Beautiful Soho-chic gallery and event space -- massive 1,600 sf (midtown 35th btn 5th/6th Aves) -- http://bit.ly/crt9b6
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
HTC Incredible's Specs Leak, Show Snapdragon Android Phone With 8MP Camera [Android]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5515922/htc-incredibles-specs-leak-show-snapdragon-android-phone-with-8mp-camera
A 3.7-inch WVGA OLED capacitive screen, 1GHz Snapdragon QSG8650 processor and 8MP camera with autofocus and flash place it above both the Nexus One and HTC Desire, and by the looks of things, it'll come with Android 2.1 pre-loaded, slicked with HTC Sense over the top. GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth—it's all there. I'm seriously excited about this handset. If you thought the Desire sounded good after reading my review, the Incredible could blow it out of the water.
But then...it's no Sprint Evo 4G, is it? [BGR]
Image Credit: AndroidAndMe
GE's LED light bulbs look cool, last forever, cost a lot
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/13/ges-led-light-bulbs-look-cool-last-forever-cost-a-lot/
GE's LED light bulbs look cool, last forever, cost a lot originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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GE Consumer Products | Email this | Comments
Intel adds Android to Moorestown compatibility list, wants to Atomize your smartphone
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/13/intel-adds-android-to-moorestown-compatibility-list-wants-to/
Intel adds Android to Moorestown compatibility list, wants to Atomize your smartphone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Apr 2010 05:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Android Police | PC World | Email this | Comments
Monday, April 12, 2010
Virus Helps Researchers Split Water into Hydrogen and Oxygen
Viruses generally get a bad rap, but they can also be very helpful little machines. For instance, bacteriophages have been engineered to clear up infections that seemed otherwise untreatable, and genetic material from viruses has been used to ease biofuel production. Now a team at MIT is using a modified virus to assemble the biological nano-scaffolding necessary to split water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
Of course, other means to split water into hydrogen and oxygen exist, but none of them are as efficient or simple as the method plants use to oxidize water through photosynthesis, requiring energy from outside the system to carry the process to fruition. Meanwhile, efforts to extract the photosynthesizing components from plants for use in harnessing solar power have been largely unsuccessful.
So the MIT team decided to engineer a virus to imitate plants' oxidizing machinery by artificial means. Using a zinc porphyrin pigment and iridium oxide catalyst, the team was already able to mimic nature's own photosynthesizers, which are very efficient at flipping solar power into fuel for water-splitting reactions within plants. But for efficient water-splitting, those catalysts and pigments must be arranged in a very particular way.
Therein lies the team's innovation: an engineered bacterial virus known as M13 that serves as a sort of self-assembling biological scaffold, spacing the porphyrins and iridium such that oxygen production increases fourfold. The pigments capture sunlight and transfer that energy down the length of the virus the way a wire transfers electricity from one end to the other. That energy in turn powers the iridium reaction that splits the oxygen from the water.
The process still lacks a critical step: once the splitting is complete, the oxygen has been siphoned from the water but the hydrogen is left split into its component electrons and protons. The team is currently exploring other biomimicking systems that might reassemble those building blocks into usable, storable hydrogen atoms. An actual commercial process that produces hydrogen from water as efficiently as plants do is likely years away, but the MIT team hopes to have a working, self-sustaining device that can perform the entire water-splitting process in the lab within two years.
[MIT News]
Site Speed Now a Factor in Google Rankings [Search]
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5514997/site-speed-now-a-factor-in-google-rankings
Index Your Files Catalogs Local and Networks Files for Speedy Search [Downloads]
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5515039/index-your-files-catalogs-local-and-networks-files-for-speedy-search
Index Your Files excels at indexing local, attached, networked, and even indexing drives you won't have real-time access to for easy search. While the previously mentioned Everything will always win with raw speed—it accesses the HDD file table for crazy-fast file finding—Index Your Files builds databases of every drive you point it at and keeps those databases accessible even after you've disconnected from an external hard drive, turned booted down your file server, and so on. Since it's portable you could even index hard drives at work and search them at home.
Index Your Files supports searches based on name, size, date, location, and advanced search using Boolean operators. You can switch between the indexes of different disks—or searching them all—by simply checking or un-checking them beneath the search box. Index Your Files is free, portable, and Windows only. Have a favorite search tool to share? Let's hear about it in the comments.
