Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve always said the native Gmail app is one of the best parts of Android, and it just got even better: it now supports Priority Inbox, has a “show quoted text” button, and features a floating message actions toolbar like the browser-based mobile Gmail webapp. The bigger news, though, is that Google’s releasing Gmail directly to Android Market, where it’ll be a separate download that can be revved with new features independently of Android itself. That’s a pretty great move, as anyone still waiting for a carrier-approved Froyo build can attest, but there’s irony afoot: the new Gmail won’t run on anything less than 2.2. Wah-wah.

Gmail for Android updated, becomes Market app originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For something so familiar, cooking is incredibly mysterious. Ask a home cook what happens to a steak in a pan—hell, ask most chefs. It gets hot. It gets brown. It gets juicy. How do you like yours, again? More »

If you’ve ever stared at your phone and thought, “this thing really needs a full keyboard,” you may need to buy a netbook. If you’ve ever stared at your iPad or Android tablet and thought “this thing needs a full keyboard,” you might be on to something. That’s why Cervantes Mobile made the Journo portable Bluetooth Keyboard, a fold-up model that includes a cradle for your mobile phone or tablet that will keep it upright and in either portrait or landscape mode while you use it.

The Journo is designed to be as portable as your mobile device, which means the keyboard folds down to be remarkably small when not in use. Aside from the portability and the included cradle, the most notable feature is that it claims to support just about any mobile device with Bluetooth, meaning iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and more. The Journo will be available for $99 list price early next year, but you can pre-order one now for $79. 

Not a lot of details to be had, but NVIDIA wants you to know Fermi isn’t the company’s be-all, end-all GPU — “hundreds of engineers” are already hard at work on Codename Kepler, expected to go to production this year and ship in 2011. Kepler’s based on a 28nm process, we’re told, and will thankfully deliver an estimated 3 to 4 times the performance per watt compared to Fermi, and hopefully run cool. If you built your last PC to last, however, you might wait for Maxwell in 2013, supposedly bringing a sixteen-fold increase in parallel graphics-based computing just two years after that, including advanced features like the ability to autonomously process some content independent of a CPU.

Update: Does this roadmap mean we should expect new GPUs from NVIDIA every two years? Jen-Hsun Huang wouldn’t commit to that, but said that there will be “mid-life kicker” product launches in-between each new NVIDIA chip to keep the wheels turning.

NVIDIA reveals Fermi’s successor: Kepler at 28nm in 2011, Maxwell in 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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My childhood was remarkably low-tech for an American kid growing up in the 1980s. I didn’t have cable TV or a computer until I went to college (1997), and didn’t play video games outside of an arcade until we got a NES in 1990. So I always thought microwave ovens came into existence in 1988, when my family got one. In fact, they’d already been in commercial production for more than 40 years.

Stacy Conradt at Mental Floss gives an appropriately accelerated history of what she calls “the Not-so-microwave“:

The first oven intended for commercial sale in 1947 was almost six feet tall, tipped the scale at 750 pounds and cost $5,000 in 1947 dollars. The second version, produced in 1954, was better but still needed work: it gobbled electricity and cost $2,000– $3,000, at a time when the average cost of a new car was about $1,700… Regular households didn’t care much about microwaves until 1967, when a relatively low-energy model costing just $500 came out.

You ever wonder how microwave ovens work? It’s just slightly more complicated than this, but basically microwaves (which are like radio waves, but with a frequency closer to the infrared spectrum) pass over food, creating a weak alternating electromagnetic field. Water molecules — which are basically in everything we eat — also have a weak electromagnetic charge, and they all realign themselves to match the polarity of the microwave radiation — kind of like passing a household magnet over a pile of iron filings. When the water molecules move, the temperature raises (because molecular motion is all temperature is). Get those molecules moving fast enough and long enough, and baby, you’ve got a stew going.*

*I know, it’s the second time I’ve used this Arrested Development reference in as many weeks. It just feels right.

See Also:

• Desktop Microwave Minimizes Calorie Loss
• Panasonic NN-SD688S Microwave Inverter Oven
• In the Kitchen with Roger Ebert & A Rice Cooker
• Here Lies Food Processor, Kitchen's Once and Future King
• Wired Makeovers: Upgrade Your Workspaces