Feeling the urge to splurge? Today only, I say throw financial caution to the wind and treat yourself to one of these fun (and evens somewhat practical) items. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-10422042-58.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Cheapskate/a/p
If there’s anything better than a holiday gift, it’s a late holiday gift, one that you can thank the FedEx guy for, open up and play happily with, away from the derisive stares and interruptions of family members (“Huh! Aren’t you a bit old for __?”).
So today brings extra joy for Palm Pre owners, wherever you may be, in the form of a wireless update to your phone’s firmware. V1.3.5 is somewhat sparsely detailed on Sprint’s support pages, and will bring the following goodies:
Right now, there are no details on Palm’s support pages or blog, but Sprint lists the release date as today, December 28th. When Palm’s release notes go live, we should have more information (Palm puts a lot more detail into these things). We are, though, expecting an altogether faster experience, and a removal (or at least an increase) of the arbitrary limit on storage space for applications.
Palm support [Sprint]
Palm Pre Support [Palm]
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Updated. JetBlue now says they’ve returned Live TV and entertainment to all of their flights. Wow, things change fast.
Original post. New security regulations put in place after last week’s terrorist incident aboard a Northwest Airlines jet are going to make flying into the US difficult, boring and unpleasant, at least for a little while.
First, the good news: both Virgin America and Southwest confirmed that new regulations don’t seem to affect domestic US flights. So laptops, Live TV and other distractions are still A-OK if you’re flying within the USA.
The problem comes for folks flying into the USA from elsewhere. According to rules quoted on Gizmodo, you can’t hold anything in your lap or access your carry-on bags for the last hour of a flight, and any in-flight communications equipment, including live TV and Internet, must be turned off for the entire duration of the flight. Airlines have so far interpreted this to mean that you can read an analog book, but not use a laptop during that final hour. It’s unclear whether this prohibits iPods or other gadgets that could be stored in a pocket rather than a lap.
But wait! It gets worse! JetBlue confirmed to me this morning that because they can’t unravel their Live TV system from the rest of their in-flight entertainment, they’re turning off all in-flight entertainment on flights from foreign countries into the US. That means no movies for the whole flight (although you can use your laptop, except for the final hour). They’re working on a solution to allow for movies on flights into the US, they said.
JetBlue only flies relatively short international routes, mostly to and from the Caribbean. We haven’t heard details from any longer-haul carriers who don’t have live TV integrated into their entertainment systems.
Fortunately, reliable airline analyst Chris Elliott says that several of the security bulletins involved expire on January 1, which means that this draconian regime may be short-lived.
For a full guide to the new security regulations – independent of gadgets – check out Frommers.com.
We’ve already seen that early builds of Google’s Chromium OS can be hacked onto existing machines, but those Chrome OS netbooks that the software giant has planned for next year have remained curiously elusive until now. According to both IBTimes and Netbook News, the company is in talks with a number of outfits in order to bring at least a few sub-$300 options to the market that are well suited to power through its first non-mobile operating system. For starters, we’re told that the 10.1-inch machine will be ARM-based, while NVIDIA’s Tegra platform (likely the second generation) steers the graphical ship. There’s also promise of a multitouch panel (1,280 x 720 resolution), 64GB SSD, WiFi, 2GB of RAM, integrated 3G connectivity, Bluetooth, an Ethernet jack, an undisclosed amount of USB sockets, webcam, 3.5mm audio jack, a multi-card reader, a 4- or 6-cell battery and optional GPS. Wilder still, a $200 configuration could very well pop up, and it looks as if (at least initially) Google will sell the device(s) directly through its own website — much like Fusion Garage has done with the Joojoo tablet. ‘Course, it’ll still take some arm twisting to get the low-end crowd to try anything not labeled “Windows,” but if anyone can do it, it’s the company that inexplicably kept Gmail in “beta” for over five years.
Google’s Chrome OS-based netbook specs leak out originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
As I stood in the corner of a small, cluttered optics lab at MIT, the professor flipped a switch. The room filled with an electrical buzz, and suddenly a holographic video popped out at my face.
