Hasta La Gadget!

Add another one to the (short) list of obscure things that slipped our net at CES. 3M, a company concerned with the materials and components that go into your delicious new gadgets, spent its time in Vegas this month discussing a new way for building capacitive touchscreen panels. By employing silver as its conducting material, 3M says it has made it possible to shrink the circuits at the edge of a touch panel by a whole order of magnitude, resulting in finger-friendly screens unhampered by bulky bezels. Additionally, due to silver’s high conductivity, response times have been shown to dip down as low as 6ms, which is ten times speedier than the currently used Indium Tin Oxide stuff. It’s arguable that neither advancement is revolutionary today, as bezels serve a purpose in providing a gripping surface for slate devices and touch responsiveness is currently constrained by software lag more than hardware capabilities, but 3M sure looks to have a nice building block for the future. The future being 2012, according to the company’s estimates.

3M touts capacitive touchscreens with tiny bezels, 10x faster responsiveness originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Forget the in-dash car phone. If all goes according to plan in 2011, a group of British scientists will be rocketing an Android smartphone to infinity, and beyond.

Researchers at the University of Surrey and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in England are developing an Android-powered satellite to be launched into lower-earth orbit.

Dubbed Strand-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator), the 11.8-inch satellite will take pictures of Earth on a mission to be launched later in the year. Included in its control electronics are the guts of a commercial smartphone running Android.

With Strand-1, SSTL researchers want to show off the features and capabilities of a satellite while primarily using relatively inexpensive off-the-shelf components.

“The economic implications of this are really exciting,” mission concepts engineer Shaun Kenyon told Wired.com. “If these phones stand up to the extreme environments we see in space, it’s amazing to think we could eventually leverage low-cost mobile technology to use in satellite production.”

This isn’t the first time scientists have launched phones aboard rockets. Last year, researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center experimented with sending a couple of HTC Nexus One phones 30,000 feet into the atmosphere, attaching each phone as payload in a small rocket. One phone bit the dust hard after the rocket parachute failed, but the other one walked away from its mission unscathed, capturing more than two-and-a-half hours of recorded video on its 720 x 480-pixel camera.

Cost is a big motivation for the experiment. Many of the standard features seen in current smartphones — cameras, GPS navigation, Wi-Fi accessibility — are also found on satellites. But the smartphone components are a fraction of the size, weight and cost of those used in aerospace.

“We want to see if smartphones can actually survive up there, ” Kenyon said, “and we’ll be looking at how phone-specific sensors like accelerometers perform in space-flight conditions.”

SSTL will initially launch the satellite powered by an on-board computer, which will judge how the phone’s vitals are holding up and monitor for malfunctions in the phone’s hardware. After the data on the phone’s basic functioning are collected, the computer will be turned off and the phone will be used to control different parts of the satellite.

SSTL won’t divulge the manufacturer or model of the phone, but says it is indeed powered by the Android OS.

The satellite will weigh just under 10 pounds and come equipped with miniature reaction wheels for general torque and orientation control, as well as GPS navigation and pulsed plasma thrusters for space propulsion. Kenyon estimates the cost of the phone parts used to come in at less than 300 pounds, or just under $500.

SSTL has built and launched 34 satellites since being founded in 1981. The company specializes in smaller, low-cost satellites that often cost much less than those normally associated with space travel. In the past, the company has worked on training and development programs for NASA and the European Space Agency. The smartphone satellite project is being done in conjunction with the Surrey Space Center at the University of Surrey.

SSTL hopes to launch the satellite before the end of 2011.

Photo: Component smartphone parts to be installed within satellite. Courtesy of SSTL.

Updated 4:32 PST to correct the reference to “pulsed plasma thrusters.”

See Also:

• Cheaper, Better Satellites Made From Cellphones and Toys
• Tiny, DIY Satellites Get NASA Boost
• Nexus One Phone Rides a Rocket Up 28,000 Feet

Who doesn’t love deals on flights or, better yet, free flights? And who doesn’t use Facebook? Well, with JetBlue’s new Go Places Facebook application, TrueBlue members can earn TrueBlue points and special discounts toward free flights.

Every time you check-in at an official JetBlue airport location via Facebook Places, you’ll receive 25 TrueBlue points. The first 100 customers to check in at Boston’s Logan International, Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International, Long Beach, New York’s John F. Kennedy International or Orlando International airport locations will receive 100 TrueBlue points.

Starting today, you can start earning points and deals with Go Places until March 1, 2011. JetBlue said in the press release, “This is the first of many customer-driven promotions that JetBlue has planned for 2011 on Facebook Places.” So, be one the look out for may ways to get cheap/ free flights through Facebook. You can get started on the JetBlue Facebook page.

Sometimes our modern life can feel overwhelming. Sometimes it can feel like it’s all too much — like everything is happening at once, and you’ve got no control over anything. Sometimes, the gadgets we buy to make our lives simpler end up making them a lot more complicated. We suspect that similar sentiments drove the brains behind the new IFC sketch comedy show Portlandia (Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein) to come up with the bizarre, hilarious video in this post. Just a word of warning — once you see it, you can never un-see it. Watch at your own risk… after the break.

Continue reading Fred Armisen gets caught in a technology loop, discovers MiND-Fi

Fred Armisen gets caught in a technology loop, discovers MiND-Fi originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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