Maine Lawmaker Wants Cancer Warning on Cell Phones

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The debate over whether cell phone radiation causes cancer has been raging for years, but most experts agree that there is simply not enough data to determine whether the mobile devices pose a health risk. Nonetheless, a Maine legislator is reportedly prepping a bill that would require cell phones in the state to carry warnings that they may cause brain cancer.

Rep. Andrea Boland, a Democrat, said that many studies point to a connection between cell phones and brain cancer, and she will introduce her bill during the 2010 session, AP reports.

Boland said she has a cell phone, but that she uses speaker phone and leaves it off unless she is expecting a call. Her warning would discuss possible electromagnetic radiation from cell phones, and recommend that children and pregnant women keep the devices away from their head and body.

Nook 1.1 doesn’t affect hacks, root still possible

The NookDevs team hasn’t wasted any time poring over the recently-released Nook 1.1 update, and there’s good news: 1.1 can still be rooted, and rooted 1.0 devices will stay that way after the update. In other news, nookdevs team member robbiet480 just sat down with Nookaholic for an interview, and he dished a few tidbits: the Nook’s Android build is called “Bravo,” the internal WiFi had to be tweaked to stop turning itself off every three hours, and Bravo itself is basically Android 1.5. Nothing major, but we’re definitely getting the feeling the Nook is going to be leading a double life as both a mom-friendly ebook reader and a happy-hacker hardware playground from here on out, you know?

[Thanks, Cameron]

Nook 1.1 doesn’t affect hacks, root still possible originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Musical liquor cabinet puts your vices in stereo

Each of several compartments is outfitted with a switch, so that when you remove a bottle, the Swig Jig lights up and plays a song.

Our 2009 12-City 3G Data Mega Test: AT&T Won

Given carrier reputation and our own iPhone call drops, we were pretty surprised to discover, through careful testing in 12 markets, that AT&T’s has pretty consistently the fastest 3G network nationwide, followed closely—in downloads at least—by Verizon Wireless.

Let’s get this straight right away: We didn’t test dropped voice calls, we didn’t test customer service, and we didn’t test map coverage by wandering around in the boonies. We tested the ability of the networks to deliver 3G data in and around cities, including both concrete canyons and picket-fenced ‘burbs. And while every 3G network gave us troubles on occasion, AT&T’s wasn’t measurably more or less reliable than Verizon’s.

It was measurably faster, however, download-wise, in 6 of the 12 markets where we tested, and held a significantly higher national average than the other carriers. Only Verizon came close, winning 4 of the 12 markets. For downloads, AT&T and Verizon came in first or second in nine markets, and in whatever location we tested, both AT&T and Verizon 3G were consistently present. If you’re wondering about upload speeds, AT&T swept the contest, winning 12 for 12.

The Cities

Last year, we did an 8-city coast-to-coast test, and called Sprint the big winner. This year, we have results from 11 cities coast-to-coast, and even got to test (during what was otherwise vacation time) on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Also, unlike last year, we were able to test T-Mobile’s new 3G network, active in all the markets we visited (except, at the time, Maui). For being such a latecomer, T-Mo did well, and the numbers show even more promise from them.

We tried to spread the love around this year, geographically, hitting cities we didn’t get to last year (at the cost of losing a few from ’08). Besides Maui, we hit Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco/Bay Area and Tampa.

The Methodology

Our testing regimen was based on the same scheme as last year: We picked five locations in each city, including at least one “downtown” location that was considered a suburb. The selections were arbitrary, or fixed but logical—landmarks, residences, etc. (Note: Due to timing constraints, Chicago and Maui only had three test locations.)

Our hardware consisted of two identical stripped-down Acer Timeline laptops running Windows Vista, and four 3G wireless modems requested from the carriers. We allowed them to make the choice of hardware, simply asking for their “best performing” model. Once up and running, here are the tests we ran:

• Bandwidth & Latency: Speedtest.net – Reports upload and download bandwidth in megabits per second, as well as ping latency in milliseconds. We performed this test five times at each location on each modem.

• Pageload: Hubble images at Wikimedia – A 4.42MB web page with 200 4KB thumbnails, it was fully reloaded three times, and timed using the Firefox plug-in YSlow. The three time readings were averaged.

• Download: Wikimedia’s Abell 2667 galaxy cluster photo – This single 7.48MB JPEG is a clear test of how fast you can download stuff from the cloud, and again, we hard refreshed this file three times, and measured time using YSlow for an accurate human-error-free reading.