The 3-D image was of a human rib cage, and it rotated in midair. And the holographic rib cage rattled me.
It was my first experience with a Display Of The Future, and it set me on a mission. In the subsequent years, I’ve been hunting down display prototypes, talking with experts, and visiting labs. In short, I’ve been on a quest for the perfect display.
Even though holographic video blew me away when I first saw it, I quickly composed myself. It’s simply not the sort of thing that will be commercially available any time soon.
I talked to Gregg Favalora, 3-D expert and founder of Actuality Systems, about the commercial viability of high-resolution 3-D video. His company broke resolution records with its display-a 100-million-voxel (3-D pixel) device that made images for radiologists and engineers hunting for oil reserves. The details of these 3-D images look eerily realistic, but Actuality had a heck of a time finding the right market for it.
In the end, the company only sold 30 systems at $200,000 each and it has now ceased engineering operations. And that MIT holographic video system I saw in a few years ago is still trapped in the lab. The lesson: no matter how extraordinary your technology, it’s impractical for the people unless you can efficiently manufacture it in large numbers.
At the opposite end of the price spectrum is LCD. It’s cheap as dirt thanks to the billions of dollars of factories built over the past two decades. I wanted to get a look at the way LCDs are made and try to find clues for how a more interesting or useful display-like a reflective e-reader or an OLED screen-could scale up and become cheap.
So I took a trip down to Applied Materials in Santa Clara, California, a company that supplies 90 percent of the LCD industry with manufacturing equipment. What I saw was impressive: the newest fabs are built around sheets of glass—backplanes of LCDs—that are the size of a garage door. They’re only as thick as six sheets of paper, and each one can yield eight large screen TVs.
The machines that deposit electronics on the glass are behemoths-taller than I can reach and with an area slightly larger than a garage door. In a fab, six of these machines are arrange circularly, and from above they look like a giant mechanized flower. The sheets of glass slide in like a floppy disk into a drive, and come out coated with thin film transistors.
The bigger the glass, the more displays can be pumped out of a factory, and the cheaper all sizes of LCD displays become. According to Sid Rosenblatt, the CFO of Universal Display Corporation, a big fab can make six 50-inch LCDs every three to four minutes. At that volume, how can anything else compete with LCD?
Well, instead of beating them, startup Pixel Qi decided to join them. The company’s screens are all LCD—built on the same lines and with the same materials as any other liquid crystal display—but with an additional mode in which the power-hungry backlight is off, and the display reflects ambient light.
I’ve seen Pixel Qi’s displays and visited with Mary Lou Jepsen, the startup’s founder and the former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project. Jepsen spends most of her time in Taipei, the capital of Displayland, but on a sunny day last fall, I caught her at her houseboat in Sausalito. It was the perfect time and place to try out an LCD that is most impressive in bright light.
In its reflective mode, the display is black and white, similar to a Kindle or Sony Reader except it’s faster-capable of video, albeit in monochrome. The first batch of Pixel Qi screens is scheduled to come off the line this month. Jepsen says more designs that further reduce power consumption are on the way. In one, she explains that the screen, when not needing to refresh, should be able to shut down the central processing unit(and wake it up within milliseconds when it’s in use).
As for a color reflective mode, Jepsen says it could be possible in a couple of years. The concept, which involves a particular arrangement of liquid crystals, is based on her PhD thesis, but it’s admittedly a more complex design than the first Pixel Qi screens. Her first priority, she says, is making sure that Pixel Qi can ship its first products quickly and successfully.
While Pixel Qi might be making cheap displays that are easy on the eyes and energy efficient, they can’t compare to the beauty and simplicity of OLED screens, in which each pixel emits its own light. The whites are whiter, the blacks are blacker, and the overall image is just gorgeous.
Even better, the manufacturing process is as simple as it gets. It’s layer of organic material that can be printed between two layers of electrodes. This means that OLED displays have the potential to fold, roll, and be built over large areas.
