Review Horizon

In an interesting effort to customize the Galaxy Tab’s UI for Romania (Eastern Europe), Samsung involuntary provided us with a joke: A Porn icon. No, the icon doesn’t start playing an X-rated movie, nor does it make the phone vibrate. Porn is the (incorrect)  abbreviation for “Porneste” or “Pornire” which means “Turn On” in Romanian. Why they did not use “Start” is beyond me since the Romanian word is exactly the same.

As a Romanian speaker, I also found some other funny translation examples: “Player muzical” is supposed to be “Music Player” but Samsung only translated one of the words. The word “Player” doesn not exist in Romanian dictionary. The word “Nota” is the Romanian translation for “Notes” but it is incorrectly translated as singular instead of plural. To be honest, quite a large percent of Romanian population speaks English at a reasonable level and could have provided a decent translation, but it looks that Samsung has chosen the cheapest (free) route of Google translation .

What is even more entertaining is that “Porn” in Romanian is also the (correct) abbreviation for the word “Porno” which in English means: you guessed: Exactly “Porn”. I wonder if the sets will command a price premium from the Romanian customers.

If you can read Romanian you can check the original article here.

…And now we have a “Live” pair. With their latest product announcement, Western Digital My Book Live, Western Digital establishes their position in the market as a manufacturer of cheap network drives. The new member lets you access your data on the network at 100Mbs (yes, it is 1080p Blu-ray ISO streaming capable, but only one client at the time). WD My Book Live is also compatible with Apple Time Machine, but probably one of the greatest features is the inclusion of a DLNA server. No transcoding but every DLNA friendly devices around your house will be able to access photos, videos and music from it, and that include XBOX 360, Sony PS3, LG connected TVs, popular media streaming boxes like WD TV Live Plus or Viewsonic VMP75.

WD My Book Live can also work as an iTunes server working with both MAC and PC and can stream photos via WD Photos, a free iOS app.

The prices? 1TB (WDBACG0010HCH) will cost you $169, the 2TB one (WDBACG0020HCH) is $229. As for us, we’ll always go for the big one . The 1TB version is available at Amazon with a funny warning: “CHOKING HAZARD — Small parts. Not for children under 3 yrs”.

Read more at WD’s website.

Today Staples announced it will start selling the entire family of Amazon Kindle including Kindle 3 and Kindle DX. The small Kindle will make its entrance in the stores this Sunday while its larger 9.7″ brother will surface sometime next months. The prices will be similar with the ones in Amazon’s own store – $139 for Kindle 3 WiFi, $189 for WiFi and 3G version, $379 for the Kindle DX. It is not expected that Staples will make too much money from the eReader units themselves but we all know how overpriced those accessories are. In my opinion, it doesn’t make too much sense to buy them from brick and mortar stores (unless you have some coupons) since you’ll have to deal with local taxes.

In the meantime, if you want to see how Kindle compares with Nook and Pandigital Novel 7, take a look at our Kindle 3 in-depth review.

Sony announced today the availability of a new CMOS image sensor capable of taking 16 megapixels photos. The new sensor, called “Exmor R” is back illuminated and Sony claims it features a higher sensitivity and lower noise than today’s technology.

The technical name is IMX081PQ and the unit (pixel) size is 1.12μm, the smallest in the industry. It would be interesting to know how much better these sensors are in low light conditions, since the experience tells us the smaller a pixel is, less light will touch it so the performance will degrade. This is why the SLR camera manufacturers are using the biggest sensors available.

Together with the new sensor, Sony will also release special lens to go with them, including lens for cell-phones.