Rebecca Day

Sprint outlined final details of the launch of the much-anticipated Evo 3G/4G wireless phone at an event in Manhattan co-sponsored by Disney. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse announced a retail price of $199 for the Evo, which hits stores on June 4.

Sony wants to expand the realm of 3D content to include 3D still images by offering consumers a do-it-yourself option for populating their 3D content libraries. Executives from Sony’s digital imaging products group told reporters in a briefing last week that the company plans to release a firmware upgrade for an upcoming line of 3D-ready hybrid cameras that enables users to create their own 3D digital still content using a panoramic feature on the cameras.

Lutron Electronics last week became an official contributor to the Smithsonian American History Museum collection. According to Harold Wallace, associate curator of the Smithsonian’s electricity collection, the 11 Lutron artifacts on display are “raw materials of history” in a collection that represents “what people 100-150 years from now will need to know about our culture when they study us."

3D trial runs continued Thursday in New York with Time Warner Cable’s presentation of the first round of the Masters golf championship. Camping out in temporary tent space in its own Time Warner Center in Manhattan, the cable giant used the invitation-only event to demonstrate the capabilities of the fledgling technology to guests.

Reminiscent of HDTV’s early days, the live CBS telecast in 3D Monday of the NCAA basketball final between Butler and Duke was rife with compelling moments and annoying glitches. The 3D telecast, sponsored by LG Electronics and beamed via satellite to about 100 Cinedigm digital cinema screens nationally, sported an on-air crew different from that of the regular CBS broadcast. It also featured a limited palette of commercials not in 3D supplied by LG, plus house ads for CBS shows such as Criminal Minds and NCIS: Los Angeles.

Monster extended its celebrity earphone line this week with the launch of the Butterfly series co-developed with fashion designer Vivienne Tam. Tam and Monster head Noel Lee took the wraps off the $199 in-ear headphones at a press conference at Tam’s retail location in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. Emphasizing the marriage of technology and fashion, Tam said the earphones, which feature Tam’s signature butterfly motif, are meant to be a fashion accessories like earrings. Tam last year introduced a line of designer notebook PCs with HP called the “digital clutch.” Distribution for the phones will be exclusive and decidedly not mass-market, Lee said. “It will respect the distribution Vivienne Tam has for her fashion line.” The earphones will be available in early April. Like other in-ear phones in the Monster line, the Tam earphones will feature a version with Control Talk, Monster’s on-cable voice-based control function that enables hands-free calling and operation of iPods and the iPhone. The Butterfly series follows Monster’s introduction of Beats by Dr. Dre, Heartbeats by Lady Gaga and Miles Davis Tribute earphones. Lee said the Butterfly phones differ from the other models in “optimization.” The Gaga phones, he said, were designed with an emphasis on reproduction of bass and dance beats, and the Butterfly model is better suited to reproduction of strings and concertos. “It’s a lighter sound, more open and not as heavy,” Lee said.

Consumers planning to buy a new TV and who deem it important in their purchase decisions to know the retailer’s policy on recycling an old set likely will get a mixed bag of responses when they bring their green questions to the sales floor, our rounds of electronics stores last week in the St. Louis area suggested. We mystery-shopped about a half-dozen stores in the area posing as flat-panel TV customers who didn’t want our 32-inch CRT set sent to landfill or shipped to unscrupulous recyclers. For us, we told salespeople who greeted us, responsible recycling of our old TV was as important a consideration as the price and installation costs of our new flat-panel set in deciding where we were going to buy.

CEA last year established a working group to study developing a standard for 3D glasses that would allow eyewear to work across multiple brands of 3D TVs. But some observers we polled told Consumer Electronics Daily that the quest for a standard on 3D goggles that all TV makers will adhere to likely will be no more successful than fashioning truly universal remote control codes. When it comes down to it, these observers said, no one supplier of 3D TVs wants consumers to use the glasses sold or bundled with another brand’s set.

Though it’s still easy to find analog phono preamps and tube amplifiers in the high-end audio section at CES, more and more audio companies are going digital with impressive results, a trend we found when we canvassed specialty audio companies at last week’s show.

LAS VEGAS - ActiveVideo Networks, a Silicon Valley cloud-based interactive services company, is the latest in a list of companies vying for the application provider role in connected TVs. ActiveVideo joins Yahoo, Vudu and others in seeking partner relationships with CE device makers for Internet application platforms that extend over multiple channels including TVs, Blu-ray and game players and smartphones. It’s fast becoming a crowded field.