May 03

New Smartphone Memory Boosts Battery Life

Posted in: memory, samsung, Today's Chili

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Samsung has announced a new kind of memory module, built from phase change material, that’s three times faster than existing flash memory and could boost battery life by up to 20 percent, BBC News reports.
Phase change material for memory is an idea that dates back over four decades, but it’s only now becoming a possibility for today’s mobile devices. In essence, the material can record or erase data when heated, and tends to use far less power than existing equivalents.
The material can be constructed in a variety of ways, but the most common is a glass-like alloy of germanium, antimony, and titanium. Heating the material turns it into two separate forms with very different electrical resistances, meaning it can represent binary 0s and 1s, the report said.
The company plans to begin producing 40-nanometer, 512 megabit (Mbit) phase change memory (PCM) chips en masse toward the end of 2010, and will build them in the same format as existing designs. This way, vendors needing a little extra battery life can drop them right into existing production runs.
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May 03

Avatar Director, NASA Building 3-D Mars Rover Camera

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
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James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of Avatar and Titantic, has linked up with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to build a high resolution 3-D camera for Curiosity, the next-generation Mars rover, Discovery News reports.
Malin Space Science Systems, the company behind the fixed-focal-length lens cameras for the rover, will build the actual 3-D mast camera as well, with Cameron listed as “co-investigator,” the report said.
Back in 1999, Cameron produced a TV mini-series and an IMAX film depicting the first humans to live on Mars. No word yet on what kind of glasses we’re all going to need to see the 3-D images coming down from the rover for the first time.
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May 03

Scientists Create Clouds With Laser

Posted in: science, Space Tech, Today's Chili

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Researchers in a German lab figured out how to generate small clouds on demand using a laser, pointing the way (at least in theory) for humans to control when it rains, New Scientist reports.
The new method builds on the old idea of cloud seeding, which consisted of sprinkling silver iodide crystals into clouds high in the atmosphere, the report said.
The new laser-based method involves firing very short pulses of infrared laser light–220-millijoules into just 60 femtoseconds each, equivalent to 1000 power plants–into a water-saturated air chamber at -24 degrees Celsius, creating linear clouds in the laser’s wake, according to the report.
Lest you think this occurred entirely in a lab environment, the scientists repeated the experiment in the skies over Berlin; while the results were invisible to humans, weather LIDAR picked up a huge increase in the density and size of water droplets.
The next step is to figure out how to replicate the experiment in a way that creates larger droplets that could fall as rain. (Image credit: Jean-Pierre Wolf/University of Geneva)
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May 03

Monitor money matters on Android with Mint

Posted in: Today's Chili

An Android app from personal finance service Mint.com joins its iPhone counterpart, though neither lives up to the full-fledged site. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-20003889-251.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Android Atlas/a/p

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May 03

Pure’s stylish internet radio lineup ships to America on July 1st

Posted in: radio, ship, shipping, ships, Today's Chili, us, usa

Pure has long since been a stranger to the US market, despite shipping some of the sexiest internet radios this planet has ever seen. The company announced back at CES that all of that would be changing in the near future, but it wasn’t until now that we had specifics surrounding the whos, whats, wheres and whens. The Evoke Flow, Oasis Flow and Seista Flow will all be available for purchase in the United States of America on the first of July, with MSRPs set for $229, $249 and $139 in order of mention. Initially, they’ll be available only through Pure’s website, though we get the impression that brick-and-mortar distribution is only a moment or two away. Check the full press release after the break, and be sure to jot down this here date in your handy dandy date book, cool?

Continue reading Pure’s stylish internet radio lineup ships to America on July 1st

Pure’s stylish internet radio lineup ships to America on July 1st originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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May 03

Nokia launches Ovi App Wizard, will probably lead to Ovi-population problems

Posted in: hands-on, nokia, Today's Chili

Nokia’s Ovi Store may still be seriously losing in the app war to Apple and Google, but something tells us Espoo’s betting on its new Ovi App Wizard to help it gain some ground. Putting mobile software creation in the hands of the code-illiterate, the auto-generated application wizard lets anyone — and we mean anyone — turn any RSS or Atom feed out there into an app, and publish it to the Ovi Store. Surprisingly, it really is that simple. While we could have made a personal app with our Twitter and Facebook feed, we went ahead and finally made an Ovi Engadget app by simply going to oviappwizard.com and going through the four step process — we put in all three RSS feeds, uploaded our logos, tweaked the colors and hit publish. According to Nokia it should only take 24 hours for the app to be approved — yes, there’s some sort of approval process — but we’re still waiting for our app to show up in the storefront so we can download it on our N97. There’s the ability to serve up third party ads, but you’ll have to prove that you own the content you’ve placed in your app. Again, super simple, but we’re a bit wary of the sorts of apps that will start to pop up, and not sure we need everyone’s own personal feeds/sites overtaking the store. But we’ll let you be the judge of that — go on, hit the read link, create an app, and Ovi-populate.

