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The eagerly anticipated second generation of the Microsoft Zune MP3 players have officially arrived, and we've photographed every nook and cranny. We also have First Look videos to give you a glimpse of the new features found on the 4, 8, and 80GB Zunes. Let's cut to the chase, shall we?

-Photo gallery: Zune 80

-Photo gallery: Zune 4/8

-First Look: Zune 80

-First Look: Zune 4/8

The big news out of Redmond today is that Microsoft is working on a Flickr competitor.

A job posting on the software giant's career site reveals that the Digital Memories Experience Team is trying to recruit a program manager to lead the project.

"This feature team is building a next-generation photo and video-sharing service that will compete with Flickr, SmugMug, and other photo Web solutions today," according to the posting. It's clear who the competition is.

Flickr has a really strong and popular product right now, so if Microsoft wants to be competitive in this space, … Read more

Photoshop Elements 6 is a good tool for those addicted to Adobe. It streamlines Photoshop's toolset for photograph editing and organizing, but like its antecedent, it's got some unwieldy bulk and it could be simplified even further. Is it worth upgrading?

… Read more

Recently Power Downloader received an e-mail from Kitty Kilobyte who was away at school. Apparently Kitty had amassed a huge amount of digital photos by taking her camera with her wherever she went. She had pictures from birthday parties, school events, and concerts she had attended, and also simple shots of friends at school and other scenery in her life. She had thought about putting them into albums or posting them online, but wondered if Power knew of something new and exciting she could do with her photographs.… Read more

Hewlett-Packard has never done as much as it could to use its servers, PCs, printers, software, and the like to cross-leverage and complement each other.

One need only look to Apple to see how this sort of thing can work. The iPod would arguably not have succeeded without the Mac home base to build from, and the Mac has clearly piggybacked on the iPod's success. With even more assets, such as servers and services, HP had still more opportunities. But it largely paid lip service to connecting them. Indeed, at present, HP seems to be headed back to a … Read more

Around this time each year I start trolling the Web, looking for potentially interesting products that we should review for the holiday buying season. So, there I was, scanning Amazon for new Philips digital photo frames, and lo and behold I came across this $130 Philips AJL308 7-Inch Digital Picture Frame, Alarm Clock, Radio and MP3 player. For some reason, I hadn't seen it before.

The Amazon product description reads as follows:

"This is the perfect item for your bedside, as it functions as a clock radio, alarm clock, and digital picture frame. This beautifully styled dual alarm … Read more

Fauxto, the Webware for photo editing that looks a lot like a desktop application, has a new look and feel. It's relaunched as Splashup and has added several new features that in many ways bring it closer to Fotoflexer, one of its main competitors. This was an interesting product for me to come back to, mainly since it was one of the first Web-based photo-editing apps I got to look at after starting at Webware, and since then the genre has seen tremendous growth.

The real draw to the app has always been its use of layers, which give you a very powerful way to manipulate and create new images using bits and pieces from one or more original photos. Up until a few months ago, other Web-based photo-editing apps didn't have this functionality.

The biggest change since I looked at the service late last year is the addition of undo controls that let you go back a step in case you make a mistake. It's also gotten much better at linking up with places where your photos might reside, such as Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa. Similar to how other Web photo-editing services have handled this, you simply need to authenticate Fauxto to each service by logging in, then you can freely browse all your albums. Originally you were limited to whatever was on your hard drive, or a URL. Likewise, saving is now far better, and you can save locally (in multiple formats) or export the shots back to the site or origin, or whatever supported sites you've given login credentials.

There are also some new tools that are aimed at the higher-end user such as a lasso and cropping tool, along with a tool that lets you take any selected imagery and copy it into a new layer. For grabbing quick shots of your face, there's now a built-in Web cam tool that will take a quick snapshot, although it's nowhere near as advanced as Fotoflexer's iteration that does on-the-fly filter and liquefy effects. … Read more

A new attempt to provide a higher-end sequel to the ubiquitous JPEG image standard is officially under way.

The multiple countries participating in the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which created the JPEG standard, have approved an effort to make Microsoft's HD Photo format a standard called JPEG XR, said Bill Crow, who has led Microsoft's HD Photo effort and who just took over the company's Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon imaging project. XR stands for "extended range," a reference to the format's ability to show a wider and finer range of tonal gradations and a … Read more

External GPS receivers are pretty handy if you want to turn your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone into a satellite-navigation device. But imagine if you could use your external GPS receiver to keep a log of your travels and then be able to see your journey on Google Earth.

Better yet, imagine if you could use that GPS travel log to synchronize your digital pictures with their exact locations, so you can post them on sites such as Locr or Flickr and let your friends see where the pictures were taken. The Qstarz Travel Recorder BT-Q1000--the little black box in the pic--does … Read more