Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Sharp's Mebius PC-NJ70A packs LCD trackpad for the whiz-bang crowd

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/21/sharps-mebius-pc-nj70a-packs-lcd-trackpad-for-the-whiz-bang-cro/

And you thought Apple's button-less "glass trackpad" was hot stuff. Sharp has just let loose details on its thoroughly Japanese Mebius PC-NJ70A, which sadly packs an exceptionally boring list of internal components but manages to stay interesting with a decidedly unorthodox trackpad. As you can see in the image above, Sharp has actually tossed an 854 x 480 resolution LCD right onto the palm rest, which automatically adjusts brightness based on surrounding light and can likely act as a secondary display for things like adjusting an equalizer with your digits. Beyond that, the netbook is downright drab, sporting just a 10.1-inch display (1,024 x 600), 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB HDD, three USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a multicard reader. There's no set price as of yet, but word on the street puts it right around ¥80,000 ($817). Glamor shot after the break.

Continue reading Sharp's Mebius PC-NJ70A packs LCD trackpad for the whiz-bang crowd

Filed under: Laptops

Sharp's Mebius PC-NJ70A packs LCD trackpad for the whiz-bang crowd originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Liquid crystal lasers will light up next-gen HDTVs, your life

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/21/liquid-crystal-lasers-will-light-up-next-gen-hdtvs-your-life/

Liquid crystal lasers will light up next-gen HDTVs, your life

If you thought Mitsubishi's LaserVue HDTVs were the beginning and the end of laser-tech in boob tubes, think again. Mitsu's line is carrying on, but the brightness and depth of color offered by that telly are apparently just the beginning of what's possible according to researchers at the Centre of Molecular Materials for Photonics and Electronics at the University of Cambridge. They indicate that the use of liquid crystals in concert with a single, laser-based light source would result in the same color depth but at a lower cost and higher reliability than the LaserVue, which requires separate lasers for RGB. What cost, exactly? That, dear reader, remains to be seen, but given the source we're thinking you have plenty of time to save up -- and to practice those Dr. Evil impressions.

[Via OLED-Display]

Filed under: Displays, HDTV

Liquid crystal lasers will light up next-gen HDTVs, your life originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cube H100HD PMP does 1080i in a tiny package

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/21/cube-h100hd-pmp-does-1080i-in-a-tiny-package/

Cube H100HD PMP does 1080i in a tiny package

Thought 720p output from a PMP was impressive? Try 1080i on for size. Yes, Cube has seemingly one-upped itself, introducing a new PMP called the H100HD that, like its predecessor, sports a 5-inch LCD and support for a variety of video and audio formats, but adds in an FM tuner, support for simple Flash games, and another step up the HD resolution ladder, all in a package that's a bit more svelte than before. And yes, it still does 720p output for those progressive types. No information on price yet, but since the last one sold for under $75 don't expect it to break the bank -- also don't expect it to show up at whatever electronics retailers are still in business where you are.

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Cube H100HD PMP does 1080i in a tiny package originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Zotac jumping in Ion-filled waters with new Mini-ITX motherboards

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/21/zotac-jumping-in-ion-filled-waters-with-new-mini-itx-motherboard/

We'd heard a few whispers rolling through the gentle breeze that Zotac would be hopping on the Ion bandwagon early on, and sure enough, it looks like said firm is indeed latched on. Reportedly, the outfit will be producing a few Mini-ITX motherboards in the near future that support Intel's Atom 230 / 330 processors and come loaded with NVIDIA's GeForce 9400M G chipsets. The mobos would also include all of the basic amenities: Ethernet, two RAM slots, HDMI / DVI / VGA outputs, a trio of SATA ports and a WiFi module. There's still no word on what system maker is looking to slap these into their next-generation nettops, but who knows, maybe this will end up being the first standalone Ion-based board for the DIYers in attendance.

[Via Expreview, thanks Shawn]

Filed under: Desktops

Zotac jumping in Ion-filled waters with new Mini-ITX motherboards originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for u! se of fe eds.

