Samsung

Samsung Mobile on Monday announced that it had installed 50 free charging stations at Newark Liberty International Airport in Terminals A, B, and C.

Each charging station includes four outlets that allow several normal travelers or a huge geek of one to recharge their electronic devices simultaneously. The stations are built to charge devices designed for U.S. voltage--120 volts--and come with a small shelf to hold the gear. Public Service Electric and Gas Company (PSE&G) of New Jersey is providing electricity for all 50 charging stations at the airport.

Samsung Mobile has already recently installed free charging … Read more

Lorena Ochoa is the No. 1 ranked female golfer in the world. She is also a mountain climber, triathlete, and soccer and basketball player. Gladiator is one of her favorite movies. The 26-year-old was at Union Square in downtown San Francisco Monday to promote the Samsung World Championship tournament to be held in Half Moon Bay, Calif., at the beginning of October.

I got a few minutes to talk with her as she was autographing posters and golf balls during the promotional event. I asked her about her technology preferences, especially as a person who has grown up in the … Read more

Panasonic and Yamaha have already had their Cedia Blu-ray plans leak out, and we suspect the same may have just happened to Samsung. A new Samsung Blu-ray player, the BD-P2550, has appeared on Best Buy's Web site, and is apparently ready to ship for $500. Although the Best Buy listing is pretty light on information, we were also able to track down the manual (PDF link) for the BD-P2550 online, which reveals that the BD-P2550 will sport 7.1 analog outputs, Dolby TrueHD onboard decoding, a USB port, and an Ethernet port. It's not yet apparent whether the … Read more

MetroPCS is the first stop for Samsung's answer to the LG Rumor. The Samsung Messenger, also called the SCH-R450, offers a candy bar design with a 262,000-color display and a slide out keyboard to warm your text-loving heart. Though the phone's overall styling is rather bland, the feature set is respectable. Inside you'll find a 1.3-megapixel camera, an MP3 player, e-mail and instant messaging, stereo Bluetooth, USB mass storage, organizer features, a speakerphone, voice recognition, 20MB of internal storage, and an microSD card slot.

The Messenger costs $199, which may seem a tad expensive, but … Read more

I consider myself a fairly patient person. In June, I sold my 34-inch Sony KV-XBR910 CRT HDTV. I was moving to a new apartment that month and the thought of moving this 250-pound behemoth--that I'd already moved twice before in the last three years--was just too daunting.

I paid more than $2,000 for the TV in 2003 and in June 2008, I put it up on eBay and Craigslist for $500. I got $150. Unfortunately, because I had an extremely small window of time before having to vacate my old apartment--and because I was afraid of being stuck with this huge piece of hardware I could not move on my own--I ended up selling it for a price much lower than what I had originally desired.

It's hard for me to even write that, honestly, as I'm sure there were things I could have done differently to get a much better return on my investment. But what's done is now done. I truly wish the soulless excuse for a human being who bought it from me the best of luck with it and I mean that in the best way.

I guess I can't blame all the eBayers and Craigslisters who passed up my TV at $500. I mean why buy a 5-year old, 250-pound TV which, although in great condition, does not have as many connection options or as big of a screen as a 50-pound, 40-inch LCD they can get for $1,000 or so.

Yes, I see how this could have been a hard sell. However, it really depressed me to realize that I was having trouble selling a 5-year-old TV for just a quarter of its original price. Is this even normal depreciation? Actually, I don't really want to know, now that what's done is done. Perhaps I should just move on and look toward bigger and better things.

Unfortunately, I've yet to actually do that. Since selling it, I've been forced to slum it with my girlfriend's 15-year old, 13-inch Philips/Magnavox TV/VCR combo while I determine which LCD HDTV I want to invest in. A few weeks back I watched the season finale of Battle Star Galactica. I won't spoil it here, but the final shot of that episode has a reveal that let's just say I had trouble fully appreciating while watching it on this thing. I remember having to get off the couch and get within a foot of the TV to see anything and even then I was like, "Um, WTF am I even looking at?"

Thanks to high-definition pics I've found on forums, I've since learned what I was missing. Friday I watched the opening ceremony to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and like most people I was greatly impressed by the incredible show China put on.

On Saturday, I went over to my friend Dan's house to hang out and to finally meet his 9-month-old daughter. The visit contained both the highlight and the low point of my weekend. While his daughter was one of the coolest babies I've ever met, watching the Olympics in HD on his HDTV was so visually impressive that it depressed me that I'd just watched the opening on such a clunker. This was an opening of such ambition that nothing like it will probably ever be attempted again in my lifetime and I got to waste its full impact on the gadget you see above. … Read more

Samsung Electronics, an arm of the giant Korean company (second only to General Electric in annual revenue among conglomerates), held a press event in San Francisco last week to show off its products for the coming holiday season.

I'd been looking for an excuse to go up to the city, so off I went-- taking Caltrain rather than driving. Conveniently, the Samsung event was just a few blocks from the train station in San Francisco.

… Read more

I've seen some hair-brained (hey-ooooo) ideas in my time, but this just might take the cake. For those of you who find Bluetooth headsets or the wired headsets that come with your cell phone too pedestrian, here's something that will certainly turn heads: a wired headset that looks like a hair dryer. Trust me, I wish I were making this up.

Yes, for just $7.59, you can talk to your family and friends through a hair dryer and be the object of various onlookers' ridicule envy. The cell phone hair dryer headset comes with various adapters that … Read more

Samsung held a holiday showcase Wednesday at a San Francisco studio. Typically, these things are reserved for our lucky New York City colleagues, so we were very happy to see Samsung grace us with such an event. The holiday decorations were also welcome, considering they matched the frigid San Francisco summer weather outside.

For the most part the cell phone news was nil, but we did spy a couple of previously announced handsets that we had yet to see in the flesh. One was the Samsung Innov8, aka the SGH-i8510, which the company announced almost two weeks ago. The loaded … Read more