Hasta La Gadget!

Here at CES 2014, Toshiba has just unveiled a new Chromebook, running Google’s Chrome OS on a 13.3-inch display for the first time, and priced below the $300 mark.

This is the company’s first step into Chrome territory, while competitors like Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Acer have been pumping out the light-as-air notebooks for a while now.

The Toshiba Chromebook is powered by an Intel Haswell chip, with a promised battery life of nine hours.

Meanwhile, the laptop sports a 13.3-inch 1366 x 768 display, with a .8-inch profile at 3.3 pounds.

On the inside, alongside that Haswell processor, you’ll find 16GB of SSD storage, 2GB of RAM, as well as dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n Wifi. And once you have Wifi on a Chromebook, the magic really begins.

These devices run on a Chrome OS, which is essentially a beefed up Chrome browser. This means that access to various applications and programs is limited to web apps.

However, Google is working to make the browser experience as complete as possible with the help of Google Apps and Gchat + Hangouts.

Toshiba’s Chromebook is available for $279 starting on February 16.

What comes after the selfie? It’s surely going to take a while to find something as effortlessly addictive as documenting our own facial features repeatedly. But perhaps the current narcissistic obsession with selfies can be expanded to encompass ourselves and everything around us.

That at least is the hope of the Berlin-based creators of Panono: a spherical camera that’s designed to capture a God’s eye, 360 degree view of everything that appears in a scene at the moment its shutters snap.  And judging by Panono’s current Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, the startup has successfully created a fair bit of momentum behind the concept.

Panono has been running its crowdfunding campaign since mid-November — with the aim of raising $900,000 to turn its ball-shaped, camera-clad prototype into shipping panorama-capturing product. With less than a week left of the campaign to run, they’ve passed their funding target — and broken through the $1M mark. At the time of writing, Panono is just shy of $1,050,000 raised.

What exactly is Panono? It’s an 11cm ball that has 36 tiny cameras fixed onto this sphere that are capable of snapping a 108 megapixel panorama photo.

To take a Panono panorama, the owner simply tosses the ball into the air and when it reaches the highest point of the throw its cameras fire simultaneously, capturing a complete, spherical panorama. The resulting image is then stitched together using Panono’s software so that it can be explored dynamically, by, for instance, viewing it on a tablet and physically moving the position of the tablet to see different portions of the panorama.  (You can see examples of Panono panoramas here, here and here.)

Alternative Panono panorama capture methods can include holding the ball up on a stick (in case you don’t want to toss it over a cliff, perhaps), or just holding it up in your hand and pressing a trigger button to fire the cameras.

Siting a series of cameras on a ball to capture comprehensive visual data of an environment is of course what Google does with its Street View cars (and its people-mounted Trekker cameras), so the concept of arranging camera lenses on a sphere is not new in itself. But Google hasn’t been interested in pushing Street View image capture technology into consumer electronic hardware itself — leaving room for others to play.

Panono is also similar to another spherical device startup called Bubl, with its Bublcam — which also recently took the crowdfunding route to get its own photo-capturing ball rolling. Bublcam’s campaign raised just shy of $350,000.

Panono looks to be offering its spherical hardware at a slightly cheaper price-point than Bublcam ($500 for Indiegogo backers; $600 retail thereafter vs $800-$700 retail for Bublcam) — but Panono is concentrating on capturing high resolution stills, utilising far more camera lenses (36 vs four) in its design. Whereas Bublcam intends to offer the ability to capture and stream spherical video too, as well as take (lower resolution — 14MP) still shots.

Regardless of Panono’s more limited functionality vs Bublcam (i.e. still shots and interactive panoramas only — no video as yet), it has managed to pull in considerable interest, with more than 2,060 backers thus far. It’s aiming to ship finished product to these backers next September.

As for viewing Panonos, it’s making an Android and iOS app viewer for panoramas (or these will be able to be viewed via the web on the Panono Cloud). It will also be possible for users to access the raw 36 unprocessed single images if they want to play around with the data in other ways.

The Panono sphere includes internal flash memory that allows for around 400 panoramas to be stored at any one time, i.e. when not sending the data direct to a smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Back in October, in its Q3 results, HTC reported its first ever quarterly loss – of around $102 million. Now, in unaudited consolidated results for its Q4, released quietly Sunday as the tech press’ gaze is focused on Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show, HTC revealed it has narrowly avoided a second consecutive quarter of loss.

