By: Debra Goh

Bluetooth In Action

In the United States, Bluetooth gets absolutely no respect. It is however, becoming more and more common in notebooks, PDAs, and especially cell phones. Bluetooth will provide wireless users a way to transmit small amounts of data over short distances.

Now, Bluetooth is facing stiff competition from new wireless technology. Referred to as UWB or Ultra Wideband, it promises data transfer of up to 480 MB a second – while most current Bluetooth devices transfer data up to 721 KB a second.

For the time being, Bluetooth devices are surely cropping up. Below, we will look at some of the accessories offered with Bluetooth technology.

Talking to the dashboard When pairing it with a cell phone, the CCM Blue Warrior car kit becomes a great speaker phone that plugs into the power adapter of your vehicle. The noise cancelling microphone will reduce background noise efficiently, with the large buttons making adjusting the speaker volume a snap. Although the Blue Warrior is far from sexy or sleek, it’s very practical.

Tiny tuning box Part MP3 player and part hands free phone, the compact and lightweight Sony HBM-30 is an attractive gadget that lets you accept calls with minimal interruption of your tunes. When you get an incoming call it will automatically pause your music, then you speak into the built in microphone that you can wear around your neck or clip to your clothes.

The pen With Nokia’s SU-1B digital pen, you can doodle and make hand written notes in ink on a special pad then transmit them from the pad to your Bluetooth phone. Being an alternative to typing on a cell phone keypad, the pen is very handy, although a pricey tool from MMS fans.

Snapshots If you want to make slide shows with your camera photos, the Nokia SU-2 image viewer will let you disply your pictures on a TV or projector. Simply hook this square gray device to your TV’s input with the built in cable, then beam the pictures to the SU-2 from your Bluetooth enabled phone and the photo fest will begin.

This device is a snap to set up and use, although it displays resolutions of up to 640 by 480. If you have a newer phone that takes high resolution photos, you won’t be able to use the Nokia SU-2 image viewer.

Keep in mind, the 640 by 480 pixel photos will appear blocky on TV screens, no matter what you do. If your phone can send batches of photos, you can create a slide show – although Nokia claims you can use sequentially beamed shots as well.

About the AuthorDebra Goh is an internet entrepreneur and a freelance writer. Her blogs are at http://free–downloads.blogspot.com and air–purifier.blogspot.com

By Nash Burns

The Sony PSP utilizes the so called UMD disc for gaming and for watching movies. UMD stands for Universal Media Disc that is the media format for PSP (apart from its memory stick). A PSP UMD Movie will typically set you back between $18 to $30 USD which is quite hefty especially for student and teenagers. Nowadays, the demography of people using PSP includes young professional where money is not so much an issue. But for teenager, it is a big deal to fork out $30 for a movie you only watch once in a while.

The UMD is similar in construction to your typical Compact Disc (CD) with the difference in the size of the disc. The maximum data that a UMD can hold is 1.8GB which is more than enough to hold a whole movie at a lower resolution than your typical DVD. Due to the capacity of the disc, bonus feature that you can get from normal DVD are sometime remove and like the normal DVD, it is prone to scratches.

The sale of PSP UMD Movies has also started to dwindle mainly due to lack of interest from customers. Big names movie companies such as Paramount, Warner and Sony Picture are cutting back releases due to lack of sales. Things are not looking so hot for PSP UMD Movies. Some of the contributions to this lack of sales are due to the price of the UMD Movies. Frankly speaking, they are highly overpriced and sometimes more expensive than DVD.

If you are like me, you would start looking for alternatives. All of us (well, most of us anyway) love to watch movies on our PSP but with the high UMD movies pricing and the limited number of movies available, the future of watching movie on our PSP is started to look bleak. Or is it?

If you like to watch movies on your PSP there are two alternatives. 1) You buy an original DVD and you ripped the DVD into your computer and download it into your memory stick 2) You become a member of PSP downloading site and download directly from that site.

DVD ripping software is provided by Sony. It enables you to extract DVD movies into your PC (or Mac) into a much more compact format. Of course you would loose a small bit of quality but since your PSP screen is small, there are no noticeable difference. The drawback to either of the method is that you would require significant amount of memory in your memory stick (at least 512MB)

The second method is by joining the numerous PSP download site available in the internet nowadays. Finding a download site is the easy part. Finding a good site is the tricky bit. The good thing about downloading from these membership site is that you don’t have to do any DVD ripping which is in itself can be time consuming at the very best and downright frustrating if you don’t get it right. You just download and watch the movies. The only thing that will cost you is the lifetime membership charges. Look at it this way, by the time you download a full movie, you’ll already cover the membership charges and you can download unlimited number of files and have access to games cheat, review and get free PSP tools too. You can always store your movie files on your PC and download the movie onto your memory stick if you want to watch them

The PSP UMD movies are fast becoming scarce but they are still there in the market. However, things are not looking so bright for them. PSP download sites offers a great alternative for PSP movie lovers but the drawback is the amount memory you would require if you want to watch more than one movie at a time. In the end it always comes to what your needs or wants are.

by: Richard Weber

About The Author

Richard Weber
Learn more about Blu-Ray here: http://www.blu-ray-site.com