SanDisk Sansa TakeTV 8GB video player leaked

from Engadget by Ryan Block

Vanilla USB flash drives are so passé, so for those who want a little more flavor more from their generic sticks of memory, might we point you to the SanDisk Sansa TakeTV, apparently freshly leaked by way of buy.com? (It also briefly appeared on PC Mag's site and SanDisk's forums among other sites.) Sure, the TakeTV an 8GB flash drive, but it's also intended to plug into a USB dock with TV outs (and remote), which is capable of reading and decoding the DivX, XviD, and MPEG-4 video files up to 720 x 576 and 7Mbps for playback on your TV. All the old school simplicity of home sneakernet combined with the one-stop-shop convenience of a USB flash drive. Unfortunately buy.com won't tell us when it's out or how much it'll cost, so no one gets to take home TakeTV just yet.

Update: This whole thing sound familiar? It might, SanDisk announced its USBTV initiative at CES this year, so it looks like this is the first resulting product. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out.

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Samsung's 40-inch 1080p LCD TV panel -- just 0.39-inches thin

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

With Sharp, Hitachi, and LG.Philips all announcing ultra-thin LCDs we were beginning to wonder, where's Samsung with their world's first / biggest / thinnest boasting? No more. Meet the 10-mm (0.39-inch) thin, 40-inch LED-backlit, Full HD LCD TV panel which covers 92% of the NTSC color gamut while consuming less than 90 watts of power. That profile easily bests the crazy thin measurements we've already seen. At the moment, however, no price or production run details are available. That could change on Wednesday when the panel goes on display at FPD International in Japan.

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Samsung's 5 megapixel G800 gets launched, available next month

from Engadget by Chris Ziegler

Is it a phone, or is it a camera? Until recently, cameraphones were unquestionably still just phones with chintzy cams tacked on, but it looks like we're finally getting to the point where the lines are truly blurred. Samsung's new G800 slider is now official, packing a 5 megapixel autofocus camera in a rather attractive metallic form; that in itself isn't terribly notable, considering we already have a handful of 5 megapixel handsets on the market. What is notable, though, is the added bonus of a xenon flash and 3x optical (yes, optical) zoom. Heck, from the back, you can barely tell it's a phone at all. Add in the usual goodies like Bluetooth, HSDPA, and a generously sized QVGA display, and Samsung has a winner on its hands -- or at least it would have a winner if only it'd launch stateside. Our far luckier European brethren, meanwhile, can lay their hands on this sucker starting in November for a to-be-determined price. [Via Unwired View]

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Casio Exilim EX-V8 reviewed

from Engadget by Conrad Quilty-Harper

Steve's Digicams has a review up of Casio's Exilim V8, a slim 8.1 megapixel point-and-shoot featuring a 7x optical zoom, and a YouTube optimized H.264 video output. Key points of the review highlight the large 2.5-inch LCD on the back, decent movie recording quality -- it goes up to 848x480 at 30fps -- and some excellent camera shake / blur technologies, all crammed into an ultra compact case. On top of that it shoots some good photos, and has a relatively decent response time: in fact the only niggle Steve found was the fiddly controls. At only $299, sounds like a steal.

[Via Photography Blog]

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Vinod Khosla Shares His Portfolio

from Earth2Tech by Katie Fehrenbacher

Vinod Khosla gave a speech down at Sand Hill Road yesterday in which he offered the most detailed description of his portfolio companies that we've heard. Breaking it down into four categories — the war on oil, the war on coal, efficiency and materials — he discussed at least 32 portfolio companies that he hopes will shape the future of energy and fight climate change. He showed off a list of 26 companies in March.

As Khosla put it, "Hopefully we'll see a hundred portfolios like this. I'm happy to share all my strategies so we get more people," to have portfolios with a large amount of diverse energy companies. At the event, he used a PowerPoint slide to showcase his portfolio companies, and more recently posted a similar slide on his web site. Though the two slides are actually a bit different, here are some of the lesser-known companies from both lists: efficiency companies Seeo, Newco1 (is that a placeholder name?), and PAX Streamline (just called Streamline on this list); water companies Quos and NanoH2O; biofuel company Ethos (although a biofuel company called Kior was on the other list); and plastics companies eChromics (which he referred to as Soladigm on the other list) and Calera.

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