Hasta La Gadget!

This week the Samsung GALAXY S 4 was revealed in New York City at the legendary Radio City Music Hall with a barrage of Broadway stars playing roles to show the life-friendly features of the new device. If you’re all about the Broadway-way of presenting a story, this epic set of oddities will be right up your alley – Fosse style go! Of course, on the other hand, if you’ve been to or watched the majority of the press event keynotes from mobile market presenters over the past couple of years and love the Apple way of doing things (rather simple), you’ll find yourself baffled by the intensity.

From start to finish, this presentation by Samsung is at once a now-classic “Unpacked” presentation of company wares and an utterly fanciful mishmash of dance moves and singing. WIth the Samsung GALAXY S 4 the company has presented a set of four everyday life enhancing pillars that we’ve also outlined for you in four distinct articles. Peruse those beasts in the timeline below while you hear the New York-style wildness here and now.

The Samsung GALAXY S 4 has taken the company to a place where they’ve decided to rely on a winning hardware design while moving forward with software features galore. If you’re familiar with the Samsung Galaxy S III, you know that the nature-inspired hardware has been appearing in Galaxy devices across the board ever since the smartphone launched last year. In the success of that device and subsequent Note devices, Samsung has stayed strong with brand-specific software connections such as Group Share and S-Beam, not to mention ChatON and note-taking apps galore.

That little weird kid was there too – don’t forget him! After you’ve seen the video, have a peek at the timeline below for all the information and hands-on action you could possibly handle from the Samsung GALAXY S 4 – and get pumped up for the full review coming on sooner than later!

Samsung GALAXY S 4 unveiling video out now: watch Broadway madness in full! is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Sensors are quickly becoming a category of external hardware gadgets unto themselves, and Slovenia-based CubeSensors is creating a set that essentially monitors your living space to provide you with aggregate data about noise, temperature, humidity, light, air quality and more to provide clues about how your environment might be affecting you and those around you.

CubeSensors are small hardware cubes that pack a bevy of sensors within, at just 2-inches long, wide and tall. They’re powered by an internal rechargeable battery, so that they don’t need nasty plugs to work, and they stream their data over Wi-Fi to a cloud-based dashboard to track information and provide it to users in real-time. They can be set to provide alerts, and the data can either be made public or set to private access for keeping it within the household.

The info collected by the CubeSensors, which ship in a starter pack with either two or three devices and a bridge to link them to your home network, can be viewed through a single app that resides on a user’s smartphone. The Cubes can be set to send alarms when certain conditions are met, like when noise or temperature reaches a certain level, and you can view historical data to track the effectiveness of any methods you take to change the influence of environmental factors.

Each sensor includes an accelerometer, a thermometer, a barometer, an air quality meter, and a humidity sensor. They’re being sold with the pre-order model that has become popular for hardware creators, with the MYO armband and Lockitron being two recent similar examples. The difference here is that CubeSensors is asking for $10 up front as a down payment, whether your order the $249 starter pack with two cubes, or the $349 pack that comes with four. CubeSensors CEO Ales Spetic says that $10 is fully refundable, however, and the startup did win the Best Hardware award at this year’s Launch Festival.

This kind of environment monitoring devices aren’t entirely new: Russian startup Lapka offers sensors that contain similar detection capabilities, which we saw at CES this year. But the unobtrusive wireless design, with a system that’s expandable to accommodate a variety of different types of environments is very interesting. There’s also the possibility that the data gathered by the CubeSensors could eventually be made to integrated with other devices and apps, adding to the dream of a sophisticated connected smartphone.

This week the Samsung Galaxy S4 (or Samsung Galaxy S IV, if you prefer) is getting its fair share of pre-release specification leaks, some of them fake, others exceedingly realistic. The one we’re about to have a peek at seems to our haggard, weathered eyeballs to be almost surprisingly legitimate – pixel sizes of their screenshots included. With this leak comes a selection of screenshots that include specifications from the app Quick System Info PRO – a free app that’ll tell you everything you need to know about your device in a jiffy.

