After a volatile election year, heightened bi-partisan bickering, a
drift-less mandate and a still-divided government, perhaps it was
senseless to think a lame duck could waddle to our fiscal rescue. On the
other hand, maybe we were waiting for the wrong shoe to drop.
So you had to possibility to swap your black iphone into a white one, but what if you liked to swap pets?
If you ask anybody to name 1 country where crazy stuff comes from, chances are very high they’re going to reply you either Japan or China. This time Japan is the top dog.. or should I say duck?
The product pictured is as a matter of fact a collar for dogs to be applied after surgery or just to prevent them biting other people when you take them for a walk. It wouldn’t be …
At this point it’s probably easier to keep count of the devices that Spotify hasn’t weaseled its way onto, but you can hardly blame the company for hustling. Today, Spotify has announced that it has brought its streaming music service to yet another hardware line — users of TiVo’s Premiere series DVRs can now get their Katy Perry fix without having to leave their television’s comforting embrace.
Of course, the usual caveats apply: you’ll need to be a Spotify Premium subscriber to get any real use out of it. A majority of Spotify’s users lean on the service’s free, ad-supported offering to get their musical fix — only about 25% of Spotify’s 20 million users actually pay for it, as CEO/co-founder Daniel Ek revealed earlier this month — but a fondness for pinching pennies won’t fly here.
What’s more, TiVo doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to offering well-designed media applications. The company’s Netflix app has driven a few users to near madness for instance, as has the YouTube app meant for use with the TiVo Premiere. The jury’s still out on Spotify’s app though — what screenshots the company has made available don’t look too bad at all, though I’m always wary when users are forced to rely on relatively simple remotes to navigate through vast stores of content. If you’ve got a TiVo Premiere and you’re itching to take Spotify for a test run, it should pop up in your Music & Photos menu within the next 24 hours if it hasn’t already.
When all-touch tablets and smartphones hit the market, the logical evolution was touchscreen keyboards in the same QWERTY array we’ve grown accustomed to. Many of us have gotten used to it, thanks to predictive text, but we can all agree that the experience could be better.
SnapKeys, a startup that has rethought the whole touch keyboard thing quite a bit, is today launching a beta app that will totally revamp the typing experience on touchscreens. SnapKeys Si focuses predominantly on the predictive bit of typing, as opposed to the pressing of virtual buttons.
In fact, most of the keys on the SnapKeys keyboard have been tossed out. Instead, there are four buttons, each representing three different letters. On the far right of the screen, there’s an invisible spacebar and on the left there’s an invisible backspace.
Any letter that isn’t displayed on a key is chilling out in between the keys.
Once you learn where the 12 letters are on the new keys, you simply type without looking and SnapKeys Si gets everything right for you.
According to SnapKeys, the letters that aren’t displayed on the SnapKeys Si keyboard are actually only used about 18 percent of the time. Clearly, for something used so little, those keys sure do take up a lot of screen real estate while surfing, texting, emailing etc.
The main goal of SnapKeys is to give the user all the viewing space afforded by the size of the screen, without making any exceptions for even a single key.
That’s why, once you’ve gotten used to SnapKeys Si, the entire keyboard can be set to invisible.
Eventually, the company can serve ads and offer a premium version of the app for users who want an ad-free experience. Either way, users will still be seeing more of the content on their screen thanks to SnapKeys.
Download the beta here.
Nvidia’s next-generation mobile processor could be a 72-core graphics powerhouse, according to leaded specs reportedly uncovered by Chinese site Chiphell. The specs for the Tegra 4 processor, codenamed Wayne (a designation we’ve heard before), detail a 4-plus-1 battery saving quad-core design like that used in the current Tegra 3 processors. It should help Android devices get even better at gaming and media applications, while conserving battery life.
The design is based on a 28nm manufacturing process, which is more power efficient than the 40nm design used in the current Tegra 3, and on par with Qualcomm’s S4 mobile processors. Nvidia is hanging its hat on the upcoming Tegra’s graphics performance, however: it boasts 6 times the graphics processing capabilities of the Tegra 3, and 20 times the strength of the Tegra 2. If you’re a next-gen gaming platform like the Ouya, or any smartphone or tablet-maker trying to usurp consoles as a viable gaming alternative, then that’s a very attractive proposition.
Other details reportedly coming to the Tegra 4 according to the leak are the ability to support video playback at 2,560 x 1,440 resolution, USB 3.0 support and also high-speed HDMI connections. The Nvidia design could help the company gain an edge over Qualcomm’s S4, which powers a good percentage of current Android OEM flagship devices. The Tegra 3 also isn’t especially friendly with LTE-capable devices, which is a growing concern, and although the leaked details don’t mention anything about LTE support, it’s hard to imagine Nvidia building a next-gen mobile processor without tackling that. Wayne has reportedly been in development at least since February, and some speculated it would be arriving soon even then, so watch this space for any official details.
Introduction
This year at Computex, we got pulled into the booth of ASUSTOR by one of our contacts that used to work for QNAP, telling us their new products would be worth the time spent. And so we did, ended up devoting quite some time to a new line of quality NAS devices, an the end even offered a lift back to Taipei city by the company’s president.
ASUSTOR has a bit of an offbeat history. The company is a subsidiary of Asus Inc., yet founded by an ex-QNAP team with the affection for …
NEC introduced today in Japan a new 24.1″ LED backlight Display with the MultiSync LCD-EA244WMi, offering some pretty standard specs including a 25,000:1 contrast ratio and a 350cd/m2 brightness, this Full HD monitor comes however with a new ECO mode that once activated give you at standard performance a maximum of 21w of power consumption. The MultiSync LCD-EA244WMi will be available in Japan middle of January at around 45,000 Yen
Here you are yet another compact Bluetooth Keyboard for portable devices. Designed to be used regardless of the operating system you are running (Windows, OSX, Android and iOS) this new TK-FBP052 Series comes in two colors (Black and White) and features Bluetooth 3.0. Announced at around 4,830 Yen this keyboard weight 169g for 237x127x21mm.
The USB Hairbrush from Japan’s Thanko combines a standard hairbrush with a spray mist humidifier packing its own internal water tank, powered by your laptop computer or desktop PC. You may end up looking geekier than Ed Grimley but you won’t have a single hair out of place, I must say.
Everyone knows the first words that were said on the moon, but what about the last? 40 years ago yesterday we left the moon for the last time, so now’s as good a time as any to ask. The answer? Well there are a few, and you can pick which one you like better. More »
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