Jan 19
Mazda will unveil the Minagi concept at the 2011 Geneva auto show, which shows off new design language and efficiency technologies.
Originally posted at The Car Tech blog
Jan 19
The world is going to end in 2012. Seriously. George Lucas says so, and let us not forget that he’s the same visionary who brought the world Star Wars and Indiana Jones and, to a lesser extent, the Howard the Duck movie (largely panned, but surely prophetic in its own right).
Green Hornet star Seth Rogen recounted a recent conversation for the Toronto Sun, in which the director just under half an hour explaining that–just as the Mayans and John Cusack warned us–the world is going to end next year.
Says Rogan,
George Lucas sits down and seriously proceeds to talk for around 25 minutes about how he thinks the world is gonna end in the year 2012, like, for real. He thinks it. He’s going on about the tectonic plates and all the time Spielberg is, like, rolling his eyes, like, ‘My nerdy friend won’t shut up, I’m sorry…’ I first thought [Lucas] was joking… and then I totally realized he was serious and then I started thinking, ‘If you’re George Lucas and you actually think the world is gonna end in a year, there’s no way you haven’t built a spaceship for yourself… So I asked him… ‘Can I have a seat on it?’
Lucas proceeded to explain that, in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, he doesn’t actually have a spaceship waiting to whisk him off to another, non-exploding planet, Kal-El-style.
“There’s no doubt there’s a Millennium Falcon in a garage somewhere with a pilot just waiting to go,” Rogen added. “It’s gonna be him and Steven Spielberg and I’ll be blown up like the rest of us.”
Jan 19
Report: HP Palm Tablet Pictures Leaked, May Ship This March
Posted in: att, HP, motorola, palm, tablet, Tablets and E-Readers, Today's Chili, webos, xoom
Looks like buttonless is in this season.
No, not on this spring’s selection of evening wear. We’re talking about renderings of HP’s rumored webOS-powered tablet published this week on Engadget. It’s a sleek, all-black rendition of what we may be seeing from HP soon, and like the soon to be debuted Motorola Xoom, the tablet has got a button-free face.
While the pictures, leaked by an anonymous Engadget source, aren’t the most detailed, there are a few new things we can glean from taking a look. The finish on the back of the all-black tablet is slick-looking, differentiated from the rubberized backing you might find on, say, the new Galaxy Tab 4G. There’s a mini USB port at the bottom of the tablet along with front-facing camera, both found in many of this year’s forthcoming tablets. Two speakers appear to be on the left side and one on the right, a configuration which adapts to stereo listening in both portrait and landscape orientations. And of course, Palm’s webOS is running on the mystery tablet’s screen.
While HP is rumored to have both a 7-inch and 9-inch tablet in the works — codenames “Opal” and “Topaz,” respectively — the pictures we saw were of Topaz. Engadget has posted additional details on the HP tablets, reporting that they will be bundled with a cloud-based storage service, HP’s “Beats” audio processing, and a “tap to share” feature for transferring URLs, documents and music between the tablet and a phone simply by tapping them together.
When are we going to see these bad boys? An exact date remains to be seen, although the leaked Palm marketing materials suggest both a Wi-Fi and AT&T 3G version of the 7-inch Opal to ship in North America, Europe and China in September of this year. The sheet also lists a 4G Verizon-carried Opal to ship in September, and a 4G AT&T-carried version to come in July of 2012.
HP did not comment on the rumors.
Separate reports have emerged suggesting we could see the 9-inch tablet even sooner. HP will begin shipping Topaz units as early as March, according to sources who told DigiTimes. HP expects to ship somewhere between 45 to 48 million notebooks in 2011, with the webOS-operated tablets being the lion’s share of those numbers.
Before HP acquired Palm last April for $1.2 billion, Palm had tried to reinvigorate its ailing mobile market with webOS-based smartphones like the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. Since Palm’s acquisition, HP has been trying to move the much-lauded webOS over to HP products like the ill-fated HP Slate.
A September release for HP’s Opal would put HP behind the forthcoming tablet debuts from Motorola, Lenovo and a potential iPad 2 release. But a staggered approach with Topaz’s March shipping date could keep HP up to speed with its competitors, and keep us puzzled with yet another tablet to choose from in the spring.
Photo: webOS interface/HP
See Also:
- HP Buys Palm for $1.2 Billion
- Palm webOS Headed to HP Tablet, Printer
- HP Slate Could Get a Makeover With Palm’s WebOS
- HP Slate Details Leaked: $550 Netbook, Minus Keyboard
Jan 19
Acer: netbooks will not be phased out, Sandy Bridge tablets not coming any time soon
Posted in: intel atom, IntelAtom, netbooks, tablets, Today's Chili
Stop ordering the caskets! Clearing up yesterday’s somewhat shady reports, Acer’s PR team has issued an official press release stating that company has no intentions to halt production on its Aspire One line of netbooks. Instead it claims that its new array of Android tablets “will find their space next to netbooks and notebooks.” In addition to that, Acer’s taking on the Sandy Bridge tablet rumor that also spouted up, and clarifying that tablets based on Intel’s new laptop / desktop platform “are not yet foreseen.” That syncs up with what we had heard yesterday — that Acer’s announced 4.8-, 7-, 10-inch Android tablets will launch in April in the US and that it would likely wait for the forthcoming ultra-low voltage (ULV) Sandy Bridge parts if it were in fact going to put Intel’s next generation Core processors into tablets. That certainly clears up a lot — hit the break for Acer’s official statement.
