Hasta La Gadget!

It seems that chargers are growing to be more and more of a fire hazard these days, as the latest incident involves an iPad charger which was said to have exploded the hand of a man, throwing him across the room as he unplugged the device. The man was thankful that it was him who received the electric shock instead of his 8-year old daughter, where he believed that the same shock would have killed her instead. Tim Gillooley, 34, is the victim in this case, and this was his recollection on what happened, “There was a huge bang and it blew me across the room. I was in shock. I was hysterically laughing for about two minutes. It was a bad shock that went down my arm. My mum was panicking and Chloe burst into tears. Nine times out of 10, Chloe would have gone to get it herself. I think it would have killed her.”

The iPad was purchased last November from the Apple store in Liverpool, but it apparently developed charging issues a few months after that. Despite returning the charger to the Apple store, he was told that the charger worked just fine, but deciding against taking any chances, he picked up a new genuine Apple charger complete with the Lightning cable, hoping that the problem would be solved this way – but it continued. Perhaps it is the power outlet that caused the charger to act this way?

iPad Charger Explodes, Sends Man Flying ‘Across The Room’ original content from Ubergizmo.

Ottawa-based Shopify, the online storefront provider that helps around 65,000 retailers reach their customers on the web, including Tesla, Crossfit and others, today announced a new retail point-of-sale solution that uses iPads for its terminals. The POS solution will enable existing Shopify users to unify their online shops with their physical locations, sharing information on inventory, sales and more seamlessly between both.

This is the second in Shopify’s one-two punch to bring its ecommerce solution up to the next level. The first was the introduction of Shopify Payments, which saw the company take on payment processing on its own, without the need for secondary partners. Merchants can still use other payment gateways, but Shopify now offers its own solution by default for new sign-ups, and has very competitive pricing, especially once you get on to higher-valued subscription tiers.

Now that it has both payment processing and in-store POS, Shopify can own the entire process end-to-end for businesses looking to cash in on bricks-and-clicks trends in retail. More and more, shop owners are looking at online as complimentary to their business, and designing stores around showrooming to supplement their virtual sales initiatives.

“We’re already doing the online thing and this seems like a natural extension,” said Shopify VP of Product Adam McNamara in an interview. “We talked to a lot of our customers, and around 30 percent of them run a physical retail store as well. We looked at this and started talking to these people, and found that most of them had some sort of in-store point-of-sale system that integrates with Shopify, or had nothing at all. But overwhelmingly, what people needed was something that allowed them to run their physical store, and run their online store, and allowed them to accept payments, and we thought ‘Well, we can do all these things.’”

The advantage is clear, and Shopify will have a clear one over and above other competing solutions like Revel since it has a presence with so many online retailers already, and can offer an extremely simple iPad based solution on a subscription basis, complete with online setup support in the form of tutorial videos, as well as in-person technical help, though McNamara thinks most won’t require that.

Shopify has been doing what it does and doing it well for many years now, but the company is really aiming to shake things up with these two bold new launches. It wades into spaces ripe with competition, but does so with a value prospect that’s clear: one retail solution for all a retailer’s needs. That’s going to be hard to turn down, based on the reduction of complexity alone.

When the Nintendo Wii was first released to the masses, many people laughed at what they called “waggle controls”, and I do admit that it was rather weird at that point in time to play with a nunchuk and a Wiimote. However, once you have gotten the hang of it, it all becomes really natural, and you could also see Sony backtracking and throwing in a half-hearted motion control system into their Sixaxis controllers. Microsoft, however, decided to take a very different route by turning your entire body into the controller itself, calling this the Kinect system that experienced various degrees of success. Come this fall, Sega has plans to roll out their first iPad game which will use the player’s body as a motion controller, which would make it not too different from current hardware based console games.

This is made possible thanks to Extreme Reality’s technology, and this particular title will hold the distinction of being the “first full-body motion controlled game on an iPad”, relying on the built-in camera within the iPad without the need for extra accessories or additional sensors. We hope to get a whiff of what this particular title from Sega would be sometime down the road, and the sooner, the better.

Sega iPad Game Relies On Body As Your Controller original content from Ubergizmo.

Many attempts at tablet-friendly remote desktop still present a traditional desktop to the user; they deliver a lot of control, but they’re unwieldy on touch-only devices. Parallels’ just-unveiled Access client for the iPad could provide a simpler, more consistent experience. Rather than recreate the full desktop of a host Mac or Windows PC, Parallels Access provides a streamlined app launcher with controls that are largely iOS-native. Text selection, gestures and even multitasking behave much like they normally would on Apple’s tablets. The approach sounds intuitive, but is it worth Parallels’ $80 yearly subscription fee? Read our hands-on after the break to find out. %Gallery-slideshow73454%

Filed under: Tablets, Software

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Source: Parallels

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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