If travel and photography are your thing, Panasonic has some gear you need. Matsuhita, a.k.a. Panasonic, submits for your approval the DMC-TZ10. This little 12MP point ‘n shoot packs an internal GPS system to tag each of your photos with longitude and latitude information, which is already consumed by online services like Picasa, Flickr and alike. GPS information is then instantly processed to show map locations and track trip trajectory. While they are plugging the heart of a navigation system into the camera, they keep most of the rest of one as well. The Lumix DMC-TZ10 camera contains a Navteq geo-location database with 500,000 points of interest, covering over 73 countries. Now your camera can let you know your whereabouts and maybe something else you might be near to go take pictures of (e.g. landmarks).
There’s also a slew of other more traditional features like a 25mm wide angle lens, which is capable of zooming up to 300mm. The Lumix DMC-TZ10 doubles as a high-def camcorder, recording video at 720p in AVCHD Lite with audio encoded in Dolby Digital. If you can upgrade to a SDXC, you can afford adjust your video bit-rate up to 17Mbps. Still sporting one of the best image stabilization systems, this new Lumix maybe bound to be even more popular than it’s predecessors.
Archive for the Category ◊ USB Technologies ◊
UWB’s fate is pretty much tied to that of Certified Wireless USB, which is only communication protocol that still depends on the said radio technology. While there are already several WUSB devices, from video / audio adapters to hard drives and docking stations, on the market, the adoption rate is a far cry from that of other USB standards. The performance of these wireless peripherals is quite discouraging with real-world transfer rate averaging at just around 15MB/s. Native WUSB hosts can remove some overhead, and likely provide some speed boost, but significant improvement will only come with new specs, just like USB 3.0.
WiMedia Alliance, believed to be in the process of disbanding, has released version 1.5 of the common radio platform specs, which in a nutshell defines the foundation for Wireless USB. The upgrade now pushes speed from 480Mbps to 1024Mbps, doubling the available bandwidth for peripherals that stream 1080p video from a laptop to HDTV. Whether or not this will save WUSB remains to be seen, but the new specs certainly outpaces 802.11n in speed, yet slaughtered by upcoming WiGig 1.0 (7Gbps).