Acer: netbooks will not be phased out, Sandy Bridge tablets not coming any time soon originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Jan 19
This Tank is Controlled by iPhone
Posted in: iPhone, Robots, Tech Toys, Today's Chili, Toys
If you have some spare cash in your pocket, an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and an affinity for tanks and/or robots, TankBot is a robotic toy that can sit on your desk when not in use, but can storm the front between HR and Sales when you need to reclaim some territory.
TankBot is controlled through an iOS app, much like the Parrot AR Drone, and uses your iOS device’s accelerometer to roll forward, backwards, or make turns.
Simply tilt your iPhone forward and TankBot starts moving ahead. Tilt your phone to the left, and TankBot makes a left turn. If you’d rather let TankBot do its own recon, you can set it to autonomous mode and let it go exploring. It’ll avoid obstacles and interact with the people it encounters all by itself. TankBot will be available in June and retail for just under $20.
Jan 19
The Kensington PowerLift Props and Charges Up Your iPhone
Posted in: iPhone, ipod touch, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili
iPhone and iPod docks are a dime a dozen, but the new Kensington PowerLift is a dock that’s designed to fit you just right. The dock is a compact package with a 30-pin dock connector on one side, a kick-stand for your iPhone on another side, a battery under the hood, and a USB cable tucked into the top.
The dock connector folds out to the angle you want to keep your iPhone propped up to, and the kick-stand folds up to keep your iPhone in place and propped up.
The USB cable folds out from the base of the dock and connects to either your power brick or your computer for charging and syncing, but you may not need it thanks to the PowerLift’s built-in 1200 mAh battery, which can give your iPhone a boost when it’s running low. When not in use, the PowerLift folds up into a small square brick and packs away nicely. It’s available for pre-order from Kensington for $49.99 list price.
Jan 19
Missing green Android costume found
Posted in: Today's ChiliAn Android mascot getup described as “round and green with foam tendencies” went went missing somewhere between Kentucky and Ohio and was found Monday outside a dumpster.
Jan 19
RIM exec talks PlayBook, App World, QNX on phones, and more
Posted in: BlackBerry, playbook, RIM, Today's Chili
While we wait for the PlayBook to released in its WiFi- and WiMAX-equipped forms over the next few months, RIM’s taking every opportunity it can to talk about the platform — and the latest comes from an interview between FierceDeveloper and the company’s veep of developer relations, Tyler Lessard, who played a prominent role at BlackBerry DevCon ’10 a while back where the PlayBook was first announced. When asked about RIM’s decision to partner up with Sprint and deliver a WiMAX version first before looking at bigger carriers with more broadly-used technologies, Lessard says that they “were really excited about was Sprint’s interest and excitement in coming to the table and working with us on a product like that” — which we take as code for either “they paid us the most” or “no one else bit.” Either way, interesting verbiage to say the least — though he does say that there are other versions in the pipe.
On App World, Lessard notes that BlackBerry’s third-party app platform has taken in some 5,000 apps in the last couple months alone — not a big number, necessarily, until you consider that they’re only up to 17,000 total, so they’re definitely seeing some nice growth percentages there. Turning the attention to the perennial question of when QNX will come to smartphones, he basically echoes a sentiment first shared by bossman Lazaridis back at D: Dive Into Mobile: dual-core processors are key, so the new platform won’t filter down until the hardware gets beefier. He says that “we really want to make sure we don’t back-step from that and offer a degraded experience because hardware is not ready or the performance isn’t there,” which is arguably odd wording considering that BlackBerry 6 is already well behind the curve — how much worse could QNX on a single-core 1GHz-plus processor really be?
[Thanks, Ben]
RIM exec talks PlayBook, App World, QNX on phones, and more originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Jan 19
It sounds like something out of a dream: you ask for $1 million, your phone rings, and a millionaire offers you exactly what you asked for. Well, it seems that dreams really do come true — thanks to YouTube. A few months ago, 27-year-old Craig Rowin, a comic who does improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City, posted a video on YouTube asking for any millionaire to come forward and give him $1 million.
Besides his work at the UCB theater, he also is a contributor to The Onion and its TV show, Onion SportsDome, and is the head writer and director for the ESPN.com webseries, “The Pretty Good Sports Show.”
Rowin’s “Please Give Me One Million Dollars” video starts with Rowin saying that the video is only for millionaires or people who know millionaires.
“Please give me $1 million. Now you have millions and millions of dollars. Give me one million. I don’t need it for anything specific, but I think it would be awesome.”
After a comical video, shown below, he asks the millionaires to e-mail him at PleaseGiveMeOneMillionDollars@gmail.com.
So, what happened after the video went public? Rowin received lots of e-mails, and finally, a man named Benjamin called to make him an offer. Really. It worked. Rowin will receive the check for $1 million live onstage at the UCB theater on February 2. Advance tickets are sold out, but there will be some available the day of the show.
You can check out the second video with a clip of Benjamin the Millionaire’s call after the jump.
Jan 19
Samsung Mobile posts a teaser site for the next “evolution” of the Galaxy S phone, with the big reveal set for Mobile World Congress 2011.
Originally posted at Dialed In
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