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Bee.One electric car to be tiny, cheap, and cute

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/21/bee-one-electric-car-to-be-tiny-cheap-and-cute/

British start-up Bee has just dropped some details on its forthcoming uber-affordable electric car, the One. This five-door affair will have a top speed of around 80 miles per hour, with a maximum range of 200 miles before needing a recharge. The car will run on two battery packs stowed under the floor, and will be easily swappable in case charging stations start popping up all over the U.K. The One will also have a constant 3G connection for management and performance system software monitoring and updates. The most exciting detail about the car, however (besides its adorable attitude) is likely to be its pricepoint: £12,000 ($17,700) plus the recent government subsidy of £5000 ($7400) for electric car purchases will bring this puppy down to about £7,000 -- or just over $10,000. Sure -- it's not Tata-cheap... but this one's electric! The One is scheduled to go into production during 2011 with an initial run of about 12,000 vehicles. One more render of the car after the break.

Continue reading Bee.One electric car to be tiny, cheap, and cute

Filed under: Transportation

Bee.One electric car to be tiny, cheap, and cute originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CMOs Not Happy With Digital - marketing ROI, behavioral analyses, CRM: most important parts of digital mix - http://ping.fm/Pd6im

TiVo to sell instant data on what people watch, fast-forward - http://ping.fm/KtC9q - advertisers are in for some eye-opening results!

Monday, April 20, 2009

New in Labs: Suggest more recipients

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OfficialGmailBlog/~3/WUTkBidTJaU/new-in-labs-suggest-more-recipients.html

Posted by Ari Leichtberg, Software Engineer

Have you ever realized you mistakenly left someone important out of an email, or just spent too much time trying to decide who from your long list of contacts to include? Well, some of us on the Gmail team feel your pain, so we wrote a new Gmail Labs feature called "Suggest more recipients."

Once you've enabled it from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see suggested recipients while composing messages. Gmail will suggest people you might want to include based on the groups of people you email most often. So if you always email your mom, dad, and sister together, and you start composing a message to your mom and dad, Gmail will suggest adding your sister. Enter at least two recipients and any suggestions will show up like this:

Click on a suggested name, and they'll get added to your email.

Hopefully having lots of friends and co-workers just got a bit less onerous for you. (Oh, the burden of popularity!) Enjoy, and as usual, please let us know what you think.

Prezi Makes a Zooming Map of Your Presentations [Webapps]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/HQ59YAwUG7I/prezi-makes-a-zooming-map-of-your-presentations

Prezi is a Flash-based online presentation maker that doesn't believe all slides are the same. Prezi allows creators to zoom in, slide over, play videos, animate, and do other eye-catching stuff with your information.

It's hard to capture exactly what a difference custom zooming and framing have on a presentation until you see it yourself. Prezi, unfortunately, doesn't offer embedding of its hosted presentations (at least with its free license), but anyone can check out Prezi's showcased works to see what the deal is about. Editing itself is done with a neat wheel/cog corner tool and a drag-and-drop grid background. The site offers a lot of tutorial videos and demonstrations, like this nice overview of editing and presentation:

Even a free account gets an offline player to use, which is a big plus, and upgrading to "Enjoy" or "Pro" accounts for €39 or €119 grants access to "Private Prezi," upgrades your Prezi.com storage space, and removes Prezi's logo from your presentations. It's similar to Microsoft's very protoype-level pptPlex, but with a refined interface and pretty impressive looks. Free to use, requires a sign-up and email activation.

Prezi [via TechCrunch]

SprintCam V3 HD Shoots Breathtaking Full HD Video at 1,000 FPS [Slo Mo]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/ruNV90v8YRU/sprintcam-v3-hd-shoots-breathtaking-full-hd-video-at-1000-fps

Sure, the Casio EX-F1 shoots great slow-mo footage for a consumer camera. But it can't touch the footage that the SprintCam V3 HD pumps out. Good lord.

This is a professional broadcast camera that is likely to cost as much as a house, so it's not something you'll be picking up at Best Buy anytime soon. But you can bet that we'll start seeing incredible HD footage like in the below video on sports broadcasts in the very near future. Get ready to analyze the throws of pitchers and quarterbacks in a whole new way. [SprintCam V3 HD via NotCot]

LaCie Debuts 8TB 4big Quadra Bundles Including a 32TB RAID [LaCie]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/sjbdmbY7L2c/lacie-debuts-8tb-4big-quadra-bundles-including-a-32tb-raid

LaCie's new series of RAID bundles include an 8TB model of the 4big Quadra, which is actually just two 4TB hard drives put together.

The 8TB model joins the 4big Quadra series—a 4-bay RAID solution that features swappable disks and seven RAID modes—that boasts transfer speeds up to 700MB/s and capacities as big as 32TB. The hard drives with higher capacities, like the 8TB, are also just bundles of smaller drives placed together.

