Hasta La Gadget!

Hey, remember when Taiwan’s ITRI said that flexible TFT-EPD displays would be ready for smartphones by 2009? Yeah, well, keep that in mind when reading about this new 6-inch flexible display the company says will be released in a line of e-readers “very soon.” It’s called the FlexUPD, a 1mm thick AMOLED with a 5cm folding radius, 150nits brightness, and “unbreakable” construction. ITRI is also talking up its switchable 2D/3D display that we saw earlier, able to display both types of content simultaneously and do so without the requirement of goofy glasses. That tech is called i2/3DW and is set to “revitalize the [display] industry by revolutionizing the concept of 3D viewing.” You keep on believing, ITRI, we’ll just keep on waiting.

Continue reading ITRI shows off 6-inch FlexUPD AMOLED, hybrid 2D/3D display, makes lots of promises

ITRI shows off 6-inch FlexUPD AMOLED, hybrid 2D/3D display, makes lots of promises originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A proof-of-concept vending machine shows how we can dispense with cash for everyday purchases, skipping credit and debit cards altogether and going straight to electronic transfer.

The vending machine uses QR codes, PayPal, a smartphone camera and Twitter. And, to complete the geek-buzzword bingo checklist, the hardware is based in part on Arduino, an open source hardware platform.

“We’re experimenting with ways of taking PayPal payments beyond the web,” PayPal Labs’ Ray Tanaka said. At the PayPal X Innovate 2010 developers’ conference, he showed off a gumball machine that lets people use their smartphone to scan a barcode instead of fishing for change.

Tanaka and his team put together their gumball machine using an ordinary mechanical vending machine, an Arduino processor, a WiShield and a few other smartly chosen basic parts.

Scanning the QR barcode sets the gumball machine in motion. Then the customer gets a Twitter notification that their PayPal payment has gone through and how much they’ve been charged. On the merchant side, Tanaka showed off an instant payment-notification system using an LCD display.

Candy is cute and “gives good demo” (as Steve Jobs puts it), but I can easily imagine 101 even better uses for a simple electronic payment system like this where cash is short and speed is essential. Here’s a short list to get you started:

• parking garages
• public transit
• toll booths
• grocery checkout
• gas stations

In short, anywhere you need to be on the move and would rather not whip out your wallet.

Story via the Arduino Blog and Helablog.

Follow us for real-time tech news and ideas: Tim Carmody and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

See Also:

• Will the Internet of Things Be Open or Closed?
• Spime Watch: Shipping Containers and the Future Internet of Things …
• Laser Etched QR Codes: Digital Graffiti For Gadgets
• Amazon iPhone App Adds Barcode Scanning
• Belly Up to the Bar Code

This article was written on October 25, 2007 by CyberNet.

Click to Enlarge

It’s no surprise that Opera 9.5 can synchronize your bookmarks with an online server, and can therefore give you access to them anywhere when running Opera 9.5! That is one of Opera 9.5′s most notable features, and the development team just stepped up their game by launching what’s called Opera Link.

With Opera Link you can access your bookmarks and Speed Dial entries from wherever you are via the link.opera.com site. Once logged in you should see an interface similar to that above, where you can add or remove bookmarks. You can’t move bookmarks between folders, or rearrange the folders for that matter, but that might be something they will work on in the future.

From the Opera Link site you can also view all of your Speed Dial entries, and it appears that they will eventually show small thumbnails of each. Right now I just get a “No screenshot available” message for each of my Speed Dial bookmarks.

And Opera didn’t stop there. They realize how popular their Opera Mini browser is becoming, and so they thought that it would be even more convenient if people could manage their bookmarks with that! Hence you can use Opera Mini 4 Beta to synchronize your bookmarks as well.

Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s CEO, said:

We refuse to believe people should compromise their experience when they access the Web from different devices. With Opera Link, we give them a consistent experience uniquely suited to the way they want to use the Web. But as cool as we think Opera Link is now, we are already hard at work making it even more valuable to our users in the future. Opera Link means convergence without compromise.

I think the only thing that Opera Link is missing right now is direct support for the Nintendo Wii browser, and I’m not sure if they have plans to integrate it with that in the future. I’m just grateful for the multiple methods they’ve already implemented with Opera Link.

Instructions for setting up Opera Link on both Opera 9.5 Beta and Opera Mini 4 Beta can be found here.

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Related Posts:

Opera Mini 4 – Free Mobile Browser2007 CyberNet Awards: Most Innovative ServicesOpera 9.5 Released; Firefox 3.0 Coming TuesdayOpera 9.5 is Almost DoneCyberNotes: Mobile Bookmarks

Can’t wait for a Verizon iPhone? No problem—you can get one now. Cheaper than AT&T’s borked handset, too. Yeah, we’re being creative with the term “iPhone,” but who cares. It works. More »

Sony got itself back in black with a $293m profit last quarter courtesy of improved PS3 and Bravia sales, and the good times continue: the company just posted a second-quarter profit of ¥68.7b ($852m). The Networked Products and Services division that encompasses PlayStation and VAIO was Sony’s strongest performer, with revenue going up five percent to ¥369b ($4.6b) on top of 3.5m PS3 sales (a slight increase), a 40 percent increase in PS3 software sales to 35m units, and “significant hardware cost reductions.” PC sales were up to 2.3m units from 1.4m units last year, and Bravia and digital camera sales also increased, to 4.9m and 6.2m units, respectively. Now for the bad news: PSP sales continued their precipitous decline, down 50 percent to 1.5m from 3.0m last year. By way of comparison, that’s the same number of PS2s Sony shipped this past quarter — maybe it’s time to break out a totally new PlayStation Phone, eh, Sony?

Sony posts $852m profit: PS3, PC sales up originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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