Concepts I’ve seen: a paper-thin, flexible display slammed by a hammer without breaking, a display that’s see-through when the power’s off, and large area OLED coating that act as a window, a wall, or a display, depending on its mode.
In terms of touch, I’m keeping an eye on a new type of technology that’s being integrated into the electronic foundation of OLED displays and LCDs too. It’s called in-cell technology, and there are a number of variants, but one type incorporates photodetectors into the pixels of a screen. It’s ideal for OLED displays, because it can be added without adding thickness, allowing them to maintain their sleek good looks.
If there were ever a perfect display, OLED is it.
In a conversation with Vladimir Bulovic, a professor at MIT (and star of the famous light-emitting pickle video) we waxed poetic on the possibilities of OLEDs. Bulovic believes that it’s only a matter of time before OLEDs take their rightful place at the head of the display industry. The reason we have to wait is simply bad timing. “If back in the 1970s, we had OLEDs, no one would even know what an LCD is today,” he said.
The widely understood problem with OLED displays, however, is that the technology doesn’t exist to mass manufacture them on large sheets of glass like those I saw at Applied Material. Therefore, their beauty is relegated to smaller screens like cell phone displays, Sony’s 11-inch (expensive) TV, and concept demos.
Engineers are working on the problem, of course. Bulovic told me about a former student of his, named Conor Madigan, who has an OLED-printing startup in Menlo Park called Kateeva. I got a hold of Madigan who said his company, which uses a hybrid approach to printing large-scale OLED display, is well funded (even in these difficult economic times) and the display industry is really starting to push large-scale OLED technology.
While it’s true that big display makers are promising big OLED screens in the next couple of years, I’m not holding my breath. Even when the technology for printing large-scale OLED displays arrives, it will still take significant investments to scale up manufacturing. It’s difficult for companies to justify investing too much money in OLED displays while LCD sales are still doing well and continue to get cheaper. Besides, these large-screen OLEDs will still be made on glass, just like LCD, which keeps things rigid, fragile, and heavy.
In order to have a light, flexible, rugged OLED display, it’s obvious that display makers must go with plastic instead of glass. Plastic Logic, is promising the world’s first plastic-backed screens with printed organic transistors, by early next year.
I’ve handled a proto-version of Que, Plastic Logic’s e-reader, at the company’s Mountain View headquarters and was impressed by the form factor. While it’s still rigid, it’s light as a thin stack of papers. And because it’s made of plastic, it’s robust. I felt like flinging it across the boardroom where I sat with the head of marketing and a public relations handler. I didn’t.
Here’s the bad news for Plastic Logic: it all comes back to scalability. At the recent Printed Electronics conference in San Jose, I had lunchtime conversations with people who just shake their head at Plastic Logic’s challenges. A number of them expressed skepticism that the manufacturing process could scale.
Printed organic transistors currently can’t compete in speed with amorphous silicon transistors used in LCDs and OLED displays. And the company’s printing technology is done in a single fab in Dresden, which could make it difficult to produce the e-reader in large volume. In other words, it won’t be cheap or widespread, at least in the near future.
However, the folks at HP Labs think they have a scalable way to make plastic-backed displays with fast silicon transistors. On a recent tour of HP Labs I saw the proof: sheets of plastic, tens of meters long, are rolled onto tubes and are loaded and locked into a system that imprints silicon transistors onto the material.
Carl Taussig, the director of HP’s information surfaces lab, walked me through the process of the so-called Self Aligned Imprint Lithography. Plastic, with a shiny coating, spins on a series of cylinders, where it is exposed to chemicals, ultra-violet light, etching solutions, and ionized gasses. The roll-to-roll setups are compact, and they don’t require clean-room level purity that other display processes do.
Taussig, who is also responsible for inventing the DVD-RW, showed me prototypes, built with HP’s silicon-on-plastic transistors. One of these plastic backplanes controlled an E Ink display. Some of the pixels that were supposed to be black appeared gray, but these prototypes help the researchers find the problems in the roll-to-roll process. If they see a blown-out pixel, they retrace their steps to find where in the process the problem arose.
