After yesterday’s launch cancellation, Ares I-X—the biggest US rocket since the Saturn V—has launched successfully. In case you missed it, here is the video of the whole launch, including the separation of its upper stage. Godspeed, Ares I-X!
Oh wait, you just died—as planned. Oh my, the fact that you were alive just seconds ago.
The Motorola Droid. Not to mix droid metaphors here, but I feel like it’s the phone Darth Vader would use. And after a couple of minutes using it, I’m still excited about it. Updated with fresh impressions, photos and video.
It’s heavy. And the construction makes it feel like one of the substantial phones I’ve used in a while. It’s not like anything you’ve got in your pocket. The way the screen—the best one on an Android phone yet—ponderously slides up, using only the manual power of your thumb, without the spring assistance our weak fingers are used to, adds to that feeling of weight. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like a fatass. While it has a thickness inherent to all sliders, it’s not unpleasantly plump. It works with the rest of the phone.
There’s also something weirdly refreshing about such a straightforwardly utilitarian design. There’s nothing here that’s trying to be sexy. Or particularly clean. There’s all kinds of lines and marks and bumps and details. It’s a strange kind of retro, with the black and the gold accent. It’s, well, Imperial.
The 3.7-inch display, packed with pixels, looks simply amazing. Text is ridiculously crisp, thanks to a 854×480 resolution that makes for 267ppi. Seriously, looking at my inbox is kinda making me drool. (The iPhone is 163ppi.) Besides clarity, touch response seems dead on. The keyboard works way better than it looks. It appears flat, but there’s a slight bump to every key that, combined with the soft rubber texture, just works. It’s way better than the Palm Pre keyboard. The d-pad, I don’t think anybody would miss it if it was gone. The touch sensitive keys on the front, I sorta wish were real buttons. (Seriously, what’s the point, except to save space?)
I think it’s my favorite piece of Android hardware yet, at least until I see the battery life.
The Droid’s running a basically stock build of Android 2.0. You’ll be able to download Verizon apps later from a special channel in the Android Market, but you get a totally unpolluted phone out of the box.
It’s faster, in almost every way possible. (This in part, is thanks to the Droid’s ARM Cortex A8 processor, the same kind in the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre.) Apps open quicker, transitions are instant and smooth, scrolling rarely drags in the browser or maps.
Android’s grown up. The icons have been redesigned—they’re cleaner, more serious, less cartoony. Contacts, as you’ve seen, improved, with Facebook integration and a new feature called Quick Contact, that lets you ping somebody however you want to. Facebook contact stuff works better than the Pre (which gives you all or nothing options) or the Hero (where you have to manually link each contact), with the option to bring in all of your Facebook contacts, just the people that are also in your Google contacts, or manual linkage.
The cool bedside interface, that turns the Droid into an alarm clock with weather and stuff when you plug into the dock, is apparently something that’s just between Motorola and Google, so we might not see it on other Android 2.0 phones. The dashboard interface, that comes up automatically when it’s plugged into the car dock, can also be accessed via the Car Home app, and it gives you quick access to contacts, navigation, voice search, search and maps.
Voice is a much bigger part of Android 2.0—holding down the search button for a second engages voice commands for search, navigation (just say “navigate”) and other features. Speaking of navigation, Brian has a lot more here on Google’s new turn-by-turn service with data layers. It might be the single most significant upgrade in Android 2.0, actually. One thing that’s not upgraded? The onscreen keyboard. It’s still sorta crummy.
Universal search—thank god. It’s amazing to me that the phone OS from the search company fell behind Palm and Apple on this. It’s here now, and it can search your contacts, browser history and bookmarks, contacts, apps, your music and YouTube. (Why you have to separately search SMS and email, I don’t know.)
The browser, besides being simply faster and working better, has a slightly refreshed UI—multiple windows are managed via a simple text list, for instance. Some of the other benefits, like HTML5 support, are obviously a little hard to easily quantify.
We’ll have more for you over the next few days, but for now, just know that yes, it’s okay to be excited about this. It may very well be the Droid we were looking for.
If Howard Hughes hadn’t shuffled off this Earth in a pair of tissue-box shoes 33 years ago, this is doubtless the keyboard the notorious OCD sufferer would be using.
It is, according to the maker Vioguard, the world’s first self-sanitizing keyboard. Rather than wait for you filthy shaved monkeys to get around to cleaning it, the keyboard automatically retracts into its own motorized home and is therein bathed in glorious, cleansing UV light, which will kill a satisfying 99% of germs (although it will do nothing for the cookie-crumbs languishing inside).
