Hasta La Gadget!

We can see it now: the four former members of ‘N Sync (minus Justin Timberlake) showing up in an HP-inspired television spot, their heads cut off from the frame while they individually sing about what how each of their MIDs knows them personally and proceed to show what they can do in a array of spectacle and CG. Suddenly, they all hold their devices next to each other in a two-by-two grid pattern and the four screens become one as their voices, too, join in harmony — which is exactly what Intel touts its newly-developed multi-client display linking can do. Except for the harmony part, that’s all ‘N Sync. In a word? Beautiful. It’s all part of Intel’s MID-centric “Carry Small, Live Large” initiative. We’re not taking bets on whether or not this feature will make a cameo in its upcoming joint venture with LG or any device in the foreseeable future, but it’s definitely something’s that piqued our interest.

Filed under: Displays, Laptops, Tablet PCs

Intel develops multi-computer display linking, the commercial writes itself originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Someday someone somewhere somehow will invent a pair of noise canceling headphones that do three things: 1. Deliver top quality audio. 2.) Cut out ambient noise perfectly. 3.) Cost under a hundred bucks. Senior editor Dylan Tweney just reviewed a set of cans that fall far short of this trifecta. From his review:

To their credit these bulbous cans do a good job of silencing the
traffic hum from the street below the WIRED offices, and they nicely
muffle the gnashing of teeth in the newsroom around me.

But sonically, they’re about as satisfying as a week-old rice cake.
The sound feels clipped and flat: High-end frequencies that hum
crystal-clear in better headphones are missing or muffled in the Plane
Quiets. Stereo separation is not as sharply defined as I’d like, and
the overall sound feels only like it’s half alive.

$100 • outsidetheboxgroup.com

Read the whole Plane Quiet Platinum Headphone review here.
 

 

An auto-engineering company from Germany has built a prototype car that uses OLED displays on its front and back windshields, the better to communicate with surrounding vehicles. 

EDAG’s ‘Light Car – Open Source’ car is based on the same principle used by phone manufacturers when replacing the physical buttons of their UI. That is, a display can have easily customizable inputs and can increase the surface area for dynamic media. In the case of the Light Car, the OLED screen can display road conditions and, when you tap on the brake or stop, a giant ‘stop’ sign will appear in the back windshield and warn the car behind.

In this first design, the glass panel OLED displays in the front of the car outline, or enhance, the area where the LED headlights blast out. In the back, a transparent tailgate is built on top of the OLED screen, as can be seen in the pictures below.

EDAG’s big idea is that in the process of buying a car similar to this one, you could configure the shape of your headlights, so that the OLED effects can be created accordingly around it, on a computer. So if you’re a big S.F. Giants baseball fan and you’re heading to the Park to watch Barry Zito play, for example, you could plug in little digital dollar signs surrounding the headlights. Or not. That might be too cruel and distracting to drivers.

Apparently, EDAG does not intend to make the LC-OS. They want to sell or share the technology to big car manufacturers so they can be put in the streets faster, hopefully within the next two or three years.

It’s true that if you’re a careful driver, adding OLED displays  shouldn’t make that much a of a difference. After all, we’ve adapted to look for two fading red lights in the back of cars for years.

But this could help out people who don’t see as well. In other words, people who shouldn’t be driving in the first place.

HTC Topa100 may be the HTC Touch Diamond 2

(Credit: FCC)

When we saw that HTC passed something through the FCC this week, we didn’t really know what it was. The model number was “TOPA100”, which doesn’t sound too familiar. That is, until we saw this post from …

Samsung has already offered up plenty of press shots of its new NX Series “hybrid” camera, but we’re guessing most folks are still a bit more interested in some up-close, unpolished shots of the not-quite-compact, even if it is being kept just out of the reach of the teeming masses at PMA. In case this one slipped past your radar, the big news here is the camera’s use of an APS-C sized image sensor, which is normally only found on full-size DSLRs, and should result in some better than usual shots from a camera this size. Better still, that means you’ll also still be able to attach at least a few different lenses to the camera, which you can catch a glimpse of by hitting up the links below.

Read – Pocket-lint, “PHOTOS: Samsung NX digital camera”
Read – Photography Bay, “Samsung NX Series – A Closer Look”

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Samsung NX Series camera gets the hands-off treatment originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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