and brain control

April 15, 2009, 09:11 AM —  IDG News Service — 

January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is a great place to see new gadgets but they're not always available right away. A couple of the coolest gadgets from this year's CES, Sony's OLED-based Walkman and Samsung's slim Blu-ray Disk player, are now on their way with availability from April.

I got a chance to <a href="http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/66377/hands-sonys-new-x-series-walkman">try out the Walkman</a> at Sony's Tokyo launch event and it's pretty impressive. With Apple starting to serve up non-restricted music through the iTunes Music Store competing players might be worth a second look. Also this month we saw another example of how quickly technology spreads and becomes available. It was less than a year ago that video came to the high-end digital SLR cameras but now its arrived in low-end DSLR models too with Canon's Kiss X3.

During the month we were also lucky enough to glimpse some truly futuristic research - brain control of gadgets! Just imagine your TV automatically switching channels when you start thinking, "this show is boring, I wonder if there's some good movies on." Read on for more!

Sony X-series Walkman

Sony has a new player at the top of its Walkman range. We first caught a glimpse of the NW-X1000 at CES but it's now been officially launched and will go on sale in Japan this month with other markets to follow in the middle of the year. The player has a bright, 3-inch OLED touchscreen and handles music, video, pictures and -- at least in Japan - mobile TV too. There's also WiFi and Sony has built in dedicated links to YouTube and Windows Live, so you can perform a search on the song or artist you are currently listening to with just a couple of clicks. There's also a general Web browser. The device is pretty impressive for all it crams into a case smaller than an iPod touch. In Japan there'll be two models: a 16GB model will cost around ¥40,000 (US$400) and a 32GB model will be around ¥50,000.

Canon DSLR with video

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