Hasta La Gadget!

Remember all that happy fuss over Samsung’s Super AMOLED display, and its more recent Super AMOLED Plus? Well now Toshiba Mobile Display has jealously stepped into the ring with its own answer to the world’s demand for thinner, lighter and less reflective LCDs. Its as-yet-unnamed technology seeks improvement in a roughly similar way to Super AMOLED, by fusing the capacitive touch layer and LCD. In so doing, Toshiba claims it can produce an integrated panel just 1mm thick, which it says is less than half the thickness of a conventional LCD touchscreen. Weight is also halved and surface reflection is reduced by 10 percent. Alas, Toshiba’s press release does not provide the stats we really want — a head-to-head comparison with Samsung’s best efforts or, say, the Synaptics ClearPad 3250 which also melds touch layer and LCD. And perhaps to avoid confrontation in the mobile arena, Toshiba emphasizes the use of its technology in “vehicle-mounted” and “industrial” applications. Seems we will have to wait until the screen is exhibited in LA next month before we know whether it is really up for a fight.

Continue reading Toshiba reveals 7-inch LCD with integrated touch, just 1mm thick

Toshiba reveals 7-inch LCD with integrated touch, just 1mm thick originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Monday

A few days ago when Ryan wrote about the fact that Space Cadet Pinball (a.k.a. Windows Pinball or 3D Pinball) is no longer included with Windows as one of the standard games, he also mentioned some of the other classic games that Microsoft has retired. I thought it would be fun to go back and take a look at some of those games that many of us used to play on a regular basis. While they are retired, they are still available for download, which I’ll include the links for.

—Pinball—

Pinball was introduced as a standard game included with Windows when NT 4.0 debuted in 1996. Formally called 3D Pinball: Space Cadet, it became a favorite and was included with versions of Windows up until Windows Vista.

About Pinball: Those of you who played it know that there were 9 different ranks that you could attain by completing missions. The lowest rank was Cadet, and went all the way up to Fleet Admiral. I don’t even remember what my highest rank was, but I know for sure it wasn’t Fleet Admiral

Download Here or Here

—SkiFree—

SkiFree was actually created by a guy working at Microsoft as a game he played for his own education and entertainment. So how did it end up as a classic Microsoft game? On the official SkiFree website, creator Chris Pirih says, “One day while I was playing with it at work, the program manager for Windows Entertainment Pack happened to look over my shoulder and immediately decided he had to have this game. I called it WinSki, but the Microsoft marketroids hated that and decided, for inscrutible marketroidal reasons, to call it SkiFree. After some token resistance I let them have their way. Since the program was not originally a Microsoft product, Microsoft licensed it from me and paid me some trivial one-time fee (something like 100 shares of MSFT stock, no royalties) for its use.” 

The object of course, was to ski down a slope but do so while avoiding obstacles. It was designed for 16–bit Windows, and then later turned into a 32–bit version. The very first version is pictured below and uses “^” to mark where the trees are, and “//” to mark the skier. A more updated version is pictured next to it.

Don’t forget about the Abominable Snow Monster who’ll appear and attempt to eat you!

Download Here or Here

—Hover—

You’ll remember Hover from Windows 95 where according to Wikipedia, “it was a showcase for the advanced multimedia capabilities available on personal computers at the time.” It’s best described as a “capture the flag” type of game where the object is to capture your enemy’s flags before they capture yours.

Download Here or Here

—Rodent’s Revenge—

Rodent’s Revenge is probably one of my all-time favorite games to come with Windows. If you’ve never played it, you’re missing out! It was originally created in 1991 and the object is to trap the cats. Once the cats are trapped and they can’t move, they’ll turn into cheese which you’ll want to go back and eat to get some extra points. You’ve got three lives to get you through 50 levels!

Download Here or Here

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Seems like we just can’t get ARM’s next-generation Cortex-A15 system-on-chip out of our minds. Having figured as a headline item in LG’s ARM licensing deal this morning, it’s now shown up on a leaked Qualcomm roadmap, landing itself a lynchpin role in that company’s Snapdragon future. Alas, Qualcomm had been promising for the earliest of its MSM8930 / 60 and APQ8064 Snapdragons to be sampling in Q2 of this year, but this latest schedule shows them as sampling at the end of 2011 (see update). This isn’t hugely surprising in light of ARM’s recent forecast of Cortex-A15 devices in “late 2012,” but it’ll be disappointing to users keen to be exploiting quad-GPU and quad-CPU mobile rigs as soon as humanly possible. Guess that just leaves us waiting for the NGP or NVIDIA’s quad-core SOC in August. Hit the source link for more on Qualcomm’s plans for the near and distant future.

