Carved out of Japanese Cypress, the Mast Humidifier absorbs water from the hull and diffuses it through the air—along with the natural lemony-scent of the wood itself. Its rot resistant and, naturally, electricity free. Plus it's really nice looking. [Masuza via Spoon and Tamago via Mocoloco]
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/13/congatec-bm57-fits-mobile-core-i7-onto-tiny-mobo/
Congatec BM57 fits mobile Core i7 onto tiny mobo originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/13/toshiba-demonstrates-64gb-sdxc-pledges-spring-release/
Toshiba demonstrates 64GB SDXC, pledges spring release originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/13/panasonics-new-avchd-camcorders-put-that-sdxc-memory-to-good-us/
Panasonic's new AVCHD camcorders put that SDXC memory to good use originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/13/intels-40gb-ssd/
Smaller sized / smaller priced SSD boot drives are a pretty attractive proposition for someone wanting to boost performance on a budget. Kingston's 40GB SSDnow, for instance, was particularly well received at Engadget HQ recently, and now Intel's on the scene with its new X25-V Value line. With a 35MB/s write speed (as reported by Listed First) and a 65 / 110 microsecond read / write latency this isn't the fastest solid state drive out there -- in fact, at $130 (New Egg) it's a couple bucks more expensive than Kingston's faster alternative. But who knows? Maybe they'll slash prices, or one will fall off a truck in front of you. Stranger things have happened.Intel's 40GB SSD quietly starts shipping originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/13/elgatos-eyetv-one-sticks-to-atsc-leaves-analog-out-in-the-cold/
Elgato's EyeTV One sticks to ATSC, leaves analog out in the cold originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/wi7IRjN1PGg/the-us-is-giving-digitalization-112-percent
Citing the Census Bureau's recent Statistical Abstract of the United States, Fast Company notes that an estimated 110 billion text messages were sent on cellphones in December 2008—more than double the previous year. Retail sales also soared from $24 billion when the decade began to $128 billion in 2007.
So where are we now? It's probably safe to assume that the Cracken has dragged our lifeless corpse to Davy Jones' locker. [Fast Company]
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/AztvCGzQeDk/how-will-we-type-on-the-apple-tablet
CES was rotten with new tablets, some Android, some not, some with fascinating screens, and again, some not. But one thing they all had in common was that they hadn't quite figured out the text input problem: How do you create text without a keyboard?
We've been comfortably typing without physical keyboards for years now, and this is largely Apple's doing. One of the great triumphs of the iPhone was to make onscreen keyboards bearable—something that, even if you hate the concept of virtual keys on principle, you have to admit they accomplished. This works:
Extending this to the tablet, though, would be a mistake. I had a chance to play with a few different sizes of tablets at CES, nearly all of which had traditional onscreen keyboards—in particular, the Android 2.0 keyboard, which is aesthetically different but functionally almost identical to iPhone OSes. None of them worked, at least in the way that I wanted them to, for o! ne reaso n: they were too big. Seven-inch tablets were too large to comfortably thumb-type on, while 10-inch tablets made text input all but impossible. The onscreen keyboard as we know it doesn't scale gracefully, and unless Apple wants their tablet to be completely useless (our sources say they don't) they're going to have to figure this out. So what are Apple's options?
Apple has made mistakes before, but to only have a simple onscreen keyboard would qualify as an outright screw-up. QWERTY-style, thumb-actuated onscreen keyboards work on screens up to about five inches, with the 4.3-inch-screened HTC Touch HD2's keyboard straining even the most unsettlingly long thumbs. But to assume that this won't work is to assume that the tablet is to be held a certain way, with hands at four and eight o-clock, more or less like a touchscreen phone in landscape mode. This may not be the case.
What if the tablet is meant to be held with one hand, and controlled with the other? What if it has some kind of kickstand or mount, so you can actually type with both hands, a la a regular keyboard. What if it's intended to only work in portrait mode, where it would be just about narrow enough to be usable?
Apple's filed extensive patents about how a large, multitouch onscreen keyboard might work, pictured above, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything: Apple's got more patents than the tablet's got rumors, and most of them never materialized into anything meaningful. The keyboard patent, for example, also includes drawings of an onscreen clickwheel, and a description of how small interface elements, like the minimize/close/zoom buttons in OS X proper, co! uld be h andled on a touchscreen—all of which are terrible awkward, and dissonant with Apple's touchscreen philosophy so far.
Either way, a single, iPhone-esque keyboard really shouldn't be the primary input method. It could be a supplementary input method, but to have two separate text input mechanisms seems messy, and distinctly un-Apple-y. Lame, half-baked input seems like the kind of thing Steve Jobs might fitfully shitcan a tablet for, actually, but that's getting awfully speculative, even for a piece about a product that doesn't officially exist at all.
Apple's been on covert voice input crusade since it introduced Spoken Interface for OS X which, if you care to look (System Preferences>Speech>Speakable Items "On) is still there. As it stands, it's rudimentary—the iPhone's Voice Control speech recognition is much more accurate—and though there are quite a few customization options, it's really just a command system, not a full text input system.
