Sifting through soil on Mars, NASA’s rover Curiosity paused to take a picture – and exposed its own bad behaviour. The shot included a bright object lying in the Martian dirt, and a closer look suggests that the rover is guilty of littering: it appears the object is a piece of plastic wrapper that has fallen from the robot. More »
Microsoft’s Surface team has been busy wrapping the Windows RT tablet up for pre-orders opening this week, but it also found time to answer some user questions in a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread. In the sprawling conversation, team lead Panos Panay and his team confirmed that Xbox 360 controllers would work with the new slate – though that they hadn’t tried Kinect for Windows yet – as well as discussing just what “all day battery life” really means.
Microsoft is quoting eight hours of “mixed activity” from a full charge of Surface’s non-user-removable battery, or 7-15 days of idle. Asked what exactly comprises “mixed activity” the team confirmed it was more than just coaxing the longest – and probably misleading – runtime from the slate.
“We conducted testing across a variety of core scenarios such as local and streaming video playback (watching movies!), audio playback, wireless web browsing and productivity scenarios such as using Office and mail” hardware lead Pavan Davuluri wrote. “We tested using different Wi-Fi networks with pre-production hardware and software. Hence the battery life numbers started early in the program as a model with calculations and then get verified with actual device HW and SW.”
Other elements of hardware came in for questioning too, such as the internal storage supplied. Microsoft opted not to make a 16GB entry-level model – the $499 that gets you a 16GB new iPad could buy you a 32GB Surface instead, albeit without one of the Touch Covers – instead choosing 32GB and 64GB tiers complete with a microSDXC card slot for adding to that. “After the OS, Office RT and a bunch of apps, you will still have more [than] 20GB” on a 32GB Surface, one team member confirmed, while memory cards are hot-swappable.
Peripherals like the Xbox 360 USB controllers have been tested, “and they work great” the Surface team insists, but some types of traditional Windows PC connectivity won’t be an option. “We are not offering an ethernet to USB bridge solution for wired scenarios” Davuluri confirmed, though the USB 2.0 port will support “millions of devices.”
There are plenty of other tidbits dotted through the thread, including a very in-depth discussion of why screen quality is about more than just hitting “Retina” resolution. For more on Microsoft’s Surface and its route from conception to market, check out our behind-the-scenes visit to Studio B where Microsoft designed it.
Astronomers have been on quite a roll lately with lots of new discoveries being announced over the last several months. One of the most interesting discoveries that astronomers have made in recent times was the discovery of one of the most tightly packed exoplanet systems ever identified. The discovery was made using the Kepler Space Telescope.
The scientists on the team discovered that a star dubbed KOI-500 has five different planets orbiting around it within a fraction of the distance between Mercury and our sun. The discovery was made by a planetary scientist from the University of Florida at Gainesville named Darin Ragozzine. The planetary system is approximately 1100 light years from the Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyre.
Each of the five planets are slightly larger than the Earth. Interestingly, although the planets are slightly larger than the Earth, they each orbit their parent star at a distance less than the distance between Mercury and the sun. The scientists say that the planet’s orbits are 150 times smaller than that of the Earth.
The planets orbit their parent star so closely, and at such a high speed that a year is only a matter of days here on Earth. Despite orbiting so close to the star, the planets have an orbital resonance that prevents them from colliding together or collapsing into the star. According to Ragozzine, when the planets are ranked based on how long it takes the planets to orbit the parent star, going from the innermost to the outermost, it takes the planets one, 3.1, 4.6, 7.1, and 9.5 Earth days each for a single orbit.
The scientists say that the system has a unique planetary relationship with the four outer planets existing in a type of orbital resonance that returns the planets to a set formation every 191 days. This orbital resonance keeps the planets from being knocked from orbit by each other’s gravitational fields and cast out further into the solar system or into the star. The scientists also say that four planets is the largest number ever discovered existing in resonance with each other. The KOI-500 star system is believed to be quite young, perhaps only 1 billion years old. The star itself has a similar mass as our sun with a diameter only three-quarters of our sun.