Available in the May and starting at $1,199, the 8TB LaCie 4big Quadra Bundle will include two 4TB 4big Quadras, an eSATA II PCI Express Card and 4 ports. The 16TB and 32TB—besides having higher capacities—come with everything the 8TB bundle contains, as well as LaCie Rescue Kits, which consists of spare hard disks and power supplies. [Lacie via Engadget]

Get ready for another co-processor: further details on Caustic Graphics's RTPU

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/

Get ready for another co-processor: further details on Caustic Graphics's RTPU

Ray tracing is the current holy grail of gaming graphics, the rendering technique that might finally make the licensed game based on Pixar's latest look as good as the film itself. But, the typically random nature of rays has made rendering them on traditional hardware inefficient, a problem Caustic Graphics claimed to have solved, and is now backing that up by giving PC Perspective some further details and demos. The company's tech will rely on a new graphics co-processor called the Ray Tracing Processing Unit (RTPU), working in concert with existing 3-D accelerators to deliver rays at frame rates high enough for interactive applications. How high? Early hardware dubbed CausticOne (that giant slab of silicon above) manages 3 - 5 frames-per-second in the demonstration video after the break. That's not nearly enough for twitchy first-person shooters, but second-gen hardware due next year is looking to deliver 14 times that -- plenty to get your high-reflectivity frag on.

Continue reading Get ready for another co-processor: further details on Caustic Graphics's RTPU

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

Get ready for another co-processor: further details on Caustic Graphics's RTPU originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung: OLED screens on half of mobile phones within 5 years

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/samsung-oled-screens-on-half-of-mobile-phones-within-5-years/

Truthfully, we wouldn't put too much stock in that headline considering that Samsung Mobile Display, a company that makes its ends off of selling active-matrix OLEDs, is the source. But on the other hand, we can definitely see it coming to fruition. According to a new report, said outfit has stated that OLED screens of some sort will be on over half of all mobile phones (not just smartphones, mind you) within the next five years, and that these same power-sipping displays will be on 20 percent of digital cameras and 30 percent of portable game players (PSP2, anyone?) within the same window of time. While it may seem a bit far-fetched now, we actually have good reason to believe that OLED adoption will indeed skyrocket on the small scale; it's those big screen TVs that we're worried only our grandchildren will truly enjoy.

[Via OLED-Info]

Filed under: Cellphones

Samsung: OLED screens on half of mobile phones within 5 years originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Transparent OLED rearview mirror both dazzles and distracts

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/transparent-oled-rearview-mirror-both-dazzles-and-distracts/

Although we've been hearing about transparent OLEDs for years now, mum's been the word on an actual product. So far the focus has been on Germany, but it looks like some interesting things have been going down in Korea as well. Researchers at ETRI (the flexible OLED folks) have apparently applied for 51 patents both nationally and internationally for the tech, including one for a transparent oxide resistor that helps increase the aperture ratio of AMOLEDs. And while all this is going down, NeoView KOLON has unveiled a new prototype rearview mirror that utilizes a transparent OLED display for -- well, displaying things. Just be sure to keep your eyes on the road, eh?

Read - "Korean Researchers Develop Transparent Transistors OLED Displays"
Read - "Neoview Kolon transparent OLED prototype"

Filed under: Displays

Transparent OLED rearview mirror both dazzles and distracts originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T likely skipping 14.4Mbps, moving straight to HSPA+

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/atandt-likely-skipping-14-4mbps-moving-straight-to-hspa/

While it puts the finishing touches on its nascent 7.2Mbps upgrades and starts certifying devices to use it, AT&T has revealed a juicy tidbit: that's probably the end of the line for old-guard HSPA on the country's largest GSM network. Before LTE, though, AT&T plans on upgrading to HSPA+ which should bring 21Mbps speeds out of the gate; straight-up HSPA is theoretically capable of moving to 14.4Mbps, but AT&T says that it's had technical difficulties in maxing it out and HSPA+ equipment is now ready for implementation anyhow. Simultaneously, the company says it's adding additional carriers at cells on a case-by-case basis to help with white-hot demand and is upgrading its backhaul network to handle the blazing speeds promised by the newer standards. We'll see.

[Via Phone Scoop]

Filed under: Cellphones

AT&T likely skipping 14.4Mbps, moving straight to HSPA+ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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