That said, Apple is very proud of Voice Control on the iPhone, and they haven't removed voice commands from OS X in over five years. It's likely that there will be some kind of voice input for the tablet, but that it'll be relegated to the same job it's held in the past, taking care of the odd command and initiating the occasional script, and not much else.
Styli! The very thing the iPhone was so dedicated to murdering could be the savior of the Apple tablet! Just ask Microsoft.
See, the only other tablet booklet device that's garnering remotely comparable hype is the Courier, Microsoft's dual-screen concept device leaked to us back in September. The Courier concept is very different from the blurry image we've assembled of the Apple tablet—it doesn't have a keyboard. Unlike the Apple tablet, though, we know how the Courier is supposed to work:
Handwriting. Apple staked an entire device line on handwriting recognition—the Newton—over 15 years ago, so isn't it conceivable that they've, you know, figured it out by now? Before taking another detour back to the patent office, let's take a moment to recall Steve Jobs' original iPhone keynote:
Oh, a stylus, right? We're going to use a stylus. No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get 'em and put 'em away, and you lose 'em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let's not use a stylus. We're going to use the best pointing device in the world. We're going to use a pointing device that we're all born with - born with ten of them. We're going to use our fingers. We're going to touch this with our fingers.
This wasn't a dismissal of styli. This was a dickish, public obsoleting of styli. If I were a stylus, I would refuse to work with Steve Jobs, o! n the ba sis of him being a jerk.
And yet, in November of 2009, an Apple patent, this time describing stylus input and clearly showing a tablet-like device, went public. If you have the will and patience to parse a little techno-legalese, go for it:
Upon the occurrence of an ink phrase termination event, the ink manager notifies the handwriting recognition engine and organizes the preceding ink strokes into an ink phrase data structure...The present invention, in large part, relates to the observation that client applications and handwriting recognition software in pen-based computer systems can make far more accurate ink-related decisions based on entire ink phrases, rather than individual ink strokes.
If not, you'll have to take my word for it: This is basically the Newton's Rosetta, updated for 2009.
The safest bet for how Apple will handle the text input problem is not coincidentally the broadest. Any onscreen keyboard would have to be different than the iPhone's somehow, but to say that Apple's tablet will have a new style of keyboard is to say that it will have pretty much any kind of onscreen keyboard that is unlike the iPhone's. This is not very useful! Luckily, we have guidance, from other companies, and even from Apple.
Split onscreen keyboards are neither new nor common, which makes them kind of perfect: the map has been charted, so Apple needs only to explore it.
The mos! t public of the alternatives is an actual, available product called DialKeys. Coopted by Microsoft a few years ago, this tech, which splits the keyboard into two crescent-shaped virtual keyboards, shipped with a handful of touchscreen UMPCs, a category of devices that died off before it had the time to truly solve the onscreen keyboard problem. It wasn't very good. But the concept had potential, maybe. 
FingerWorks, a company specializing in touch interfaces and gesture concepts, was forcefully drawn into the Apple family about five years ago. A lot of their touch gestures actually made their way to the iPhone, albeit adapted from touchpad to screen use, according to FingerWorks employees:
The one difference that's actually quite significant is the iPhone is a display with the multi-touch, and the FingerWorks was just an opaque surface. That's all I'm going to say there. There's definite similarities, but Apple's definitely taken it another step by having it on a display
Interestingly, FingerWorks had a physical product with a split keyboard, which sat over Apple laptops' regular keyboards, and which promptly disappeared after their acquisition. From the press release, which, mind you, hit the wires in 2003:
The MacNTouch Gesture Keyboard is a complete user interface that serves as mouse, standard key! board, a nd powerful multi-finger gesture interpreter. Mouse operations like point, click, drag, scroll, and zoom are combined seamlessly with touch-typing and multi-finger gesture everywhere on the MacNTouch's surface. Proprietary hardware and software allows pointing right over the keys, thus eliminating the frequent movement of the hand between the keyboard and the touchpad. The MacNTouch has been designed to minimize stress and it gives users unprecedented control of their computer using hand gestures.
Best of all, the FingerWorks domain, which proudly displays all of these concepts, was pulled from the internet this week. If this feels like a strange coincidence, that's because, well, it is.
For all the evidence about the tablet's possible input methods, there's no standout answer. Apple's got a thing for voice input, a history with onscreen keyboards, a patent trail and strong lineage of stylus input, and a pattern of suspicious behavior with and towards new keyboard types. We've got a handful of cases here, all compelling, and all conflicting. And the takeaway, if you haven't picked it up yet, is that nobody really knows.
For my money, though, an adapted, possibly split onscreen keyboard is the best bet, and assuming the learning curve isn't too steep, the most appealing option. But of the options laid out here, it's by far th! e most v ague—its FingerWorks ancestor is nearly a decade old, conceived in a time before multitouch screens—so the only truly safe bet is that whatever Apple comes up with, it's going to surprise us.
We don't have specific information on either of the products (no pricing, availability, or speed) but we do know that mass production on the 32GB microSD card should start next month, which means with any luck we'll start seeing them in the first half of this year. The 64GB NAND (moviNAND, technically) has been in production since December 2009, so it should hit even a little sooner.
