NASA engineers has finished developing new camera eyes to the agency’s new Curiosity Mars rover, scheduled to launch in 2011.
The Fixed Focal Length Mastcam, developed by Malin Space Science Systems, contains a telephoto lens, and will pan and tilt to provide image coverage around the rover, as well as nearby and further out to the horizon, Space.com reports.
The new eyes will soon be mounted to the rover. NASA originally scrapped a plan back in 2007 to add a 3D-capable zoom lens thanks to cost pressures, the report said. But the agency has since funded the project anyway, and there’s still time for MSSS to develop 3D-capable zoom versions.
You’re really into MMORPGs when you spend hours repeating the same tasks over and over again to acquire gold. You’re way, way too into MMORPGs when you create a custom six-computer setup to do it that much faster.
There’s no denying that Microsoft’s new Kin phones are a next-gen riff on the Sidekick, and just like the Sidekick, everything that happens on the phone will be backed up to a Microsoft service, called Kin Studio. Text messages, photos, videos, music, other content — it’s all instantly synced to the Studio, which is obviously accessible from any browser. Of course, it’s sort of funny for Microsoft to be saying that it’ll back up all your data for you, since it just had a major Sidekick data loss incident, but hey — the kids don’t know that, right? They’re off skateboarding, or hanging out watching fat people eat burritos*, or whatever they do.
Update: Video for the “upload generation” now available to stream after the break. Think you can handle that? *Actual line from teen testimonial video shown during Microsoft event. We are not kidding.
Thanks to Robin and her son for sending us 404 sticker pictures from the Midwest Gaming Classic!
(Credit: Robin Smith/The 404)
Wilson’s taking a three-day weekend to recuperate from last week’s Apple madness, so Natali takes his place to kick off this week of Apple-free episodes…not. Just when you thought Apple would let someone else have the news spotlight, out comes Stop the Madness Steve Jobs, an open letter written by developer Jack Freeman about Apple recently changing the requirements in the iPhone OS terms of service, limiting the programming languages developers can use to create applications.
According to the letter, “these new terms will shut down many current developers, and disallow many popular game engines and other “middlewares.” The article also pleads with Jobs to filter the current app store based on quality of the end product instead of the programming methods. There’s no petition to sign, but Jack encourages all supportive developers to comment on the letter and forward it to friends!
The most controversial app lets you detect a woman’s bra size with a simple swipe of the handset. The video demo posted shows a couple guys walking into a “random” bar and asking the bartender’s permission to “scan” her female parts with the Droid, although we’re pretty sure this is old technology–version 1.0 didn’t even need a phone; it was just called using your eyes.
Finally, we have some bad news for fans of “Arrested Development”–the much-discussed movie adaptation might actually be dead in the water, or at least that’s what star David Cross recently said to a reporter, claiming too much time has passed since the series finale. It’s not an official death sentence, so we’ll just have to assume that the movie would’ve been a crappy, stretched-out version of the series anyway. Hopefully.
It’s finally official: Microsoft Pink — the product of Redmond’s acquisition of Danger — has just been unveiled as a pair of handsets sourced from Sharp (which made most of Danger’s Sidekicks) known as the Kin One and Kin Two. The devices are being marketed as Windows Phones, and while they’re ultimately based on most of the same underpinnings of Windows Phone 7, it’s a distinctly and totally different experience — the entire user interface is custom to Kin with a heavy social media slant, a custom browser (we’re told it’s based on the Zune’s browser), and surprisingly, zero support for third-party apps. The displays are capacitive with support for multitouch (yes, you can pinch and zoom in the browser), but there’s no support for in-browser Flash or Silverlight.
