Hasta La Gadget!

A Chinese vendor at the Consumer Electronics Show in January proudly displayed an iPad 2 case, three months before the iPad was released. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Chinese police have arrested three factory workers accused of leaking the iPad 2’s design prior to the tablet’s release, according to a report.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that assembles electronics including the iPad, suspects the employees leaked the design to Chinese accessory makers, giving them a head start on making iPad 2 cases before the rest of the world.

“The local police on December 26, 2010, arrested three employees that were suspected of leaking the design, and officially charged the three employees for violating the company’s trade secrets on March 23, 2011,” Taiwanese publication DigiTimes reported.

Is anyone surprised?

The accessories industry has historically been a leaky boat, because the people who create the plastics that come on iPhones and iPads are closely connected to the companies making third-party protective cases. As a result, quite often we see cases released for Apple products before the Apple products themselves — though the accuracy of the designs are hit or miss.

Several months before the iPad 2 debuted, accessory makers were proudly promoting protective cases for the iPad 2. We saw one ourselves at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The iPad 2 case vendor at CES explicitly told me he received the design details from someone at Foxconn. Not sly at all.

And when the iPad 2 officially released in April, the designs of many leaked cases fit the actual specifications of the tablet. The case we photographed (above) had a thinner profile, a hole cut out for a camera, and a slot in the bottom-right corner for the speaker. Everything lined up.

See Also:

• Leaked Cases Reveal New iPod Designs
• Leaked Case Designs May Predict Future iPod Cameras
• Leaked iPhone 2.0 Case Photos Could Confirm New Design
• Photos: Are These iPad 2 Cases?

The Shake Weight it is not, but as 21st century workout solutions go, Tweet_Fit certainly has the potential to get people talking — or, at the very least, tweeting. Developed by a UK design student, the connected gym accessory attaches to the end of a standard dumbbell and sends updates to your Twitter account when you start and stop your workout. Take it offline and it guides you through the perfect curl. Tweet_Fit’s designer points out that it offers a novel way for trainers to keep track of their clients, and can be used to spur healthy competition between friends. Given, it won’t make bragging about how much you can bench any easier, but, then, tweeting an invitation to the gun show is so impersonal. Tweet_Fit is still a prototype, but you can check out a video of the Twitter-enabled dumbbell in action after the break.

[Thanks, Fraser]

Continue reading Tweet_Fit tweets while you sweat to the oldies (video)

Tweet_Fit tweets while you sweat to the oldies (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Fraser Spowart  | Email this | Comments

Plowing through bug reports is a reliable way to dig up juicy morsels of info, and thanks to that timeless tactic we’ve got some specs on a pair of unannounced Chrome OS devices. First up is a netbook from Acer codenamed ZGB which, according to a recently filed report, will have a 1366 x 768 panel, presumably in the 10 to 12 inch range. We also know that you can hook up an external display to it via an HDMI port powered by an encoder chip from Chrontel. Since AMD’s Fusion netbook platform supports HDMI natively, we can also safely assume that the ZGB will be running the web-only OS on an Atom processor. That’s where the details end for now but, hey, it’s better than nothing.

The other device, Seaboard, has been floating around the Chrome OS flaw depot for some time, but reports are finally starting to reveal some tantalizing details. We now know that it is powered by a Tegra 2 and sports a touchscreen — the perfect place to test out those finger-friendly tweaks we’ve heard so much about. There are also mentions of a “lid switch” and a physical keyboard, indicating it may be a convertible or something in the vein of the Eee Pad Slider rather than a pure slate. The hybrid form factor would make perfect sense since it will house a pair of USB ports and an HDMI jack, which could make for a rather chunky tablet. Obviously, neither of these devices are confirmed yet (and Seaboard is most likely being used for internal testing only) but at least we’ve got a better idea of what to expect when the browser-based OS comes to consumers later this year.

Chrome OS machines leaked in bug reports: Acer netbook and touch-friendly Seaboard originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CrunchGear  |  Macles, Chrome Story  | Email this | Comments

Verizon delays the release of the Samsung Droid Charge but doesn’t say why or when it will be available.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

As we recently learned, growing marijuana indoors uses up a whole lot of energy. Possibly as much as one percent of the entire country’s energy consumption. But what if marijuana were legal and therefore didn’t need to be grown indoors?

An infographic created by Lumin Interactive and designer Jacob O’Neal, and comes with a not all that surprising answer. According to the infographic, commercially growing marijuana outdoors could reduce energy use by 75 percent. Or 0.75 percent of the nation’s entire energy consumption. But there’s more.

“The carbon footprint of covert cannabis production might also be easily offset by the energy used to enforce the laws against it,” the infographic reads, “electricity for the some 60,000 inmates in prison on marijuana related charges at any time, and the fuel for the police cruisers that brought in the offenders, among other things…”

Currently 17 states legally allow marijuana cultivation.

Via Treehugger