Fully Charged: New MacBook Airs next week, Warhol’s Amiga artwork and Sony’s new 4K streamer

New MacBook Airs coming next Tuesday?

Well, we haven’t had any MacBook Air rumours for a while, so how about this one: Apple will announce a new range of 11in and 13in MacBook Airs next week (probably Tuesday).

You’re probably crossing your fingers and toes that said notebooks will have Retina displays – sadly the tipster doesn’t believe that they will, and that these sharper-screened models may be launched later in the year. Next week’s announcement, apparently, will merely be an update of the current line – so expect little more than a spec bump, if anything.

[Source: Cult of Mac]

Andy Warhol’s Commodore Amiga artwork recovered

Andy Warhol was known for using a wide variety of media when creating his pop art – but did you know that he once employed a Commodore Amiga 1000 and tools like GraphiCraft and ProPaint to make images?

Back in 1985, Warhol used the computer as part of a live event to promote its abilities as a multimedia tool – and since then, many of the images he created have sat on floppy disks in the Andy Warhol Museum’s archive, being seen by no-one.

Recently, that changed. The disks were obsolete, but artist Cory Arcangel spurred efforts to extract the data – efforts which have since been documented in a film called Trapped: Andy Warhol’s Amiga Experiments. The movie will be available to watch online from 12th May.

[Source: Engadget]

READ MORE: Hall of Fame: Amiga 500, the computer that showed consoles how it’s done

Sony’s 4K media streamer released for “old” 4K tellies

If you have one of three older Sony 4K TVs (the KD-55X9005A, KD-65X9005A or KDL-84X9005), you may have noticed that it’s not compatible with Netflix’s 4K streaming – and that’s because it can’t decode the HEVC (H.265) standard used to encode the ultra-crisp video.

Newer TVs can, but don’t rush out to buy one just yet, because Sony’s new FMP-X5 4K Media Player can add support. OK, so it costs £350 and currently can stream only one 4K show (House of Cards), but both Netflix and Sony are promising more 4K material soon.

Samsung Galaxy Beam 2: a second-gen projector-smartphone

Remember the Galaxy Beam? Samsung’s smartphone-with-built-in-projector was introduced back in 2012, and attracted a fair bit of attention until people realised that squeezing a pico projector into a phone was massively gimmicky.

And now, a couple of years on, Samsung has gone back to the well a second time, launching the Galaxy Beam 2. Like its predecessor, there’s a projector built into the top edge able to throw an image onto a nearby surface. Said image isn’t HD (it’s WVGA) and won’t be especially bright, either – so don’t expect home cinema quality. It’s more for sharing the odd picture or video.

Aside from that, there’s Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, an 800 x 480 screen, 1.2GHz quad-core CPU, 5MP camera and microSD slot. A distinctly average setup, in other words – but currently the Beam 2 seems destined only for the Chinese market, where there are literally millions of people in the market for mid-range Android phones.

[Source: Android Central]