In another demonstration, I saw a new type of reflective display developed at HP that was about the size of a smart phone screen. It has color and video and is one of the best-looking reflective screen I’ve seen. Technical details were sparse (they will come out early next year), but Taussig told me that part of the trick is to make a pixel out of three layers of color dyes that take incoming white light and reflect specific colors of it back at you, something like the way that butterfly wings reflect light.
While Taussig doesn’t think roll-to-roll will replace LCD processes anytime soon, he hopes it can help plastic become the foundation for reflective displays as well as emissive displays like those made of OLEDs. HP has licensed its roll-to-roll technology to PowerFilm, a thin film solar manufacturer. And recently, PowerFilm’s subsidiary Phicot has started to commercially developing the process for electronics. The first products will be displays for soldiers that may be integrated into clothing or wrap around their arms.
Combining HP’s roll-to-roll manufacturing with OLEDs and a reflective reading technology is the closest thing to the perfect display that I’ve seen. So I ask Taussig how long it’s going to take to make the process reliable. He’s optimistic that Phicot can iron out the problems soon. “To be successful we need to roll this out within two years,” he says, since the first plastic displays will hit the market in 2010.
In talking with Taussig, it’s clear to me that even though he’s a researcher, he’s focused on making plastic displays practical. He knows the only way to do that is with solid, cost-effective manufacturing. Once the manufacturing problems are solved, he says, plastic displays become inevitable. “My grandkids will never believe that we made displays with glass,” he says. “Everything will be on plastic.”
I can’t wait. The perfect screen will be lightweight, energy-efficient, and able to take various forms—flexible, transparent, and with touch or some other form of gesture recognition. I want colors so vibrant that images look real enough to grab. Still, I want to read on it without feeling like I’m staring at a flashlight. And it’s got to be cheap.
So far, the displays I’ve seen come close. And while nothing yet gets it all right, there are some up-and-coming technologies-and, crucially, emerging manufacturing processes-that give me confidence that the perfect display is on the way.
Kate Greene spends most of her day staring at the screens of her MacBook Pro and iPhone. She became a journalist by way of physics, where she worked in a basement lab with lasers and a lot of liquid nitrogen. Currently, she writes for publications like The Economist and Technology Review and goes on display hunts for Gizmodo. She can be found on the Internet at kategreene.net and on twitter
Pedal Brain is a kind of Nike+ for cyclists, an iPhone accessory and application that, despite looking quite excellent, could possibly nickel and dime itself out of existence.
Pedal brain comes in three parts: a handlebar-mounted iPhone (or iPod Touch) case (called the Pedal Brain Synapse), an iPhone application and a web-app. The case (plastic initially, with a carbon-fiber version to follow) communicates with your bike monitoring devices using the ANT+ wireless protocol, a standard utilized by power-meters, heart-rate monitors and speed and cadence sensors. This is the first deviation from the successful Nike+ model, which comes with its own sensor.
This requirement for expensive accessories might explain the price of the unit, which will go for between $130 and $200, and more for the carbon fiber case. This is in addition to a (undecided) monthly fee you’ll have to pay if you want to keep your data for more than a week. It’s true that amateur cyclists like to waste money on their hobby, especially on training kit they don’t need, so this could be a hit. And let’s face it, nobody will buy the plastic version. Anyone who has a power-meter will already be a carbon freak.
The app pulls together all of the information available and collates it into pretty graphs, which are shared in real-time with the web (iPhone-only) as they are recorded. An interesting twist is the coaching function, which lets cycling trainers submit coaching plans to which riders can subscribe. The prices of these are determined by the coach, and Pedal Brain adds $4-a-month on top.
The whole kit-n-caboodle should be available in March, ready for wussy, winter-shy cyclists.
