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Sunday, July 25, 2010

Most expensive football transfers

 
  • Cristiano Ronaldo

Real Madrid look to have blown the current transfer record for a footballer out of the water after having an £80m bid for Cristiano Ronaldo accepted by Man United. We look back at the ten mega-deals the Portuguese wizard's apparent move to Spain will put in the shadows.




  • Kaka £59m - from AC Milan to Real Madrid               
Until Real came in for Ronaldo, their reported £59m bid for Kaka looked like it was going to be the new world record benchmark for a transfer fee. Kaka said he was moving 'for AC Milan'. Course he is.
Zinedine Zidane£46.7million - from Juventus to Real Madrid in 2001


Following the controversial arrival of Luis Figo in the Spanish capital a year before, Real president Florentino Perez continued his now infamous Galacticos project with the capture of the then FIFA World Player of the Year Zinedine Zidane from Italian giants Juventus for a fee that stood as the world record until Kaka's deal.

   Luis Figo £37million - from Barca to Real in 2000


Perez was elected Real president in the summer of 2000 on the back of his promise to do the unthinkable and bring the star player from arch-rivals Barcelona to the Bernabeu. Upon appointment he was true to his word, breaking the world transfer record by signing Luis Figo for £37million.
  
 
 Hernan Crespo £35.7million - from Parma to Lazio in 2000 
         

In the summer of 2000 Sven-Goran Eriksson's Lazio were Serie A champions and flush with cash following the sale of Christian Vieri to Inter Milan a year before for a then world-record fee. They spent £35.7million of their money on Parma's Hernan Crespo, who finished top scorer in the league in his first season in Rome but was unable to help the club defend their Scudetto and also left for Inter in 2002.

  
Robinho £32.5million - Real Madrid to Manchester City in 2008  

                               


Having been taken over by the super-rich Abu Dhabi investment group on the final day of the 2008 summer transfer window, the new owners of Manchester City made a signal of their intent by beating Chelsea to the signing of unsettled Brazilian star Robinho from Real Madrid in a Premier League record deal worth £32.5million

Sony Ericsson Satio another 12.1MP


Sony Ericsson has announced another 12.1 megapixel phone, the Sony Ericsson Satio. It is a full 640 x 350 3.5-inch touchscreen phone comes with 12.1 megapixel camera, dual-band HSPA, microSD expansion (forget about the expensive memory stick), xenon flash and will be available in three colors black, silver and Bordeaux. Will be out in October.

 Sony Ericsson Satio specs:


• 12.1 megapixel camera, video light, xenon flash, auto focus, face detection, bestpic, geotagging, image stabilizer.
• red-eye reduction, smile detection, touch focus
• Bluetooth stereo (A2DP)
• WebKit web browser
• On-screen QWERTY keyboard
• Auto rotate• Gesture control
• S60 5th edition Symbian OS
• HD and 3D games
• FM radio with RDS
• Java
• TV out
• In-built WiFi
• A-GPS
• Size: 112 x 55 x 13.3 mm
• Weight: 126 grams
• Main screen: 16,777,216 colour nHD TFT
• 16:9 widescreen
• Resolution: 640 x 360 pixels
• Size: 3.5 inches
• Phone memory: 128 MB
• Memory Card Support: SanDisk microSD

N Board - Regular stand for iPad


Fresh from the streets of Korea comes the N-Board, a new gadget which lets you convert your iPad into an (almost) full-fledged netbook computer.


The handy N-Board acts as an easel to prop up your iPad, but also sports a hub with 4 USB ports, and what I thought was an unnecessary cooling fan.

Upon scrolling further down the product page, I came to discover that the N-Board was actually designed as a cooling station for everyday netbooks, but happens to make the perfect prop for your iPad too. That said, if you have both an iPad and a netbook, it’s nice to know that it’ll work with both.

Either way, you’re probably not going to be buying an N-Board any time soon, unless you happen to live in Korea, where it sells for 35,000 KRW (appx. $29 USD).

The world's largest dam is located in China

Flooding in central China feels the strength of the world's largest dam - Three Gorges. It is reported that it now to the limit - resets 70,000 cubic meters of water per second. This is a record. However, the water level every hour only grows. The consequences, according to the engineers, can be disastrous, especially considering that the flooding in the area have already left homeless tens of thousands of people and caused material damage to millions of yuan. Evacuate had about a million people.


Nokia Kinetic -Concept Phone


The Nokia Kinetic isn't just a sleek concept phone. It's a sleek concept phone that raises itself up into a standing position when a call comes in. Huh?  Inside the Kinetic is an electromagnet that can shift weights in the curved base, causing the phone to tilt upright on cue, that cue being an incoming call. Telemarketer again? Tap the phone to decline the call and it'll fall back down. It's intended to be a playful feature, though I can see it being useful in a quiet office where even vibrating phones are sometimes an irritant to others.


The Kinetic's pretty clever, though designer Jeremy Innes-Hopkins will have to do some serious convincing if anyone's going to go for the bulbous form factor of this thing.