Hasta La Gadget!

Hey, can you feel the vibe? That was actually your iPhone being snapped off by your reclining-inclined back. Anyhow, some genius at Branex Design of France decided that people would totally buy this $570, 11.5-pound speaker stool. Underneath the hood are four 1.5-inch 10W tweeters and a 5.25-inch 80W subwoofer to shudder your pelvis, all of which contribute to an overall power rating of 70W. There are over ten colors to choose from, too. Let’s just hope that Philippe Starck doesn’t see this and cry.

Branex iTamTam iPod docking stool ensures your backside breaks it on day one originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How we missed this at the ASUS booth is beyond us, but leave it to the eagle-eyes at Ars to hone in on the ASUS UL80JT with an overclockable Core i7 processor and NVIDIA GeForce 310 graphics. So it’s just a run-of-the-mill gaming rig, right? Wrong. The 14-inch laptop has switchable graphics like we have never seen before; the laptop automatically switches, “second-by-second” between the NVIDIA card and the integrated Intel one, instead of the “standard” switchable graphics we’ve seen on laptops like the MacBook Pro 15 or ASUS UL80Vt which require users to switch manually. The major foreseeable benefit of this is longer battery life even when the system is using the discrete card, and ASUS touts 12 hours with the automatic solution turned on. No word on price or availability, but we’re guessing ASUS will have more details soon and that we’ll start seeing this this in more and more laptops as NVIDIA spreads the love around to the rest of the industry.

Update: We jumped the gun here, we’ve actually seen this new automatic switching technology in the recently announced Sony Vaio Z.

ASUS UL80JT spotted with automatic switchable graphics, brags 12 hour battery life originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Home theater is about compromise. You probably can’t afford tens of thousands of dollars to make a real home cinema. Neither can you convince your significant other that you need to jam a speaker into every corner of the room and, worse, run cables to them. And even if you’re happy with just a big TV hooked up to your PS3, the wall-mounted flat-panel is likely firing its rear-mounted speakers straight through the plaster into the (unimpressed) neighbor’s bedroom.

Thankfully, there is one compromise that looks like it will pay off in your favor, offering sleek good looks along with decent sound. The solution is a soundbar, a discreet strip of speakers that sits below the screen and, while not delivering the power or clarity of a full 5.1 setup, will certainly be good enough to make it worth watching T2 yet again.

We were expecting a slew of new soundbars at CES 2010, ready and eager to team up with all the big new HD TVs people have convinced themselves they needed for the analog switch-off. But we were disappointed, both with the quality and the quantity. The worst we saw were from Dell, paired up with its new Mini 10, the netbook with a hi-def screen and TV-tuner. A netbook is probably the computer in most need of a decent set of speakers, as the built-in ones are almost always tinny and terrible. Dell’s effort did nothing to improve the sound of the machine it was attached to.

The best (as in most convenient) models are those with built-in amplifiers, as they don’t need a separate receiver: instead they hook up to your TV’s outputs. Make sure, too, that there are enough inputs for all your sources, from DVD to games console to (gasp) VCR.

The most promising soundbar at CES was from Panasonic. The SC-HTB1 not only packs in all the speakers and electronics needed to trick you into thinking the sound is coming from behind you, it also has a pair of subwoofers inside, mounted pointing in opposite directions to reduce vibration. The unit hooks up via HDMI (for two-way audio) and has processing to make it sound as if the dialog is coming from the entire TV screen.

We’re skeptical on those subwoofers, though, as they are too tiny to shift the amount of air needed to punch the bass into your gut. Consider instead convincing your spouse that a sub-woofer is a worthwhile addition. Like the sub-and-satellite speakers most of us use to listen to music these days, adding a big, bad bass speaker to the mix will give explosions the kick that the little soundbars just can’t deliver. Better still, as bass is mono and mostly non-directional, you can always hide it behind the sofa, like a little kid watching Doctor Who.

Pixel Qi’s low-power displays that can switch between color LCD screens and e-reader-like black-and-white displays was labeled vaporware in 2009.

But the company silenced its critics by offering some hands-on time at the Consumer Electronics Show with the screens that are already in production.

“We are going mainstream in 2010 in millions of units and we are leading with netbooks,” says Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of Pixel Qi.

Conventional LCD screens offer bright, glossy images but consume too much power. The images they display are also not visible in sunlight. It’s one of the reasons electronic paper, a low-power black-and-white display that can be seen clearly outdoors during the day, has become a rage among e-book readers. Pixel Qi promises to bridge both worlds.

