LG Curved 3D OLED Hands-On: An Imax For Your House

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5974348/lg-curved-3d-oled-hands+on-an-imax-for-your-house

LG just made the first curved 3D OLED screen. I just saw a crazy setup of three 55-inch beauties aligned side-by-side into a perfect cinematic curve. The effect is very dramatic. This could be the whole reason 3D and curved OLED exist.

As we saw with the huge curved OLED that Samsung showed us earlier today, these wavy displays are basically made for watching epic and atmospheric content. That's true with LGs OLED with 2D content and when you throw on a pair of shades and watch 3D content like planets in space and weird intergalactic flying jewels, you get sucked in.

The content doesn't pop out at you the way some people imagine 3D. Rather, the curved panel pulls you in, and when all three are lined up creating a mega curved OLED the effect is even more intense.

And of course there are no plans to sell these things yet, but we can all ready of setting up some real home theaters one day.

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What the Hell Is Facecake? (It's an Awesome Augmented Reality Shopping App)

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5974382/what-the-hell-is-facecake-its-awesome

I really love to shop, but I always feel bad about pestering the salesperson for different sizes or colors of a pair of pants or something. But Facecake eliminates that issue—and makes it so you never have to ask another human being if a pair of jeans make you look fat.

Using Kinect, you can browse through a virtual clothing rack where you can see if that dress looks alright on you or if the purse you picked totally ruins the whole look. There's also a version for testing makeup and accessories called Swivel.

It was pretty fun to try—I love makeup, but sampling a different hue of an eyeshadow isn't as easy as slipping on shoes in another color. And obviously you want to know what something looks like on your face. Swivel literally lets you swipe through color selections. I tried orange, red, purple, and I don't even know, green lipstick? Just using gestures I could instantly make myself look classy or choose more of a hooker clown kind of look. I test drove jewelry and scarves in the same way. Bloomingdale's used the clothing version during Fashion Week at a New York City store, and you're going probably going to see Swivel pop up in more retailers this spring. It's so awesome for me, but also really bad: It's the kind of thing that makes you want to spend, spend, spend.

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Luci Hands On: The Cheap Inflatable Solar-Powered LED Lantern

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5974388/luci-hands-on-the-cheap-inflatable-solar+powered-led-lantern

Developed as an affordable and reliable solar-powered lantern that can be easily deployed to parts of the world lacking reliable infrastructures, the Luci also happens to be the perfect camping accessory since it's lightweight, durable, waterproof, bright, and collapses as flat as a pancake.

Looking like a translucent cylindrical beach ball, the Luci can be deployed with just a couple of quick breaths, and a built-in lithium-ion battery holds enough charge to keep the lantern's ten white LEDs glowing for up to 12 hours on its dimmest setting, or six if you crank the brightness. On the underside you'll find a simple solar cell that will completely recharge the Luci's battery in six hours of sun or artificial light, but that's your only option. There's no USB port, and the battery is most definitely not swappable.

Probably the best feature of the Luci is its price. You can get one for just $20, but for every lantern purchased the Mpowerd will donate another one to aid organizations around the world. So you're not only getting a brilliant camping accessory—or a great addition to your car's emergency kit—you're also helping someone in need. Can you say that about your 4K 3D curved TV?

[Mpowerd]

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Lenovo K900 Hands-On: This Tall, Skinny Hottie Needs to Get In My Pants

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5974392/lenovo-k900-hands+on-this-tall-skinny-hottie-needs-to-get-in-my-pants

The Lenovo K900 is a big phone, yes, but it's a designy big phone. It's handsome, skinny, and slick like the finest smartphones ever made. We never thought we would be into a 5.5-inch phone until the K900's brushed metal back landed in our hands.

This phone is all about the hardware. The unibody construction is completely smooth and flat, unlike other large, long phones. In fact, Lenovo says that at just 6.9mm thick, it's the thinnest in its class. It weighs just 5.7 ounces.

The Full HD, 400ppi screen is amazingly satisfying. As you can see in the images, the IPS display blends beautifully with the black bezel. On the reverse, the back panel is totally without bumps, which is impressive on such a slim construction. Not even the camera pokes out. (Speaking of the camera: it shoots with a 13-megapixel Sony Exmor sensor and has a super fast f/1.8 lens.)

The K900 runs an Intel Atom z2580 processor, and it was wasn't final so we don't know anything about performance. Sadly, we don't even know what operating system the phone will run, let alone when I'll be able to see if it fits into my skinny pants.

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ZTE Grand S Hands On: Superphone Doesn't Seem So Super

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5974391/zte-grand-s-hands-on-superphone-doesnt-seem-so-super

We love an underdog story. So when we saw that ZTE—a company which in the U.S. is not so synonymous with "quality" —was making a spec-monster phone, we were excited. After playing with it for about ten minutes, we're a bit less enthusiastic.

On the good side, the phone looks very nice and it was super light. And it comes in, like, eight different colors. The screen looked as sharp as you'd hope, but colors didn't seem as vivid as some other 1080p phones we've been peeping. But to be fair we'd have to do a side-by-side comparison to be sure.

The software is where things start getting messy. For starters the custom UI strips away the slickness of Android 4.1 (Jelly Been) both in look and feel. Menus look more like they belong on a late 2000's feature-phone. Everything is blocky and cartoonish in an unappealing way. Worse, though, the smoothness is gone. You can see it in the video when I flip between screens, there's a fair amount of lag. With a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro and 2GB of RAM for brains, you don't have lag on your phone unless you screwed up your software.

There's also this strange, floating thing that brings up the classic four navigation buttons for Android. It's omnipresent and distracting, but even more so, it's redundant as the phone has three capacitive navigation buttons at the bottom. See them in the video? No, you don't, because they're practically invisible and they didn't light up. Just what the hell is going on here?

The camera was slow to open and took a long time in between pictures. I wasn't able to get a sense for the photo quality in my brief time with the phone, but it's lack of speed is certainly troubling. When I first got to it, it was even laggier and slower than the video shows, due I assume to many people pawing at it over the course of several hours. I rebooted the phone to make sure it was getting a fair shake, but A) it shouldn't have had that problem in the first place and B) even with a clean boot it wasn't exactly a speed demon.

So, we'll see what happens here. Obviously, because we still don't know exactly when this phone will make its way to the U.S. or which carrier will pick it up (if any), the software isn't final, so they may be able to work these bugs out. We hope they do, because so far we aren't so impressed.

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