Kin One — the phone we’d seen rumored as “Turtle” — is basically a curved square slider with a QVGA display, 4GB of internal storage, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a full QWERTY keyboard. Kin Two, meanwhile, is the phone leaked as the “Pure,” upping the ante with a HVGA display and a more traditional landscape QWERTY slide form factor. It also moves up to an 8 megapixel cam and 8GB of internal storage, but otherwise, the experience is roughly the same as what you get on the One; both phones have WiFi and Bluetooth in addition to their 3G cellular radios. For what it’s worth, Microsoft is emphasizing that internal storage really isn’t a big deal with the Kin phones, because your entire photo and video collection that you capture using the onboard camera is synced seamlessly with your bottomless online storage; you can access the entire collection from your phone at any time by browsing thumbnails, and if you want the full content, you can download it. Kin comes bundled with a desktop web experience that’s entirely based on Silverlight for viewing and sorting just about all of the major stuff that you can see on your phone — contacts, social network status updates, images, and so on — and we’ve got to admit, it looks pretty slick. Keep reading after the break for a lot more info and video!
Mark Hachman will be at the event in San Francisco, live-blogging the announcements as they are made. Oddly enough, Microsoft is holding a smaller version of the same event in New York on Monday as well; our understanding is that this is geared more toward hands-on time than a flashy news announcement. Our top phone analyst, Sascha Segan, will at that event.
Since the dual presentations are somewhat odd for the industry, we’re playing it a bit by ear. At this point, we’re not sure if Sascha will be able to step in and comment — or whether he’ll have all the news in hand by the time the San Francisco event begins.
Supposedly the new phones will be released for Verizon Wireless, and manufactured by Sharp. But what flavor of operating system will they use: Windows Phone 7, or something else? We won’t know until the announcement. The event’s over, but see a transcript of our live blog with details on the Kin phones after the jump! –Ed.
We’ve been ushered out to lovely San Francisco today (well, actually, not so lovely — the weather is uncharacteristically yucky) to learn all about this mysterious “It’s Time To Share” thing that Microsoft has been cooking up. The popular rumor is that a new line of handsets (Pink? Kin?) are en route. Stay tuned!
Now nearly three years old, Apple’s first-generation iPhone will no longer be compatible with future upgrades of the iPhone operating system, according to Steve Jobs.
Apple previewed iPhone OS 4 last week, which will deliver multitasking and other improved features to the latest iPhones and iPod Touch devices. The older iPhone 3G will run OS 4, but some features, such as multitasking, will not work due to hardware limitations, according to Apple. Noticeably missing entirely from the discussion was the original iPhone.
We suspected that the original iPhone would not run OS 4 at all, and Jobs confirms our assumption in an e-mail he sent to a customer inquiring whether Apple would continue to support the original iPhone.
Jobs’ reply is terse as usual:
Sorry, no.
Sent from my iPhone
And there you have it. Original iPhone owners began receiving a lesser iPhone experience since iPhone OS 3.0, which delivered multimedia messaging to the newer iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, but not the first-generation iPhone. And now Apple has ceased supporting the original iPhone with OS upgrades altogether. The original iPhone is officially obsolete. Three years ain’t a bad run, though.
iPhone OS 4 releases this summer for the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch. iPad owners will be able to download OS 4 in fall.
A hat tip to MacStories for originally reporting this e-mail exchange.
Now that the iPad is out and iPhone OS 4 has been announced, it looks like Steve Jobs is taking a little time to catch up on his email — in addition to taking up the new SDK rules, it appears he’s very tersely confirmed what we sadly suspected all along: the first-gen iPhone won’t get an upgrade to iPhone OS 4. That makes a certain amount of sense, given that Apple’s subscription accounting model for the original iPhone only booked free upgrades for 24 months, but really, that’s just paperwork — we don’t see why Cupertino couldn’t at least allow for an iPod touch-style paid upgrade, especially since the upgradeable iPhone 3G runs essentially the same hardware. And let’s not forget that first-gen iPhone owners paid more or less full price for their devices, so if this is true, Apple’s summarily dead-ended a $400 phone just under three years after it launched. Of course, none of this is officially confirmed yet, so anything can change — we’ve pinged Apple for comment and they haven’t responded yet, but we’ll let you know what we find out.
Software maker teams up with Verizon on a pair of feature phones dubbed the Kin One and Kin Two, with a Zune music tie-in. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20002173-56.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Beyond Binary/a/p
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