Not to be outdone by Microsoft’s Project Natal, Sony were also demoing motion control at E3 this year. The Sony offering doesn’t have a name yet but to me “wand” seems like the most appropriate description.

Sony have taken a different tack to MS – rather than have the camera interpret a whole body movement, Sony’s technology uses a physical controller (the aforementioned wand) and a camera to track it. The wand has motion sensors and buttons on it – so far, so Nintendo although it’s tracked with far more accuracy than the Wii manages.

The “gasp” moment in the demo (really, listen out for it) came when they showed the wand magically transforming into a variety of bats and weapons in the players hand.

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This week’s issue of the “New Yorker” magazine features a cover illustration painted on an iPhone. Jorge Columbo is the artist responsible and how he managed to do anything useful at all – never mind a magazine cover – on a 3.5” screen speaks volumes for his talent.

The image was sketched in an hour using finger-painting app Brushes (yours for the princely sum of £2.39).

You can see more of Jorge’s work here, or check out the CNET story for a cool video showing how the image was built up.

On Sunday MobileCrunch posted details of a possible new Nokia smartphone and yesterday CellPassion added the photo.

Today TrustedReviews ran the story, so in the grand tradition of chasing internet rumours around the blogosphere we now present it to you!

Short version: This could be the Next Big Thing(tm) from Nokia. Codenamed “Rover” (huh?) it’s a smartphone / internet tablet with the following specs:

• 5MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens
• 800×480 screen
• GPS
• Accelerometer (rapidly becoming obligatory in new phones)
• HSDPA

The weekend saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha – a search engine designed to do more than just return lists of results – in fact, it doesn’t work that way at all so if all you’re after is a picture of a chocolate bar you’re better off sticking to Google.

If, on the other hand, you want to know what’s in the chocolate then Wolfram comes into it’s own. The idea behind Wolfram is to make knowledge “computable” – in other words, to take raw information and turn it into something meaningful.

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Visit the apple web site at the moment and you’ll be presented with a running counter of app store downloads for the iPhone and iPod touch. Even if it is an American billion it’s still an impressive number.

Apple are looking to mark the occasion of the billionth (is that a word?) download with a $10,000 iTunes giveaway and some hardware. To enter the competition just download something from the app store. Or fill in the “no purchase necessary” form if you’re a cheapskate like us.

This is definitely not the sort of thing most of us will run out and buy for our home networks, but it deserves a mention anyway for it’s sheer capacity.

Texas Memory Systems have launched a 5TB solid state storage array. That’s 5 Terrabytes of stupidly fast, solid state storage. It certainly puts my 64GB laptop drive into perspective. No word on price though – as the old saying goes, if you need to ask…

So it’s April 2nd, which means a roundup of yesterday’s April fools stories. To be sure there were some pretty inventive ones out there – IWOOT came up with some cracking new products. The IClamp was almost believable, but the ContaXt digital lenses were inspired.

Not to be outdone, Firebox retaliated with some lower-tech (but strangely believable) products like powdered beer – which if it doesn’t exist, should! The sat-nav shoes were a nice touch too – technologically possible, but wholly impractical. Which is why I almost fell for them, since an awful lot of what we cover comes into that category!

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As with so may other types of media, electronic books come in a variety of formats and just like video and audio there are competing interests at work.

The two big players Amazon and Sony both sell eBook readers, but the Sony PRS-505 has support for the open “ePub” format. Why does this matter? Because Google announced today that they’re throwing their weight behind ePub.

For us, this means 500,000 new books from Google’s extensive online library of public domain and copyright-expired works  are going to be available from the Sony book store to download onto the PRS-505 you got for Christmas.

(If you haven’t seen one by now, you really ought to head on down to your local Waterstones and have a play; they’re rather good)

Via [The Register]

Apple took the wraps off the next iPhone software update today, at an invite-only event in Cupertino. We weren’t invited (sob) but luckily the Internet makes physical attendance at these events less of an issue than it used to be.

So, what’s new?

The number one requested feature for the iPhone finally makes it – yes that’s right folks, you can now copy information from one application and paste it into another one!

Sarcasm aside the update looks pretty good. Bluetooth support is beefed up to include p2p functions (i.e. connecting to a PC or other phone) and A2DP stereo support.

Also welcome is landscape support in all applications meaning you can finally flip the thing sideways to use a decently sized keyboard when composing an email.

European users get MMS support (apparently this was a big ask – do people really use them?).

Lastly there are 1000 new API calls for developers, enabling tons of under-the-hood features that can be exposed via third party applications. Expect to see in-application app store support (you can purchase content direct from within applications) and apps making more use of bluetooth, maps and other features that were previously only available to Apple.

If you’ve got 1.5 hours free you can watch the full presentation online at the Apple site.

It’s been a while since we looked at Irish “free energy” company Steorn; they’ve been dangling tantalising titbits of their technology in front of us for a couple of years now, starting with the bold claim in 2006 that they have a technology which produces “free, clean and constant energy”. If true, this statement would pretty much turn the last hundred years of established physics upside down which is why we’re treating it with a fair degree of healthy scepticism.

The last minute cancellation of a public demonstration in 2007 didn’t do much to help their cause, since we’ve still seen no evidence that “Orbo” actually exits in any tangible form, or what precisely it is going to do for us.

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