Hasta La Gadget!

“Supernanny” Jo Frost, the star of TLC’s “Family S.O.S,” stopped by HuffPost Live on Tuesday to dish on her new show and share her parenting tips.

Some of her best advice? How to broach the difficult topic of divorce with your kids, and what exactly parents should tell their kids about the split.

Noting that parents need to be “sensible with the amount of information” they share with young kids, Frost recommended saying something along the lines of, “Mommy and daddy don’t live together anymore, that’s a decision that we made, however mommy and daddy still love you very much.”

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As we noted yesterday, Apple’s Tim Cook hinted that variations of the iPhone, such as versions that fall at different price points, could be in the company’s future. Rumors of a low-cost iPhone have been circulating for months now, with at one point Apple’s Phil Schiller saying such a device will never have a future in the company’s products. Despite that, the rumor is still alive, and today sources told the Wall Street Journal that a low-cost iPhone is expected to be made available later this year.

The alleged cheaper iPhone will primarily be assembled by Pegatron Corporation, with Apple shifting some more of its supply chain load to the lesser-known Chinese company. Pegatron has already dabbled in Apple manufacturing, having produced some iPhones in 2011, as well as some iPad mini tablets in 2012 and even iBooks in days gone by. Such a shift from heavily relying on Foxconn, which has long been a staple of Apple, represents risk diversification.

Foxconn ran into some problems late last year with the iPhone 5, having experienced problems meeting demand for the smartphone, with customers having to wait weeks before they received the device. Such issues make efforts in risk diversification an obvious step for the company, but the sources who provided the information said that growing competition from Samsung and others has also prompted the change. 

Others reasons were also cited, including less financial incentive to stick with Foxconn in light of work condition improvements that are cutting into the overall financial picture. On the flip side, Pegatron is willing to manufacture for Apple with less profit that Foxconn requires. Says sources, Apple and Foxconn are also taking on a bit of an antagonistic stance with each other, with the fruit-logo’d company finding Foxconn harder to control and Foxconn finding Apple’s products increasingly harder to assemble.

That doesn’t mean Foxconn head Terry Gou and Apple’s Tim Cook aren’t still on good terms, says the sources, with both still having a “strong relationship.” Such reported changes are the result of necessary business conditions, although nothing official has been confirmed, with neither Apple, Foxconn, nor Pegatron willing to comment on the matter.

SOURCE: WSJ

Apple pushing supply chain load from Foxconn to Pegatron, says sources is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
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A look at the way that video game technology can be used to help in the creation of robots. A new robot that is being worked out by a research team at Cornell Universit that is using the set of cameras and the ability to recorgize the movement of human beings of the Microsoft Kinect to make a new robot.

Outside of possible FCC filings, Motorola has largely been coy about just what its next major smartphone will be — until now. The firm’s Dennis Woodside just revealed at D11 that the new flagship will be called Moto X (previously rumored as the X Phone), and that it will be built in a Fort Worth, Texas factory that was once used to make Nokia phones. Woodside isn’t giving away many details at this stage, although he teases that the smartphone will “know what you want to do before you do.” Oh, and he has a Moto X in his pocket… not that he’s about to show us anything just yet, of course. If you’re curious about Woodside’s actual quote, it’s below:

“It’ll be the first Motorola smartphone built in the United States. It’ll be built in Texas — we’ll employ around 2,000 people. It’s right outside of Fort Worth in a 500,000 square foot facility that was previously used to build Nokia phones.”

Update: Woodside had two extra nuggets while on stage — he mentioned that the Moto X will be “broadly distributed” across numerous carriers, a rarity for Motorola smartphones in recent years. Specifically, he noted: “The Moto X is going to be broadly distributed — that’s a first for Motorola in a number of years. The support of the carriers has been fantastic.” In other words, this won’t be a Nexus device, and you can count on some amount of skinning and bloatware to muddle things up. On the issue of battery life, Woodside said: “I’ll save the details for later, but [the industry issue of] battery life is a huge problem. Motorola has some of the world’s best engineers and systems designers who spend their lives on that problem. There are two processors in the device that creates a system that allows you to do such a thing.” Two processors, you say? Fascinating!

Update 2: The Moto X should arrive in late summer. Also, a reminder: Motorola mentioned a shift toward stock Android coming later this year. While there isn’t any guarantee that the Moto X will embrace that philosophy, it would be a fitting poster child.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google

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The Mindstorms line already makes it possible to create robots, machines and other moving and highly interactive toys out of LEGO. But the company isn’t resting on its laurels. Recently LEGO teamed up with Sony to make what they’re calling Toy Alive – prototype LEGO bricks that have motors, LEDs and even cameras.

Toy Alive was one of the prototypes shown off by Sony Computer Science Laboratories Tokyo at its 25th Anniversary open house. As you’ll see in the video below, the embedded gadgets can be controlled wirelessly. There are motors that let you race LEGO, actuators that can be used to destroy LEGO structures on cue and a LEGO toy with a built-in camera that sends footage to an iPad app.

Sony researcher Alexis Andre explained that the collaboration aims to look at ways to combine the strengths of videogames and LEGO. The Toy Alive prototypes provide kids with a wider array of interactivity compared to normal LEGO toys without restricting their imaginations, as most videogames do. You can listen to Andre talk about Toy Alive at around 0:58 in the video below:

It’s like a real world Little Big Planet.

[via Network World & The Japan Times via Topless Robot]