[via Wired]
I must say, legendary artist and producer Dr. Dre have certainly made good for himself in terms of his business acumen, and starting the Beats brand with Interscope Geffen A&M Chairman Jimmy Iovine has proved to be one of his masterstrokes. Well, the company continues to march onward by announcing their spanking new Beats Pill. No sir, the Beats Pill is not something you pop to drown out the tunes of commercially appealing pop from manufactured boy bands, but rather, it comes across as a portable wireless speaker that boasts of built-in patented Beats Audio. Needless to say, expectations tend to run a little bit higher than normal when there is the Dr. Dre name associated with a particular device, no?
Beats By Dr. Dre President & COO, Luke Wood, said, “The introduction of the Beats Pill and the Executive is the perfect beginning to a truly autonomous Beats as we transform into a freestanding consumer electronics company this year. These products demonstrate our total commitment to design, technological innovation and premium sound experience.”
The Beats Pill Wireless Speaker ensures that the company’s mantra of “sound is king” remains on a pedestal at all times. Audio engineers have made sure that the Beats Pill will live up to such a mandate, starting from careful placement of the drivers to the materials of the grill, where it was specially designed to optimize sound quality and maximize volume. Not only that, the Beats Pill is the first product of its kind to be fully integrated with the company’s patented Beats Audio algorithm, while boasting exclusive speaker modules that are able to provide the highest quality portable listening experience.
Another first registered by the Beats Pill would be the fact that it is the first wireless speaker to come with tap-to-pair NFC and apt-X technology for easy and instant Bluetooth audio, now how about that for technological advancements? With a rechargeable lithium ion battery that offers up to 7 hours of non-stop playback on a full charge, the $199 Beats Pill does seem to sound (pardon the pun) to be the ideal companion for the mobile music lover.
Press Release
[ Take a Chill (Beats) Pill copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
A little over a week ago we reported that Apple’s Maps had seemingly outed a secret Taiwan military base which we assume did not sit well with the Taiwanese government. Now it seems that according to reports, China has stepped up the policing of “illegal maps” which has been defined (via Xinhua Tuesday) as unauthorized maps that mistakes how the country’s borders are drawn, missing geographical features, and maps that reveal confidential information (or locations, if you’d rather). We’re not sure if this is in light of the recent incident with Apple Maps or if it is merely a coincidence, but it will be interesting to see how China goes about policing these “illegal maps”. (more…)
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google’s Eric Schmidt believes that Apple should have kept Google Maps, Survey finds that 74% of respondents have no problems with Apple’s Maps app,
Rovio has come up with many different variations for their Angry Birds franchise, and a while back Angry Birds Star Wars was revealed to be the latest version of Angry Birds that is expected to be made available come 8th of November. Details of the game and the gameplay are a bit scarce at the moment, but it has not stopped Rovio from teasing gamers with trailers, and in the latest teaser trailer it doesn’t really tell us anything – instead it just whets our appetite for the game and the desire for more information! In any case in this video we are introduced to an Angry Birds Millennium Falcon which we are sincerely hoping will be playable in the game, so check it out in the video above and check back with us at a later date for more details!
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Rovio releases their first book app, “Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes”, Rovio teases new female Angry Birds character,
When we first laid eyes on the MG, it was an ambitious effort that hoped to bring Android 4.0-powered gaming to the casual masses through the hit-and-miss world of crowd funding. Though its Kickstarter efforts were a bust, its creators have managed to get this project off of the ground and are now accepting discounted pre-orders at $150 until November 4th — after that, the price will climb to a full $170. All pre-orders are expected to ship during the second week of November. As a refresher, the MG features a 4-inch WVGA display, a 1GHz Cortex A5 processor, a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage and an 8GB microSD card. It’ll also accommodate up to 64GB cards, should you ever hit a wall. Sporting a design that’s reminiscent of the Tapwave Zodiac, the MG will ship pre-loaded with several “freemium” titles and will have access to Google Play’s massive library of games. So, if you’re looking to wean your younger sibling off of your high-end smartphone, the MG could be the stocking stuffer that gets the job done this holiday season.
Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds
MG Android gaming handheld now available to pre-order for $150, ships early November originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Oct 2012 08:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The second mobile device to use Sharp’s IGZO screen technology, the KDDI AQUOS Pad SHT21, has been revealed, a 7-inch tablet promising more than double the runtime of rival slates. Following on from Sharp’s SH-02E phone, announced for DoCoMo earlier this month, the AQUOS Pad SHT21 runs at 1280 x 800 resolution and, Sharp claims, will run for 2.5x as long as tablets with conventional displays thanks to IGZO’s frugal nature.
If you’ve not been keeping up with the minutiae of screen technology, IGZO is named after the indium gallium zinc oxide used in the LCD, rather than the more traditional amorphous silicon layer. Since it’s more efficient for electron mobility – roughly 40x more so, Sharp claims – the pixels can be smaller, and thus demand less backlighting.
Device manufacturers can either take advantage of that reduced backlight requirement to fit smaller batteries but maintain typical runtimes, squeeze extra runtime out of regularly sized batteries, or provide high-brightness “outdoor visibility” modes.
In the case of the new KDDI tablet, it seems there are various modes that can be switched between, depending on your priorities with the tablet: visibility or longevity. The slate also supports digital pen input, is waterproof and dustproof, and includes 4G LTE, WiFi a/b/g/n (2.4/5GHz), Bluetooth 4.0, and 1-Seg digital TV, all in something 106 x 190 x 8.9 mm and 280g.
There are twin cameras – 8-megapixel on the back, VGA upfront – and Full HD video recording, and the SHT21 runs Android 4.0 with a custom UI on Qualcomm’s MSM8960 1.5GHz dualcore processor with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage (plus a microSDXC card slot).
Sales will kick off in Japan in December, with pricing yet to be confirmed.
While baby monitors are certainly not a new piece of technology, we guess given that how big a role smartphones and tablets play in our lives these days that the technology behind baby monitors will be changed as well. Belkin has done that with the WeMo Baby which is part of the company’s WeMo line of home automated gadgets. The WeMo Baby is essentially a more high-tech version of the regular baby monitor and is a microphone that transmits audio from your baby’s room to mobile devices – up to six simultaneously, to be exact, as long as it is hooked up to a WiFi connection (presumably the one at home).
The WeMo Baby will also come with an accompanying that is only compatible with iOS devices, which is powered by Evoz’s baby monitoring service. It will work on 3G, 4G or WiFi which means that parents can listen in on their baby without having to be at home, although why would you leave a baby unattended at home alone is beyond our guess, but we guess the flexibility and mobility might have its place in some situations. The Belkin WeMo Baby will be priced at $90 and is expected to go on sale early next month. [Press release]
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Belkin WeMo home automation system now up for pre-order, Belkin shows off redesigned Thunderbolt Express Dock, now upgraded with USB 3.0 ports,
When it comes to the tablet market, right now it goes without saying that Apple’s iPad (and perhaps, the iPad mini that will be announced later this coming October 23rd) is the undisputed king of the hill, although there are pretenders to the throne from the Android camp which are best represented by Samsung. What happens when there is a third player in the tablet operating system, and that player goes by the name of Microsoft? We all know that Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system is about to be released very, very soon, and along with it, their highly anticipated Microsoft Surface tablet that was specially designed to be the ultimate stage for Windows. More details on the Surface tablet has been revealed today, including pricing. Is it worth your hard earned money?
Basically, the Microsoft Surface which was unveiled all the way back in June this year, will come in two flavors – one with 32GB internal memory, while the other will have 64GB of internal storage space. The Surface with Windows RT will arrive to the masses in three different configurations, where a 32GB model costs $499 to directly challenge the iPad, a 32GB version that comes bundled with a black Touch Cover which will cost you an additional Benjamin on top of that, and a 64GB version that comes bundled with a black Touch Cover, where it will set you back by $699.
Not only that, Microsoft wants to make sure that the Surface gets off on the right footing, and to do so, they will introduce a range of accessories along with the Surface tablet, including Touch Covers in five more vibrant colors – black, white, magenta, cyan and red, which are priced at $119.99 a pop. Hey, if you know you are so going to get the Touch Cover in the first place, just pick up the bundle (if you don’t mind black, that is) and save $20 in the process. Out later this October 26th in North America, the Microsoft Surface tablet will also arrive in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom via online sales channels.
Press Release
[ Microsoft Surface tablet details revealed copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
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