NEWS

Transport your PSP in style

The New York Times
Intec's PSP Pro Gamer's Kit is an aluminum case large enough to pack away your PlayStation Portable, an extra set of ear buds, a neck strap, a screen protector, car adapter and pocket-size game case.

Soon after Sony released the PlayStation Portable hand-held gaming console in North America last month, store shelves began to bulge with gleaming new extras for it.

Among the standouts is the PSP Pro Gamer's Kit by Intec. The $30 kit is an aluminum case with a molded interior. At 11.5 inches wide by 9.5 inches deep by 3.5 inches high, it is large enough to pack away the PSP, an extra set of retractable ear buds, a neck strap, a screen protector, a car adapter and a pocket-size case for PSP game discs, with room to spare for accessories not yet conceived.

Intec, based in Miami, has also introduced a smaller case for $20 that cradles the PSP and an $8 collapsible docking station for recharging the console while viewing movies on its 4.3-inch screen.

"What we have now with the PSP is the first really high-end hand-held gaming console," said Mark Stanley, Intec's senior vice president for marketing. The console's elegant design has inspired accessory makers to try to match its style and performance, he added.

The Intec PSP accessories are widely available at Wal-Mart and other stores. Stanley said the company was scheduled to release a powered stereo speaker system for the PSP.

  • LEARN TO PLAY LIKE CLAPTON WHILE YOUR GUITAR GENTLY LIGHTS UP: Do you cover the B string for a C major chord? A new electric guitar lets you know with a glance at the fret board, where a display of light-emitting diodes shows you where to place your fingers.

    The $599 Fretlight FG-400 has 132 computer-controlled LED's embedded in its fret board that display 3,000 chord variants, 500 arpeggios, notes and custom chords.

    Optek Music Systems, the manufacturer, says the guitar can reduce the time needed to learn a song to days from weeks. The solid-body guitar is available at www.optekmusic.com.

    Powering the LED's on and off is the job of the included Windows-based GuitarPower software, which links a PC to the guitar with a USB cable. Notes and chords are displayed on the screen and played through the PC's speakers.

    While GuitarPower is primarily a tool to teach finger positions, $20 music-only albums (in Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, format) are available to help you learn the songs of artists like B.B. King, Sting and Travis Tritt. (These albums require the Fretlight M-Player software, a $40 MIDI player.)

    When you are ready to play for an audience, the guitar requires an amplifier. The LED's can be turned off and are nearly invisible in the polymer fret board. A note of caution, however: trashing your ax in a flamboyant finale will void the warranty.

  • SO MANY FEATURES, SO LITTLE TIME LEFT TO MAKE CALLS: For people who want their cell phones to do more than make calls, the options are growing as cellular carriers introduce new multifunction models.

    The Sanyo MM-5600, available through Sprint, has a 1.3-megapixel camera with flash and digital zoom, and includes a removable 16-megabyte miniSD memory card. You can save photos to the card and print from it at photo kiosks or with compatible printers.

    The phone has a built-in music player for MP3 and AAC music files, which can be heard through the included earphones or a built-in speaker.

    With its included cable, the phone can connect to the USB ports of computers and printers; you can transfer music files, photos and data files to and from the phone and print photos directly to PictBridge-enabled printers.

    The phone ($250 with a two-year contract at www.sprint.com) is the first in the United States to offer music-video ring tones. It has access to Sprint's Multimedia options, including Sprint TV, which provides video clips, like news from ABC News Now, sports and weather.

    To expand storage space, the phone accepts miniSD cards up to one gigabyte, enough to store a good-size collection of music files and photos, with room left over for backing up files like spreadsheets and documents.

  • ADD-ON ALLOWS FIREFOX BROWSER USERS TO MAINTAIN AN ARCHIVE OF WEB PAGES: Web site content often changes, moves or disappears, but archiving tools can help you save and manage collections of Web pages that you want to keep permanently or peruse offline.

    ScrapBook, a free add-on to the Firefox browser (which is available as a download at www.mozilla.org), lets you archive Web pages about as simply as creating bookmarks.

    The program opens a pane along the left side of the browser; you can drag pages into it or capture them with a couple of mouse clicks.

    The archived pages can be organized in folders, viewed offline and edited with tools that may be useful to researchers, like a yellow highlighter and an in-line commenter for adding notes to selected areas. The pages are saved in HTML format; they retain links and other qualities of Web pages.

    ScrapBook (amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook) is one of an assortment of free add-ons, or extensions, for Firefox, a free open-source browser that has gained popularity as an alternative to Internet Explorer. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.