The first mistake several commenters have made already this morning is to decide that the little half-circle tab in the lower left-hand corner of several of the following screenshots is a multi-screen feature in the Galaxy S IV. In fact it’s a tab existing inside the Quick System Info PRO app itself, appearing in any device you open it up with. It does look extremely similar to the tab that appears in the Galaxy Note 2 enabling multiscreen functionality.

The information these screenshots provide for us includes a set of specifications that we’ve come across before for this handset as tipped and “leaked” in the past more than once. They are as follows:

• 5-inch Display
• Resolution 1080 x 1920 pixels, 480PPI
• Quad-core processor, ARMv7 1.7Ghz
• 13-megapixel camera (4128 x 3096 pixels, 4:3 aspect ratio)

You’ll also see a couple of “Smart screen” additions like Smart stay, Smart rotation, Smart pause, and Smart scroll. These are outlined again in our post about Smart additions to Samsung’s Jelly Bean.

If you have a peek at the actual image file of any of the screenshots provided by the source, GSM Israel, you’ll find that the height and width are not 1080 x 1920 – they are, however, a height and width ratio that’s able to be scaled up to that size, meaning whoever uploaded the photos likely simply scaled them down to fit the blog space.

So what we’ve got is a Samsung Galaxy S4 with a few new “smart” features and a top-tier set of specifications in its screen and its processor. It’s still quite likely that we’ll be seeing a Samsung Exynos processor in this device as it appears abroad and a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor inside the USA as we did with the Galaxy S III. On the other hand, the Galaxy Note II did come with the same SoC no matter where it was launched – so we’ll see!

have a peek at the timeline below for more information on the Samsung Galaxy S4 and stick with SlashGear for the March 14th event – join us at 6PM EST (or a little earlier if you want to pick your seat) for the whole show!

Samsung Galaxy S4 screenshots foretell beastly specifications is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Raspberry Pi is a small computer on a developer board that can be used for all sorts of electronic projects and devices. The little board has been around now for one year officially, and to celebrate the first anniversary of the product launch, RS Components has announced a special limited-edition Raspberry Pi. The manufacturer has produced 1000 Raspberry Pi Model B Revision 2 boards in an exclusive blue color.

Each of the limited-edition blue boards is stamped with a serial number and comes supplied in a special presentation box. The limited-edition version also ships with a special crystal blue case and a certificate of authenticity. These limited-edition boards are not being offered for general sale and are being issued by the manufacturer through a variety of channels.

Most of these boards are being donated to charitable causes associated with young people and education around the world. However, between March and June of 2013 enthusiasts around the world will have the opportunity to enter competitions to win one of the special boards. To enter for a chance to win, simply send RSElectronics a tweet with the hashtag #bluePI.

MotoCzysz is known for its electric motorcycles, which have dominated races and won awards for years. In an effort to further up its game, the company has teamed up with NVIDIA to utilize the company’s Maximus technology and Quadro GPUs, with the goal being to create a motorcycle that sets a new speed record. The company used NVIDIA’s Tesla K20 GPU and Quadro K5000 GPU to improve its productivity in design.

MotoCzysz has tasked itself to prepare for this year’s electric motorcycle racing season, and in doing so the company’s workers are spending ample time designing in Solidworks, its software of choice. To give the designers the power they needed to perform their jobs well, the company utilized NVIDIA’s Tesla K20 GPU and Quadro K5000 GPU.

As a result of this, the company says that it experienced a huge productivity boost in the design department. Because of the hardware, the designers were able to use SolidWorks for looking at the bike’s details in-depth without fighting against computer lag and other issues that commonly result from such hardware-intensive tasks. Finally, by combining the Tesla GPU with Bunkspeed Pro for ray-tracing, both rendering and simulations could be performed in the background.

MotoCzysz senior engineer Nick Schoeps had this to say: “The reason why the NVIDIA Quadro K5000 makes sense for us is because we can create fully rendered images of a bike before we actually build it. A major manufacturer might make several passes, create a physical clay model, and then make further refinements to the design. With our small staff and budget we need to do it all in one pass.”

[via NVIDIA]

MotoCzysz uses NVIDIA technology to give its electric motorcycles a boost is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.