Hasta La Gadget!

The Verge reports that a new research program revealed today shows the Navy is looking to equip Humvees and other military vehicles with laser weapons intended “to shoot missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles out of the sky.”

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Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but imitators usually have a degree of separation between their clone and the authentic product. Such is the case with HDC, which has cloned the HTC One with its own handset named – you guessed it – the HDC One. The handset is priced at $160, and at a quick glance is the same in appearance to its counterpart, but the hardware doesn’t live up to the real deal.

Despite being a clone, the HDC One still offers decent specs, especially for the low price tag, making it a budget option for those in China looking for the style without the price tag. Still, it is worth noting that the handset is slated for release on April 1, and though the date may be coincidental, it’s always worth the pause to stop and consider the validity of anything on that date.

As far as design goes, the only difference between the HDC One and the HTC One is the lack of an aluminum body, with the Chinese company swapping it for a plastic frame. Aside from that, everything is the same – the position and design of the speakers, the power button’s location, etc. The differences become apparent, however, when you start looking at what it is running under the hood.

While the HDC One runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, it offers a 1.2GHz quad-core MediaTek processor, a big difference over HTC’s Qualcomm 600 processor. There’s a single gigabyte of RAM, and the display comes in at 720p HD. There’s an 8-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, as well as a tiny 1,700mAh battery, which means users will be charging it fairly often.

As far as cloned handsets go, the HDC One is about as close to the HTC One you can get – visually, at least – without buying the real deal.

[via Android Community]

HDC clones HTC One with new smartphone, offers it for $160 is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The WSJ is reporting that Facebook’s upcoming Android event will be a home screen—as in the first screen you see when you flip on your phone—dedicated to Facebook. It will “display content from users’ Facebook accounts on a smartphone’s home screen.” More »

New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Simon Garnier and other researchers have used tiny robots called “Alices” to mimic the behavior of ants, something they say could help improve modern transportation. Ants are notorious for their colony-wide behavior, acting as one when assembled in groups and using the shortest paths to navigate to their food, forming a so-called superorganism.

The researchers achieved this by using robots said to be about the size of sugar cubes and equipped with light sensors. Above the robots was a projector that marked the robots’ trails with light, which the tiny devices were programmed to follow. The light trails were intended to simulate the pheromone trails left by ants that help them navigate.

The robots’ ability to navigate was very rudimentary: they were programmed to avoid obstacles and barriers, to follow light trails, and to move forward, with their forward direction changing angles frequently. It is not surprising, then, that initially the robots moved randomly forward, but that over time as their motions created light trails, they gravitated towards following the light trails.

Said Garnier about this behavior, “The principles that ants use to find shorter paths have actually been the basis of computer programs developed in the last 10 years to help decide what are the best paths for trucks to transport merchandise between cities ― the so-called traveling salesman problem. One of the most efficient algorithms to solve this problem is directly inspired by the same logic studied in our work, and is also used by telecommunications companies to route packets of information between cell phones.”

[via Livescience]

Researchers develop tiny robots that mimic ant behavior is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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