Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Friday, January 28, 2011

Nook Color earns its very early, very unofficial Android 3.0 Honeycomb wings

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/28/nook-color-earns-its-very-eary-very-unofficial-android-3-0-hone/

One of the first things that happens after a new platform emulator breaks loose is that a bunch of hackers far smarter than ourselves get hold of it, tear it apart, and port it to whatever's convenient. In the case of this week's Android 3.0 Honeycomb preview, "whatever's convenient" would be the Nook Color, which reigns as perhaps the cheapest decent-quality Android tablet money can currently buy. Naturally, xda-developers has a thread going on the subject as we speak; the current port is said to be really slow and mostly broken -- but then again, that kind of describes the current state of the emulator itself. Good news is that the developer says he plans on working on graphics acceleration to improve performance over the weekend, so with any luck, the Xoom might have some unofficial competition before too long. Follow the break for another shot.

[Thanks, s30zgt]

Continue reading Nook Color earns its very early, very unofficial Android 3.0 Honeycomb wings

Nook Color earns its very early, very unofficial Android 3.0 Honeycomb wings originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Qwiki Is Like a Mini, Visually-Rich Wikipedia That Reads to You [Webapp]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5744339/qwiki-is-like-a-mini-visually+rich-wikipedia-that-reads-to-you

Qwiki is a new webapp that helps you learn about virtually anything, but aims to inform you quickly by reading the articles to you while showing you a slideshow of pictures while you listen.

Qwiki was announced awhile back but just launched to the public—as an alpha release—this week. When I first heard about it I thought it sounded kind of stupid—why do I need a web site to read to me, especially in a computerized voice?—but after giving it a try you'll come to see what it's compelling. It doesn't hurt that it's nice to look at (the format of the slideshows are especially creative), but each article is so concise yet sufficiently informative that you can brush up on any topic in about a minute and actually feel like you know a fair amount about it. It's one of those things you have to try.

Of course, it's not perfect. The page on George Orwell is far more compelling than, say, the page on Lifehacker. This is primarily because there's only one picture of the Lifehacker site and several pictures related to George Orwell (and other featured topics). The difference really demonstrates how effective the slideshow can be. Their computerized voice also needs a little work on her pronunciations, as I imagine Jizmodo would be a very different kind of blog. Again, it's an alpha release, so we should see improvements and more content as time goes on. Right now, it's pretty cool and definitely worth a look.

Qwiki

You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Toshiba Used Nano-Technology For This Color-Changing Laptop [Laptops]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5745828/toshiba-used-nano+technology-for-this-color+changing-laptop

Considering most of Toshiba's laptops have a design only their R&D department can love, they must've turned to the mood rings of yesteryear for styling inspiration with their Dynabook Qosmio T750. Supposedly it's the first-ever color-changing laptop.

Unfortunately it doesn't change color like a chameleon, but instead uses nano-technology for the metallic look, which changes from green through to blue and then purple. The effect was achieved without using any metal, making it kinder to the environment according to Toshiba.

Under all that gloss, there are some powerful components ticking away to ensure it's got brains as well as beauty: there's a 2.66GHz Intel Core i5-480M, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, plus a 750GB HDD. The laptop itseld measures 15.6-inches, and has a 1366 x 768 resolution screen. For now, it's only available to our Japanese friends. [JapanToday via The Earth Times and RegHardware - Thanks, Yogesh!]

Stanford researchers demo social NFC applications on the Nexus S

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/27/stanford-researchers-demo-social-nfc-applications-on-the-nexus-s/

To hear most mobile companies tell it these days, you'd think that NFC (or near field communications) is only for mobile payments. That's not the case at all, of course, and a group of researchers at Stanford's MobiSocial lab have now thrown a few new ideas of their own onto the table after getting a pair of Nexus S phones to play with. After first making a few tweaks to overcome some of Gingerbread's limitations -- it only uses NFC for reading tags -- they were able to develop a few social-minded applications that make use of the P2P functionality possible with NFC. That includes one example that lets you share photos simply by pressing two phones together, and a second that lets two phones share an application -- collaborative whiteboard, in this case. Unfortunately, those aforementioned tweaks to Android mean you can try out the apps yourself just yet, but the researchers are hopeful that similar applications will eventually be supported by Android and other platforms. Head on past the break to check them out on video.

Continue reading Stanford researchers demo social NFC applications on the Nexus S

Stanford researchers demo social NFC applications on the Nexus S originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MSI's Windows 7-based WindPad 100W now on sale for $710

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/27/msis-windows-7-based-windpad-100w-now-on-sale-for-710/

MSI's first entry into the wild, wonderful, and oftentimes wishy-washy world of tablets is now on sale, but frankly, we aren't too sure we'd be jumping to hand over our $710 -- er, $709.95 -- for the WindPad 100W. The retailer is Simply Electronics, which just so happens to rank a few rungs below Amazon in terms of heardability-ness. At any rate, those willing to take a flying leap of faith should expect a 10.1-inch device loaded up with Windows 7 Starter, Intel's Atom Z530 1.6GHz single-core processor, 2GB of memory a 32GB SSD and a battery that'll keep things humming for around six hours. Here's hoping it'll perform better than that first wave of Win7 tablets, and you know, that you actually receive one.

MSI's Windows 7-based WindPad 100W now on sale for $710 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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