For this week’s Shooting Challenge, we asked you to abuse the principles of perspective to confound our sense of scale. The results are as charming as they are clever…or someone took out a second mortgage on that giant Aibo.

Second Runner Up

Taken with my Sony a350 Sony DT18-70 lens @ 20mm; f/9; 1/160sec; ISO100. Picture of Randy’s Donuts in Inglewood, California. Took the picture w/ my friend Rafael Ortega he held the cup as I pretended to dunk the donut. Rafael bought coffee from Randy’s ,but the cup was too blank so after a couple of takes he decided to draw “Coffee” on it.
– Luis Marroquin

First Runner Up

I was aware of this optical phenomenon, but never really thought of it in relation to photography. Without an assistant to call for, I had to trust my remote once more. So here’s me (duck) peeking out of a cup, and a towering 70-200mmL (f/4 non-IS) lens with another duck on top.
Gear used: Canon EOS 450D, Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM, Manfrotto 190XproB tripod RC-1 IR remote. f/22 (max), 1/10s, ISO 200.
– Staff Anthomen

Winner

Meet my dog Arti(ficial). He likes humans (bones), pissing on big trees and having sex with trucks. He reads Gizmodo all day and tried to escape from me two times to become Rosa´s new pet. Too bad his battery drains and needs his own nuclear plant…
Canon Eos 500D / Canon 18-55mm lens @ 28. 1/50 sec. / F 25 / Iso 1600 / Monochrome.
Lightroom for brightness adjustment / Photoshop for crop.
– Bobo the Teddy

Thanks for all of the entries. And as usual, here’s the full gallery of participants:

Windows Phone 7 snuck up on the world today, but having played with it, I’ll tell you Microsoft is putting all its muscle behind this. No matter who you root for, to be anything short of impressed is stupid.

How does it feel? Nothing like an iPhone, for starters. The slippery, rotate-y screens may take a little getting used to, but they feel right. Microsoft deliberately wanted to get away from icons and this notion that all behaviors get the same size button on the home screen, and you definitely get more of a sense of priorities here: Entertainment, social networking, photo sharing—those matter, and oh yeah, here’s a phone if you need a call, and here’s a browser if you need that too.

It’s hard to tell from looking at this stuff, but much of it is customizable, including almost everything on that home screen. Don’t let the uniformity of design language fool you, there will be a lot you can do to differentiate from other people.

As you can see, the fluidity of the “panorama” navigation is here—when you enter a hub, you get those little teasers to the right, showing you want you’ll get if you flip one screen over.

Though details are scarce in these early days, the device here is built “to spec,” so probably running 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. I can tell you that everything ran smoothly. This is obviously too early to make any technical statements, but it really was impressive, and where there are a few hiccups, it’s hard to say whether it was human error or a glitch, but we’ll leave it be for now. This is just demo software.

On to the screenshots—click here if thumbs haven’t loaded, or if you just hate gallery format:

As you can see from the screenshots above, most hubs are fleshed out, though we couldn’t have a look at Marketplace. Some of the shots here are “in between” shots, that moment between tapping a start screen element and the whole hub springing in behind it. There is also one shot of the slide transition from sleep screen—which has a lot of great heads-up information—to the start screen.

There aren’t a ton of answers yet, but what we do know you can find above or in Matt’s piece: Windows Phone 7: Everything Is Different Now

[Windows Phone 7 on Gizmodo]

Toshiba K01 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Cambridge University finds credit card security flaw, uses the money for beer pong supplies (video)

Cambridge University finds credit card security flaw, uses the money for beer pong supplies (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It seems that the megapixel race in the mobile arena has slowed (temporarily, at least), but it’s not like innovation has completely ground to a halt. OmniVision, which made waves around a month ago with its 14.6 megapixel CMOS sensor, has just announced what may be the most significant introduction in the cameraphone space… ever. The 1/4-inch, 5 megapixel RAW sensor is said to offer up best-in-class low light sensitivity (680-mV/lux-sec), and it can also capture 720p video at 60 frames per second or 1080p at 30 frames per second. The real kicker, however, is its ability to shoot in RAW, which would give cameraphone shooters a much greater range of editing options when it came time to tweak before hitting Flickr. We’re told that the chip is sampling now and should hit mass production this July, and we’d be lying if we said we weren’t falling over ourselves to get ahold of a RAW-capable smartphone.

OmniVision brings RAW shooting to mobiles with new 5 megapixel sensor originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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