Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Friday, March 28, 2008

Stretchy silicon circuits wrap around complex shapes, like your wife

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/259534468/

The first "completely integrated, extremely bendable circuit" was just demonstrated to the world. The team behind the research is led by John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The process bonds circuit sheets measuring just 1.5 micrometers (50 times thinner than human hair) to a piece of pre-stretched rubber. That allows the circuits to buckle like an accordion when pulled or twisted without losing their electrical properties. Unfortunately, the materials used thus far are not compatible with human tissue. In other words, no X-ray vision implant for you. X-ray contacts perhaps... quantum-computers now, please Mr. Scientists? Watch a circuit buckle in the video after the break.

[Via BBC, thanks YoJIMbo]

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Nokia N96 gets in-depth review months ahead of release

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/259560184/

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Mere mortals will need to wait until the third quarter of the year -- if not longer, depend on their region and tolerance for some probable price gouging in the early going -- to get their hands on the mighty Nokia N96. On the other hand, Mobile-review apparently knows the right hands to shake and eyes to wink to get hold of a prototype unit extraordinarily early, and they're taking full advantage of the opportunity. A few hours of your time devoted to the novella of a review will net you a deep understanding and appreciation for the N96's strengths and follies, but in a nutshell, the site seems to come away with a pretty ambivalent opinion of a device that should be knocking everyone's socks off -- especially for a sticker price that'll hover in the $800 arena. Problems included a penchant for picking up dirt and fingerprints (the price you pay for a beautiful glossy face, we suppose), a cramped nav key layout with the tricky touch-sensitive Navi Wheel front and center, audio performance that wasn't bad but was expected to be far better in light of the dedicated DSP, and a "shovel"-like feel in the hand, a symptom of the phone's generous dimensions. Everyone owes the production version of the N96 a chance to show its true form when it's released later this year -- and hey, at least Nokia's got a checklist of things that need improvement in the prototype now -- so we're keeping our chins up that this'll still make the N95 8GB a proud daddy when it comes time to hand over the crown to the Nseries kingdom.

[Via Tech Digest and NokNok]

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Crystal Watch

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/yankodesign/~3/259088851/

Inspired by Swarovski’s expertise in crystal and Signity’s brilliance in gems, the Luna Watch is made of crystal, stainless steel and a Spessartite Garnet. To tell time just touch the two contact points and time seems to magically float inside the crystal.

Simplistic in its function yet aesthetically complex therefore this is a fashion watch. You can expect to see it in a range of colors with coordinated Signity gems.

Designer: John Pszeniczny

John Pszeniczny

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Slides from wonderful "engineering climate change" talk

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/258795416/slides-from-wonderfu.html

Here's a slide deck to accompany Saul Griffith's incredible talk on engineering solutions to climate change from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference earlier this month in San Diego. The talk was the highlight of the conference for me, dealing as it did with the engineering affordances of carbon, climate, and energy sources of all kind, and coming to a humane solution that invites us to live luxuriant high-quality lives that nevertheless massively reduce our carbon footprints to a sustainable level. Link (Thanks, Avi!)

AMD Quad-Core Phenom X4 9850 Reviewed (Verdict: Owned by Intel Quad Cores) [Amd]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/258760932/amd-quad+core-phenom-x4-9850-reviewed-verdict-owned-by-intel-quad-cores

The Phenom X4 9850 is AMD's latest quad-core chip. It's free of the performance-sapping bug that plagued the first batch of Phenoms, and AMD hopes it'll claw back some ground from Intel. Maximum PC stacked it up against two quad-cores from Intel—the mid-rangeish Penryn Core 2 Quad Q9300, as well as an older Core 2 Q6600. Ouchies for AMD, the Intel pair blew past it.

The Penryn-based Q9300 "owned the night," with the Q6600 trailing, and Phenom in back of both. It wasn't "so far behind as to be dead in the water" but "it doesn't quite go head-to-head with the Penryn lite." (They call the Q9300 Penryn-lite because it has half the cache of the higher-end Penryn quad-cores.)

The 9850 X4 is the fastest AM2 chip around, however, so if you're sticking with that board "it's a pretty good upgrade." The bigger problem is that AMD still has nothing to touch Intel's top quad cores, and won't for months, at least. [Maximum PC]

HP UMPC 2133 specs revealed, street date of April 7th?

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/258652300/

Filed under: Laptops

We'd been hearing that HP's slick UMPC 2133 was going sport VIA processors, and now we've got some more info to back that up -- we just received what appears to be a full spec list for the upcoming machine, and it's VIA C7-Ms all around, with graphics courtesy of a VIA Chrome 9 chipset. According to our source, these will hit on April 7th, and it looks like those pricing whispers were pretty accurate as well: $600 will buy you a 1.2GHz C7-M, a 120GB drive, 1GB of RAM and Vista Home Basic, while $749 bumps you up to 1.6GHz and Vista Business and adds Bluetooth, another gig of RAM, and a bigger battery. There's also a mysterious $849 Vista Basic model listed as having "regional" availability (the others are listed as "Smart Buy") with Bluetooth and bigger battery, but we don't see why it's more expensive than the Vista Business version. Regardless, what really caught our eye was the $549 model that shares the same specs as the $600 unit, but looks to be running SuSE Enterprise -- another rumor that's come true. That could be the one that HP expects to sell like hotcakes -- after all, the goal is to have people buy these "without a thought," and that's certainly not going to happen at $749. We'll see soon enough, we suppose. Full spec sheet after the break.

