I don’t know about you, but the general rule of thumb is this – ladies seem to take more pride in their physical looks than us men. We’re more utilitarian, wearing whatever we can grab at the moment before heading out for a social event without thinking too much about whether our turtleneck and jeans are suitable or not. The ladies? They’ve practically got an entire thesis down pat on what to wear for a particular event. Well, one thing’s for sure – they are also more concerned about the scourge known as cellulite, especially around the thigh area. This is where the $1,500 Home Cellulite Smoother comes into play, although I am not quite sure whether it is worth your time (and especially money) in checking it out.
How do you verify the effectiveness of a device like this? It is said to be able to smoothen and tighten dimpled skin caused by cellulite in a safe and painless manner. Taking over 20 years of engineering research, the Home Cellulite Smoother was developed in France, and sports motorized rollers that rely on gentle suction and massaging pulsations in order to stimulate fat metabolism. Each purchase comes with five treatment heads, cleaning wipes, and 20 replacement filters to get you started right out of the box.
It’s early morning. You’re running around, grabbing your stuff and throwing everything in your bag, and just as you’re about to leave, you double back inside to grab your iPhone from the kitchen table – only it’s not there. So you waste another ten minutes or so trying to find your phone before finally rushing out of your apartment. Sound familiar?
Well, here’s one solution for you: the MagSkin magnetic skin for your iPhone. It’s a thin decorative skin that “magnetizes” your iPhone so you can just stick it on your fridge when you’re not using it. That way, it’s always going to be there for you to just grab when you need to go.
The MagSkin is actually a Kickstarter project by Daniel Weyer in a bid to de-clutter his counter from all the wires and devices he and his wife had. If you have a couple of smartphones and music players, then the MagSkin can probably work on them, too, so you can stick everything onto your refrigerator.
The fact that they’re available in a wide range of colors, some shade shifting and thermo-sensitive, doesn’t hurt on the stylish end either.
A minimum pledge of $12(USD) will get you one of your very own MagSkins over on Kickstarter. Aside from that, you’ll also be getting two MagDocks, which are magnetic backings that will convert any surface into a docking area for the MagSkin-wearing device.
What you see here is arguably be the coolest thing on display at Google I/O 2012 — an 8-foot, 300-pound Nexus Q replica (complete with LED ring visualizer) mounted on a robot arm. This interactive installation called Kinetisphere was designed and fabricated by San Francisco-based Bot & Dolly and is controlled by three stations each consisting of — wait for it — a Nexus Q device and a Nexus 7 tablet. How meta is that? One station controls the height of the sphere, another its angle, and a third lets you pick the pattern displayed on the LED ring. Of course, it’s all carefully synchronized to music for maximum effect.
We spent a few minutes talking with Jeff Linnell of Bot & Dolly about what went into the making of Kinetisphere. As it turns out, there’s a lot more to the installation than a Kuka industrial robot, fiberglass, plywood and steel railing. In addition to using the Nexus Q and Nexus 7, the company combined its expertise in motion control and automation with Google’s Android ADK 2012, Autodesk‘s Maya and even Linux. Take a look at our gallery below then hit the break for our video interview and a lovely behind-the-scenes clip.
It’s been about five years since I bought an iPhone, and after giving myself some time to get a feel for the device, I think I’m ready to say that a smartphone is something everyone should consider owning. More »
Two years ago, we fought for and achieved a law that stood to make health care better for those who already had coverage and provide affordable insurance for the millions who did not. The naysayers have yet to produce a better solution Read More… More on Health Care Reform
“Wilfred” is back (Season 2 premieres Thurs., June 28 at 10 p.m. ET on FX) and this sophomore season promises to up the ante on bizarre, dark comedy twists.
But, as the recent Season 2 premiere episode preview showed, they’re also pulling in some more big guest stars like Robin Williams, Rob Riggle, Steven Weber and “Smallville” alum Allison Mack.
“Guiltily, I’ve been spoiled now,” “Wilfred” star and creator Jason Gann said about their continued guest casting coups. “Sometimes we’ll be looking at possibilities for casting, and you’ll see someone and go, ‘We can do better than him.’ And it’s someone quite high profile. Who am I? I’m in a dog suit!”
There’s nothing worse than relying on a GPS unit with incorrect map information, so TomTom has opened up its Map Share community so that around 60 million units can take advantage of daily map changes for free. TomTom say that Map Share was previously restricted to a limited number of devices, but now just about everyone can get in on the action.
Any changes in the immediate area, such as new speed limits, blocked roads, or different street names, can now be modified directly on the device. If the user then chooses to do so, they can send the updates to TomTom and the Map Share community so that everyone reaps the benefits for free.
Major changes such as brand new roads or roundabout placements are logged with TomTom, validated, and added to maps on a quarterly basis. The collaborative approach to creating the maps apparently helps TomTom to create “maps [that] accurately reflect reality.”
Want a preview of Map Share? Take a peek at the video below to get a better idea of what it’s all about.
Google’s Nexus 7 didn’t come as a great surprise when it launched at IO 2012 yesterday, but the $199 price tag still raised some eyebrows in astonishment. At under half the price of a new iPad, it’s competitive – though very different – to Apple’s slate, but it also undercuts a fair number of other Android tablets too. You can’t even accuse Google of milking international buyers to make up the difference, as prices outside of the US are, surprisingly, very reasonable too. The Nexus 7 will sell from £159 in the UK, for instance, versus expectations of around £250. So, how has Google (and hardware partner ASUS) managed to make the Nexus 7 so cheap?