QSynergy Makes Multi-System Control Easier and Prettier [Downloads]
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5515093/qsynergy-makes-multi+system-control-easier-and-prettier
QSynergy isn't the first update to Synergy we've come across—Synergy-Plus added some updates and bug fixes to the original. QSynergy adds a few bonus features of its own, but its main benefits involve how easy it is to install on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems, and the setup tools and design put into it. Arranging the left-to-right arrangement of multiple systems is done with a grid interface, the crude, Windows-98-era options panels are cleaned up, and with just a little tweaking, you're managing multiple computers as if they were just multiple monitors on one grand Mother Brain.
QSynergy is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. Thanks for the tip MePerson!
Mandatory Password Changes Costs Billions in Lost Productivity [Passwords]
Source: http://lifehacker.com/5515133/mandatory-password-changes-costs-billions-in-lost-productivity
Google Docs Updates with a Drawing Editor, Real-Time Collaboration, and Speed [Screenshot Tour]
(Click any of the images above for a closer look.)
The updates come to three apps within Google Docs: Doc, Spreadsheets, and a new Drawing editor. The Drawing editor will roll out over the course of the day, and the new document and spreadsheet editors will be available only via opt-in preview sometime soon. One at a time, here's what you can expect:
The Google Docs Document Editor Gets Real-Time, Looks and Feels More Like a Desktop Word Processor
If you're a regular user of word processing in Docs, you'll notice Google Wave-like cursor chasing (like you see in the screenshot at top), which provides real-time, character-by-character updates of what everyone's doing inside Docs so you don't have to worry about stepping on each others toes, ending up with out-of-sync versions, and so on. Basically collaborating in Docs just got a whole lot better. You can also now collaborate simultaneously with up to 50 users (seems more than most would ever need, and I'm not really sure what the limit was before this).
Frequent users will also notice the addition of common word processor features to the web editor, including:
- Ruler with tab stops
- Floating images
- Spell check as you type
- New commenting system
Rulers and floating images aside, the as-you-type spell check and commenting system tread more closely to some of what makes Google Wave so great. Users can now comment on sections of a document without disrupting the flow of a document or editing it directly.
I wouldn't say that these Wave-like features come close to doing what Wave can do, but for many users, the live typing and inline document commenting are all they'd want from Wave, and in those cases, these Docs updates are perfect.
Spreadsheets Speed Up, Get More Desktop-Like
- Drag-and-drop columns
- Cell autocomplete
- Formula editing bar
The Drawing Editor Lets You Create, Collaborate on, and Export Complex Images
The Bad News
The new editors do not support Gears for offline storage and access, and Google is disabling this feature in Docs on May 3. That doesn't mean that offline access if off the table—Google is still planning to bring offline access to Docs via HTML5 technology at some point in the future—but it does mean that there's going to be a gap in support for offline access.
A Big Step Forward for Collaboration
These updates look like a big and important step forward for using Google Docs as a collaboration tool. (I co-wrote a book in Google Docs a few years back and would have killed for the more advanced collaboration tools.) It's pretty clear that Google's aiming squarely at Microsoft Office with these features, and depending on the business, the strength of Google Docs' collaboration tools may be exactly the ticket. At the same time, Docs still doesn't have the raw power and deep feature set of Microsoft's suite of tools. If you need all that power, desktop tools are still the way to go. If not, Google Docs is getting better and better at handling your basic document and spreadsheet collaboration needs. (As I said, while the update pulls in some of our favorite features of Google Wave, it by no means handles close to what Wave can—but for some people the improved collaboration will be more than enough.)
So what do you think of the big updates? Let's hear it in the comments.
Google Docs Updates with a Drawing Editor, Real-Time Collaboration, and Speed [Screenshot Tour]
(Click any of the images above for a closer look.)
The updates come to three apps within Google Docs: Doc, Spreadsheets, and a new Drawing editor. The Drawing editor will roll out over the course of the day, and the new document and spreadsheet editors will be available only via opt-in preview sometime soon. One at a time, here's what you can expect:
The Google Docs Document Editor Gets Real-Time, Looks and Feels More Like a Desktop Word Processor
If you're a regular user of word processing in Docs, you'll notice Google Wave-like cursor chasing (like you see in the screenshot at top), which provides real-time, character-by-character updates of what everyone's doing inside Docs so you don't have to worry about stepping on each others toes, ending up with out-of-sync versions, and so on. Basically collaborating in Docs just got a whole lot better. You can also now collaborate simultaneously with up to 50 users (seems more than most would ever need, and I'm not really sure what the limit was before this).