This was a test of 3G performance. Even though Sprint and its tech partner Clearwire have intrepidly released 4G networks in half of the tested markets—Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Maui, Portland and Seattle—we only tested Sprint’s 3G network. The reason should be obvious: While we performed the test with laptop cards on PCs, it’s supposed to serve as a test of the network’s ability to deliver service to all devices, including smartphones, dumbphones and laptops. Show us a Palm Pre WiMax edition—better yet, sell 100,000 of them—and then we’ll switch it up. And while you may argue that this 3G test still doesn’t adequately reflect your experience with your iPhone, at least it’s the same network, and may serve to rule out AT&T’s data pipe as the independent cause for all those infamous dropped calls.

(On a side note, when multiple carriers release 4G networks, we’ll definitely conduct a comparative test of them all, using new parameters, and focused around laptop use.)

The Results

Now that you know how we ran the test, here are the top finishers in each market, plus some pretty bar graphs showing you how bandwidth compares.

Though we tested for uploads and downloads, we focused our additional tests on the downstream, as it’s the more important direction, in the minds of most consumers and most carriers. The anomaly there is AT&T, which has dramatically good upload bandwidth, even when its download bandwidth doesn’t keep up. Fast uploads are a priority for AT&T, and will soon be for T-Mobile, which recently turned on faster uploading in NYC, which you can see in our test results. Meanwhile, although Verizon technically came in second in uploads as well as downloads, it doesn’t seem to treat this as a major priority.

When it came to downloads, though, the competition was markedly stiffer:

Atlanta – AT&T, followed by Verizon
Bay Area/San Francisco – AT&T, followed by Verizon
Chicago – AT&T, followed by Verizon then Sprint
Denver – AT&T, followed by Verizon
Las Vegas – Verizon, followed by AT&T
Los Angeles – AT&T, followed by Sprint
Maui – Verizon, followed by AT&T
New York – AT&T, followed by T-Mobile
Phoenix – Verizon, followed by T-Mobile
Portland – T-Mobile, followed by Verizon
Seattle – Verizon, followed by T-Mobile
Tampa – Sprint, followed by AT&T

Is That The End?

No. We’ve compiled the following gallery with all the data from each test location in the 12 markets, so you can see on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level who won what. This also includes latency, pageload and download numbers, so you can track the performance in several ways. (The data above is bandwidth, though as you’ll see, that was generally representative of the overall performance. If a carrier was tops in bandwidth, it was usually tops in download time.) These tests are all just “snapshots in time,” as the carriers like to say, so feel free to bitch about where your experience doesn’t reflect our results. We stand by them, but acknowledge that network performance is changing all the time, and experiences very regular hiccups.

Regarding latency, you’ll notice it didn’t appear to affect actual user experience—3G isn’t really up for Modern Warfare 2, if that’s what you’re thinking—we will gladly show you latency averages, as well as pageload and file download averages, broken out for every market on the test.

Special thanks to all of the excellent testers we enlisted, Mark Wilson, Chris Mascari, John Herrman, Kyle VanHemert, Dan Nosowitz, Matt Buchanan and Rosa Golijan from our own team, along with Tamara Chadima and the indefatigable Dennis Tarwood. You guys were troopers, and I’m pretty sure FedEx either loves you or hates you. Thanks to John Mahoney for helping develop the initial tests that we’ve continually refined, to Chris Jacob for mapping all the locations, and to Don Nguyen for the mad number crunching—you truly are a spreadsheet pimp.

Note: Some of you may have noticed that San Diego is among the cities highlighted on the top illustration—and that Maui is not. The reason is that while we did testing in three great San Diego locations, one of the locations didn’t get any Sprint or T-Mobile service, and the already fairly thin dataset was rendered too compromised for any kind of usable report. As for Maui’s absence, Maui’s just too far out in the Pacific to make for a pretty map shot.

Barnes Noble Improves Nook With Firmware Update

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Barnes & Noble has rolled out the first firmware update for its Nook e-book reader that includes performance updates in areas such as page turning of e-books and formatting of downloaded books.

The $260 Nook, which started shipping earlier this month, was criticized for its slow refresh rate as users flipped pages and for a software interface that didn’t entirely seem ready, as Wired.com pointed out in its Nook review.

The firmware update 1.1.0 attempts to fix some of these problems. The update improves the start-up time for features such as ‘My Library’ on the device. It also ensures that the device displays the correct time on its status bar, has better page numbering for books and removes some formatting-related issues.

Meanwhile, some users have ‘rooted’ the Nook or hacked the device’s firmware to gain system level access. This allows them to run on the Nook apps such as Pandora, a browser and other programs that Barnes & Noble does not support officially.

