Nintendo Developing New Device

It seems that the folks at Nintendo, despite its persistent and fairly unconvincing dismissal of any rumours until now, could well be working on a new console, something outside of its current lines entirely.

This... is not a GameBoy

Rumours that Nintendo had been working on something new had been floating around for a while, though many indicated that Nintendo would be to build an updated version of its motion-sensitive Wii (with many wondering if it could possibly be capable of high-definition output) while others had pointed to a motion-sensitive version of its by now near ubiquitous DS hardware. Instead, it seems that Nintendo is working on something a little different.

New DS to Hit Europe in March

Nintendo’s latest addition to the DS line has finally been given a release date in Europe and, surprisingly enough, it looks as though it’ll be before the US release date.

As a rule, games consoles tend to hit Europe last, though after the fairly furious backlash from Sony’s PlayStation Portable launch delay over here, it seems that the effort is being made to ensure that Europe gets hardware in a timelier fashion than once we did. Now, it seems that Nintendo will reverse the trend, offering it’s the new, bigger version of its DS hardware in Europe from March onward, though there’s no real detail on the US release date (which has been tentatively penned in as “Q1.”

Special Offers – Week of Novermber 1st

Good afternoon all, hopefully the Halloween weekend was kind to you guys (and to those of you with kids, hopefully you’ve not gone too mad on their sweets). For those who aren’t too familiar with the way we roll on the blog, every Monday we post a list of the items that are on Special Offer for the week; it means people have as long as possible to decide whether or not to go for an item on offer.

Anyway, this week, we have a Philips display, a Sapphire Radeon graphics card and a printer on offer. There’s a little something for everyone, so it’s worth having a look 🙂

Philips 20” Wide:

The full name for this Philips 20-inch widescreen display is the “Philips 20” Wide 201E1SB, which is a bit of a mouthful, so for now we’ll avoid using the serial-number of a name and just call it the “Philips 20” Wide.”

Click through to see our product page for the Philips 20\

It’s a sleek, elegant display, with a 16:9 aspect ratio for those who like to watch movies or play their games in cinema-style widescreen. It boasts a 5ms response time, which means that it won’t disappoint sports fans or demanding gamers when it comes to visual lag.

Perhaps most importantly, it boasts a contrast of 25000:1, which means you’re going to get solid blacks out of it. Naturally, they won’t be on the same level as the blacks you might expect from a plasma display, but they’re better than a lot of LCD options, which is going to be important to movie and videogame fans.

It’ll do both 720p and 1080i, which should keep the high-definition hungry quite happy, though it’s worth noting that it doesn’t take a HDMI cable, so you’re stuck with either VGA or DVI for input. All that said, it’s marked down by fully 10% this week, so you could do a lot worse.

The Philips 20” Wide is down to €125. If you’d like to read more about or see more images of it then you can check out our product page for it.

Microsoft’s New Tablet, Courier, Leaks

Details of Microsoft’s new project have started to leak out. It’s called “Courier” and it looks to be a very interesting take on the tablet PC.

This is pretty much the only image anyone has of the courier.

Surprisingly detailed word comes via Gizmodo of Microsoft’s latest tablet project, outlining a device around the 7-inch mark, hinged so that it opens out to boast two 7” multi-touch sensitive displays. If nothing else, the device looks like it could well give an Apple tablet a run for its money. Pleasantly enough, things only get more interesting the more you hear about the hardware.