Pedal Brain site [Pedal Brain via the Giz]
See Also:
Considering the present date, it’s no longer a mystery that Fermi won’t be seeing the glaring lights of store shelves this year, but now DigiTimes reports that the delay might be even longer than feared. Sources from within board manufacturers have been informed by NVIDIA that the launch of the 40nm GPU will be pushed back to March 2010. Though NVIDIA’s flagship DirectX 11 card has yet to get out of the starting blocks, ATI — already the proud papa of a litter of DX 11 parts — is said to be preparing a renewed onslaught on the mainstream market with two new releases slated for late January or early February. The HD 5670 (Redwood) and HD 5450 (Cedar) will slot in alongside the unannounced HD 5570 and HD 5350 to flesh out the lower and middle portions of ATI’s Evergreen refresh. So that’s one whole family of DirectX 11 parts from ATI, and one long wait from NVIDIA.
NVIDIA Fermi pushed back to March, ATI prepping midrange refresh for early Q1? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 07:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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While the empty space behind my apartment’s walls is filled with the bodies of dead cheerleaders*, it’s likely that the space beyond your drywall is going to waste. So why not hook up some of Meysam Movahedi’s splendid Rambler Sockets and put that void to use?
The sockets eliminate cable clutter by putting an extension cord in the wall itself (too bad if you have an old stone-walled house). Squeeze the little ears to release the socket’s core and out it comes, trailing a snaky 1.5 meters (5-feet) of cable behind it.
When you’re done, you just give it a little tug and the spring-loaded mechanism within winds it back into the bulkhead, just like the cord in a vacuum cleaner. You want to buy one right now, huh? Sorry. The home electrics industry still hates you, and is determined that none of the wonderful innovations we bring you on these pages will make it to market. That’s our long-winded way of saying that this remains, for now, a concept design.
*Joke.
Recoiling Socket In The Wall [Yanko]
See Also:
The slow steady drip of details from the yet to be announced Nexus One continues today with a pair of accessories for the HTC / Google mashup. Above we’ve got a wireframe of the portrait-mode Desktop Dock to be known as model CR B410. What’s unusual here is the inclusion of Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR in the dock when the Nexus One is already Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR capable. After all, we’ve heard that the handset includes a docking connector at its base so what additional functionality would the second Bluetooth radio provide? That mystery aside, the FCC test report also shows a configuration where the dock is tethered via an AV-jack to a DVD player to help pull your multimedia off the slate and into the living room. We’ve also grabbed a shot of the Nexus One navigating inside a car with the help of a dashboard clip mount — check it after the break along side another FCC pic.
[Thanks, elli8ness]
Continue reading Nexus One Bluetooth desktop dock clears the FCC, car clip spotted in the wilds
Nexus One Bluetooth desktop dock clears the FCC, car clip spotted in the wilds originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Happy Christmas. I got a coffee pot. You? If you got a book, it’s likely that it wasn’t made of paper. The succinct title of this Amazon press release tells the whole story: “On Christmas Day, for the First Time Ever, Customers Purchased More Kindle Books Than Physical Books.”
According to the release, “Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon’s history.” Amazon still refuses to break out actual Kindle sales figures, but the following snippet shows you just how good a holiday season Amazon had: “On Amazon’s peak day, December 14, 2009, customers ordered over 9.5 million items worldwide.” That’s a number that would bring most servers to their knees, let alone physical delivery fulfillment systems.
Let’s make sure we read those figures right, though. “On Christmas Day customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.” Considering that many people received Kindle’s for Christmas, it is likely that they then bought books (it is rather too easy to do). How many people, in comparison, were ordering physical books on Christmas Day?
What this still means is that e-books are now mainstream. The Kindle has its flaws, and it is certainly nothing like the devices we will use to read books in the future, but for now it has that critical combination of brand awareness, catalog and full integration. This, if you remember, is how Apple’s iPod killed the competition nearly ten years ago, with another small white box sporting a monochrome display. It took the iPod and iTunes many years to become the number one music retailer in the US. The Kindle has overtaken the competition (Amazon) in just two years.
And we recommend following the link. Amazon really knows how to write an interesting press release.
Amazon Kindle is the Most Gifted Item Ever on Amazon.com [Amazon]
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