HTC reported net profit after tax of NT$0.31 billion (circa $10.3 million) on total revenues of NT$42.89 billion ($1.4 billion). In its Q4 outlook, back in November, HTC had said it expected revenue for the quarter to be in the range of NT$40 billion to NT$45 billion.

However the small profit HTC squeaked in the quarter appears attached to the one-time windfall from selling its stake in Beats Audio, rather than selling enough phones to get back in the black. In September, HTC said it intended to sell its 24.84% stake in the audio brand for $265 million. Bloomberg expected the deal to close in the fourth quarter.

HTC’s unaudited results for its Q4 also report an operating loss of NT$1.56 billion (close to $52 million). Unaudited earnings per share after tax were NT$0.38 based on 823,541 thousand weighted average number of shares, which falls within HTC’s earlier expected EPS range of NT$0.1 to NT$1.7.

While it’s narrowly avoided another quarterly loss, there’s no denying HTC is running out of room for manoeuvre in the Samsung-dominated Android smartphone space. And that 2014 is going to be a critical year for the company.

At CES 2014, Withings was showing off the latest product in its lineup of home health tracking connected gadgets, the Aura. The Aura looks vaguely like a submarine’s periscope, but it lives on your nightstand, connects to a sensor pad that goes under your mattress, and provides super sophisticated sleep tracking along with intelligent wake up and sleep sequences to give you your best possible rest.

The Aura is a wake-up like, not unlike other products on the market from companies including Philips, but it uses light combined with sound to help trigger melatonin release, which the company says happens via scientifically sound processes. These are triggered variously to relax you at night, or wake you up in the morning, using different tones from the LED light in the nightstand component, which also doubles as an alarm clock and speaker.

The Aura connects to a pad of sensors via cable, providing power and collecting data from said attachment. This pad picks up “micromovements” according to Withings, which are far more subtle than the kind of tossing and turning detectable by most wrist- and pocket-borne activity trackers, including Withings’ own Pulse. The sensor can detect small movements from under a pillow-top or even a tempurpedic mattress (which are designed to minimize the effect of movement), and up to two can be used to monitor sleep patterns for two people in the same bed. It can detect not only movements, but also breathing cycles and heart rate to arrive at much more sophisticated conclusions about that nature and quality of your sleep. Using this data, it can help the Aura alarm unit start to wake you up more gently when it makes sense, rather than abruptly right at a specific time.

These can be used in combination with Withings’ existing suite of health products to provide a more complete picture through their smartphone app, the company says. It’s aiming to ship the Aura starting in spring, 2014 and the whole kit, including one sensor pad and one nightstand alarm/light will cost $299. That’s steep compared to the Philips wake-up light at $99, but Withings is essentially the first to combine that product with highly sophisticated sleep tracking. Still, you have to be very committed to the self-monitored health movement to make that leap, I’d imagine.

French Bluetooth company turned drone-maker Parrot has some new hardware for CES 2014, including two brand new smartphone-controlled bots. One is the rolling, jumping Sumo and the other is the MiniDrone, a super small version of its popular AR Drone that flies, rolls and hugs the ceiling and the walls.

The MiniDrone is remarkably small, coming in at about a tenth of the size of the full version, which makes it incredibly portable. You could actually slip one in your pocket without much issue if you really wanted to. To get that size advantage, it ditches the camera, but it adds to removable, large wheels that allow it to roll around the ground – or go acrobatic and run along the wall or the ceiling, too.

The Sumo is a two-wheeled ground-only unit that does have a camera, just like the big AR Drone, and has a foot built in that allows it to stop pretty much instantly, and to leap up in the air up to 80cm. It’s a bit more rugged in keeping with its rough-and-tumble lifestyle, too, and reminds me a bit of the Sphero 2B that company just unveiled.

There’s no firm ship date for either the MiniDrone or the Sumo, but they’re coming “soon” according to CEO Henri Seydoux, for a price that’s yet to be finalized. I asked Seydoux how these two designs came to be, and whether they were the result of user requests and feedback, and he said that in fact Parrot dreamt them up because “we like to have fun.”