What does this mean? 64GB iPhones (Apple uses Samsung NAND for the iPhone, so this chip could well show up in an iPhone). 32GB cards for the Droid and Nexus One. We knew this stuff was coming (just as we know those numbers will double again in another year or two) but, well, now they're here! Press release below. [Samsung]
SEOUL, Korea - January 13, 2009 - Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology solutions, today announced two high-density memory solutions for mobile devices. The new storage solutions – a 64-gigabyte (GB) moviNANDTM memory device and a 32GB micro secure digital (microSD) memory card – satisfy mobile handset designers' requirements for advanced compact high-density memory.
"Samsung's high-density memory solutions bring the storage capacity levels of computing systems to small, mobile devices," said Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president, memory! marketi ng, Samsung Electronics.
He added, "The 64GB embedded memory, moviNAND, and the 32GB microSD card each greatly expand the data storage density of mobile devices, meeting customers' memory requirements and ushering in a new era of mobile and IT device capacity growth."
The memory solutions are based on Samsung's advanced 32 gigabit (Gb) NAND flash. The 64GB moviNAND, which measures 1.4mm in height, consists of 16 30nm-class 32Gb MLC NAND chips and a controller. The 17-die stack was achieved by using 30-micron thick chips and advanced package technology. With the new 64GB solution, Samsung's proprietary embedded memory, moviNAND, is now available in 64GB, 32GB, 16GB, 8GB and 4GB densities.
The 32GB microSD card, developed this month, stacks eight 32Gb NAND components and a card controller. The industry's highest capacity, production-ready microSD card is enabled by the use of Samsung's advanced 30-nm class 32Gb NAND flash memory technology. Previously, the highest density microSD card in production had a 16GB capacity and was based on 40nm-class 16Gb NAND. The new 32GB card is 1mm-thick. The portion of the card that is inserted into a handset measures just 0.7 mm in height.
According to market research firm iSuppli, the global NAND flash memory market for 32GB and higher memory cards is forecast to be 530 million units in 2010 and reach 9.5 billion units by 2013 (in 16Gb equivalent units).
Samsung's new 64GB moviNAND has been in mass production from December 2009, while the 32GB microSD is now being sampled with OEMs, with mass production expected next month.
Selling an actual product to actual consumers is a very new game for Google, and if the myriad messageboard complaints and now a New York Times piece are any indication, the company is making the kind of toddler missteps you'd expect. Google sells the Nexus One exclusively, but haven't set up a system of customer service that's anywhere near adequate for a product as buzzed-about as the Nexus. There's no way to contact Google by phone, and email responses are reported to take several days for a response. That's a huge problem for Nexus One owners.
We like the Nexus One a lot—Jason even called it "the best Android phone" on the market—but if Google doesn't get their shit together and start providing the kind of service smartphone owners have come to expect, it'll prove a serious setback for not just Google but Android as a whole. We hope they work it out—they're working to reduce that several-day delay in email response to a few hours, but it better happen fast if they don't want people to lose confidence. [NYTimes]
Joining the PS3 and Xbox 360, Netflix will bring its streaming video service to the Wii, offering movies and TV shows to subscribers of the $9/month DVD mail-out service. You'll need to grab a software disc from Netflix though in order to get streaming rights on your Wii, but it's sent to your pad for free so you can't quibble much about that. Worth pointing out though is that the Wii can't give you anything more than 480p video resolution, so don't go thinking this Netflix deal is the best news ever. [NY Times]
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/12/casio-ex-10hg-hybrid-gps-prototype-taps-into-accelerometers-fo/
Casio EX-10HG 'hybrid GPS' prototype taps into accelerometers for pinpoint accuracy originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 10:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/12/inklet-trackpad-tablet-app-for-macbook-is-wacoms-worst-nightmar/
Continue reading Inklet trackpad tablet app for MacBook is Wacom's worst nightmare
Inklet trackpad tablet app for MacBook is Wacom's worst nightmare originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/12/kingston-ssdnow-v-dips-to-30gb-size-lower-price/
We've already made our fond feelings toward Kingston's SSDNow V line quite clear, so you'll understand our joy at the news that it's about to add a new member to the fold. Cutting storage down to 30GB should mean Kingston is about to offer its cheapest drive yet, though all the info we have is that it'll be "under 90GBP" (or $145). That doesn't immediately strike us as better value than the 40GB SSDNow V -- which reached an $85 price point not too long ago -- but European prices aren't directly comparable at the best of times. In exchange for your cashola, you'll get a speedy little boot drive, backed by a three-year warranty, 24/7 tech support, and the knowledge that it can withstand a baseball bat should the need ever arise. Full PR after the break.Continue reading Kingston SSDNow V dips to 30GB size, lower price
Kingston SSDNow V dips to 30GB size, lower price originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This is what $170 will get you: One small black box that clones 2.5 and 3.5-inch SATA I and II drives at 72MB/sec, inner peace, and multiple digital lives. Thanks, you Aleratec HDD Copy Cruiser Mini you. [
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