screens

Providing one-stop shopping for all your video needs, open-source and cross-platform Miro deserves much of the praise that's been heaped upon it. The latest major point to version 2.0 continues to impress.

The concept is brilliant, yet simple: Create a video player that can subscribe to and download video podcasts while managing the videos you've saved on your hard drive. On the face of it, this might sound like iTunes, but the sharing component is an essential aspect of the program. Miro has always been geared toward video and it shows in the program's design. When … Read more

Forget your laptop stand and hideously mismatched secondary display, because Samsung's Lapfit series offers external LCD monitors that will match your laptop beautifully. The Lapfit External Display, which coordinates with the design of Samsung's latest laptops and comes in 19- and 22-inch versions, connects to your notebook, considerably enlarging your workable display area.

The pair of low-profile, wide-screen monitors, the LD190G (19-inch) and LD220G (22-inch), sit at the height of your typical laptop and have adjustable tilt angles from 10-30 degrees. Both monitors offer 1,360x768 pixel resolution (16:9 aspect ratio), 4ms response time, and a 20,… Read more

Remember that X-Series Walkman that Sony kept behind protective glass at this year's CES like it was the Mona Lisa? The one I swore would never actually hit the states? The one that U.K.'s Stuff Magazine had to fly to Sony headquarters in Japan just so they could fondle the prototype (see below)? Well, the lucky bastards at France's Le Journal du Geek actually got their hands on a legitimate version of the X-Series Walkman and then proceeded to photograph the living bejeezus out of it. [Correction: Sony has confirmed with us that the X-Series unit … Read more

We already knew this was coming, but now we have actual pics that give a better sense of its scale.

Philips introduced its new Cinema 21:9 TV with a wider-than-wide-screen display at a press event in London. Our favorite blokes at Crave UK were in attendance and snapped a few frames of the "mutant telly."

Head over to Crave UK for a whole gallery of photos, as well as their take on the trouble of a new viewing format. (Alternatively, if you find wide screen worthless, head here.)

Because it lacked any kind of real help feature, our first impression of this free utility was not a good one. But after we played around with it for a few minutes, it proved to be a decent screen capture tool.

Once activated, ScreenParts introduced a transparent window to our desktop. We found that we could easily resize the window by dragging and dropping the corners, but it wasn't quite clear where to go from there. A right-click revealed a menu that contained options for resizing the window, resetting the capture counter, and configuring the capture timer. In Settings, … Read more

The displays of the world are getting wider. For those of us who work, this is not progress. Sure, wide-screen computer screens look cool, but in the real world of working on laptops, a wide-screen display is an ergonomic step backwards.

Before I slam the move to wide-screen computers, I will gladly admit that for entertainment content, wide-screen works. Our eyes are side-by-side, after all, and having a story unfold in a way that more closely respects how we see gives a more engrossing, absorbing experience. Wide-screen plasma and LCD television sets make sense, as do CinemaScope movie theaters.

But when we have work to do, the fact that our eyes are set up to spot a herd of jackals approaching us over the plain becomes irrelevant. For most people, the world of work is in portrait mode, and wide-screen displays offer scant benefits.

Like reading a page of text or a book, most Web sites are set up with strong vertical orientation. That works for text-based material, since wide lines of text, longer than about 60 characters, become hard to read (the reader has a hard time finding the beginning of the next line). … Read more

From the "how in the hell do I get this guy's job?" corner of the tubes comes an interesting video from Engadget.

In it, a guy dressed in a white lab coat takes out his frustrations on a Vissumo touch-screen monitor using a 9mm. There are days I wish this was my job. I just need to get CNET to build a firing range, then convince them to let me walk around the office with a 9. Hmmm, you know, thinking about it, I don't see this happening anytime soon.

Check below for the video. One … Read more

Despite a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, the new BlackBerry Storm has gotten off to a shaky start, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Storm, which is Research In Motion's first touch-screen device, was supposed to be Verizon Wireless's iPhone killer. Verizon is the exclusive carrier for the Storm. Apple's iPhone is sold exclusively by AT&T. Verizon and RIM had supposedly been working on the device even before AT&T launched the original iPhone two and a half years ago.

The Storm launched in November, in time for the holiday-shopping season. And while it sold well initially with about 500,000 shipping the first month, the Journal reports that many customers who bought the device are complaining of buggy software and hardware glitches.

Specifically, consumers say that the software used to type on the touch screen, which requires you to press down on the face of the phone, is sluggish. I have used the device on and off since it was launched November 21, and I'd agree that it is clunky.

Other examples: the accelerometer that senses and changes the view on the screen when it's turned on its side is slow. And sometimes the "sure press" screen is difficult to use because it registers the wrong character.

Verizon and RIM rushed the device to market, perhaps before it was really ready, according to the Journal article. The newspaper notes that Jim Balsillie, RIM's co-CEO said the companies reached the Black Friday deadline "by the skin of their teeth," after they had missed a planned October debut. … Read more

Longing for some change in your life? Why not start with that boring old Windows XP logon screen? With the freeware LogonStudio, choosing another screen is a matter of two clicks. Alternately, you can design your own with a built-in editor.

The first option is a lot easier. About 30 cool screens are available on the WinCustomize site, and the program can randomly select one on every boot. Editing is less straightforward. You build or modify logon screens by tweaking parameters on a lengthy list of elements. So you might, for instance, change the FirstColor parameter of the Centre Panel … Read more