Want to make your turntable sound groovier than ever? The Audiophiliac is here to help. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-10410551-47.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Audiophiliac/a/p

There are plenty of ways to be green these days, but without some sort of feedback it’s hard to know just what shade you are. Enter Google’s PowerMeter, a service that tells you how much current you’re responsible for consuming. Why, it even shades its bar graphs in green, getting more pale the greedier you become. Google has partnerships with some utility companies in the US, Canada, and India, meaning a select few of you can do this sort of tracking by default. The rest of us were left out — until now. Two devices on the market let you track your usage in PowerMeter regardless of just how backwards your utility company is: The Energy Detective’s TED 5000 and the AlertMe Energy. We’ve been experimenting with these two for about a month now, finding that they serve the same purpose in very different ways and at very different costs. Click on through to see which one can best help you get greener.

Continue reading Powering Google’s PowerMeter: testing TED 5000 and AlertMe Energy

Powering Google’s PowerMeter: testing TED 5000 and AlertMe Energy originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From the webcast yesterday, the JooJoo (previously named Crunchpad) seemed flimsy and barely working. But now that we spent a good deal of hands on time with it, we can say that Fusion Garage executed an internet tablet quite well.

Specs

Here are some new facts I gathered from the meeting. First, the device runs a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB RAM. The guys at JooJoo said they weren’t ready to reveal specs yet, but I saw the bootup sequence—a standard BIOS setup that displayed what it was booting to—and saw the specs. Chandra, CEO of Fusion Garage, says that the demo hardware was basically the final hardware, so it’s easy to put two and two together.

As for the graphics card + CPU combination, it’s probably an Nvidia Ion chipset. They claim that it handles 1080p YouTube video fine—we only got to see a few seconds of 720p and 1080p HD YouTube video because the internet connection was acting up—so it’s probably an Ion. But the HD video we tested looked just fine on its 12-inch, 1366×768 resolution screen. Again, the Ion chipset is just an educated guess, but there are few other hardware options that can handle 1080p video smoothly, and an Atom CPU by itself (which we did see) can’t do it on its own.

There is a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a built-in webcam at 1.3 megapixels, a charging port and a USB slot. The external card slot present in the prototype isn’t going to make it to the final version, but they are thinking of making it available to put a 3G card in there in the future. No TV out/HDMI out yet, but they are thinking about that. There are built-in speakers for playing back audio without headphones, and they’re decent enough that you can actually listen to them, but you’ll want to plug them in to speakers for any kind of extended video consumption.

Performance

The tablet actually handled pretty well, with browsing web pages, transitioning between tabs (windows) and opening up new web pages working fine. There’s an accelerometer in there to detect between vertical and horizontal orientations.

The body is solid, sturdy and graced with a bright 12-inch screen. The back is curved and made of a plastic that feels nice in your hand, and the whole thing doesn’t seem too heavy to prop up on a bed or a toilet.

In short, it’s an actual web browsing tablet that you’d be perfectly fine using.

The software

The entire system is basically a gateway to your browser, which is based off WebKit, the same code that powers Safari and Google’s Chrome. It’s fast, and handles gestures (pinching to go back a level, swiping to move up and down) just fine. There are other gestures that will be included in the final build, like two finger swiping for going back and forth in history and a bookmark swipe, but we didn’t get to see that. But, you can’t zoom into text. That’s partially because the pinching is already used for going in and out of your windows into the home screen, but also partially because the screen is 12 inches. You don’t need to really zoom into text on a laptop-sized screen of 12 inches. And they also said they may make LARGER sized tablets as well, with 12 being their smallest size.

JooJoo’s keyboard looks like this, and takes up only a portion of the screen. It’s usable, but you don’t want to use it to bang out a blog post; this is mainly for consuming media.

Fusion Garage’s concept for the product is that the “internet is the application”, which means you can’t save photos or files locally and you can’t access any of the 4GB of storage to do any user level stuff. The most you can dictate is how much each internet application (e.g. Gmail or Google Wave) can have for a local cache.

It does support Flash as usual, except when you play HD Flash it’ll force you into fullscreen mode to render better/faster. And if you want to read PDFs, it’ll force you into Google’s web-based PDF doc reader. So it handles PDFs, but not “natively”.

Your home screen is composed almost entirely of icons—shortcuts—to web applications. The screen is customizable with your own applications, eventually, and has a weird feature where it displays a different color background whenever you go back to it. Fusion Garage is thinking of taking this out, or swapping it with some other feature.

As for multitasking, Fusion Garage says that they will have specific APIs available to webapps to incorporate in order to pass notifications up to the user. For example, if Twitter refreshes in another window and you’re watching a YouTube video, a popup will show and tell you you have something else going on. The APIs will be available at launch, but it’s up to websites to support them.

How good is it?

Despite its weird birth issues this past week with all the Arrington trouble, the JooJoo is surprisingly solid. You can tell Fusion Garage spent a good deal of time polishing the hardware, by the fact that they managed to include a 12-inch screen that’s decent enough to not have lousy viewing angles, plus support 1080p HD video playback.

The only trouble right now is software, which is only about 75% done. Fusion Garage plans to ship devices about 8-10 weeks after preorders, which start this friday. If FG can manage to finish the software and get it to a point where it’s transparent to the user who just wants to get online, $500 isn’t too outrageous a price to pay. Decent netbooks are around that price, and it’s about the price you’d expect Apple to charge for their tablet, if not even more. We’d of course be very happy if it were down at $300 or $400, but it’s basically a new device in a new market, and you’ll have to hand over a little extra for being an early adopter.

So right now we’re at a wait and see status. The JooJoo seems good, from our time with it, but it really needs to be taken home and thoroughly tested with different webapps, watching a lot of HD video and streaming music. At the very least, we’ll see how much of that 5-hour battery life stands up to constant use. You can pre-order it yourself this Friday, but, since there’s some legal troubles on the horizon, you probably want to wait until the whole thing clears up first before putting any money down. [JooJoo]

The joint venture between four leading publishers has issued a press release highlighting a few of the finer points of its plan to create a platform for digital magazine distribution — we guess that The New York Observer wasn’t kidding when it said that a deal between Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation, and Time Inc. was imminent. Essentially a vehicle for selling publications for just about any device (including smartphones, e-readers, and laptops), the content will be optimized for multiple operating systems and display sizes, and according Time exec John Squires, it will all be DRM-free. They’ve yet to announce a name for this beast — although we’re leaning towards Magulu (or, perhaps, the iMags Store). PR after the break.

Continue reading Magazine publishers announce joint digital distribution scheme

Magazine publishers announce joint digital distribution scheme originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The microwave oven already looks like a TV set, so why not make it act like one? That’s (almost) exactly what the CastOven does. The working prototype has an LCD screen in the door and is hooked up to a pair of speakers. When set you the timer to nuke some food, it automagically picks a clip from YouTube of around the same length and shows it to you.

The software runs on Adobe Air, and is still running on a PC, but it can’t be long until somebody shrinks it into a chip for real in-oven entertainment. We can’t help but think that this is missing the point of cutting-edge microwave technology, though. Surely the best microwave would be only just big enough to fit in the single thing that anyone ever puts in there — a cup of cold coffee.

Castoven [100kw-sgss]