[Thanks, Mike]

Update: Qualcomm got in touch to correct the timing here. The company’s 3G/LTE MSM8960 chipset remains on track to sample in this quarter, as promised in the company’s latest earnings report. The other two parts were already expected to come later, so there’s no delay to speak of. Just juicy specs.

Qualcomm’s next-gen Snapdragon roadmap leaks, exhibits great expectations (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Apr 2011 09:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Big Button phone has big buttons

Most phones for old folks offer nothing but a large-text display, big buttons and nothing else. And rightly so: Removing complexity is the point. But what about adding in a few Grandpa-friendly extras? That’s just what the Bluechip BC5i Big Button Mobile Phone does.

The Big Button phone lives up to its name, with big fat buttons on the front, and these are joined by a big orange button on the back. This is the emergency button. When Granny presses it, the phone will call a preset number (hint: put in the number of a sibling and not your own).

The phone speaks numbers out loud during dialing, so you can be sure you hit the right button. SMS is also supported, and the phone’s settings can be updated by sending it a specially-formatted SMS message.

But what about those extra features? These are neat enough to make me consider buying the phone for myself. First is an FM radio. If you don’t know what that is, it doesn’t matter, because Grandpa will. Think of it as a kind of 20th century Spotify that doesn’t let you choose the music and you’ll get pretty close.

There is also a flashlight built in, which uses bright, low-power LEDs. This, along with the radio, is operated by sliding a switch on the side of the phone. No diving into menus here.

The price for this technical anti-wonder? Just £30 ($50) without a contract.

Bluechip BC5i Big Button product page [Mobile Fun via Mobile Crunch]

See Also:

• Researchers: Adults 31 and Older Hate, Fear Cell Phones
• Android App Tracks, Helps Wandering Alzheimer's Sufferers
• Folks Take Cellphones To The Grave

Photosmith is like carrying the Lightroom Library Module on your iPad

Got an iPad? Use Adobe Lightroom to organize and mess with your Photos? Then prepare to get excited. Photosmith has launched today, and it’s an iPad app which sits between your camera and Lightroom.

Photosmith lets you tag, rate and otherwise organize all of the photos which you have imported into your iPad, whether using the camera connection kit, an Eye-Fi card or just saved from an e-mail. This means that you really can leave your laptop at home when you go out shooting, or away on vacation.

The app comes in two parts. The iPad app itself, and a plugin for Lightroom. The plugin lets you sync the two, slurping in all photos and metadata over Wi-Fi. You can also import much faster via USB and then just sync the metadata over the air.

The iPad app is where the fun is had, though. Once the app has crunched the data from your photos, you can browse the thumbnails and also view any of the photos full-screen and even at 100% zoom. You can sort the photos into collections (Lightroom speak for folders) and also smart collections (Last Imported, Unmarked, Rejected and so on). You can view and edit metadata, rate images, add colored labels and assign keywords. In short, everything a neat-freak needs to do short of editing the pictures.

Then, when you get home, everything is synced back to Lightroom.

But what if you don’t want to wait until you get to a computer before you share the pictures? Photosmith has you covered. You can export your photos direct to Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, or via e-mail.

I have been trying to test Photosmith in pre-release form for a while, but my iPad doesn’t like it and the app quits during import. This appears to be an exception, though, as pretty much everyone, everywhere else says that the app is both fast and stable.

Photosmith works with any JPEG, and any RAW file supported by the iPad. If you can import photos from your camera using the camera connection kit, then you’re good to go. Photosmith is available now, for $18.

Photosmith product page [iTunes]

Photosmith – The Grand Tour [Photosmith]

See Also:

• LRPAD, an iPad Multi-Touch Controller for Lightroom
• Photogene 2.0 for iPad: A Desktop Photo Editor on a Tablet …
• Photoshop Crashes onto iPad
• Adobe Shows Three Amazing iPad Apps for Photoshop