Hasta La Gadget!

The Bluetooth 4.0 specification may have been finalized in July of last year, but smartphones supporting the standard are just starting to hit the market. In fact, the first such handset is the iPhone 4S. That the 4S is the first to deliver its 4.0 wares to the American public is something that got lost in all the hubbub surrounding its launch. One of the biggest selling points of the latest version of the PAN standard is its low-power mode, though that wont have much of an impact on Apple’s device. What it will enable the latest iGadget to do however, is act as a hub — collecting data from multiple sensors and accessories simultaneously, such as heart rate monitors and cats. Don’t expect this to be alone on the market for long, other manufacturers will certainly be squeezing support for the specification into their next flagship device.

iPhone 4S claims title of first Bluetooth 4.0 smartphone, ready to stream data from your cat originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One group of people has traditionally been left out of our modern tablet revolution: the visually impaired. Our slick, button-less touchscreens are essentially useless to those who rely on touch to navigate around a computer interface, unless voice-control features are built in to the device and its OS.

But a Stanford team of three has helped change that. Tasked to create a character-recognition program that would turn pages of Braille into readable text on an Android tablet, student Adam Duran, with the help of two mentor-professors, ended up creating something even more useful than his original assignment: a touchscreen-based Braille writer.

Currently a senior at New Mexico State University, Duran arrived at Stanford in June to take part in a two-month program offered by the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC). The program is a competition: Participants are given research assignments, ranging in the past from aerospace modeling to parallel computing, and vie for honors awarded at the end of the summer. This year, projects aimed to solve a problem using the Android platform. Duran and his team’s project, titled “A virtual Braille keyboard,” was this year’s winner for “Best Android Application.”

Duran was challenged to use the camera on a mobile device, like the Motorola Xoom, to create an app that transforms physical pages of Braille text into readable text on the device. From the get-go, there were problems with this plan.

“How does a blind person orient a printed page so that the computer knows which side is up? How does a blind person ensure proper lighting of the paper?” Duran said in an interview with Stanford News. “Plus, the technology, while definitely helpful, would be limited in day-to-day application.”

So Duran and his mentors, Adrian Lew, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Sohan Dharmaraja, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate studying computational mathematics, decided to develop a writer app, instead of a reader. Currently, the visually impaired must use desktop-based screen-reading software or specially-designed laptops with Braille displays in order to type using a computer.

Because a blind person can’t locate the keys of a virtual keyboard on a flat, glossy touchscreen, the team decided to bring the keys themselves to the user’s fingertips. Specifically, when the user sets eight fingers on the device, virtual keys align underneath each of the user’s fingers. The team’s Braille keyboard is comprised of eight keys: six that are used to compose a Braille character, a carriage return, and a backspace key. If the user gets disoriented, he or she can re-establish the keyboard layout with a lift and re-application of the hands.

“The solution is so simple, so beautiful. It was fun to see,” Lew said. Such a keyboard is also useful because it customizes itself to the user, adjusting the onscreen keys based on the user’s finger size and spacing. (I wish my iOS keyboard did that!)

Duran demoed the app blind-folded, typing out an email address as well as complicated mathematical and scientific formulas, proving the keyboard could be useful to educators, students and researchers. He also got to see a blind person use his app for the first time, which he said was an indescribable feeling, “It was the best.”

Lew said via email, “We do not yet know how exactly this will reach final users, but we are committed to make it happen.” The team has several options they will be considering over the next few weeks, so perhaps we could even see an app end up in the Android Market soon.

The tablet-based system costs 10 times less than most modern Braille typing solutions, and, based on the video below, appears to be anything but vapor.

Image and Video courtesy Steve Fyffe/Stanford University

We double-took when we noticed this strange little handset on T-Mobile’s leaked fall roadmap under a ‘Flip II‘ codename, and now it’s emerged in some press shots with a doubly playful new moniker and a touch more clarity. We can see a five megapixel rear camera with LED flash, a front-facer of unknown resolution, and what’s reported to be a 320×480 HVGA main display. We know very little about the secondary display except that it seems to give you quick access to your apps — although we’re hoping there’s more to it than that. The roadmap indicated an imminent November 2nd launch for $150 on contract and it surely won’t be long before we get some hands-on time. Til then, we’ll just try to imagine the ergonomics.

LG Doubleplay packs dual screens, likes being different originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Your 3TB drive is pretty sweet, but it’d be so much more awesome if it was a 6TB, right? You bet. And TDK says it’s got a way to make that happen. That could be important very soon, as some industry insiders think that hard drive manufacturers only have one or two generations left before […]

First the PlayBook, and now a huge service outage on the eve of iOS 5. Can nothing go right for RIM? Photo Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Oh, RIM! It looked like things couldn’t get any worse, and then your messaging services go down for days. And right before the iPhone launch, too.

BlackBerry owners will already know about it, but for the rest of you, BBM (BlackBerry Messaging) went down hard on Monday morning, and is still staggering along two days later. Outages have occurred in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and spread to India, Brazil, Chile and Argentina.

The problem was caused by a switch failing in Slough, England. This was followed by the backup failing, too. BlackBerry’s UK service update says that “the messaging and browsing delays that some of you are still experiencing were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure. Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested.”

That was yesterday. Today, things are still not working right, and Blackberry’s latest update doesn’t look like they’ll get better anytime soon. “The resolution of this service issue is our Number One priority right now and we are working night and day to restore all BlackBerry services to normal levels” is about as specific as things get. David Chow, friend of Gadget Lab over in England, reports that BBM, e-mail and browsing are all down, but Twitter works over Wi-Fi.

The one thing that BlackBerry still has over other phones is BBM, the service that lets users send SMS-like messages to each other, for free. Without that, there seems no point in buying a BlackBerry instead of an Android handset or an iPhone. Worse still, today is the launch day Apple’s iOS 5, which includes the Messages app. This lets users send free messages between iOS 5 devices, and goes head-to-head with BBM.

Nobody is going to abandon their BlackBerry right away, but Messages could be the carrot, and this too-long outage the stick that together send users over to Apple next time a contract is up.

BlackBerry Service Update [BlackBerry UK]

See Also:

• BlackBerry Users See the Fail Whale Twice in Week
• Blackberry Email Server Malfunctions, Takes Down User Email and …
• PlayBook Tablet Has a Spotty Day One in San Francisco
• DOA: Blackberry PlayBook to Ship Without Mail, Messaging or …