2009 Honda S2000 Ultimate Edition: Honda says farewell to the S2000

Honda announced today that it will say goodbye to the Honda S2000 with a special-edition model of the roadster for the European market. The Honda S2000 Ultimate Edition will make its debut at the 2009 Geneva Motor Show and will go on sale in March.

The special-edition S2000 Ultimate Edition will get a unique white exterior with a red leather interior complemented by red stitching for the gear lever. Each unit will be marked with a numbered plaque on its kickplates. The special-edition S2000 will also come with graphite colored alloy wheels and black S2000 badging.
Power still comes from the 2.0L VTEC engine making a total of 240-hp.
The Honda S2000 Ultimate Edition will indeed be the last version before the global production of the roadster ceases altogether at the end of 2009. Honda says it has sold a total of 110,673 units of the model worldwide.

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Swarovski Sparkling Contact Lenses

Swarovski has been synonymous with adding that extra ‘sparkle’ to everyday life. Swarovski crystals have the power to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary through their sheer brilliance. `Sparkle’ is one such attempt to enhance the expression of one of our most expressive features: our eyes.

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Toyota Passo Sette and Daihatsu Boon Luminas launched

TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION (TMC) and Daihatsu Motor Co., Ltd. (Daihatsu) announce today the nationwide launch of a seven-seater compact vehicle with three rows of seats that will be sold in Japan under the Toyota brand as the “Passo Sette”*1 and under the Daihatsu brand as the “Boon Luminas”*2. The roomy, user-friendly and stylish compacts are small enough to make handling easy and big enough to accommodate seven people. Featuring the driving-assistance features and comforts often favored by female drivers, the Passo Sette and Boon Luminas offer added flexibility for mothers with young children and help support active and exciting lifestyles.





For the Passo Sette and Boon Luminas, TMC and Daihatsu combined their product-planning know-how, with Daihatsu putting to use its extensive experience in compact vehicles to be in charge of development and production. Daihatsu will supply the Passo Sette to TMC on an original equipment manufacturer basis. *1 Sette: Means seven in Italian, and refers to the seven seats in the Passo Sette *2 Luminas: A coinage drawing on the English words roomy and luminous. The name is intended to evoke the image of a vehicle that provides new splendor to its occupants.

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Sony Ericsson Concept Phone with USB Port

Have you wondered how the future Sony Ericsson phones would look like? The designer Vincent Palicki thinks this would be it.

The major speciality of this phone would be its full size USB port. It will be the first kind of phone with full sized USB ports.



Imagine how this capability can change your entertainment life. Once you have this phone, you would just need this phone to load iPods, memory sticks and to charge USB powered devices.

This concept phone will have a full sized LCD screen and a regular Sony Ericsson keypad with stainless steel buttons.

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Sony PSP 2 Graphics Processor Revealed?

A British company may have won the contract to design and build the next-generation graphics processor for the PSP2. Imagination Technologies Group announced in a press release this week that the company has signed a license agreement with a new partner, “a major consumer electronics company.” Industry sources say that the partner is almost certainly Sony, and that the SGX55x graphics chip will be used in the upcoming PSP2. The secrecy on the part of Imagination Technologies makes sense, because Sony is understandably unwilling to announce its plans for a PSP successor just yet. Imagination's PowerVR MBX chip is already being used in the Apple iPhone, so Sony finds itself in good company with this manufacturer.

The SGX55x chip promises to be much more powerful than what is currently found in the PSP. At the moment, the PSP uses a proprietary GPU designed by Sony that is very similar to the older graphics processor in the PS2.

PSP GPU Specifications:
166 mhz core speed
2 MB VRAM
Up to 33 million polygons per second
664 million pixels per second (fill rate)

PowerVR SGX530 Specifications:
200 MHz Core Speed
13.5 million polygons per second
1200 million pixels per second (fill rate)
DirectX 9 Shader Model 3 support / OpenGL 2.0
128-bit color precision
Multi-sampling and anti-aliasing

Note that the specifications above are for the current generation SGX530. The SGX55x, which is still in development, is expected to be much more powerful. With unified shader architecture and OpenGL 2.0 support, we expect the next-generation PSP GPU to be somewhat in-line with the graphics capabilities of the RSX chip currently found in the PS3, just on a smaller scale. Two images below are taken from recent technical demonstrations by Imagination Technologies. These images show what the pixel shaders in the SGX GPU can do to add realism and effects to 3D games.

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Sony Continues to Support UMD Format with New Pricing

Last year it was announced that Sony would discontinue support for movie releases on UMD, with poor sales and a lack of quality control cited as the major reasons for the move. However, the most attentive fans have noticed that Sony continues to support the format even after the supposed cancellation. The company now says that it will focus on releasing 5-7 new titles per quarter, as well as additional titles from Sony-owned studios. That actually sounds like a considerable amount of support, after all.

In a recent interview with reporters from Video Business, the company laid out a new plan for the diminutive format. According to company spokesperson and director of hardware marketing John Koller, one of the main barriers to sales of UMD movies was the price. This is something that Sony has taken steps to address with their new approach. Movies will now retail from between $10 and $15, Koller said. Besides their high price, the other major issue facing UMDs when they first launched was the glut of films not targeted toward the male teen demographic.

“The biggest issue with UMD was the lack of creating for a targeted demo,” Koller told reporters, “When we first launched, it was a difficult sale. I don’t think it’s a big stretch to say that a 16-year-old doesn’t have a lot of discretionary income. … We were offering UMDs that were more expensive than DVDs at the time. And we want content that is in line with what the demo is asking for, action and comedy … not romantic dramas.”

While the UMD format will compete directly against downloadable offerings from the PlayStation Store, there remains some reluctance by studios to release content digitally. The potential for piracy of digital content has led some studios to prefer the more secure “legal alternative” offered by UMD, Koller said.

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PSP 3000 Hacked by Datel: Battery Tool Coming

The previously unhackable PSP 3000 model has finally been cracked by third-party accessory company Datel. Its self-proclaimed "Raw Science Engineering Division" has cracked open a PSP-3000 and decrypted the circuit board that was preventing earlier generation Pandora batteries from working. The UK-based company performed SEM imaging to better understand the workings of the new PSP 3000 at the silicon level. The resulting Datel Lite Blue Tool is a new battery peripheral that will allow users to enter Service Mode on their PSP 3000 consoles and then downgrade them to earlier custom firmware versions. The device will go on sale at the end of November for the price of $29.99.

Datel is clearly walking on very thin ice with the announced "blue tool" device. Through an interesting series of legal loopholes, companies like Datel have been able to reverse engineer consumer electronics products and produce cheaper third-party peripherals such as memory cards and controllers. However, production of devices that are solely designed to enable piracy may not be afforded the same protection as memory cards and controllers. If the Blue Tool contains any of the same technology used on Sony's own device, it could present grounds for a patent infringement case. Sony undoubtedly has a team of lawyers looking at this new development, and will rain down a hail of lawsuits in short order.

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