Hasta La Gadget!

The iPad 2 is real. We sort of new that already, right? That we’ve seen the countless rumors and confirmations, coupled with the fact that Apple likes to keeps its devices on a more or less yearly schedule, leads us to feel pretty confident that the thing is coming pretty soon.

Hardware parts, leaked video, and stray sightings have been cropping up everywhere lately, including, memorably, CES and a recent launch for New Corps’s The Daily iPad newspaper. Also, that weird Elton John thing….

The latest word is that the upcoming version of the popular tablet has apparently just gone into production, according to the proverbial “people familiar with the matter,” says The Wall Street Journal.

According to the paper, the iPad 2 will be thinner and later than its predecessor all will feature better graphics, more memory, and “at least one camera on the front of the device for features like video-conferencing.” No real revelations there. Oh well.

The Motorola Xoom is coming soon. And it ain’t gonna be cheap. The much anticipated Android Honeycomb tablet will be hitting the market on February 24th, according to a Best Buy circular that popped up online. At launch, the device will carry a rather lofty $799.99 price tag.

The flier also shed some light on the Verizon plan for the device, which is set to start at $20 a month for 1GB. You can upgrade that up to $80 a month for $19GB of data. As Engadget points out, those are the same prices currently being offered for Samsung’s Galaxy Tab.

Motorola also celebrated last night’s Super Bowl ad by launching the official Xoom page on its site.

Hacker Hexxeh (known for his custom builds of the ChromiumOS project, the open-source version of Chrome OS) has managed to get an AT&T SIM card running on the Cr-48 using a little bit of hacking. This type of thing is likely frowned upon by AT&T, but it definitely shows that Google is only a few software changes away from letting you surf with ease on the network. T-Mobile and Vodaphone are both apparently valid options in the software as well, though neither has been confirmed to work so far.

Because of the unofficial, totally hacked-on nature of GSM support right now, there’s no data counter. And no guarantee that it won’t “break totally unexpectedly,” according to Hexxeh himself. Probably better off waiting until the carriers give their okay.

[via Hexxeh, Engadget]

That SLR around your neck might lose the huge lens in the future, thanks to lessons learned from biology. Scientists from the University of Illinois and Northwestern have created a camera with a liquid lens and flexible sensor that can capture images in a method similar to the human eye. Cameras have previously been designed around the same principles that the eye uses, but they have been limited to a single focal length incapable of zooming. This is due to the constraints of using the solid, rigid sensors used in regular cameras, according to a press release. Unlike your eye, this new camera uses silicon photo-detectors connected to a hydraulic system to get a 3.5x zoom, roughly the same as that on high-end compacts like Panasonic’s Lumix LX-5. When water is pumped into the lens to change the thickness, the sensor adjusts accordingly and the image zooms in. 

The big advantage to this technology is the simplicity of the design. Current camera lenses use a number of elements together to create the image that you see on your sensor. The light has to be corrected for a number of aberrations to make the resulting image as sharp as possible. Even the simplest lenses that can’t zoom, like a 50mm f/1.8, can have around six elements. This system uses only one, shaped to correct imperfections using water pumped into it.

Though the tech is still a while off from showing up in your next Canon, the team responsible for it says they see it being used in everything from night-vision to consumer electronics. Maybe in the future, you and your camera phone might be looking at the world through the same kind of lens.

[via University of Illinois, NewScientist]