Hasta La Gadget!

Just because ASUS has planned a grand October 23rd event to outline its US Windows 8 lineup doesn’t mean we can’t get an advance peek. Pre-orders have officially kicked off for at least two touchscreen PCs that also give us a very good feeling for the hardware we’ll see at our doors. The dual-screened TAICHI 21 is naturally the star of the show, but it will cost you: a base version of the 11.6-inch hybrid with a 1.7GHz Core i5, 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD starts at $1,300, while an uprated model with a 1.9GHz Core i7 and a 256GB SSD will set early adopters back by $1,600. We’d say the VivoBook X202 is more likely to get some purchases sight-unseen at $600 for an entry laptop with an 11.6-inch touchscreen, a 1.8GHz Core i3, 4GB of RAM and a conventional 500GB hard drive. Both of the systems should arrive in tandem with Windows 8’s October 26th launch and compound the traffic jams for couriers and retailers on what could be a very busy day.

[Thanks, Donny]

Update: As Computerworld noticed, Newegg also has a pre-order listing for the VivoTab RT, which costs $599 in its lone 32GB configuration. It ships the same day as its bigger cousins.

Filed under: Laptops, ASUS

ASUS TAICHI 21 and VivoBook X202 go up for US pre-orders, spoil the party a bit early (update: VivoTab RT, too) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not everyone is able to hold their drink, but if having a nightcap in the form of gin is your choice of poison each day before you wind down for the evening, then you might want to check out the latest happenings surrounding Bombay Sapphire. Design consultancy Webb deVlam and packaging manufacturer Karl Knauer have joined forces to come up with what they call a special Global Travel Retail pack, sporting an illustration by Yehrin Tong which is not static, but rather, it will light up whenever someone reaches out to touch it. I suppose the premise is simple – your body will act as a conduit for the electricity, completing the circuit so that the illustration lights up when touched.

According to Design Week, the illustration itself was produced in electroluminescent ink, while there is a hidden battery that is located somewhere at the bottom of the packaging. Each time you pick it up off the shelf, there is a mechanical switch stashed somewhere which triggers the electric current. This will take different paths at different times, resulting in a visual effect that lasts for 18 seconds.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: PSA: If you’ve got a SOPA alert, it’s a virus, This beautiful “flower” could lead to better batteries and solar cells,

While a new crop of smartphones has just been released in the U.S., the Japanese aren’t going to fall behind anytime soon. They just upped the ante with the new Sharp Aquos Phone Zeta SH-02E, which is the first production smartphone with an IGZO display.

What’s so interesting about IGZO? The indium gallium zinc oxide tech promises higher translucency, compared to regualr LCDs, which reduces the energy needed for backlighting and thus saves power – and the backlight is usually the number one consumer of power in mobile devices. The 2,000 mAh battery is no slouch either, though it’s unknown how much battery life is actually improved by the IGZO display.

The phone has a large 4.9-inch screen with 1,280 × 720 resolution, and a 16 MP camera. It has a 1.5 GHz S4 Pro quad-core processor and has NFC-compatibility. Hopefully we’ll get something like this in the States soon.

[via NTTDoCoMo via Engadget]

There’s an addiction in the modern news reporting universe online to updates on details so very small that less than 10 years ago they’d never have left their respective sources lips. With Apple, we’ve got an addiction to details on the devices we’re holding right this minute. Chances are, in fact, that you’re working with a device right now that we’ve written about in the past 24 hours, and it doesn’t just have to be an Apple device.

When I write a story about a BlackBerry device, I don’t necessarily feel as though it’ll be read by BlackBerry fans alone. Our news cycle currently includes mainly stories about BlackBerry 10, an operating system that’ll be released inside the next few months, likely at the start of 2013. Because this operating system’s success will in a giant way affect the company that makes BlackBerry available to the world, each detail matters. As the iPhone 5′s absolute barrage of tiny details turned into full stories has shown you over the past several months, it doesn’t matter that the end product is greater than the sum of its parts.

With BlackBerry 10, we’re not expecting an operating system that’s going to change the whole mobile universe. It is interesting, on the other hand, to masses of people working with their smartphones on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, that BlackBerry 10 will bring a whole new keyboard to the mix. If you’ve got a keyboard that’s a hit on one system, the other systems see the success and step up their own game.

If we see Apple adding a new way to look at the map on your smartphone, the competition has no choice but to jump into the ocean. Google Street View recently added underwater panoramas to their archive. If Google was the only group in the world making an effort to map our planet, the public would expect that the speed at which they’re doing it was the fastest anyone could go. They’d also expect that noone else could do it better since Google would be the only one making the attempt.

So what does it mean when Apple’s Lightning connector is broken into? It means that Apple’s continually successful projection of a “magical” delivery of technology is inspiring the rest of the industry to “fight back”, so to speak. There’s no chance that manufacturers across the board don’t see an update about a hacked Apple cord and think, at least to some degree, “I wish our hardware mattered that much.”

Because of Apple – and the rest of the companies that find their way into our news feed every day – we’re seeing the personal technology market grow at a rate that’s absolutely astounding. Think about what we were working with just 2 years ago and consider how a story about clock image licensing is changing the speed at which we see great innovation every day.

Why every Apple news byte seems to matter so much is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

You know why soldiers on the ground need to be so buffed up and fit? Well, not only do they need to make sure they are the toughest and meanest looking folks on the battlefield, there is also a whole lot of gadgets and equipment that they will need to carry in combat, so not having that rippling six pack is going to work against you. Researchers have a soft spot for the men and women serving our country on the frontlines, coming up with a prototype Wyss suit for battlefield personnel that enables them to walk longer than ever while resisting the incidences of injuries. How is this made possible? Part of DARPA’s Warrior Web program, a contract worth $2.6 million has been awarded to them to develop a “wearable system that would potentially delay the onset of fatigue, enabling soldiers to walk longer distances, and also potentially improve the body’s resistance to injuries while carrying loads.”

The Wyss suit remains a concept as at press time, and there is still a long road ahead before it becomes viable in the flesh, such as overcoming the battery issue. The thing is, the final suit will hopefully be soft as well as flexible, working alongside the soldiers’ bodies instead of adding additional gear and bulk to their already burdened frames.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Chrome for Android makes its way onto Intel x86 powered Android devices, Intel-powered Motorola RAZR i has been officially revealed,