useful? no idea… but who cares? how cool is this?!?!
Transparent notebooks!! w00t!

Course only Samsung is badass enough to put out a prototype… ^^

Samsung is out with two new viral videos tied to the 2010 Winter Olympics to be held in Vancouver. Check them out and become a Samsung mobile explorer.

Awesome ice skating warm-up routine

Hardest hockey shot ever!!!!

The Samsung Jet S8003 has a feature called Fake Call which can call you back. In this video, Mike’s dates use this feature to cut the date short. Enjoy!

Samsung Jet – Faster than a Smartphone.

Extended versions of each date to follow – http://samsungblog.co.za

Here’s the latest viral video from Samsung. It’s for the Samsung ST 550 and Samsung TL 225 digital cameras. What’s so special about these cameras? They feature dual LCD’s. One on the back (like usual) and one on the front. See what we’re talking about…

First up is the 12.2 megapixel Samsung TL 225. It features a 3.5-inch touch LCD screen in the back and a 1.5-inch LCD in front. Users simply tap the front LCD to turn it on and off.

The primary use for the front LCD is for users who like to take pictures of themselves with friends by holding the camera out in front of them. In this scenario, the LCD screen helps users frame the shot, and face detection boxes pop up so you know if you’re in focus.

The ST550 record HD video in 1280×720p resolution at 30 frames per second in H.264 format. The ST550 also features HDMI connectivity via an optional adapter, so you can see your HD video creations in glorious HD on an HD TV. The ST550 is expected to be available in the US in September 2009.

The Samsung E-Book SNE-50K

launched in Korea yesterday here in Korea without too much fanfare.

here’s the $0.50 preview:

SAMSUNG E-BOOK SNE-50K PREVIEW REVIEW (with Pictures! yay!)

NOTE:
I haven’t had a chance to check it out in-store as they didn’t have it our local Kyobo bookstore for some annoying reason (I blame Kyobo), and as cool as the SNE-50K (formerly “Papyrus”) is…  I didn’t want to shell out near $300 bucks just just to review it. And there are no in-depth reviews are out on any Korean blogs or news yet either…+_+

For now, I figured it’d be good enough to just give some updates and glean info from pics, and Korean articles that I didn’t see in any English publications.

The first obvious differentiating feature is the stylus …
ie: you can write on it. Picture says it all…

This immediately brings it into more into PDA zone, and given the size of the device its seems the o’ mighty Samsung is purposely going for a new niche tween-niche ie: in-between a PDA and Amazon Kindle (which is huge in comparison). More portable Kindle? I’m down.

The price (about USD$280ish), size, the stylus in lieu of keyboard, and SCHEDULE feature reflects this as well (see next pic).

No idea how well the writing works, but it’d be nice if you could add notes right on top of pages.

EDIT:  And it has Hand-writing Recogition capabilities.

But wait there’s more…

the Samsung SNE-50K e-book has a SCHEDULE feature (probably for targeting students) and an image viewer (no color, but cool) and …

“전자종이 단말기 SNE-50K는 글로벌 전자책 표준 포맷인 ePub과 TXT 뷰어가 기본적으로 지원된다. 제품과 함께 제공되는 CD로 버츄얼 프린터 드라이버를 설치하면 파워포인트, 엑셀, 워드, PDF 등의 파일을 BMP 그림 파일로 자동 변환 후 기기 내 저장시켜 줌으로써 초보자도 쉽고 간편하게 다양한 파일을 옮겨 볼 수 있다…” (clip from yonghap news)

Not wanting to translate completely… the gist is that it will actually convert power point, excel, word and pdf to BMP for easy reading and to make it easy for n00bs to navigate image text via touch dragging. Niceness!

At first I didn’t much of this, but then thinking about it, I realize that the upside is touch dragging images is something that even the most non-tech oriented person intuitively understands (aka “the mom test”). Scrolling via scroll bar is still amazingly a mystery to many, but touch-and-drag a picture is completely natural to those same non-scrollers. So it makes sense. (Of course, that belies the fact, that one would have to convert Word or PowerPoint first –which assumes you can do that much, you can scroll)… but I suppose that’s one can hand off your gadget wiz-kid 6 year old to do.

I will have to get my hands on one to see how easy it is to convert, and how well it renders, and most importantly, how intuitive navigation and UI is, but the feature and concept is good nonetheless.

Any questions? (no, not about her)

Well, for text inclined, here is the menu …

Just draw your own conclusions from there:

• Book
• Memos
• Schedule
• Images
• Settings

The deal with KYOBO BOOKS is significant as that is the largest book chain in Korea. Its the “Barnes&Noble of Korea” if you will… so this will the SNE a big step up towards…well… available books.  Most books are only available via download from Kyobo’s site at this point… but this basically means a massive library stock .

Anyway..for a bonus here is a shot of the Samsung E-Book SNE-50K  showcase that I didn’t see anywhere else (except Korean sites).

If I can get my hands on an SNE-50K, I’ll give another “real” review..  and other updates… but for now…

you’ve been Samsungished!