Snapfish tries to make photo upload a snap

We can't help the pun, but it's really finger-snapping easy.

The Singaporean flavor of the US photo sharing/printing site has announced an upload service that allows the user to email photos into Snapfish without interfacing directly with the Website. Sounds cool. But it isn't worth a thumbs-up for freshness. The megalith photo-sharing site, Flickr, had an email upload tool in hand before this.

Nikon's "my Picturetown", a Wi-Fi camera-to-Website photo upload service, goes one better by allowing the synchronization of a user's "my Picturetown" contents with a pre-selected Flickr account. That's worth a few claps.

Snapfish, now here's the deal. Give me something really innovative to write about. Like enabling printing orders to be sent along with the email upload and I will promise you a standing ovation.

Cheers,
Hopeful reviewer

Network your USB printer

At the HP SmartOffice launch in Vietnam today, HP showcased its latest USB network print adapter alongside the new range of office laser printers.

Barely the size of a four-port USB hub, the little black box allows your to hook up your USB printer to a router, thereby allowing the peripheral to be shared between different PCs without having to exchange plugs. Though network printing adapters have been in the market for a long time, HP's offering is possibly one of the more affordable options around. It will retail for US$69 when it becomes available in Asia next month. This device works on a 10/100 Ethernet connection and is compatible with Windows XP as well as Vista.

Printing in tongues

Fuji Xerox has a new concept printer that promises to translate on-the-fly.

The idea of a trilingual photocopier is pretty neat, though strictly speaking, it's really not since it can only translate Asian languages (Japanese and Korean) to English and vice versa.

But whatever its linguistic abilities, yakitori restaurants are going to love it. Why pay a language student peanuts to translate the contents of a Japanese menu to English when you can fork out a king's ransom for the same mangled translation?

The copier works by scanning a document (in the recognized language) before the built-in microcomputer translates the text and prints out a copy. We do not have any indication of its processing speed, though we are sure, as most translation gadgets go, that it's bound to get tongue-tied at some point.

Via uberreview

New HPs roll into Asia with a boom

Yes, it was Big Bang time again when HP held a regional consumer launch event in Singapore today.

Four product categories saw new entrants, but it was the printer category which dominated the proceedings with a staggering 13 new models along with the announcement of the Snapfish online photo service in Singapore.

The Palo Alto-based company also debuted five new iPaqs--two business-oriented PDA-phones, two PDAs and one GPS navigation device. The hero product of the bunch is the iPaq 612 Business Navigator which includes a raised touch-sensitive circular edge on the keypad for navigation.

Over on the computing side, Chin Hon Cheng, vice president for HP's Consumer Products and Mobile Business Group, elaborated on one of its strategy cornerstones. "We will engage the youth as an emerging segment of our consumers… and this youth will one day become a working adult." Chin explained that HP hoped the impression made on the youth will influence the products and technologies they will be using in working life.

To help its bid to net the youth market, HP has extended three new design finishes--Verve, Influx, Trace--to its laptops. Chin also revealed that Webcams will be a standard feature for its future laptops.

HP goes Print 2.0
HP showcases quad-core Pavilion Elite
HP notebooks undergo a makeover
HP's five latest iPaqs

Now these are two hot Samsung printers

Hardly do you hear people going ga-ga over inkboxes, but Samsung's latest ML-1630 and SCX-4500 printers unveiled at IFA Berlin were simply droolicious. Forget the dreary pages-per-minute or dots-per-inch race as this pair of inkboxes exude class like no other with their glossy piano-black finish, blue touch-sensitive controls and LED indicators. Does that sound almost like the Samsung Bordeaux Plus TVs? No matter. Now we definitely need one of these. Hello, office manager, you listening? Lest you actually intend to print, both laser printers churn out 16 A4-size pages in a minute, with the SCX-4500 able to copy and scan as well.

Read our full coverage of Samsung's luxury-class printers here

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