Pixel Qi’s 3Qi display operates in three modes: a full-color LCD transmissive mode; a low-power, sunlight-readable, reflective e-paper mode; and a transflective mode, which makes the LCD display visible in sunlight.

The company is currently producing displays in the 10-inch screen size. They will debut on netbooks. Last year, research firm ABI expected 35 million netbooks to be shipped. That makes it easier to predict demand for these devices and produce displays in large volumes for them, Jepsen says. By the end of the year, Pixel Qi’s screens are expected to be in e-readers and tablets.

Here’s a closer look at the screen:

Transmissive mode:

Pixel Qi display’s transmissive mode is similar to how traditional LCD screens work.

An image on the display is composed of millions of individual pixels. Each pixel is divided into three sub-pixels: red, green and blue. Controlling the intensity of light available to each of these sub-pixels helps produce a color image.

Now, each of the subpixels are further divided into transmissive and reflective modes. In transmissive mode, the screen is primarily lit from the rear using a backlight. When the light reaches the LCD panel, it passes through polarizers that allow it to light up the required combination of subpixels.

The resultant reflected light is picked up by the eye. Pixel Qi’s full-color 10-inch screen has a resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels. It almost feels like a conventional LCD display though the colors aren’t as saturated and the image isn’t as vivid.

Still it is a remarkable sight especially when you know that with the press of a button that screen can be transformed into a black-and-white electronic paper display.

At its peak, the Pixel Qi’s display consumes far less power than conventional LCDs. Peak power is 2.5 watts.  Turn off the backlight and you can shave 2 watts off, giving you an extremely low-power display.

Reflective mode:

With the press of a button (Fn + F2 key sequence during the demo), the screen switches to a black-and-white display that evokes the E Ink screen seen on the Kindle, Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook.

In the reflective mode, the backlight is turned off  and the ambient light hits a layer of mirror on the display that reflects it back completely. The result is a much higher resolution than in the LCD mode and a screen that plays just off the grayscale rather than creating colors.

In this mode, Pixel Qi’s display looks similar to the electronic paper displays. The key point here, the company says, is that in reflective mode though the screen looks and acts like a E Ink display, it still uses the LCD technology and is cleverly engineered it to mimic an E Ink-like feel.

But unlike an E Ink display, even in the reflective mode, Pixel Qi’s display burns power. E Ink displays don’t consume power while you are reading the text on the screen. It just draws power when you turn the page.

Pixel Qi’s display keeps refreshing at 60 Hz per second so it can’t offer the week-long battery life that an E Ink-based reader does. Pixel Qi says it’s working on displays with lower refresh rates (such as 30 Hz and less), but it isn’t there yet.

Transflective mode:

Play Slumdog Millionaire and stand in bright sunlight and you can still get a pretty good idea of what’s going on on the screen. Pixel Qi’s display scores over its rivals because of the transflective mode that allows viewers to use the LCD-like display even in bright sunlight.

Traditional LCD screens tend to go dark when turned on in direct sunshine. Pixel Qi solves the problem by adding a special layer to the display. The layer is a partial mirror since a part of it transmits the light and part of it reflects the light.

“It’s like a typical mirror layer found in most displays but with holes punched out in it,” says Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst with research firm DisplaySearch. This allows for a composite mode where users can adjust the backlight and still see the LCD screen with reasonable brightness.

If the details about how the displays work are a little hazy, then it’s because Pixel Qi has been very tight-lipped about how it has re-engineered traditional LCD displays to create a screen that can operate in three modes. Pixel Qi has filed more than 20 patents around the technology.

The company is now working on creating touch overlays for its displays to turn them into touchscreens, Jepsen says.

Photos: Priya Ganapati

There’s always someone that will tell you that you can make the Rock Band experience more “realistic,” as if there was something more realistic than pressing buttons on a piece of plastic that vaguely resembles a guitar. And believe us, there was no shortage of companies with Guitar Hero / Rock Band controllers at CES — including Gambridge, whose Z line of dual game / MIDI guitars are full-sized instruments with built in sound modules that also function as game controllers, compatible with all major music video game titles. And, judging by what we saw at the company’s booth, their industrial design assures that no one will ever dream of stealing one from you. Pricing and availability to be announced.

Gambridge Z line MIDI guitars compatible with Rock Band, sort of sound like guitars originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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