Hasta La Gadget!

While a new crop of smartphones has just been released in the U.S., the Japanese aren’t going to fall behind anytime soon. They just upped the ante with the new Sharp Aquos Phone Zeta SH-02E, which is the first production smartphone with an IGZO display.

What’s so interesting about IGZO? The indium gallium zinc oxide tech promises higher translucency, compared to regualr LCDs, which reduces the energy needed for backlighting and thus saves power – and the backlight is usually the number one consumer of power in mobile devices. The 2,000 mAh battery is no slouch either, though it’s unknown how much battery life is actually improved by the IGZO display.

The phone has a large 4.9-inch screen with 1,280 × 720 resolution, and a 16 MP camera. It has a 1.5 GHz S4 Pro quad-core processor and has NFC-compatibility. Hopefully we’ll get something like this in the States soon.

[via NTTDoCoMo via Engadget]

For starters, I’ll go on record to say that I’m a big DirecTV fan. Having tried Comcast’s abysmal cable box UI and DVR, and knowing the fact that Dish doesn’t have AMC anymore is enough to keep me a loyal subscriber for many years. That said, I was pretty excited to hear about today’s reveal of DirecTV’s newly upgraded HD DVR, the Genie.

The new DVR continues to best others on the market, this time adding a massive 1TB hard drive, capable of storing up to 200 hours of HD programming – or 800 hours of SD (but who watches SD anymore?) The Genie HD DVR also has 5 tuners built in, allowing you to record up to 6 shows at once, including a simultaneous VOD download.

A single Genie receiver will provide whole-home DVR service to up to 8 televisions around your house. You can even watch the same program on up to 4 sets at the same time, and each location gets its own full DVR controls, including record and delete abilities. And if you have a TV that supports RVU (currently Samsung’s 2011 6000, 6400 and 6420 series sets), you won’t even need a separate box to control the Genie.

It also supports picture-in-picture – a feature I’ve sorely missed from older television sets, so you can watch two programs simultaneously on one set.  DirecTV is also touting “Genie recommendations” which are supposed to suggest shows that match your preferences, but I’m not sure how different this is from the recommendation feature already available on current DTV receivers.

I’m definitely interested in upgrading my 5-year-old HD receiver, so I’m happy to hear about today’s announcement – though there’s no official word yet on upgrades for existing subscribers. Though the idea of losing the 50 or so hours of programs I’ve still got to watch on my current DVR is a little hard to stomach. Perhaps, someday they’ll offer an upgrade path that lets you transfer your existing programs to a new DVR.

You can find out more about the DirecTV Genie here.

Many international universities are fostering students’ natural
curiosity and ingenuity to create new products to help their fellow
citizens. Such is the case at HCM City University of Transport where, as
the name implies, Vietnamese students focus on developing new,
efficient forms of transportation. Recently, they revealed prototypes of
the students’ solar-run scooter and a new battery-operated wheelchair
that can be produced at a much lower cost that those produced in western
countries.

Over the last few years, we haven’t seen the kind of gains in computing speed that one might expect if you’re strictly following Moore’s Law. We’re beginning to run into limits on the frequency of any single CPU or GPU, and one of the modern ways to get past this limitation is through the use of parallel computing architectures.

However, programming for parallel chips hasn’t been an easy transition for traditional programmers, and the technology has largely remained the domain of high-end engineering projects. However, one company is pushing an initiative to bring parallel computing to everyone.

Adapteva has been producing multicore chips with 16 cores for a little over a year now, and is now testing a 64-core chip. The plan now is to produce a low-cost parallel processing kit for as little as $99. The hope is by providing fully open source hardware and software, development for and adoption of parallel processing would increase dramatically. As this takes hold, the plan is to launch a computing platform called “Parallella.” According to Adapteva: “Once completed, the Parallella computer should deliver up to 45 GHz of equivalent CPU performance on a board the size of a credit card while consuming only 5 Watts under typical work loads. Counting GHz, this is more horsepower than a high end server costing thousands of dollars and consuming 400W.”

By launching its first kits on Kickstarter, the company aims to drive production costs down dramatically, and in exchange will open source the chipset as well as all documentation and software. The $99 kit will put an Epiphany-III based Parallella board in your hands, including a dual-core ARM A9 CPU, as well as 16 Epiphany cores on board and development software.

A pledge of $199 or more will get you the upcoming 64-core Epiphany-IV board – if the project is able to reach a stretch goal of $3 million. With 17 days left to go, the project has raised nearly $300,000 of its $750,000 goal, so there’s a way to go. If you’re into tinkering with the latest in technology, and want to see what you can do with an extremely powerful chip, then you might want to get in on the project and pledge.

If you watch Ben Heck’s online show you’ll notice that the master modder has branched out beyond the gaming mods that made him famous. For his latest episode, Heck shows us how to make a very practical gadget: sunglasses that automatically raise or lower a pair of polarized clip-on shades depending on the ambient light.

Heck used an ATtiny board, a photo cell and a servo to modify his own sunglasses. Lesser mortals not versed in tinkering and programming will most likely zone out within two minutes of the clip; you can skip to about 11:55 in the video below if you’d just like to see the finished product.

I guess now we know what Dwayne Wayne could look like… in a different world. YEEEAAHHHHH