Hasta La Gadget!

Apple is being forced by a British judge to state explicitly that Samsung didn’t copy its iPad design. According to Bloomberg, Judge Colin Birss said that Apple has to post a notice both on its website and several British newspapers and magazines, to help correct the “damaging impression the South Korea-based company was copying Apple’s product.” The online part will reportedly stay there for six months. Apple lost its case against Samsung in the UK earlier this month, with the same judge awkwardly branding the 10-inch Android tablet “not as cool” as the iPad.

Filed under: Tablet PCs

UK judge forces Apple to state on its site that Samsung didn’t copy the iPad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Jul 2012 13:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Phone options for the blind previously been pricey hardware based solutions — or feature-light (physically-heavy) handsets. While the functional abilities of smartphones have expanded out wildly from the mobile devices we used to use, accessibility options have remained firmly in the past. Enter Georgie, an Android app that offers up a blind-friendly interface to open up the likes of maps, Twitter and email. It also includes an OCR function that can both re-display text in larger fonts and offer an audio version for listening. You can even store these photos for listening to later. Navigation through the app is steered by holding your finger to the screen, hearing the menu described and giving haptic feedback to confirm your choice. Keep reading to see how the app developed and our impressions on how it all works. You can also check out our hands-on video, which includes a glimpse at the app’s OCR read-out feature and a quick demonstration from its co-creator Roger.

Continue reading Georgie app offers up Android features and voice-guided menus for the blind: we go hands-on (video)

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

Georgie app offers up Android features and voice-guided menus for the blind: we go hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ZTE must be onto us, for we love a good mystery. The company took to Twitter to tease “one of the most advanced gaming smartphones,” which it says will be in customer hands just six days from now. With so few breadcrumbs, it’s difficult to determine whether ZTE intends to unveil a genuinely new smartphone, or whether it’s merely hyping the release of a known product. While we’d love to see a brand new device — perhaps based on the Adreno 320 GPU — a plausible argument can also be made for the alternative. During Mobile World Congress, the company announced its flagship phone, the quad-core Tegra 3 Era, and the handset has been completely absent from the radar ever since. While the Era boasts only a 4.3-inch qHD display, it was said to arrive during the second half of this year — might the stars simply be aligning with a bit of marketing fluff? Only time will reveal this gamer’s true identity, but it seems we won’t have long to wait.

Continue reading ZTE teases ‘advanced gaming smartphone’ set for availability in six days

Filed under: Cellphones

ZTE teases ‘advanced gaming smartphone’ set for availability in six days originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Jul 2012 23:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yes, you just read that right, there are indeed mummies being discovered off the coast of Scotland that are made up of the body parts (or at least the bones) of multiple humans, making them the living embodiment of the classic Frankenstein monster. It’s not often that one finds a body buried with a jawbone that’s taken from a different body than the skull that its attached to, and the scientists that are working with the bodies that’ve been discovered this past month have certainly never come across cases as strange as these before.

It is along the West Coast of South Uist, an island in the Hebrides that has given up a couple of corpses with remains as old of 3,5000 years old. These mummified bodies suggest that the first residents of the island of South Uist were not without their strange activities in the body burial sector – strange by today’s standards, anyway.

It was researchers led by archaeologist Michael Parker-Pearson of the University of Sheffield that turned up this find, they digging near a more modern graveyard by the name of Cladh Hallan. The team was excavating a set of three roundhouses from a village which was occupied from approximately 2200 BC to 800 BC, each of the skeletons being recovered in a fetal position. These bodies appeared to have been preserved in peat bogs for what must have been a year or longer, then placed in the grave sites having been relatively well preserved by the high acidity and low oxygen of the area.

These skeletons were found, strangely enough, to be made up of several bodies, each of them giving up the correct bit to create one human skeleton. These single full bodies had such oddities, of course, as arthritis on the vertebrae of the neck but not on the rest of the spine, a skull with no teeth on the upper jaw while the bottom had none, and at least three different sets of bones having been used at different times in all. One body showed bones with parts showing several hundred years time between them.

Parker-Pearson spoke with LiveScience on the subject, speaking on the importance of the find:

“Altogether, these results have completely changed our ideas about treatment of the dead in prehistoric Britain. Other archaeologists are now identifying similar examples now that the breakthrough has been made — beforehand, it was just unthinkable.” – Parker-Pearson

Archaeologist Terry Brown of the University of Manchester has done DNA tests on analysis of one of the bodies dubbed female and has found that the lower jaw, thigh bone, and arm bone all came from different people, none of them maternally related.

Head down to our archeologically friendly timeline below for lots more bone-digging news bits from the past few weeks!

Science baffled by frankenstein monster mummies is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Americans have enjoyed the freedom to choose between Starbucks apps on both iOS and Android for over a year, and now the Google-flavored iteration is now finally going abroad, launching in both the UK and Canada today. The launch coincides with an app update for all users on the North American continent and across the pond. You’ll now be able to connect your phone to your Starbucks Card payment account, seek out nearby caffeine outlets and gleefully obsess over rewards and balances. The refresh also adds a widget for your presumably otherwise bare homescreen. This first global rollout now totals over 14,000 locations to use your Starbucks Card to pay, with PayPal functionality also rolled into both the US and Canadian iterations. Hit up the PR after the break for the nitty-gritty.

Continue reading Starbucks Android app gets caffeinated update, also launches in UK and Canada

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

Starbucks Android app gets caffeinated update, also launches in UK and Canada originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Jul 2012 08:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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