Hasta La Gadget!

German car-maker Volkswagen has designed a bike. Weird, right? Actually, no. The Bik.e is actually a sidekick for your car, something you are supposed to remove from the trunk when you have parked up and can go no further on four wheels.

The Bik.e is electric, and folds up to fit in the spare-wheel well in the back of your car. While sitting in the dark like a kidnap victim, the Bik.e recharges from the car’s electrical system as you drive, meaning it is always ready to go. And that’s just as well, as the Bik.e has no pedals. If you run out of juice when away from the mother-ship then you’ll be scooting back Fred Flintstone-style, or just pushing.

With a 12.5 mile range and a 12.5 mph top speed, it’ll be fine to take you from your Walmart parking space right up to the front door, while the disk-brakes and LED lights will keep you safe. VW doesn’t seem to be planning to supply the Bik.e with its own cars yet, but Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg, the R&D boss at VW, told an audience at Auto China 2010 that it is committed to actually bringing it to market.

I’m all for getting people out of their cars and on to two wheels – after all, one less car on the road means one less two-ton hunk of death piloted by a cellphone-dialing driver directly at vulnerable cyclists. But I can’t imagine that this electric scooter is going to be cheap, so why not just throw a Brompton folding bike in the trunk? You might even get fit as you ride it.

Volkswagen bik.e replaces spare tire with electric mobility device [Green Autoblog via the Giz and Fast Company]

See Also:

• Gocycle Black, The Non-Electric Electric Bike
• Super Size Me! Electric Bikes for the Obese
• Video: Sanyo Eneloop Bike Pedals For You
• Electric Bikes Are Blowing Up and Gadget Lab Readies an e-Bike …

Lexus looks set to expand its range of hybrid vehicles in a manner which almost nobody saw coming. Its next concept project, bizarrely enough, is a hybrid bicycle.

When HP’s Todd Bradley was asked by analysts how his company’s $1.2 billion purchase of Palm would affect its Windows 7 Slate, he replied “We haven’t made roadmap announcements.” In corporate speak, that means “We have killed it.”

Silicon Alley Insider speculates that the HP Slate may be reborn as a WebOS tablet, although Michael Arrington of TechCrunch thinks it “seems very unlikely given the dominance of the closed Apple OS and the likely success of the open Android and Chrome operating systems from Google.”

I’d disagree with Arrington. If anyone has the know-how to pull off an iPad-style hardware/software marriage it is the Palm team. The WebOS failed in the market, but it was quite an excellent product, managing to wow even the jaded tech journalists at CES 2009 (us included). Scaling up this friendly, touch-based OS for a larger screen seems like an obvious move.

By contrast, the Win7 Slate would suffer the same problems as all other tablets up until the iPad: despite skins and overlaid UIs, Windows is a desktop OS. Even Windows Mobile has always been a poorly re-scaled Desktop OS. They’re designed for mice and keyboards, not fingers.

If HP really does “double-down” on the WebOS as it has promised, and designs machines around it, then we’re very excited to see the results. Say what you like about the iPad, it has exposed a new way of interacting with information, and it looks like the HP/Palm team may be the first other company to actually realize that. John Gruber puts it best: “HP is not going to make the same mistake in the mobile market that they made in the PC market, by not owning and controlling their own OS.”

Apple Doesn’t Have To Worry About The HP Slate Anymore [Silicon Alley Insider]

Hewlett-Packard To Kill Windows 7 Tablet Project [TechCrunch]

See Also:

• HP Slate Details Leaked: $550 Netbook, Minus Keyboard
• HP's Windows 7 Slate Strikes at the iPad
• HP Slate: About $500, Atom Processor, June Launch
• Leaked HP Slate Fails to Impress in Early Peek
• HP Offers Another Peek at its Tablet, Specs Leaked?
• HP Buys Palm for $1.2 Billion
• Palm Acquisition

Samsung is set to launch a black and white version of its mirrorless APS camera, the NX10, on May 7th, according to the Samsung Imaging blog. I have one question: Who buys these fancy-colored cameras?

Pentax loves to put out multi-hued versions of its SLRs, and Panasonic’s G and GF-series cameras can be had in all manner of nasty shades, but who buys them? In a world where people were prepared to pay a $100 premium for a black MacBook just a few years back, it would seem that we are pretty conservative in our color choices for big-ticket gadgets. In fact, even seeing the odd silver Canon Rebel in the wild makes me softly gag.

The NX10 is, by most reports, a fine camera, with its SLR-sized sensor in a slim, mirrorless body and three-inch AMOLED display, but one thing it is not is handsome. Even in its black incarnation, the body is little more than curvy-utilitarian in design. Giving it a lick of paint doesn’t help, and the extra attention this will attract reminds me of that lottery-winners’ favorite, the bright-yellow Lamborghini.

Actually, the Samsung Imaging post gives us a clue as to who is snapping these things up. The Hoth-ready body, with 30mm pancake lens, will ship to Korea, the Netherlands, China, the US and Taiwan. Yes folks, the US is on that list. It’s time to come forward and admit it. Stand up and be counted in the comments, color-freaks. Why do you do it?

NX10 comes in Limited Edition with a white body [Samsung Imaging via Photography Bay]

Where Steve Jobs leads, Microsoft follows — how’s that for shaking up the hornet’s nest? It’s said in jest, of course, but we’ve just come across a post from the General Manager for Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, and the perspective expressed by him on the subject of web content delivery broadly agrees with the essay penned by Jobs yesterday on the very same subject. Echoing the Apple CEO’s words, Hachamovitch describes HTML5 as “the future of the web,” praising it for allowing content to be played without the need for plug-ins and with native hardware acceleration (in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X). He goes on to identify H.264 as the best video codec for the job — so much so that it’ll be the only one supported in IE9’s HTML5 implementation — before turning to the dreaded subject of Flash.

This is where it gets good, because he literally repeats one of Jobs’ six pillars of Flash hate: “reliability, security, and performance” are not as good as Microsoft would like them. Where Hachamovitch diverges from Apple’s messiah, however, is in describing Flash as an important part of “a good consumer experience on today’s web,” primarily because it’s difficult for the typical consumer to access Flash-free content. Still, it’s got to be depressing for Adobe’s crew when the best thing either of the two biggest players in tech has to say about your wares is that they’re ubiquitous. Wonder how Shantanu Narayen is gonna try and spin this one.

P.S. : it’s notable that in multiple paragraphs of discussing “the future,” Microsoft’s IE general fails to once mention the fabled Silverlight, itself a rich media browser plug-in. Given Silverlight’s featured role in the Windows Phone 7 infrastructure and other things like Netflix, we doubt it’s on the outs, but there are sure to be some sour faces greeting Hachamovitch this morning.

[Thanks, KnifeX4]

Microsoft weighs in: ‘the future of the web is HTML5’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 04:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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