Hasta La Gadget!

Smartphones have a lot of on-board sensors, but do they really have enough? No way, say a slew of recent hardware startups, of which Danish Vavuud is only the most recent. Vavuud is turning to Kickstarter to help build a smartphone-compatible wind meter, one that miraculously contains no electronics and yet still can communicate accurate wind speed measurements wirelessly to iPhones and Galaxy devices.

The Vavuud wind meter provides an easy way to measure wind speed exactly where you are, with a device that’s remarkably inexpensive and deceptively simple. It plugs into the headphone jack of your device, but that’s to give it a stable base; it actually uses two magnets in the rotor, which generate a magnetic field that the smartphone can pick up and process using algorithms normally used for sound processing to translate it to wind speed data. Vavuud co-founder Thomas P. Helms says it’s been tested with iPhone 4, 4S, and 5, as well as Galaxy SII and SIII so far, and it has been calibrated in a wind tunnel at the University of Denmark to ensure accuracy.

“To our knowledge we are the first to use the magnetometer in smartphones in this way, so we of course think the technology itself is kind of cool,” Helms explained via email. “It’s also cool because on a mechanical level it appears quite simple, but there is some relatively complex math behind it .”

It’s likely that Vavuud will be able to work with any modern advanced smartphone with built-in magnetic field sensors (which is pretty much all of them), so the limited existing test pool shouldn’t frighten away potential backers. The Vavuud is designed to be used by anyone who might find accurate current windspeed readings useful – a potential group of users that includes windsurfers, sailors, paragliders, model plane pilots and more.

“Surfers, sailors, paragliders etc. have needed an online anemometer for ages to be able to create and share crowd-sourced wind information,” Helms explained. “Because conditions at your favorite spots may depend on very local factors like mountains, could be affected by thermal conditions, and on and on.”

Vavuud is looking to ship the Wind Meter by June of this year, with pre-orders beginning at the £15 level. iOS and Android apps from Vavuud itself are expected to become available at the same time, but it’s easy to imagine how, as with the Thermodo, the developer community might embrace another means of collecting information about the world around you and integrate Vavuud into their own apps.

In a lot of things, being the best generally leads to victory. Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the London Olympics? He wins the gold. A hosting company has the best recorded uptime? It takes home an award. Google launches the fastest consumer broadband available in the US? Boom, victory.

But every so often, life throws us a curveball. For every 1972 Dolphins team, there’s a pack of believers from NC State eager to do something crazy in 1983. And in more germane terms, there’s presently no rhyme or reason why HTC has continually outgunned Samsung in terms of design prowess, yet continues to bleed cash while its Korean rival mints it. Actually, there is a reason. It’s called marketing.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Samsung

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Samsung tonight revealed the much-anticipated follow up to its insanely popular Galaxy S3 smartphone, the Galaxy S4, which will ship with the latest build of Android Jelly Bean, 4.2.2.

The Galaxy S4 has a more-than-ample 5-inch 1920 x 1080 Super AMOLED 441ppi display, that fills out almost the entire face of the phone. While the phone is a skinch larger than the Galaxy S3, it weighs virtually the same, at just 130g. Dimensions are appx. 5.3″ long by 2.7″ wide, and just 7.9mm thin – just a fraction of a millimeter thicker than the svelte iPhone 5.

The phone offers an upgraded 13-megapixel rear camera, with nifty features like a “Drama Shot” which can capture numerous photos in rapid succession and superimpose them, to create a composite motion image.

It can also shoot images from both the front and rear 2-megapixel cameras simultaneously so you can see a front and rear view on a single image, or can also be used for three-way chats. You can also annotate still images along with sound snippets that you can play back along with them – though I think that idea seems sort of silly when you could just shoot video.

Some of the whiz-bang features of the phone which may or may not prove useful in the real world are the ability to scroll up and down the screen by just tilting up or down, as well as the being able to interact with content by hovering your finger over relevant locations on the screen. Samsung also added a “Smart Pause” feature which uses the front-facing camera to automatically stops playing video when you look away from the screen, and resumes when you start looking again.

Other cool features include the S Translator, which provides voice-based translation service, S Voice Drive – hands-free driving mode, and Group Play, which lets you share music and sync it to up to eight other phones by simply bumping phones together.

The S4 has 2GB of system memory, and storage is available in 16, 32 and 64GB flavors, along with a microSD slot for up to 64GB additional storage. Plus, the phone also has a removable battery – thank goodness. Of course, it’ll offer both 3G and 4G LTE versions with global support, as well as 802.11 b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity. The 4G LTE is supposed to offer data download speeds up to 100Mbps and upload speeds up to 50Mbps on supported networks. I also like how they built in an infrared transmitter so you can use the phone as a remote for your TV and other media equipment without extra hardware.

The phone will sport a large 2,600 mAh battery – 500 mAh more than the S3 came with. In order to enable some of the new features, the Galaxy S4 has a new front infrared sensor and a temperature and humidity sensor.

CPU specs haven’t officially been announced, but it’s been said that the Galaxy S4 is powered by a ridiculously spec’d Samsung Exynos 5 Octa-Core CPU, with Quad Cortex-A15 cores running at 1.6GHz AND Quad Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz or a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 CPU clocked at 1.9GHz (depending on market), and a PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU running at up to 533MHz or the Adreno 320 GPU (depending on market.)

Numerous accessories are planned for the launch, including a wireless fitness band called the S Band, which can measure sleep and exercise data and transmit it the S-Health app running on the phone.

There’s also a game pad in the works which provides dual analog sticks shoulder buttons, D-Pad and everything else you need to enjoy tactile gameplay on the phone’s lovely full HD screen.

For more details, you can check out the full product reveal by jumping to 40 minutes into the video below. It starts getting awfully cheesy around the 60 minute mark, so be prepared.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IDXILsX7_QI?t=40m

Surprisingly, Samsung didn’t reveal the pricing or an exact release date for the Galaxy S4 tonight, but word on the street is that we should start seeing the S4 in stores sometime this April.

To register your interest in the Galaxy S4 and for a chance to win one, head over to the Samsung website and fill out this form.

At 7 o’clock EST, Samsung’s finally going to take the wraps off of its flagship Android handset. It’s easily the most anticipated phone of the year so far, and you can watch it make its debut right here. More »

Sure, some last minute leaks may have ruined Samsung’s big surprise, but that doesn’t mean that there still won’t be plenty to talk about when the Korean electronics titan shows off its flagship Galaxy S IV later tonight.

As usual, Samsung will be streaming the event (both online and in the heart of the city), but Jordan Crook, Michael Seo, and I will be liveblogging the event too in case you aren’t set up for video or would prefer to digest the night’s events with a heaping dose of personality.

In case you’ve somehow missed the deluge of Galaxy S IV information that has inundated the geekier districts of the web, here’s a quick rundown of what we expect to see tonight. If a slew of recently leaked photos are any indication then the Galaxy S IV won’t stray very far from the design language Samsung has grown fond of with devices like the Galaxy S III and Note II, and the love-them-or-hate-them plastic bodies don’t seem to be going anywhere. Meanwhile, people’s eyes will likely gravitate toward a 5-inch Super AMOLED screen and one of Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa chipsets (though it could be swapped for a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 when the device makes its way Stateside).

And of course, new hardware is only going to be part of the equation — Samsung appears to have baked nifty software features like Floating Touch and Smart Pause into its highly customized Android build. It won’t be long until we finally see how the device matches up to the rumors, so stay tuned.