How much is this wonderful, sanitary machine? A mere $900, which will pay itself back in un-bought hand-sanitizer in just a few thousand years.
Product page [Vioguard via SlipperyBrick]
We knew good and well this thing was coming sometime in November, and now Verizon Wireless has made it official: the Motorola DROID will hit Big Red on November 6th for $199 on contract (after a $100 mail-in rebate). Naturally, the DROID itself is just the first of what could be many Android-laced phones coming to the carrier, and Verizon Wireless CMO John Stratton even stated that the phone “is wide open” — pretty big words from a company like VZW. Android 2.0 will be front and center, along with Visual Voicemail, a 3.7-inch display (854 x 480 resolution), 5 megapixel camera (with dual-LED flash), a bundled 16GB memory card and a beta version of Google Maps Navigation(!). For those wondering, yeah — the DROID is the first phone to offer that, which transforms Google Maps into a turn-by-turn routing system that’ll have your dedicated TomTom / Garmin trembling in fear. There’s also a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 3G, WiFi, voice-activated search and over-the-air Amazon MP3 downloads. With all that, who needs the iPhone, right Ivan?
Update: Check on our in-depth hands-on coverage on the DROID, Google Maps Navigation and the accessory dock!
Gallery: Verizon Wireless’ DROID by Motorola
Continue reading Motorola DROID official on Verizon: $199 on contract, coming November 6th (video)
Filed under: Cellphones
Motorola DROID official on Verizon: $199 on contract, coming November 6th (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Garmin’s first foray into smartphones–almost two years in the making–could very well be its last, if the hugely disappointing Garmin nuvifone G60 is any indication.
Despite the fact that it doesn’t do many of the things people expect smartphones to do–like record or play video, support MMS or instant messaging, stream music, run mobile TV, play games, or run any apps whatsoever–Garmin and AT&T are calling it a smartphone *and* charging $300 up front for it. That’s $200 more than the iPhone 3G for those keeping track at home.
That said, it’s an excellent GPS device, and it *does* make calls and take pictures. If that’s enough for you–and it shouldn’t be–Amazon is now discounting the G60 to $100 with a two-year contract, just days after the thing hit the market, as Engadget reports. I’d still buy the iPhone 3G in a split second. But hey, at least the price is semi-palatable now.
NEW YORK–Verizon Wireless customers will soon be able to get their hands on the much anticipated Google Android phone called the Droid.
The companies officially unveiled the device at an event here. Like most smartphones of its class, the phone will cost $199 with a two-year contract. And it will be available to consumers starting November 6. Customers can pre-order the device now.
The Motorola Droid
(Credit:
Motorola)
The device offers voice-activated search that allows users to speak a query and the Google-powered search engine will deliver Web results or results from the device such as contacts, music, and photos. The voice search also works with the new turn-by-turn directions for Google Maps. It allows users to view geographic information, such as My Maps, Wikipedia entries, and transit lines on the map.
John Stratton, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Verizon Wireless, said he had used the navigation service just yesterday on a trip to Arkansas. He said he simply spoke “gas station” into the phone and it quickly found nearby gas stations. When he clicked on one of them, it activated the turn-by-turn directions and he was given spoken directions right from the phone.
While the new Droid is loaded with lots of cool Android apps and has access to the more than 10,000 applications available in the Android Market, it does not have many of Verizon’s branded services. For example, Verizon’s VCast music service is missing in this version. But Stratton said that will be added eventually. And the phone does not have Verizon’s VZ Navigator, since it comes bundled with the Google Android navigation.
The good news is that some of the services, such as navigation that Verizon charges for on devices running VZNavigator, will be free to users of the Droid.
In terms of the specifications, they are exactly what had been expected thanks to multiple leaks about the product. …
Originally posted at Signal Strength
Finding it difficult to be happy with the current state of the world? Boy have we got the hat for you. The Happiness Hat takes a Pavlovian-style approach toward smiling, driving a metal spike into its wearer’s head should he or she make the mistake of frowning.
The hat’s designer Lauren McCarthy describes the function of the Orwellian device thusly,
An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.
The knitted cap seems to be little more than an art project at present, but heck, it made us smile.
Researchers figured out how to simulate a miniature black hole in a lab–though fortunately for us, it’s not going to eat the Earth, as Space.com reports.
