We've reported before on the fact that some games for the PlayStation Portable do indeed sport a region-coding number, but now that the US games are finally out, we're happy to note that Sony (as promised) did not put a region lock on any of their games. Which means that yes, you can play any Japanese game on that fresh, mint-condition, scratch-free PSP you just picked up (or if you've had a PSP for a few months, there's now a few new American titles you can add to your library). Sony did lock up the UMD movies, so those of you with Japanese PSPs won't get any Spider-Man 2 action.

Mac PSP gamers have known about iPSP (the easiest method to sync with the PSP for Macs) for quite some time, and now there is a PC version in the works. Kaisakura gave us an exclusive first peek at iPSP 2.0 for Windows, which automatically saves your gamesaves, optimizes pictures for display on your PlayStation Portable, transfers music, and encodes videos (much simpler than our How-To guide a few months back) for playback on the PSP. We think Sony really should offer some kind of easy-to-use software similar to iPSP, but in the meantime, iPSP 2.0 should be out shortly (before the US PSP launch) and set you back about $25.

Toshiba just updated their line of widescreen 17-inch Satellite P35 gaming laptop. The P35-S629 sports a Mobile Pentium 4 3.3GHz processor, 512MB RAM (upgradeable to 2GB), a 100GB hard drive, a built-in DVD recorder drive, and either an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 or 9700 video card. Comes standard with SRS TruSurround XT technology and Harman Kardon speakers and is available now directly from Toshiba for $1800.

Tranquil PC (a UK outfit) has a new Media Center PC called the the T2e MCE2005 that runs on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, uses a low power VIA 1.2 GHz CPU, Serial ATA hard drives, and has a heat pipe system (similar to what Shuttle uses in their XPCs) to create a quiet home theater PC that can sit next to your TV without driving you nuts with obnoxious whirring fans. The T2e also has optical audio out, a slot loading DVD drive, a GeForce 128MB FX5200 graphics card, and comes with 512MB of DDR266 RAM.

[Thanks, Stefan]

This one almost slipped by: the Logitech ViewPort AV 100 brings Bluetooth capability to your video conferences, with a VGA quality webcam and a built-in Bluetooth headset and microphone. It can send images up to 30 frames per second, does face tracking using digital pan and zoom, a USB 2.0 interface, and works on any Windows 2000 or XP PC.

[Thanks, Marke]

Admitting that Apple's inexpensive iPod shuffle is putting a little bit of pressure on them, ReignCom, the makers of the iRiver line of MP3 players, has cut the prices of their flash-based models by 20 to 25 percent in Korea (with other markets to see price drops in February). This follows Cowon's price cut of 15 percent (10 percent for international markets) on their iAudio audio players. Note that neither cut extended the discounts to their hard-drive based players.

As a follow-up to their popular Saturn USB gamepad, Sega has released the Virtua Stick PC USB joystick, which features a clicky gumball joystick, eight Japanese arcade-style action buttons (with L and R buttons surrounding the six main ones), and a Start and a Turbo button (great for shoot'em-ups) up top. The Virtua Stick sells for $85 and works on PCs with Windows 98SE and above, and on Macs with OSX 10.2.8 or newer. We like that Sega kept it old school by using metal plates at the bottom of the joystick (just like many of our old imported Japanese joysticks)—NCS advises putting a towel underneath it, lest you suffer some ice-cold chillin' on your lap.

We've always wondered why most video security cameras only transmitted audio one way, and so has Axis Communications, which has created the 211A network camera, which transmits 640 x 480 VGA video through Motion JPEG and MPEG-4 simultaneously and allows viewers of the video stream to voice communicate live with the people they are monitoring. The Axis 211A has built-in support for audio and Power over Ethernet (which means you just need one Ethernet cable for power, audio, and video) and will be $900 when it's released in February (yeah, steep).

The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W5, an update to the DSC-W1, is a 5.1 megapixel camera with 3x optical zoom, 32MB of onboard flash memory, a 2.5-inch LCD screen, and will retail for $350. The DSC-W5, which for some reason reminds us of an old Canon Powershot, uses Memory Stick or Memory Stick Pro media, can capture up to 9 shots in a burst mode at 1.6 frames per second, and will record video at 640 x 480 VGA resolution at 30 frames per second.

Available for just eighty bucks, you can relive your '80s videogame nostalgia with the Gametech Pocket Famicom (it can play NES games with an adapter), which surpisingly does not look like a lame third-party attempt at a handheld, though we're not quite sure of the legality of being able to play Famicom games seeing as how this isn't produced by Nintendo. It comes with an video cable to connect to your TV, a headphone jack, and runs on 3 AA batteries. We're now waiting for a day when folks produce a portable Sega Master System.

[Via GadgetMadness]

Sharp's ultraportable Actius MP30 laptop weighs only 2.8 pounds, runs Transmeta's Efficieon 1.6 GHz processor, has a 10.4-inch screen, with 512MB RAM, a 40GB hard drive, and built-in 802.11g WiFi. PC Magazine finds the keyboard a little small (87 percent of a full-size keyboard) and the Efficeon runs about 15 percent slower than a similar speed Pentium M, but the laptop lasted a respectable 3 hours on a battery charge and has Intervideo's Instant Play, which lets users play DVDs and CDs (the store-bought kind) without needing to boot Windows.

Western Digital is joining the growing list of hard disk manufacturers making mini one-inch hard drives. The WD drives will have that Compact Flash form-factor and come in capacities as large as 6GB, use low power consumption, spin at 3600 rpm with a 12ms access time. The first ones set for release in the second quarter of 2005, expect to see them in plenty of MP3 players (and lots of other mobile gadgets) before the end of the year.

So the control freaks at Sony might take a big step and do something smart: allow other manufacturers to use the PlayStation Portable's Universal Media Disc (UMD) in their own devices. Other companies would not be able to play PSP games on their machines—that will be exclusive to the PSP, of course—but obviously Sony thinks they have a shot at making the UMD a popular format for music and videos on portable devices. They'd be opening up the format to potential piracy (since they'd inevitably have less control over the discs' use, as well as their manufacture and distribution), but loosening the reins is really the only way they're going to put the "universal" in "Universal Media Disc," right? If they really want to impress they'd take the next logical step and sell UMD recorders that would let consumers burn their own movies, music, and yes, even games to the discs, but we probably shouldn't get ahead of ourselves.

Canon's newest entry level 3 megapixel digital camera, the A510, sports a 4x optical zoom, uses Secure Digital memory cards, and only requires 2 AA batteries for operation. Replacing the A75, the A510 can also record 640 x 480 VGA video clips up to 30 seconds long, weighs 6.3 ounces, and will be available this month for just $200.

It's going to be a few more years before you have an organic light emitting diode (OLED) display on your desk or in your living room (though they have already found their way into smaller gadgets like MP3 players, cellphones, and even the odd digital camera display), but if you're fixing to get in on the action, OLED screens are slated to show up in the dashboards of cars like the Aston-Martin DB9, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and the Chevrolet Corvette later this year. The big deal about OLED displays is that they're brighter, clearer, and less power-hungry than LCD screens—and once the economies of scale thing kicks in, they promise to be cheaper to produce, too. We're already gazing lustily at that 21-inch prototype Samsung was showing off the other day.