Gallery: Ovi App Wizard hands-on

Nokia launches Ovi App Wizard, will probably lead to Ovi-population problems originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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May 03

Nintendo Wii Gets Black Color, MotionPlus Bundle

Posted in: nintendo, nintendo wii, Today's Chili, video games, wii
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This certainly took long enough, but Nintendo fans in the U.S. are finally getting a black color option for the Wii.
Not only that, but Nintendo is boosting the stock bundle for both the black and white varieties. In addition to the motion-sensing Wii Remote controller, Nunchuk controller, and Wii Sports game that came before, all Wiis will now come with Wii Sports Resort and the Wii MotionPlus accessory.
The retail price for both colors will remain at $199.99. No word on pricing outside the U.S. yet.
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May 03

Lenovo’s 14-inch Z460 mentioned again overseas, this time with a Core i5 CPU

Posted in: chinese, CoreI5, intel, laptop, Today's Chili

Ready for the latest international laptop mystery? Good. Lenovo‘s 14-inch Z460, which has yet to be confirmed as real by the company, recently surfaced over in China with a decidedly average set of specifications. A Core i3 CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB SATA hard drive and Windows 7 Home Basic were found onboard, though no further details were divulged. Fast forward to today, and this very same machine is seemingly available to order on contract from Singapore’s own SingTel, complete with a Core i5-430M processor (2.26GHz), Windows 7 Home Premium, a 14-inch WXGA display, 500GB hard drive and 2GB of DDR3 memory. Naturally, a free integrated wireless modem is thrown in here, but now we’re stuck wondering if a) this is the last of the configuration options and b) when exactly Lenovo plans to come forward and officially introduce this thing. Any day now, Junior…

[Thanks, Zhang Yi Jiang]

Lenovo’s 14-inch Z460 mentioned again overseas, this time with a Core i5 CPU originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 07:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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May 03

Photos: iFixit Rips Open iPad 3G

Posted in: ipad, Media Players, teardown, Today's Chili

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You knew this had to happen: IFixit has taken the brand-new iPad 3G and torn it open, all before some of us have managed to get our hands on one. The internals of the 3G iPad don’t differ much from those of the earlier Wi-Fi-only model, but there are some design surprises apart from the big plastic strip on the back of the body.

The hardware additions come down to the cellular networking and aGPS chipsets. The iPad uses the exact same 3G chip as the iPhone 3GS, although it isn’t marked as such. iFixit’s sleuthing confirmed that it is in fact the Infineon 337S3754 PMB 8878 X-Gold IC used in the latest iPhone.

The GPS hardware, though, is different: Apple has switched to a Broadcom AGPS chip, dropping the iPhone’s Infineon Hammerhead II (which has a way better name).

The most interesting part for those of us not into chip numbers is the amount of antennae in there. You thought the iPad was stuffed full of battery, but it is also stuffed full of aerials: the 3G has five of them, for Bluetooth, GPS, 3G and Wi-Fi. One of the cell antennae is in the plastic RF window, as you’d expect. The other is hooked up to the LCD frame, running round the entire edge of the iPad. This should give great reception, and is a trick that Apple has used before in some MacBook models.

As ever, though, the best part of the iFixit post is the pile of wonderful pictures of the tear-down process. If you ever dreamed of ripping open your gadgets to see what was inside, but know that you’ll never get all the parts back together again, iFixit is the place to go. See a few more photos below.

iPad 3G Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]

Photo credit: iFixit


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May 03

Nintendo Wii goes ebony and ivory on May 9, includes Sports Resort and Motion Plus

Posted in: breaking news, BreakingNews, nintendo, nintendo wii, NintendoWii, Today's Chili, wii
Nintendo Wii goes ebony and ivory on May 9, includes Sports Resort and Motion Plus

Nintendo’s Wii has been available in black overseas for quite some time now, and while there were ways to get one in North America, those ways weren’t exactly cheap — nor legitimate. Now Ninty is finally giving us a color option, releasing a black Wii to American consumers for $199.99 on May 9. In other news, you’ll have a copy of Wii Sports Resort included and a MotionPlus adapter to match, along with the controller and nunchuck that were previously included. In fact that looks to be the standard bundle going forward on the white models as well, which equates to something of a soft price drop assuming new Wii owners were going to buy Wii Sports Resort. And of course they were, because who can resist bopping their friends over the head with pretend wooden swords?

Continue reading Nintendo Wii goes ebony and ivory on May 9, includes Sports Resort and Motion Plus

Nintendo Wii goes ebony and ivory on May 9, includes Sports Resort and Motion Plus originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 07:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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