To say that Apple’s iPad has driven the tablet market straight into an era of revival would be understating things greatly, and one million units later, we’re here to ask the earliest of adopters how they’d tweak things if they were ever lucky enough to take over where Jonathan Ive left off. We already know that select changes are coming in iPhone OS 4.0, and the recent Spirit jailbreak has also opened up a whole new world of possibilities, but there’s always work to be done, right? Would you have included a USB port and SD card slot along the edges? Designed it for use on other carriers? Made the screen a bit bigger / smaller? Thrown in a front-facing camera? Go on, spill your deepest, darkest wishes for Apple’s first tablet in comments below. Someone will listen, we promise.
Nintendo may have seen its first slide in net profits in over half a dozen years recently, but that’s not to say all is depressed in the Mushroom Kingdom. To the contrary, in fact. The outfit’s CEO has the troops fired up and aimed squarely at Apple, and its little-handheld-that-could has just surpassed its earlier-handheld-that-could to become the best selling portable gaming machine in history. While belting out numbers during the latest quarterly earnings report, Nintendo confessed that the DS family (DS, DS Lite, DSi and XL) had sold around 129 million units, and at last check, the Game Boy crew had peaked at around 118 million. We’re hearing that Sony’s world-beating PlayStation 2 still leads the way when looking at all gaming devices at 140 million, but with that 3DS hitting in the near future, we might just see a new all-around champion crowned in the numbers game.
Visit CBS.com from your iPad right now and all you’ll get is a full episode of Survivor and clips from various other shows. By the start of the Fall season, however, CBS Interactive SVP Anthony Soohoo is promising content parity between its Flash-based website and HTML5-compliant iPad portal. While on the subject, he also notes that the video strategy will be entirely web-based, with no plans for an app à la ABC Player. Flash isn’t being subjected to a veritable slapsgiving, however, as it’ll remain the desktop technology of choice. Soohoo notes HTML5’s toolset for measurement and encryption isn’t quite at the same level yet. Full video interview after the break, and iPad users? This fall, expect something quite legen — oh, you know where we’re going with this, but still we’ll pause for dramatic effect — dary.
Robotics and prosthetics designers have been making great advances in the power, sensitivity and humanity of their creations.
Case in point: The i-Limb Pulse is a new bionic arm that allows users to handle heavy objects or delicate items, as well as customize the grips to fit their needs.
With a design similar to Darth Vader’s bionic hand, this is one tough prosthetic device.
The maker, Touch Bionics, claims this prosthetic hand can handle more than 200 pounds, if your biceps are up to it. When grabbing an object, it can apply additional force by using a pulsing effect.
“This effect is generated by sending rapid, high-frequency electronic pulses to the finger motors, driving them to close more securely around an object,” the company explains on its website.
The i-Limb Pulse is customizable with software. Doctors and users can tweak i-Limb Pulse’s behavior, programming it with specific grip patterns to fit the customer’s needs. They then beam the new patterns to the hand with Bluetooth.
It comes in two sizes, to accommodate both genders. But a number of details have not been disclosed, including the price and artificial-skin options, which were available for the previous model.
Which, by the way, wasn’t exactly shabby. The I-Limb Hand was the first fully-functional artificial hand commercially available to people who needed a hand, according to Touch Bionics. Time magazine named it one of top 50 inventions of 2008 (to be fair, that list also included Dimitrij Ovtcharov’s new ping-pong serve).
According to Touch Bionics, i-Limb Hand has been fitted to more than 1,200 patients.
We’re not sure the same amount of commercial success will follow another interesting robotic arm concept that hit us in the past few days: an arm modeled after an elephant’s trunk.
Although its name includes the word “bionic,” the Bionic Handling Assistant is more of an industrial-level robotics device — and still not available for sale — but the makers, Festo, say it will offer a safe and flexible way to move stuff around.
Because contact between humans and current industrial robots can be hazardous, BHA’s human-friendly trunk retracts on contact (or so the company claims). As such, it would be a safer way to transfer things in hospitals or at home.
The idea of a robotic arm that looks like a trunk so it doesn’t violently murder you might sound silly. But a recent study by three German scientists showed that robotic arms could, in fact, violently murder you.
Looking at hundreds of FCC documents each and every week, it’s pretty difficult for us to get too excited about any particular filing, but there are two words that do it for us each and every time: “LTE” and “WiMAX.” In this case, the latter word caught our eye all throughout the filing for HTC model PC36100, which runs WiMAX on Sprint’s (and Clearwire’s) 2500MHz band alongside the standard suite of CDMA bands with EV-DO. In other words, folks, yes — it’s true — you’re looking at the frickin’ EVO 4G for Sprint. There’s not much to see here, really; it’s still under confidentiality for the external photos, but at least they’ve cleared that all-important FCC hurdle on the way to retail, which will be… soon, Sprint? Right? Please?
The social gaming giant is apparently at odds with Facebook over the percentage it would have to pay to use Facebook’s currency platform. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20004499-52.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Geek Gestalt/a/p
Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.
Adding even more drama to an pivotal and transformative year in tech, last week HP announced it will buy Palm for the nice round sum of 1.2 billion dollars — a move that will position it as a major player in the crowded mobile market. HP is no stranger to mobility — the iPaq was once a defining mobile product — but over the years the company has been unable to replicate that success with similar efforts in as the dynamic shifted from PDAs to phones. Buying Palm is a quick way of getting back in the game.
This deal underscores the velocity of mobile and how that speed is affecting long term winners and losers. Many had written off Palm’s relevance in the market, which might have been a correct assessment if Palm had ended up elsewhere. But I think Palm found a good home. In addition to Todd Bradley, the former CEO of Palm who now leads HP’s Personal Systems Group, there are many Palm alumni at HP. This means that there should be a relatively smooth transition and overall good cultural fit. That’s important because time is of the essence — the market won’t wait around for HP to integrate Palm.
If you don’t know the name Shane Mahan, that’s your loss. He’s the real Tony Stark, the practical effects wizard leading the team who constructed the actual Iron Man suit for the Iron Man movies. And he’s a great interviewee:More »
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