This weekend was super amazing, first with the long long drive in the country with my friends in NJ & NY and then a visit to B&H Photo Video, in Midtown New York… Dave has been praising about the place from a long time and I am glad he took me there.

And I instantly fell in love B&H Photo & Video, the massive electronics store you can imagine. After a long time, I had the same and even better feeling that I had in Funan digital life mall in Singapore.

B&H Photo & Video is a great example for retail stores, for its functioning & organization.The store is operated by Hasidic Jews. As I entered the store, I thought I will get lost here but no, it was very well organized with information help & customer representatives spread out through out the store, you get all the information & your questions get answered where ever you are!

I was especially surprised to see the conveyor belts moving over heads that carry your purchased merchandise reach to the checkout counter within seconds. It is super natural..Dave candidly even mentioned that this looks like Santa Claus Factory, with so many people working and catering to such a big crowd with such precise consistency.

Excellent shopping experience with sheer amazement.
At each customer help desk, you see bowls stacked with free sour candy & they also give away a lot of free catalogs & journals in photography & Video. I spent some time looking at DSLR cameras and then quickly went into the Computer & gadgets area, where I picked an external hard drive, after a through yet brief tour by the customer representative, they knew what I need and they knew what they were talking about..that definitely was a great buying experience.

When I had questions about the disk formatting, the representative, Jim even gave me a working demo and that resolved all my concerns, I was a happy that I made a good buying decision. This is what lacks in most stores, but B&H is an exception, they have everything you can think of & they serve you just right.

If you have a custom order, it is assembled in the same warehouse as an online order and arrives at the counter for inspection by way of a conveyor inside the counter. If you are satisfied with the order, the same conveyor line takes the order to the packaging area, in the mean time you checkout at the counters. And finally pick up - delivered by the same conveyor system.

A visit into B&H can be a learning experience besides a good shopping experience, their efficiency & quickness speaks for itself. I would love to go there again and would recommend all of you if in NYC, to pay a visit!

Following are the leaked images of Barnes & Noble e-book reader. It looks a lot like the Kindle with one striking difference which is a little touch screen at the bottom that can be used to buy books right while on use with the reader or it can also be used as a touch keyboard as & when required.

The photos of the reader show a 6-inch screen for reading and the second touch screen at the bottom of the device. This new e-book reader is using e-Ink technology, like other devices on the market.

Other than, the unique touch screen at the bottom, gets powered off when reading books, meaning no power drain at all when not needed. Barnes & Nobles did deals to be the content provider for the upcoming Plastic Logic and iRex e-book readers. B&N operates the Fictionwise, eReader and their own branded online e-book retail outlets, and they are therefore gearing up for competing with Amazon’s Kindle.

Sony has today once again tried to make its presence felt in the MP3 player segment by introducing two new walkmans today. The S series(image above) and E series (image below) mp3 walkman players are inexpensive and utterly stylish. These are in fact the only reasons why anybody would be interested in them and not the new iPod Touch which might be getting some boost during the Apple event in September. The new Zune HD is another player which might is poised to charm the users by its HD glory.

Sony S series walkman consists of a lightweight design, built-in stereo speaker, high contrast 2.4 inch OVGA LCD screen and a smooth playback up to 30fps. S series has the battery life of 42 hours of music playback and the 6.5 hours of video playback. It also happens to have voice recording and FM recording feature. It supports MP3, WMA, AAC among audio codecs while AVC (H.264/AVC) Baseline Profile, MPEG-4 and WMV(DRM) in the video codecs. It is going to be available in the storage capacities of 8GB and 16GB priced at $110 and $130.

Sony E series of walkman on the other hand has a smaller screen at just 2 inches and lesser battery life of 30 hours for audio and 4 hours of video. It’s available in the storage capacities of 8GB and 16GB priced at $80 and $100.

Amazon is holding a press conference on coming Monday and it is poised that Jeff Bezos will launch the second version of Kindle which will be thinner and sport some other improvements. Mobileread has got some pics of supposedly the same Kindle which is going to be launched on Monday.

Amazon Kindle 2 will have some surprise elements like it’s thin (see the image below) and the back is apparently made of metal and there are stereo speakers at the bottom.

We will obviously know more details once that event takes place on Monday. It is believed that cool looking e reader will be sold at $359 when it arrives on February 24.

Cowon has introduced two new personal media players which the company is expected to showcase at IFA 2008. IFA  is one of the largest consumer electronics fair held at Berlin and electronic companies from across the world display their latest products and technologies.