Frequent users will also notice the addition of common word processor features to the web editor, including:
- Ruler with tab stops
- Floating images
- Spell check as you type
- New commenting system
Rulers and floating images aside, the as-you-type spell check and commenting system tread more closely to some of what makes Google Wave so great. Users can now comment on sections of a document without disrupting the flow of a document or editing it directly.
I wouldn't say that these Wave-like features come close to doing what Wave can do, but for many users, the live typing and inline document commenting are all they'd want from Wave, and in those cases, these Docs updates are perfect.
Spreadsheets Speed Up, Get More Desktop-Like
- Drag-and-drop columns
- Cell autocomplete
- Formula editing bar
The Drawing Editor Lets You Create, Collaborate on, and Export Complex Images
The Bad News
The new editors do not support Gears for offline storage and access, and Google is disabling this feature in Docs on May 3. That doesn't mean that offline access if off the table—Google is still planning to bring offline access to Docs via HTML5 technology at some point in the future—but it does mean that there's going to be a gap in support for offline access.
A Big Step Forward for Collaboration
These updates look like a big and important step forward for using Google Docs as a collaboration tool. (I co-wrote a book in Google Docs a few years back and would have killed for the more advanced collaboration tools.) It's pretty clear that Google's aiming squarely at Microsoft Office with these features, and depending on the business, the strength of Google Docs' collaboration tools may be exactly the ticket. At the same time, Docs still doesn't have the raw power and deep feature set of Microsoft's suite of tools. If you need all that power, desktop tools are still the way to go. If not, Google Docs is getting better and better at handling your basic document and spreadsheet collaboration needs. (As I said, while the update pulls in some of our favorite features of Google Wave, it by no means handles close to what Wave can—but for some people the improved collaboration will be more than enough.)
So what do you think of the big updates? Let's hear it in the comments.
Eric Schmidt spreading word of an Android-based Google tablet, HP building one as well?
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/eric-schmidt-spreading-word-of-an-android-based-google-tablet-h/
Eric Schmidt spreading word of an Android-based Google tablet, HP building one as well? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 09:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
PermalinkLap top | NY Times | Email this | Comments
Meizu Mbook tablet gets pictured, initial specs detailed
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/meizu-mbook-tablet-gets-pictured-initial-specs-detailed/
Update: Commenter Mr. Crosini pointed out that the photo above is actually a fan-made conceptual render added here by ardent Meizu fanboy bingo_zheng. However, the specs are said to have come straight from the mouth of Meizu's CEO, and if you can't trust Jack Wong who can you trust?
Meizu Mbook tablet gets pictured, initial specs detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
PermalinkMeizu Me | Meizu BBS | Email this | Comments
Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two first hands-on!
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/microsoft-kin-one-and-kin-two-first-hands-on/
We know that the One is positioned as the slightly lower-end device on account of its 5 megapixel cam (the Two has 8) and half the internal storage, but we actually came away liking it more -- it's the only one of the two that looks truly unique, because the Two just looks like any old landscape slider smartphone (not to say that's necessarily a bad thing). The front of both devices is graced with a single metallic button to offset an otherwise clean glossy black bezel -- this button functions as Back, not Home, so if you're multiple levels deep into the UI you'll only be taken back one. You can still hold the button down to get back to the home screen, fortunately, and both the One and Two have dedicated camera buttons -- Microsoft's making no secret of the fact that image and video capture are a huge push for these devices.
Follow the break for more thoughts, shots, and video!
Continue reading Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two first hands-on!
Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two first hands-on! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | Email this | CommentsKin is basically a Zune HD inside, can go for a weekend on a charge
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/kin-is-basically-a-zune-hd-inside-can-go-for-a-weekend-on-a-cha/
Realistically, we've gotten the impression today that Kin doesn't come close to tapping out a Tegra's horsepower, but that might be by design: Snyder also mentioned that a key goal of the development phase was to make sure that the phones could go a whole weekend without a charge. Running a Tegra at full bore 24 / 7 doesn't lend itself to miserly power consumption, so the overall simplicity of the UI -- and the lack of 3D gaming -- might play a role there.
Kin is basically a Zune HD inside, can go for a weekend on a charge originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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