Now here’s how to show off a durable camera. While a number of companies we’ve seen at PMA had non-interactive displays to exemplify just how waterproof their shooters were, Sony went one step further and put a pair of its DSC-TX5 in a block of ice. Yes, we could pick this one up and play with it — as well as another pair that were submerged in water of milder temperatures — and from our time with the camera, there was no fogginess and the shots were very clear for its class — no replacement for a DSLR, but it’s certainly easier to fit in our pocket while falling down the ski slopes (and capturing our failures in 720p, should we choose to publish the embarrassment). Also spotted? The DSC-H55, but with theHX5V just around the corner and sporting a similar form factor plus GPS and TransferJet, we’re having a hard time getting too excited about that one.
Those two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home — one block can power the average European home. At least that’s the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on 60 Minutes last night. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that’s been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell. Bloom’s design feeds oxygen into one side of a cell while fuel (natural gas, bio gas from landfill waste, solar, etc) is supplied to the other side to provide the chemical reaction required for power. The cells themselves are inexpensive ceramic disks painted with a secret green “ink” on one side and a black “ink” on the other. The disks are separated by a cheap metal alloy, instead of more precious metals like platinum, and stacked into a cube of varying capabilities — a stack of 64 can power a small business like Starbucks.
Now get this, skeptics: there are already several corporate customers using refrigerator-sized Bloom Boxes. The corporate-sized cells cost $700,000 to $800,000 and are installed at 20 customers you’ve already heard of including FedEx and Wal-mart — Google was first to this green energy party, using its Bloom Boxes to power a data center for the last 18 months. Ebay has installed its boxes on the front lawn of its San Jose location. It estimates to receive almost 15% of its energy needs from Bloom, saving about $100,000 since installing its five boxes 9 months ago — an estimate we assume doesn’t factor in the millions Ebay paid for the boxes themselves. Bloom makes about one box a day at the moment and believes that within 5 to 10 years it can drive down the cost to about $3,000 to make it suitable for home use. Sounds awfully aggressive to us. Nevertheless, Bloom Energy will go public with details on Wednesday — until then, check the 60 Minutes sneak peek after the break.
Betcha didn’t know that USB flash drives weren’t allowed in the US military. Or maybe you did — you know, considering that one with Japan-US troop deployment maps went missing in mid-2008. Oops. At any rate, the Department of Defense has reportedly lifted said ban, but as with anything related to The Man, gobs of red tape will be involved. For starters, they won’t be reintroduced “wholesale,” instead being reserved for “mission essential applications.” We’re also told that the drives themselves must contain specific security features, and administrators will be able to track the use of ’em from the outset. For those unaware, the ban was originally put into place just over a year ago after virus-laden USB keys disrupted military networks, presumably flashing Blingee’d faces of Kim Jong-il onto CIA surveillance screens. Or not, but that’d be pretty hilarious.
Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. Recruiting a ton of them to create a rich app experience for Windows Phone 7 Series is going to be Microsoft’s toughest challenge if it wants to get its groove back in the mobile space.
Demonstrated last week, Microsoft’s new mobile operating system Windows Phone 7 Series looks elegant and immaculate compared to its predecessors. The OS blends together Xbox Live gaming, Zune multimedia, personal media (photos and videos), social media utilities, productivity tools and third-party apps, which are organized into categories called “Hubs.”
Even so, a neatly packed user interface doesn’t fully address the fundamental weakness of the previous Windows Mobile OS: a fragmented platform that made coding and selling apps for Windows Mobile a challenge for smaller developers.
In other words, Microsoft has long lacked the sort of widespread, enthusiastic support from independent developers — not just enterprise coders within large organizations — that made the iPhone and its App Store a blockbuster innovation.
“They’ve been doing such a miserable job for a while now,” said Peter Hoddie, CEO of Kinoma, which creates software that makes Windows Mobile easier for users to navigate. “I would be thrilled if they could turn it all around and tell a story that makes sense, but they have a long way to go.”
To help address fragmentation, Microsoft said on Feb. 15 that it would be more involved in the hardware design process of its partners’ phones running Windows Phone 7 Series. Each Windows Phone 7 Series handset, for example, will include a built-in FM radio tuner and a physical button to access Bing search.
But the question remains whether Microsoft can make Windows Phone 7 Series a compelling platform, giving developers the tools and audience they need.
