Hasta La Gadget!

Have you ever wondered just how it would feel like digging up roads during peak hours, causing inconvenience to the masses simply because you are following orders from the top management who do not seem to know what’s going on on the ground? Well, I suppose you can give your little one a taste in the life of one who rides and operates a tractor for a living with the $199.95 Ride On Double Digger.

To put it in a nutshell, this is the ride-on loader and backhoe which enables your little one to not only sit on it, but to dig and dump sand into the included trailer. Both the articulated loader as well as backhoe can be controlled through levers and handles which are easy for tiny hands to operate, and good thing there are no engines to keep this running as it is pedal-powered, meaning you need not burn more money on gas. Heck, there is even a steering wheel that works great to inform the family dog or cat to get out of the way. The chain drive system is fully enclosed so that pant legs will not get caught while pedaling, but of course one should always use this under adult supervision.

[ Ride On Double Digger copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Fresh to the “comes as no surprise to anybody” column comes word that Apple’s online store has gone down for updating, ahead of the iPhone 5 launch expected later on today. The by-now traditional downtime gives Apple’s technical staff time to prepare the store for the latest round of Cupertino goodies, today expected to include not only a new iPhone but freshly updated iPods, too.

The new iPhone is tipped to have a larger display than all previous generations, closer to 4-inches than the current 3.5-inches, with a body that has been kept roughly the same width but stretched lengthways. It’s also believed to include LTE connectivity, but there’s controversy over whether it will add NFC hardware and, if it’s there, whether it will be activated for any particular service from the outset.

As for the other kit we’re expecting, new iPods have been on the cards for some time. A larger iPod touch, echoing the new screen and resolution of the iPhone 5, is predicted, along with a refresh to the iPod nano and iPod shuffle.

Both ranges are said to use a smaller dock connector, which will allow Apple to not only make the hardware smaller than the current, 30-pint connector allows, but to more strictly control third-party accessories. Updated headphone designs are also in the pipeline, sources claim.

SlashGear will be liveblogging the whole Apple announcement, so join us at live.slashgear.com from 10AM PT (that’s 1PM ET and 6PM if you’re in the UK) for all the news as it happens.

Apple Store is down: iPhone 5 incoming! is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Acer’s CloudMobile (A800) has quietly slipped on its September 5th release date in the UK and headed East, where it’s swapped its Android front-end for Alibaba’s Aliyun OS. The dual-core handset will be released in China this Friday for ¥2,999 (approximately $474), making it the most expensive in the country — according to the Wall Street Journal. Acer has reportedly chosen the fledgling, cloud-based OS for its Chinese customers because of the easy user experience, especially for smartphone first-timers. The company seems committed to exploring Aliyun in follow-up devices also, with one planned for release next month and more coming in 2013. Meanwhile, the flagship has yet to receive a dollar price or release date at Expansys, which doesn’t suggest imminent availability of the Ice Cream Sandwich variant. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never see Aliyun make it outside of China and into our eager hands… not without dropping some serious cash on an import, anyway.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile

Acer CloudMobile moves to China, dumps Android for Aliyun originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Sep 2012 08:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Of all the technology that they had on the Enterprise, what I always wanted the most was the Holodeck. The Holodeck was a gigantic room where people in the series went for recreation and was a fully immersive holographic video game system. A newly published patent from Microsoft shows a method of combining gaming and other content on a smaller TV screen with the projection of peripheral images around the player.

The patent shows how Microsoft envisions being able to project an image 360° around a room to complete a virtual landscape. Microsoft filed for the patent in early 2011, and it was published last week by the US patent office and talks about an “immersive display experience.” The system described in the patent would connect to a standard video game console that was in turn connected to something dubbed an environmental display.

That environmental display would then throw an image that appears to surround the user so whichever direction they turn they would see the projected game space. The main TV screen would still be used in the system with the peripheral images beamed around the room serving as an extension to the primary display. The idea is that by using these peripheral images the gamer could turn left or right and see an enemy sneaking up on them.

The patent says that the technology would use a depth sensing camera system along the lines of the Kinect that would sense the layout and typography of room to project the image. This sounds like a cool system, but it also raises some interesting challenges. One challenge is how exactly the system would be able to a project surrounding images in rooms where some sides of the room are open with no walls. For instance in my game room, the right wall is open to a landing for the stairs. I wonder if the system would sense missing or incomplete walls in a room and just not use that wall.

[via ArsTechnica]

Microsoft patent surfaces showing immersive Holodeck-style display is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Intel at CES promised a partnership with Nuance to give Ultrabooks a taste of ready-made voice recognition, and we’re finally seeing the results at IDF in San Francisco through the launch of Nuance’s Dragon Assistant Beta. As the name implies, this isn’t just a voice dictation engine like that in Naturally Speaking: chatty users can delegate common tasks like playing music, reading social network updates and searching the web. The beta isn’t immediately available as of this writing, but it should go live soon and will be a core part of of Ultrabook software bundles in the near future, starting with the Dell XPS 13 this fall. We’re wondering why Intel is focusing its Dragon Assistant efforts solely on thin-and-lights — the company still makes money from portlier PCs, after all — but we won’t mind as much given the simultaneous launch of a Perceptual Computing SDK 2013 Beta, which lets developers work Dragon recognition into their own apps. More details await after the break.

Continue reading Nuance and Intel team on Dragon Assistant Beta for Ultrabooks, Dell XPS 13 to lead the charge

Filed under: Laptops, Software

Nuance and Intel team on Dragon Assistant Beta for Ultrabooks, Dell XPS 13 to lead the charge originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Sep 2012 07:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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