“The device we created is not a real black hole, but only a device to mimic the black-hole effect,” said researcher Tie Jun Cui, a professor at Southeast University in China, in the article. “Actually, the device can trap and absorb the electromagnetic waves which hit the device. Hence we call it as the Electromagnetic Black Hole.” Essentially, the pseudo black hole sucks in light, but not mass.
The team “built the black hole” (I love my job) out of circuit board, by linking 60 concentric circular layers etched with copper patterns, the report said. In turn, the patterns interact with electromagnetic waves. That means the device, as a result, absorbs any incoming light that’s in the microwave range of the spectrum–but not any mass. (Image credit: Cheng/Cui/Arxiv)
You bought one of Amazon’s International Kindles and now you regret it. Not only can you not access the web (apart from Wikipedia) but you can’t even buy from Amazon’s full range of Kindle books. Worse, your local newspaper probably isn’t listed, and if it is, it comes without pictures. And if you want to read your favorite blogs, you’re completely out of luck: Not even the for-pay option is available to you.
Fear not, poor non-U.S. buyer, because we’re here to help. Here’s how you can un-cripple your International Kindle.
First, you’ll need sources for your books and other content. Thankfully, there is an internet, and while nobody but Amazon will sell you DRMed content that works on a Kindle, plenty of alternatives exist. Google books and the Gutenberg Project you know already — these are great if you like Jane Austen and they’re free.
But if you want newer titles, things are more troublesome. E-books are currently mired in the same foolish protection schemes as music was a few years back. The answer is, sadly, piracy, and while we don’t recommend it, Google or the ancient but still very active usenet is all you need to track down almost any title.
And then there is free content. Many newspapers publish everything online, and there are some great long-form blogs suited to e-books. There is also Instapaper, the beloved “read-later” service that clips and reformats web pages for, well, reading later. Instapaper has a little-known beta service that will mail clipped articles to your Kindle, stripped of junk and nicely formatted, once a week. You’ll have to pay Amazon’s data charges, but as these are text files they’re rather small, so it won’t cost much. It is also the best way to make your own, custom newspaper.
So, you have a lot of legally acquired but poorly formatted books, along with the addresses of your favorite blogs and newspapers. How do you get all that onto the Kindle?
Calibre is a clunky piece of software with looks only a mother could love. It is also very powerful, kind of like an iTunes for e-books, and runs on OS X, Windows and Linux.
The first trick is file-conversion. Amazon’s own service works well enough, but you have to mail in the files and wait to get them back. It also has trouble with complex documents.
Calibre can crunch pretty much everything into a format your Kindle can read. It’ll rescue hideously formatted text files, adding paragraph and page breaks where none could be seen before, and it will even squish pictures down to a smaller size. For most people, the presets will be enough, but you can dig in and get your hands dirty with regular expressions and advanced options.
And once you’re done, you can retrieve cover art and metadata from the internet and add keywords for easy sorting. Is this starting to sound familiar?
From there, you can send books direct to the Kindle (or other reading device — most are supported) and even delete old ones. It really is like iTunes for books.
Calibre’s best trick, though, is its Fetch News feature. This works just like podcasting, only it’s for text (and pictures). Choose from a built-in list of newspapers and magazines (Wired.com is in there) and it will scrape the site at scheduled intervals and crunch the articles into an e-reader-friendly form. When you plug your Kindle into the computer, Calibre sees it and automagically sends the new issues across. They’re formatted just like the newspapers you might buy from Amazon.
Dig a little further and you can add custom sources. Plug in the URL of a newsfeed, choose persistence and schedules and you’re good to go. Calibre will grab any new items and package them up into an e-newspaper for you. It can even grab your feeds from Google Reader or Instapaper (and it does a better job that Instapaper’s own solution).
It’s far from polished, and under the hood the Python scripts which go out and do the dirty work sometimes cause your computer’s fans to spin up like leaf-blowers, but it works, and it is almost ridiculously powerful. It is also free and open source, and exactly the kind of thing we will likely never see from the likes of Amazon, Sony or Apple because of licensing restrictions.
For the small inconvenience of plugging your e-reader in every morning, you can turn it into what it should have been all along: The all-media reading device found in a million sci-fi novels.
Product page [Calibre]
Product page [Instapaper]
Instapaper on Kindle [Instapaper Blog]
See Also:
At the Verizon Motorola Droid product release event this morning, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said Motorola was committing to releasing more than 20 smartphones in 2010. He first used the phrase “multiple tens,” but then when asked for clarification, agreed to at least 20.
The Motorola Droid, announced today, is the first Android 2.0 smartphone.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
