Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung has definitely come into their own as a company that produces fantastic smartphones over the past few years (apart from them churning out a plethora of other consumer electronics goods, of course), and just in case you had picked up a Samsung Galaxy smartphone but wished for it to arrive with a larger display, fret not. You do not have to trade in your phone anytime soon, as a company known as Skywood figures out that they have the answer, which is a tablet dock that has been specially designed for it to work with the Samsung Galaxy S2, Galaxy S3, and even the most recent Galaxy S4 handsets. Apple users, do not look on in envy as Skywood has also mentioned that they are working on a version which will play nice with the iPhone 5s or iPhone 5c.

The Skywood PhonePad was shown off at the HKTDC show in Hong Kong, where this smartphone accessory would arrive with a 10” display that can be flipped up. Once that happens, it will stand up in the same manner as that of a laptop, allowing you to view movies, watch presentations, as well as having a whole lot more fun on a larger display. Using this in Economy Class on board an aircraft might not be such a good idea considering the cramped space, but perhaps when you are traveling on the road, or simply want to rest in your cubicle with a favorite short movie, it does seem to be ideal. The thing is, the external 10” display is of lower resolution than the newer Galaxy smartphones, with just 1024 x 600 pixels packed in. Bummer!

Skywood PhonePad Loves All Your Samsung Galaxy Smartphones original content from Ubergizmo.

Don’t you just love concepts? We absolutely do. After all, when it comes to concepts, one does not have to think too much when it comes to hardware and software limitations at the moment, since you can go totally wild with your imagination, and let the engineers sort out whatever issues that would arise after that. It is fr this particular reason that we are interested in this short video that Microsoft released, where it depicted how a group of students over at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, were recruited simply to tap into their brains as they came up with concepts for “blades”. These “blades” happen to be the accessories which are able to hook up to the Surface range of tablets.

The video does offer a rather fascinating look into how these students were able to work all the way from concepts with their initial designs drawn on paper, to crude mock ups that came in a variety of shapes and sizes. Hey, isn’t variety the spice of life after all? Depending on which student you were to concentrate on, some of them came with a keyboard, while others had more interesting items such as a percussion and DJ set-up, an artist tool kit, a solar panel, a cash register and even a method so that a couple of folks are able to view a video in a 3D space. Will these concepts make it eventually to the market? Perhaps, but Microsoft does not have that much time to dabble around in the highly competitive tablet market space.

Microsoft Surface Blade Concepts Spotted In New Video original content from Ubergizmo.

Remember that time you submitted a script to Babylon 5 and it was accepted for a show? Yeah, didn’t happen to us either, but apparently Tokyoflash has a much more open mind with its fans. It just launched the Kisai Quasar, a hexagonal-themed watch that was originally submitted by Tokyoflash buff …

According to the latest documents leaked in the Edward Snowden saga, the NSA collects “hundreds of millions” of email and instant messaging accounts’ contact lists globally, including those belonging to individuals in the United States. Additional information on the subject was provided to The Washington Post by unnamed individuals said to be senior intelligence officials. […]

We have seen some interesting prosthetic hands in the past, where they are all definitely able to do their bit to make our lives easier – especially for those who have already lost their limbs in some way or another, but much work and research can still be made to improve the prosthetic hand. This time around, researchers from the University of Chicago have come up with an interesting prosthetic hand that when fitted on a monkey, it will provide an artificial sense of touch after pairing it up with brain stimulation. In a nutshell, the scientists successfully replicated the sensations of pressure as the prosthetic hand grabbed an object by sending electrical signals to different parts of the brain.

For those who want to find out more about how this particular technology would be able to work, the University of Chicago researchers have already published a paper that talks about stimulating a prosthetic limb wearer’s brain with electrical signals in detail, where that would be able to replicate feelings of touch. Theoretically speaking, since it worked with monkeys, it should also work just fine on humans, although there are still plenty of kinks and issues left to be ironed out before something like this can be commercially available and ready.

Prosthetic Hand Gives Monkey Artificial Sense Of Touch original content from Ubergizmo.