Cowon’s latest PSP are high on style and function with plenty to keep everyone at peace. O2 is a simple design and derives the look from the previous media players of Cowon. It has a 4.3″ touch screen with multemedia compatibility with these formats - DivX, XviD, MPEG4, WM9, H .264 video files and WMA, MP3, AC3, AAC, FLAC, OGG audio files. It has an electronic dictionary as well while it is available in memory capacity of 8 GB, 16 GB and 32 GB as well.

The second media player is S9 which has perfect curves and cuts with enough meat inside the system. It runs on a 500Mhz dual-core CPU with supported features like Bluetooth, electronic dictionary and Digital Media Broadcasting. It has a touch screen of 3.3″ which supports 16 million colors.

Looking for a mouse pad, that does more than just providing you surface, you must look at the Zone ZUP8020 Multifunctional Mouse Pad which simply does that and does more than that.

It has four USD 2.0 hub integrated, a built in microphone and stereo speakers plus Built in audio in and out ports.

Just making your life easier, but putting it all in one place. Nothing too great about the functions, but just basic stuff and all integrated makes it even cooler.

Available for $19.99.

Lenovo announced the IdeaPad U8, a new mobile Internet device (MID). The device is equipped with a 800MHz Atom Z500 processor, 1 to 2GB of RAM, and a 6GB solid-state drive. It has two cameras, and includes one USB port, which lets it access mobile TV through supporting tuner add-ons.

Notably the unit is controlled mostly through a stylus-operated touchscreen, and supports wireless technologies including GPS, Bluetooth, 802.11b/g and EDGE cellular.

It will also be capable of running 3G and WiMAX broadband. The Lenovo IdeaPad U8 is set to ship to China on a price that is at par with the smartphones in the market.

Griffin has released iTrip Universal FM transmitter for MP3 and CD players. iTrip can be connected to any portable audio device with the 3.5mm headphone cable to the iTrip.

The Universal version is the first iTrip device to use a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery via a USB connection. The backlit LCD display shows the current FM frequency selected, and the unit has three memory settings for saving frequencies.

Comes with a cable with the 3.5mm stereo plug on both ends that can form the connection between the iTrip Universal and the portable audio device.

The iTrip Universal is available now in stores and via Griffin’s website for $40.

Sony has unveiled its latest addition to T-series of Cybershot range DSC-T700 and DSC-T77 models. DSC-T77 camera looks pretty sleek and rightly so because it is the slimmest camera ever made by Sony.

Sony DSC-T77 has 3 inch touchscreen and has thickness of mere 0.55 inches. It features a Carl Zeiss camera lens which is 10.1 megapixels.

The inbuilt memory storage is 15 MB and it sports many features like intelligent scene recognition technology, Smile Shutterâ„¢ and face detection technologies, eleven scene modes, and in-camera image management.

DSC-T700  on the other hand is rather a little thicker but has a bigger touchscreen of 3.5 inches. T700 has almost the same specs as T77 except the in built memory storage which is 4 GB.

Sony could have done away with more storage on T77 but you can use M2 data cards to extend memory. Another camera, T700 is the same as T77 in terms of features except externally it is fat, 3.5-inch LCD and 4GB internal memory. Both the cameras have the option to expand memory with M2 cards.

The price of DSC-T77 is $300 and its big brother DSC-T700 costs $100 more.

Whether you are a photography freak or you love saving your special moments with a camera, this gadget is made for You. Kodak is famous for manufacturing the most innovative photography equipments has recently added a new product to their catalog. Much before Nokia stepped in, for camera’s Canon, Kodak and Nikon where the names to reckon with.

Kodak EasyShare V610 is an amazing and a stylish camera, an Innovative dual-Lens. The Phone just has thickness of just 0.9 Inches making it the world’s smallest 10X optical zoom camera. Using embedded Bluetooth wireless technology, the V610 allows users to take pictures and beam them straight to their PC or a compatible printer. This small, 6-megapixel camera also comes with dual-lens technology and a 2.8-inch high-resolution color display.

This small, 6-megapixel camera comes with embedded Bluetooth wireless technology which allows users to take pictures & transfer them straight to their PC or a bluetooth compatible printer without the hassle of connecting the wires.
Other features include:

Display: A 2.8 inch high resolution color display.

Size: 4.4 X 2.2 X 0.9 inches.

Resolution: 6 Megapixel lens with anti-blur & Dual-Lens technology makes pictures so crisp & Blur free.

Video: TV quality(VGA) recording with 10X optical zoom at 30fps & MPEG-4 compression capability. In-camera panorama stitching. KODAK Color Science image processing chip gives a rich image quality on-camera cropping, picture blur alert, auto picture rotation, and red-eye reduction.

Size: 28 MB internal memory with additional SD card storage.

Price: $350