It doesn’t hurt to have relatively mundane hardware. Tegra 3 is no longer a brand new chipset, with the early-adopter tax likely rubbed off, and in fact Google is using the even cheaper KAI version announced earlier this year. That means the 1GB of memory can be the cheaper DDR3L sort commonly used in PCs; meanwhile the 8GB or 16GB of internal storage is unlikely to add greatly to the bill-of-materials. The display is, at 1280 x 800 resolution, better than the 1024 x 600 panel we’ve seen on other cheap slates like RIM’s heavily-discounted BlackBerry PlayBook, but then nor is it an expensive Super AMOLED as on, say, some of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab models.
The rest of the tech is tablet-by-numbers, with only NFC a mild stand-out (and an inexpensive one at that). The camera – front only, as the Nexus 7 does without the rear shooter – is a mere 1.2-megapixels, fine for Google+ Hangouts but not something you’d want to capture precious memories with. Finally, the case is simple molded plastic and rubber, not metal as on the iPad.
“Google’s intentions with Nexus 7 are very different from every other Android OEM”
Meanwhile, unlike every other Android OEM, Google’s intentions with the Nexus 7 are very different from the usual “make some money” approach. The race to the bottom of the Android tablet market has been tempered, a little, by each manufacturer’s hope to secure at least some margins on each unit they sell. After all, they make their money on hardware.
Google, though, is seeing Nexus 7 as a means to an end, not the end-product itself. As Android chief Andy Rubin said at Google IO yesterday, the missing piece in tablets running the platform to-date has been the software ecosystem: there were simply not enough compelling apps to make slates look competitive against the iPad.
Nexus 7 Android 4.1 Jelly Bean hands-on:
The Nexus 7, then, is a device to spur interest, adoption and hard work from Android developers. In that way it’s a slightly different proposition from the Nexus phones we’ve seen so far: they were intended as guiding points to the mobile handset industry, resetting specification goalposts that had begun to atrophy amid OEM apathy. The tablet, then, can be cheap because it doesn’t need to be anything more, and Google can opt for relatively mainstream hardware.
That in doing so it also mounts a challenge to Android upstart Amazon – which has been using a similar gateway-hardware strategy with the Kindle Fire, selling a cheap tablet and relying on ebook and media sales to deliver a longer-term revenue stream – is a pleasant bonus, especially since the retailer worked so hard to strip out Google’s own store options in the Fire and replace them with its own.
Google is doing everything it can to get users to start spending money in the Play Store. Free app downloads are well and good, but Apple continues to crow about the amount iOS users spend on paid apps and in-app purchases, and Google would like a share of that market too. Receiving $25 of free Play credit promised for all Nexus 7 buyers is, unsurprisingly, contingent on having “a valid form of payment” in your Google Wallet account. Google is also taking a page out of Amazon’s book with the Kindle, shipping the Nexus 7 automatically paired to users’ accounts – presumably with the same payment information as used to buy the tablet itself – so that it can be used to buy apps out of the box.
It remains to be seen whether Nexus 7 owners can be trained to spend money on software by a little free credit, but if interest in the tablet by the developers at Google IO is anything to go by, a $199 price point might be enough to persuade them to branch out into tablet app development. There’s more on the Nexus 7 in our review.
Google I/O Conference is certainly a hotbed for technology, and it kickstarted with the announcement of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean which delivers a far smoother user experience than ever before, and you will be pleased to hear that the first device in the world which will run on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean right out of the box is, unsurprisingly, a Google device – the Asus-manufactured Nexus 7 tablet.
Google claims that the Nexus 7 delivers incredible performance and a stylish design, all coming in the form of a light and portable package that is capable of fitting in nicely with your hand. You will not find Asus skimping on the hardware specifications here, that is for sure. Specially designed to run an incredible variety of entertainment, productivity and gaming applications, the Google Nexus 7 tablet will run on the NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor which sports a quad-core chip and a 12-core GeForce GPU, ensuring your gaming experience on the Nexus 7 is nothing short of extraordinary.
There will be two models of the Nexus 7 in the market, where it will come in 8GB and 16GB flavors. The 8GB model will retail for $199, and those who want to opt for double the storage space will have to fork out $249 for it. Just what kind of hardware specifications are we looking at for that kind of money? Enter the 7″ IPS panel which is said to deliver crisp and detailed visuals, sporting an ultra-wide 178° viewing angle, scratch-resistant Corning FIT Glass and a textured chassis design which ensures your Nexus 7 tablet will not slip out from your hands by accident.
Battery life has been rated at 9.5 hours on movie playback alone, and the entire shebang measures 0.4″ thin and tips the scales at 0.7lbs. It is said to be as portable as a paperback book thanks to its size, but boasts enough portability to make you want to use it all the time. Is this the iPad killer that the industry has been waiting for a long time?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
I don’t know about you, but the general rule of thumb is this – ladies seem to take more pride in their physical looks than us men. We’re more utilitarian, wearing whatever we can grab at the moment before heading out for a social event without thinking too much about whether our turtleneck and jeans are suitable or not. The ladies? They’ve practically got an entire thesis down pat on what to wear for a particular event. Well, one thing’s for sure – they are also more concerned about the scourge known as cellulite, especially around the thigh area. This is where the $1,500 Home Cellulite Smoother comes into play, although I am not quite sure whether it is worth your time (and especially money) in checking it out.
Google I/O Conference is certainly a hotbed for technology, and it kickstarted with the announcement of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean which delivers a far smoother user experience than ever before, and you will be pleased to hear that the first device in the world which will run on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean right out of the box is, unsurprisingly, a Google device – the Asus-manufactured Nexus 7 tablet.