Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re planning on adding Facebook Home to your device this weekend, you might want to consider the positives and negatives of doing such a thing. If you’ve got an HTC First, you’ll likely have purchased the device because you want Facebook on your device, and there’s really not a whole lot you need to consider. If you’re a Facebook user and have an Android device, you’ve got what might be a rather easy decision ahead of you.

With the launch of Facebook Home you’ve got the ability to use advanced features (new this week) for Facebook without adding the Home launcher to your Android device. You’ve got three applications in the mix now where before you had two:

• Facebook for Android
• Facebook Messenger
• Facebook Home

The first two have received updates today along with the update for Facebook Home which include connections to Home, but do not require Home to work. If you want to avoid Home entirely, you’re free to do so. With Facebook Messenger you get what Facebook calls “Chat Heads”, a rather awesome feature that you can learn all about in our Chat Heads First! post from earlier today. With Chat Heads you’ve got Facebook’s messenger service with you at all times – those heads can pop up anywhere!

Facebook for Android stays largely the same if you don’t download Facebook Messenger or Facebook Home. In fact you’ve got basically an app with no real surface updates at all if you don’t download Messenger or Home – how about that? If you do download Home, though, you’re in for a real trip.

When you first open Home, you’ll be treated with a full-screen presentation of one of your friends’ recent status updates with a photo that will be oversized enough to fit your display. This status will be accompanied by a short blurb – sometimes the full text, sometimes just a clip, and you’ll see some recent activity from your “updates” in the form of small bars with attached Facebook “Heads”.

These Heads will continue to pop up throughout your experience with Facebook at this point. They’re just your regular Facebook profile photo living in a sphere rather than a square, and outside of Chat Heads, they’re just plain old Heads. You’ll find the SlashGear “head” to be more of a “Gear”, as it were.

You can cycle through statuses from here, pretty pictures included if you have friends that post appropriately colorful bits and pieces. Whichever status you leave up, that’s the one that sticks as your “wallpaper” as you cycle through apps if you do choose to enter any app from this point onward.

Your apps are all still accessible, and as our Facebook Home Review shows, you’ve got a really basic experience waiting for you. This Facebook Home environment makes for a real Facebook Front and Center situation, that’s for sure.

The lockscreen isn’t actually a lockscreen in Facebook Home, it’s called “Cover Feed.” With Cover Feed as your first screen, you’ll often not really want to go far beyond – or if you do, it’s through Facebook that you’ll be doing it. Facebook Home covers you in a solid blue aura of Facebook. I nearly typed “of social networking”, but with Facebook Home, you don’t get your other social networking (or any other) updates on the Cover Feed, you only get updates from Facebook.

Above: Facebook’s own camera interface makes its mark as your primary go-to shooter as well.

The story is a bit different when you get a Facebook Phone like the HTC First. Have a peek at our HTC First review to see how different the experience is – it starts with apps other than Facebook being able to give you notifications in-launcher. That can be quite an important decision point for you if you’re planning on working with Facebook Home one way or the other.

Above: Your normal Android settings are available if you know where to find them. On the Galaxy S III you can simply pull your notifications bar down and hit the gear!

You can download Facebook Home right this minute from the Google Play app store for free and load it for a limited number of devices. After today there will be updates every once in a while adding smartphones to the fold – for now, it’s quite obvious that AT&T is being favored for the hero line-up. Have a peek at which devices can work with Facebook Home and let us know what you think!

BONUS: What you’re seeing above is the Samsung Galaxy S III running the Quadrant benchmark test with Facebook Home running, then without Facebook Home installed at all. The differences can be seen two ways – extremely minor, or just different enough to sway you one way or the other. Consider your options!

Facebook Home vs Homeless: should you go blue for Android? is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’ve had a few looks at Edison2’s Very Light Car (VLC) project including its gasoline-powered X-Prize winning incarnation, but today’s EV looked a bit different. In an event at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, CEO and founder Oliver Kuttner showed off the latest version of the vehicle, this time unskinned — while referencing similar body-less showcases of the Lamborghini Miura and Volkswagen Beetle — to show off the innovative suspension that contributes greatly to the car’s light weight. The in-wheel suspension units connect to single piece axles that bookend the car’s chassis and feature fewer contact points than traditional car suspension designs. Kuttner claims this technique will also feed back into conventional car bodies, opening up more space and taking weight out of future vehicles. Check after the break for more details about what’s changed and what’s next for Edison2, or dive into the gallery to take a look for yourself.

