Many of us tend to lead hyper-connected lifestyles these days and we simply cannot be bothered with all of those different cables. If you’re feeling the itch to cut a few cords, you may be interested in the Samsung ST1000 digital camera.

You might remember the unboxing video that I posted last week, giving you a glimpse at what could be the most highly connected consumer camera to date. This thing has wireless radios up the wazoo.

Features and Box Contents

As a quick refresher, the Samsung ST1000 is meant to approach the slim consumer digital camera market, but it brings many features that you may not find in many of its competitors. This 12.2-megapixel camera gets 5x optical zoom, a 3.5-inch WVGA touchscreen, smart gesture UI, smart auto mode, advanced dual image stabilization, and up to ISO 3200.

Perhaps even notable, as mentioned, is its highly connected nature. You get GPS for geo-tagging, Bluetooth for wireless file transfers, and Wi-Fi for uploads. This includes the ability to upload your pictures and videos directly to Facebook, Picasa, YouTube, and more.

Unlike nearly every other digital camera out there, the Samsung ST1000 does not use the standard SD memory card format. It has a little bit of internal storage, but the main memory card slot is actually microSD. Thankfully, the cellphone-centric format has gone down significantly in price, so picking up an 8GB card (or bigger) won’t cost too much.

Forget About Buttons

Flipping around to the back of the camera, you’ll find that it doesn’t have much in terms of physical controls. There is one small button toward the top-right that gets you into playback mode, but all the other modifications are done through the touchscreen.

From what I can tell, the touch display is capacitive, just like the iPhone. When I tried going through the on-screen menu to adjust the settings, I could not do it when I had a glove on. What this means is that while the touchscreen is finger-friendly, it may not necessarily be winter-friendly.

The on-screen user interface very much mimics the interface you would have with hardware buttons. You can touch the icons on the screen to adjust the flash, autofocus, self-timer, image stabilization, geotagging, and so on. The right and bottom “buttons” can be stowed away like a hidden dock. This works quite well and it gives you good access to all the features.

If you have the geotagging feature activated and the camera is able to detect your location, you can have it show the name of the town or city on the screen as well. This can also come up when you’re browsing through your photos on the camera, since they can be sorted not only by date, but also by location.

Connecting via Wi-Fi… Sort Of

This certainly isn’t the first camera with Wi-Fi, but I do like the ability to upload pictures taken directly to the world wide web. Unfortunately, it seems to only scan for SSIDs that are visible and available.

You can access protected networks, but you can’t access networks whose SSIDs are hidden. That’s a pain for security enthusiasts who do that (like me). I’ve encountered similar issues with WiFi-equipped photo frames and this is something that all makers of consumer electronics should bear in mind.

And the Picture Quality?

I thought the picture quality offered by the Samsung ST1000 was quite good. Shown above is a macro shot that I took at Starbucks and it was able to pick up on the colors quite well.

You can see a few more sample shots on my Flickr account, including a couple where I used the “classic” color option. This makes for a great grayscale photo and you can apply filters like it from the playback menu as well as during the photoshoot itself.

Conclusion

If you’re the kind of person who values all sorts of wireless connectivity and you love messing around with big touchscreen displays, the Samsung ST1000 seems to be a very solid choice. The build quality is great, the picture quality turns out quite good, and the optical zoom doesn’t result in a protruding lens. The geotagging is a nice touch too.

I would have really liked to see a stronger Wi-Fi utility that allowed for connection to hidden SSIDs and this camera is a little heavier than I would have liked, but this is still a great picture-taker. Too bad it’s currently listing at over $500.

Overall Rating: 7.5/10

From the same people that brought us the Wi-Fi Detector Shirt comes the Wi-Fi Detector Cap. This does exactly what you think it does. You toss the hat on your head and the illuminated logo on the front will start to light up in correspondence with the 802.11b/g Wi-Fi strength in your immediate vicinity.

As with the t-shirt, the light-up bars won’t tell you whether the Wi-Fi hotspot is password-protected or not. It also won’t tell you if the Wi-Fi signal will lead you onto the Internet or if it’s just for internal networking purposes. But hey, it’s a start.

Yes, it could be a nice piece of geeky apparel, but it could be even less useful that the accompanying shirt. With the shirt, you can glance down at your chest to see how many bars you are getting. With the cap, you have to take the thing off your head to look at it.

The Wi-Fi Detector Cap can be found on ThinkGeek for $14.99.

Source: TechEBlog

There are a number of BlackBerry devices, for example, that may be great for business, but do not have Wi-Fi. Instead, they rely solely on the availability of the wireless network and this just won’t do for some customers.

As such, Sprint has announced that it is now “embracing Wi-Fi in all its major devices going forward.” This way, you don’t have to worry as much when your signal cuts out, since you can still check your email from an available hotspot. It can also help to cut down on your wireless data costs.

Sprint isn’t the only company to make this promise. Verizon has also said that it will be doing the same, promising that future Blackerry devices after the Tour (like the Storm 2) will come with Wi-Fi.

Source: BGR

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is currently working on a new standard for Bluetooth that would effectively piggy-back or work with a WLAN (Wi-Fi) based connection. As it stands, you can only get a maximum speed of about 3Mbps. The new standard can bump that up to 24Mbps.

Dubbed Bluetooth 3.0 + High Speed (BT 3.0+HS), this is the next logical step beyond Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. The objective of this project is to improve interoperability between Bluetooth devices, but it’s the speed improvement that’ll capture your interest more than anything else.

In effect, WLAN will be added to the MAC layer, physical layer, and other layers of the existing model of Bluetooth. I still don’t think that it’ll be quite as speedy as a physically wired connection, but that’s a small price to pay for the convenience of wireless. 24Mbps sounds pretty good to me.

Source: Techon