Continue reading HP UMPC 2133 specs revealed, street date of April 7th?

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Bug Labs sells-out of initial inventory, founder pumped

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/258807053/

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

The whole claim of a product sell-out is a bit dubious without any numbers to back up the boast. Was it 100 or 100,000 units sold? Nevertheless, Bug Labs has depleted its initial stock of Bugs. Those of you looking to get your hands on the open-source, modular hardware platform will have to wait until the next shipment in May. While most of the purchases went the way of tinkerers, about a third of the devices were surprisingly scooped up by corporations looking at Bug to possibly replace expensive, custom devices. At least that's how Bug Labs' founder, Peter Semmelhack spins it. Could be, or perhaps it's just the same compelling curiosity we all feel about Bug with a desire (read: R&D budget) to keep abreast of industry change? Regardless, good on ya Pete.

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Sigma's DP1 with DSLR-sized sensor reviewed, raises bar

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/258909405/

Filed under: Digital Cameras

It's always worth noting when a reviewer says that a device, "sets a new standard for image quality in a compact camera." That's PopPhoto's conclusion after testing the Sigma DP1 with a DSLR-sized, FOVEON X3 CMOS sensor packing 14 megapixels. The image quality and color accuracy remained "steller" right up to ISO 800 where all compacts shackled with tiny sensors begin to lose control of the noise. The biggest nits are with the sluggish 9-zone AF system, an unsophisticated flash, lack of image stabilization, and delays between shots. Fix those while whittling-back the $800 street price a bit and PopPhoto believes the DP1 could go mainstream.

[Via Photography Blog]

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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Samsung's AnyCall Haptic is out and UI-licious

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/257715958/

Filed under: Cellphones

While Samsung is a perennial innovator when it comes to hardware, software has never been the company's strong suit. Lucky for us, the new TouchWiz UI Samsung is building for its touchscreen phones is a significant step in the right direction, and the new AnyCall Haptic SCH-W420 looks to be the perfect way to show it off. Centered around a 16:9, 3.2-inch screen, the phone includes DMB, a 2 megapixel camera and Bluetooth 2.0. Haptic feedback in the form of vibrations help out with the UI, and home screen is customizable with widgets. The feature set seems to be squarely targeted at the consumer, but the price sure ain't -- the phone is launching in Korea starting at 700,000 KRW and ramping up to 800,000 KRW ($700 to $800 US). Video is after the break.

[Via Engadget Spanish]

Continue reading Samsung's AnyCall Haptic is out and UI-licious

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ASUS EAH3850 Trinity crams three Radeon GPUs onto one card

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/257731880/

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Forget FPS and polygon crunching, we want one of these ASUS EAH3850 just for its sheer logic-defying properties. ASUS really took AMD's CrossFireX multi-GPU capabilities and ran with them, stuffing a ludicrous trio of GPUs onto a single "concept" card. Three RV670 cores power the setup, and it's kept cool by some heatpipes and a water block. If your box doesn't implode in incredulity, that means you can power four monitors with the three GPUs, or power a single monitor with all four at once for some seriously serious World of Warcraft, though we'll have to wait for benchmarks to see how well this setup actually runs.

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ASUS EAH3850 Trinity crams three Radeon GPUs onto one card

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/257731880/

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

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NVIDIA's 9800 GX2-based Quad SLI solution gets mixed reviews

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/257782842/

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

NVIDIA's high-end GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card has been pretty well received on its own, but it looks to be decidedly more of a mixed bag when it comes to a Quad SLI configuration, at least according to a pair of early reviews. Least impressed with the setup was PC Perspective, which described the system's performance as "uninspiring" and "frustrating more often than it was fun to play on." The site did see some potential in the system, however, saying that it's very possible that NVIDIA will be able to address many of the problems in upcoming driver releases. Slightly more positive about the config were the folks at HotHardware, who were pleased with the performance, and seem to have been more satisfied with the setup's ability to scale with various applications than PC Perspective was. On the downside, they did admit that the system didn't scale well for everything, and there is of course the little matter of price (about $1,200), which will likely be pretty hard for even the most die-hard performance junkie to justify.

Read - PC Perspective
Read - HotHardware

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Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Friday, March 28, 2008

Stretchy silicon circuits wrap around complex shapes, like your wife

Nokia N96 gets in-depth review months ahead of release

Crystal Watch

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Slides from wonderful "engineering climate change" talk

AMD Quad-Core Phenom X4 9850 Reviewed (Verdict: Owned by Intel Quad Cores) [Amd]

HP UMPC 2133 specs revealed, street date of April 7th?

Bug Labs sells-out of initial inventory, founder pumped

Sigma's DP1 with DSLR-sized sensor reviewed, raises bar

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Samsung's AnyCall Haptic is out and UI-licious

ASUS EAH3850 Trinity crams three Radeon GPUs onto one card

ASUS EAH3850 Trinity crams three Radeon GPUs onto one card

NVIDIA's 9800 GX2-based Quad SLI solution gets mixed reviews

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