The latest firmware update does not lock the rooted Nooks, says nookDevs, a group that has created a wiki and an online forum for Nook enthusiasts. “The update is safe, if you’ve had your device already rooted,” says the group on its website. “It will stay this way.”

But that’s if you got a Nook in the first place. With some customers worried that their pre-ordered Nooks won’t arrive in time for Christmas, Barnes & Noble has sent an e-mail promising a $100 gift voucher to anyone whose Nook doesn’t make it.

See Also:

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com


GM woos CFO Chris Liddell away from Microsoft

As you may or may not have heard, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell announced that he was leaving the company late last month, but neither he nor Microsoft was doing much talking at the time about what he would be doing next — other than that he would be “looking at a number of opportunities that will expand his career beyond being a CFO.” Well, it looks like he will still be a CFO after all — this time at General Motors. That move was just made official today, and follows news earlier this month that GM’s current CFO, Ray Young, would be transferring to China. As you might expect given the executive situation at GM, however, there’s plenty of speculation that this hire might be more than what it seems, and folks already talking that Liddell may actually be being groomed to take over as CEO of the company once he gets a bit more experience in the automotive industry.

GM woos CFO Chris Liddell away from Microsoft originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Prototype laser setup lets users ‘feel’ remote objects

A team of researchers from Japan’s University of Tsukuba demonstrates what they can do with haptics by letting users “feel” a remote object.

Car Review: Audi Q7 Diesel, a 5,500-Pound Fuel Miser

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The Audi Q7 3.0 TDI is an SUV to consider if your needs call for a three-row SUV and you want the best possible fuel economy and range for that kind of vehicle. Drive gently and this 5,500-pound Audi will reward you with almost 30 mpg. The EPA rates it at 17 mpg city, 25 mpg highway, 20 mpg combined. I got 27 mpg in a long weekend of driving, mostly highway miles. With its massive 26.4 gallon fuel tank, you’ll go 600 miles between fill-ups. Highway cruising is where a diesel-engine vehicle is most at home.

Intel’s New Atom Chips: What They Mean for You

New Atom chips from Intel means better netbooks, right? Sorta. Here’s the skinny on the new netbook brains.

Pine What?

Okay, so one of the big things about the new Atom chips is that for the first time, it integrates a graphics core and a memory controller directly onto the same die as the processor. This whole platform, that is, the processor, graphics and memory controller is “Pine Trail,” while the processor by itself is “Pineview.”

More specifically, the graphics core is 45nm die shrink of Intel’s GMA 3100, redubbed GMA 3150, that runs at 400MHz. So, not only does it still suck, it also doesn’t hardware accelerate H.264 video as AnandTech points out, meaning it’s completely useless for Flash video, even with all of the new Flash acceleration hotness Adobe is delivering next year.

Instead, netbook makers will still have to bundle, at the very least, an “HD decoder” that accelerates H.264 for decent Flash playback, and it’s not anywhere near Nvidia’s Ion in terms of graphics performance. (This chip from Broadcom, to be precise.) And, not that you’ll be pushing 1080p video out of your netbook, but video res is capped at 1366×768 out of the HDMI and DVI ports. Bottom line, Intel’s stock offering still blows goats when it comes to video, and we’re still waiting to see what Nvidia’s going to do about it, given that they can’t plug in Ion the way they used to. (Anand speculates they might just tack on through a PCi Express port.)

These are the three chips Intel’s launching today, only one, the N450, is for netbooks, and as you’ll notice, it’s 1.66GHz single core chip (Intel thinks that’s just fine) and supports just 2GB of RAM. The improvements you’ll see with the N450 over the current Atom chips aren’t exactly explosive—they mostly come from faster memory, and even Intel admits they’re incremental.

Sure, it’s 20 percent more efficient than the last Atom chips, but if you want remotely decent video performance in a netbook right now, it looks an Nvidia Ion-based system is still the way to go, even with Intel flashing new silicon. If you can stick it out for another month, it might be worth seeing what’s a little further around the bend. [Intel]

OSIM uCrown 2 rubs your head, looks like an electric chair appendage

You know, there are some things in life you never expect to do twice: get divorced, fall into the same puddle, write a post about scalp massagers. But here we are, looking at the OSIM uCrown 2 — an AA battery-powered “soothing head massager” that will jingle your worries away while using “patented air pressure technology, vibration, magnetic therapy” and heat to make your cranium a warm and cozy place to be. We give it credit for looking less like it came from the set of Spaceballs than your typical fare, but quickly take it back because of the ridiculous asking price of $200 and the fact neither model is brave enough to wear the uCrown with their eyes open.

OSIM uCrown 2 rubs your head, looks like an electric chair appendage originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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