Hasta La Gadget!

PrimeSense provides some of the brains behind Microsoft’s Kinect, and wants a bigger piece of the pie; ASUS has a reputation for announcing wonderfully wacky peripherals every year. At CES 2011, the Wavi Xtion will check off both boxes nicely. In a nutshell, the Xtion is a PrimeSense 3D depth camera built exclusively for PC, but with an important twist — it connects to a pair of ASUS Wavi boxes, which wirelessly streams its data to your living room PC between your TV and a Windows PC over the 5GHz band. Oh, and should ASUS attract enough developers, it will even pull down applications from an Xtion online store. ASUS says we’ll see the package commercially available around the world in Q2 of next year — with a UI and selection of apps and games on board — but they’ll release an Xtion PRO developer kit in February to tempt all you Kinect hackers into coding magical things for the platform. No more details for now, but there’s an event in Vegas this week where ASUS is all but guaranteed to show it off. PR after the break.

Update: Did we say HTPC? Turns out it doesn’t quite work that way — the Wavi are actually a pair of boxes that wirelessly sling data between them. You put the Xtion sensor on top of your TV, connect it to Wavi #1, then plug Wavi #2 into a PC up to 25 meters away. Mind you, it looks like the Xtion may not be quite as capable as Microsoft’s unit, as there’s only infrared hardware inside — it might be fine for gesture control, but don’t expect any augmented reality lightsaber fights. See some mockups below!

Continue reading PrimeSense and ASUS team, bring Kinect-like Wavi Xtion to your living room TV (update)

PrimeSense and ASUS team, bring Kinect-like Wavi Xtion to your living room TV (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 13:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How much would you pay for an animal that sort of resembles another animal? It’s no unicorn cow, sure, but you can get your hands on a panda cow for the low price of $30,000. There are only 24 of the animals in existence–the latest of which, Ben, was born at 8:00 AM on New Year’s Day.

The cow’s panda-like markings are the result of almost 50 years of genetic tricky at the hands of a Washington-based farmer. The animals are in high demand in China, according to their developer, Richard Gradwohl.

Ben’s owner, Chris Jessen, said that he would likely be selling the unique cow, though he hasn’t yet set a price.

Here’s some video of Ben’s Good Morning America debut, in which he may or may not be peeing on his owner’s lap.

In the George A. Romero classic, Night of the Living Dead, a radioactive satellite falls to earth and causes the dead to rise from their graves — but what if the satellite itself had become a zombie? That’s the slightly less frightening reality that has befallen Intelsat’s Galaxy 15 communications satellite, which “went rogue” in April of 2010 and has been unresponsive ever since — even though it has continued to transmit signals. Late last month, however, the satellite finally came back to life, and Intelsat was able to put it into safe mode to prevent it from interfering with other communications satellites. It’s apparently even now trying to determine if the satellite could become fully functional again — although, if you ask us, that just sounds like it’s all part of the zombie satellite’s plan…

‘Zombie satellite’ springs back to life, actual zombies still zombies originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ah, there always has to be fine print, doesn’t there? Don’t get us wrong — $40 for unlimited talk and text alone is still a pretty fantastic deal in the scheme of things — but in tweaking its LTE service plans today, MetroPCS has made the data situation just a little confusing. Technically, the $40 plan also includes unlimited web access plus YouTube… but at the $50 price point, you get 1GB of “additional data access” for features that aren’t covered under MetroPCS’ definition of “web browsing.” You also get turn-by-turn navigation, international text messaging, access to corporate email accounts (another arbitrary distinction that we’d kind of like to see go away), and audio / video features through the carrier’s MetroSTUDIO service. At $60, you get unlimited access to MetroSTUDIO including 18 channels of on-demand video content. MetroPCS’ lowest-cost LTE offering had previously been $55, so it’s a step in the right direction — but pro-net neutrality? Yeah, not so much. Follow the break for the press release.

Continue reading MetroPCS tweaks LTE plans: $40 gets you unlimited talk, text, and web*

MetroPCS tweaks LTE plans: $40 gets you unlimited talk, text, and web* originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 09, 2006 by CyberNet.

People have been speculating for so long about when Gmail is going to come out of beta. Every change that’s made, people get excited and infer that it’s bound to happen sooner rather than later. Back in February when Gmail users were given a load of invitations to send out, people took this as they were just about ready to release it from Beta. It has yet to happen globally, however in Australia today, Google has announced that you will no longer need an invite from an existing Gmail user to create an account.

People in Australia wanting to test out the service can simply go to www.gmail.com and create a free account without an invitation or without using Google SMS. Gmail has become highly popular offering over 2.7GB of storage with millions of users already taking advantage of that.

Many people would rather it remain a service that requires an invite. It’s not a difficult process to sign up, however it does take a little more effort which seems to keep spammers from creating accounts. I’m curious as to whether they’ll move this to other regions of the world. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

News Source: PC World Australia

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