Filed under: Transportation

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Korg’s love of the mini-analog synth clearly remains strong as it’s added three more new ones to the fold — the Volca Beat, Volca Bass and Volca Keys (the clue to what they do is in the names). While some firms take a pro product and work down, making cheaper versions, Korg seems to take a different approach. It did the stripping-back thing when it launched its popular Monotron synth. Since then, it’s incrementally developed it back up into a whole category of its own, the latest iteration of which we apparently see before us here. The trio of mini-synths clearly take inspiration from the Monotribe groovebox that came before them, but are a step up in terms of design. Brushed metal finishes give them a vintage, almost Stylophone feel. The Volca Bass, in particular, looks almost too much like the legendary Roland TB-303 to be coincidence, and if we didn’t know better, we’d say the color scheme of the Beat echoes the TR-808. As we happened to be in Frankfurt, we couldn’t resist getting out hands on them, or as you’ll see past the break, at least trying to.

Filed under: Misc

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The Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 is about to hit stores in the United States, and with it, Samsung’s next push for a new display size attached to next-generation smart pen abilities. This device is essentially the larger wi-fi-only version of what we’ll be seeing with the Samsung GALAXY S 4, hovering abilities and all. It might not have the same processor, and it might not be connected to mobile data, but it’s certainly keeping with the friendly theme.

Here with the Galaxy Note 8.0 you’ve got an 8-inch display that’s both bright and relatively sharp, 1280 x 800 pixel resolution working with TFT LCD technology and a connection to the newest in new S-Pen technology. The entire tablet measures in at 210.8 x 135.9 x 7.95 mm regardless of which version you’ve got while the weight will be ringing in at 340g for the wifi version (that being the one we’ve got here) and just 5g more for the 3G or LTE iteration (coming soon!)

This machine continues the tradition begun with the original Samsung Galaxy Note, employing a built-in “S-Pen” device that connects wirelessly to your tablet. You’ll be able to hover over bits and pieces of your everyday Android experience to see previews or zoom-in, you can draw pictures galore in a lovely assortment of ways, and you can write all the notes you like. This device has all the features of the previous Galaxy Note devices and more – the closest you’ll get to this experience outside this experience is in the Samsung Galaxy Note II.

Below you’ll see a set of three basic benchmark tests, each of them run without this device’s “power save” mode activated. You’ll find that with this display size and processor, the Galaxy Note 8.0 should be more than powerful enough to handle your everyday activities, be they gaming, productivity, or simple web browsing.

This device works with a 5 megapixel camera on its back, a 1.3 megapixel camera on its front, and is just large enough to feel a tiny bit awkward using while capturing photographs. We’ll have photo examples for you later this week when we’ve posted the full review – the same goes for more detail on the software included here, and battery tests as well. Here we’ve got an additional gallery of up-close-and-personal photographs of the device for you to enjoy.

Let us know if you’d like any more information than you expect us to provide in the review and we’ll do our best to make a fabulous review appear for you! Meanwhile hang tight and get ready for another look!

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 Hands-on and Unboxing is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A couple of years is a pretty good run in MIDI controller-land. It was 2009 when Novation‘s Launchpad turned the Ableton world onto its simplistic charms. It appears, however, the firm’s decided it was long overdue a refresh, so that’s exactly what it’s done. Say hello to the Launchpad S. What does the S stand for? We’re not entirely sure, but it could be for speedy, as Novation has ramped up the refresh rate to give a snappier response when you switch between modes.

It could also be for superior lights, as the brightness has been dialled up in response to user feedback. It’s also worth noting these pads are entirely USB-powered, making it trickier than simply sucking down more juice. One other superficial change — perhaps more to give it its own sense of identity than anything else — is a change of color. It’s out with the original’s black, and in with an almost metallic gray. So far so good, but we’re really thinking that S stands for “software.” Why? Because thanks to standards compliant MIDI implementation, the Launchpad S is now plug-and-play with a whole host more applications, not least core-MIDI iOS apps such as the popular FL Studio Mobile. We took a few minutes to get to know the Launchpad S a little better, which you can see in our video past the break.

Filed under: Misc, Peripherals

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