Microsoft was mum on details about its third-party app development platform at the Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona, Spain, but developers have already leaked some of the company’s plans regarding its third-party development tools, which include Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-platform web application framework, as well as a limited set of native application programming interfaces and managed APIs. (For a more detailed explanation translating nerd speak to normal human talk, see Mary Jo Foley’s article on ZDNet.)
Mobile developers polled by Wired.com had mixed reactions (to say the least) about Windows Phone 7 Series’ development tools, based on the leaked documents.
Kai Yu, CEO of BeeJive, was pessimistic. He said his independent company, which makes apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry, wrote off Windows Mobile years ago because of “incomplete, half-assed” developer tools and a lack of support from Microsoft, and he doesn’t see those problems changing with a new operating system.
“I think it’s just royally fucked,” Yu said of Microsoft’s phone platform. “That place is so big: The tools, the people, it’s all so fragmented…. What’s the advantage of having these hubs and cool-looking UI? In the end, I don’t know if that gives you anything.”
On the opposite side, Jim Scheinman, COO of Pageonce, which makes productivity apps for BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android, said his company was excited about Microsoft’s reboot of its phone platform.
“My speculation is that Microsoft has some incredible platforms they can tie all together with the new mobile platform,” Scheinman said. “If one developer can write across all the other platforms, that would be easier for us and all the developers…. If you want to attract hundreds of thousands of developers, it would behoove Microsoft to try to make that happen. That would be a very, very exciting opportunity for all of us.”
But Hoddie wasn’t enthused, either. Regarding the new Windows Phone 7 Series OS, Hoddie said adding Silverlight into the mix wouldn’t help much. He explained that similar to Adobe’s Flash, Silverlight was a technology made for desktops, and it’s bound to cause performance issues when transplanted into mobile devices.
“Silverlight, geez,” he said. “Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water.”
Hoddie echoed some of Yu’s concerns, complaining about how “horribly” Microsoft treated its mobile developers. For example, Hoddie recounted an incident when one of his apps had a problem with text input on a specific phone running Windows Mobile. When he finally got in touch with Microsoft’s support team, Microsoft said it was only responsible if the text-input problem appeared in the Windows Mobile emulator software — and if it didn’t, Hoddie would have to contact the Japanese manufacturer directly to address the problem.
Poor developer support? That’s strange, because Microsoft understands more than any company how important developers are. (Steve Ballmer made that loud and clear in the video above.) The Windows PC operating system, after all, won the desktop OS war early largely with the help of software developers that made programs only for Windows.
But perhaps the problem for Microsoft is that the definition of “developer” has changed in recent years. Apple’s App Store popularized a business platform that made developing software a viable and even sometimes highly lucrative career choice for small, independent coders working in their bedrooms, whose quirky apps have made the iPhone one of the most innovative inventions yet.
By contrast, mobile developers working on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform have largely been laboring in the bowels of large corporations, creating mobile front ends for enterprise applications like SAP.
Can Microsoft attract the small developers as well, to create another app boom?
Independent developer Dave Castelnuovo, whose iPhone game Pocket God is one of the App Store’s all-time top sellers, said he and his peers had no plans to develop for Windows Phone 7 Series. He explained that fragmentation — a complex hardware ecosystem that requires developers to code several versions of one app to sell on one platform for different types of phones — will always be a major problem with Windows phones.
“Fragmentation ends up making development more expensive,” Castelnuovo said. “Microsoft is trying to solve some of that by being a little more hands-on…. They all have multitouch and the same three buttons, but the problem is I don’t know what kind of other options there are. Is there a camera option? What is the minimum CPU speed or amount of RAM? If you’re an independent developer, you’ll have to code to the lowest-possible common denominator in order to get to the biggest-possible market.”
There are still plenty of questions in the air surrounding Windows Phone 7 Series and its overall mobile strategy. Microsoft declined to comment on the purported leaks about Windows Phone 7 Series’ development tools. The company plans to preview its development tools at its MIX developers conference next month. Until then, developers will just have to wait and see.
Artificial schnozzes have been sniffing foreign objects for years now, but rarely are they engineered to sniff out specific things. A team of researchers from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign have done just that, though, with a new snout that acts as a coffee analyzer. Reportedly, the device can “distinguish between ten well-known commercial brands of coffee and can also make a distinction between coffee beans that have been roasted at different temperatures or lengths of time.” The significance here is that this distinction is incredibly difficult to make, and it could one day help coffee growers determine whether batches are as good as prior batches on the cheap. More importantly, however, it could help the modern java hunter determine whether or not they’re walking in a corporate Starbucks or one of those “branded” kiosks with two-fifths the menu. Brilliant, right?
Whoa, Nelly! Talk about a whale of a story. Ben DeCosta, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport’s general manager, loves gadgets. So much, in fact, that he purchased a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, which is capable of recording audio onto its 4GB of internal storage space. While details on the story remain murky (disputed by both sides, actually), it’s fairly clear that Ben and Delta didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye on everything. To that end, Mr. DeCosta figured he could flip the recorder on during a private conversation between airline executives and personnel from the city of Atlanta, and now the whole thing seems to have backfired. Ben maintains that he didn’t intend to record Delta’s negotiations, and he even went so far as to suggest that Delta stole his pen in order to discredit him. In the end, the city’s investigation found that there was “insufficient evidence that DeCosta intentionally sought to record the private conversations of Delta’s team,” but that’s not stopping Ben from retiring when his contract expires in June. Hit the source link below for the whole drama-filled thing, but unfortunately, the discussions held on the pen have yet to leak. TMZ — you on that, or what?
No matter how realistic a KIRF phone looks these days, there’s always a catch somewhere. For instance, this GSM handset is pretty much an exact clone of the HTC Tattoo, except for a couple of debatably important things: the suspiciously-cheerful $169 price tag, and the fact that Windows Mobile (and not Android) is running the show. Oh, and it doesn’t end there: judging by the photo, you’d assume this evil clone runs WinMo 6.5, yet the spec sheet mutters 6.1. A typo? Maybe. Something far more baleful? Maybe. A KIRF OS to go along with the KIRF hardware? Probably. That said, it’s hard to turn down a cheap phone that packs GPS, FM radio, stereo Bluetooth audio, a spare battery and a 2.8-inch touchscreen (240 x 320), but that’s assuming that you’ve no self-esteem to speak of. See if the full kit after the break will seal the deal for you.
Samsung’s TL500. We caught the bright, bulky beast bristling at PMA in front of a miniature 3D model of the Taj Mahal enclosed within a shadowy cube. The articulating display was indeed quite luminous, and as you can see from the sample shot, the flash-imbued capture is quite nice — same can’t be said sans flash in this instance, though. As for the TL350, we’re always a fan of the analog dials for battery and storage, and the 1,000 frames per second video recording was quite the treat. That said, at 138 x 78 resolution, it’s not practical, but the in-between burst shoots do lend themselves to some fun party tricks. Hardware shots just below, TL500 sample shot after the break.
The Week in Green is a new item from our friends at Inhabitat, recapping the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us.
The past week saw several big developments in the energy industry as President Obama announced $8 Billion in loan guarantees for the construction of the first new nuclear plants in 30 years. Nuclear energy is basically emission free, which is a good thing – but what about all of that radioactive waste? Enter GE Hitachi, who announced a system capable of transforming nuclear waste into fuel. Meanwhile our friends in Norway are charging ahead with plans to build the world’s largest wind turbine, and we’re feeling a bit jealous of those forward-thinking Scandinavians.
We also saw signs of the inevitable cyborg uprising as researchers unveiled energy generating gadgets that may one day be implanted within our bodies. MIT is working on a range of heat harvesting electronics that could power biomedical devices such as heart rate and blood sugar monitors. Meanwhile, the University of Michigan has developed an energy recycling prosthetic foot that makes walking easier for amputees. Even the planet is getting wired, as HP gets set to roll out its Central Nervous System for the Earth — an array of billions of sensors that are paving the way for smarter cities, healthier humans, and the “Internet of Things”.
We’ve already seen Pentax tease a few new cameras ahead of PMA, and it looks like another pair have now slipped out at the last minute. That includes the rugged W90 which, among other things, packs a ring of LEDs around the lens to help with close-up shots, and should hold up against even the nastiest conditions (as Pentax has gone out of its way to demonstrate in the photo above). Joining it is the 12.1-megapixel Pentax X90, which is a bit less compact and not weatherproof, but packs a 26x optical zoom in a DSLR-esque body, among other as yet unspecified specs. Still no word on pricing or availability, but Pentax should be getting official with these any day now.
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