It’s not the first time we’ve seen the iPhone used as an experimental means of education, but a London school’s recent announcement of its plans has caught our attention. The Gumley House Convent School — a small, Christian School for girls ages 11 to 18 — in London has laid out its plan to use give Apple’s smartphone to a select group of 30 students as a test educational measure. Previous efforts we’ve seen to rope the iPhone into modern education have been mostly at the collegiate level, but Gumley’s plan is still a bit vague. The girls will have free access to all of the phone’s features with the exception of actual calls, and the trial will last until the end of the school year. Like we said — the school’s not given out details as to what the actual rules of use will be — but we have a feeling this will all end in some wild bout of texting overload.

London school children to get free loaner iPhones in experimental, educational trial originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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VMWare is making noise about smartphone virtualization again, claiming their new system will run two operating systems at once, sorta. It’s a compelling idea! But even more, it’s a reminder: Why the hell can’t we choose our smartphone’s OS, again?

When you buy a PC, the most important decision you make is selecting its OS. Do you want Windows 7, for a modern Windows machine-slash-media center? Are you a little more conservative, hanging back with Windows XP? Do you want a lightweight Linux OS on your netbook so you don’t have to worry about viruses, or slowdown? Are you a Gentoo purist, building your OS flag by flag, penguin shirt moist from excitement? Or, god forbid, are you a hackintosher? Whatever choice you make, you’re making a choice. You’re selecting the interface with which you interact with your computer, and by extension, the entire digital world. This makes sense.

But this just isn’t how things work in the mobile world. If you want Windows Mobile, you need to buy a Windows Phone, complete with a dedicated Start button. If you want Google’s Android, you’ve got a narrow selection of handsets from a handful of manufacturers, many of which, at least for now, don’t even support the same version of the OS. If you think webOS looks cool, buy a Pre. If you like Symbian, import a Nokia or settle for a Samsung. And most predictably, if you like the App Store, Apple—and only Apple—is ready to process your credit card. Like the Touch HD2’s obscenely hot hardware, but don’t care for Windows Mobile? Tough luck. Think the Droid is a perfect piece of machinery, but don’t understand what all this Android hubbub is about? Shut up.

In the last half-decade, we’ve become acutely aware of what goes into our smartphones. New phones get a spec rundown that mirrors a PC’s: Qualcomm processor X! RAM speed Y! Screen technology Z! It fosters a climate ripe for PC-style hardware wars, with new processor architectures competing head to head, an ongoing—and fruitful—resolution race, and each new phone edging out its predecessors with even more onboard storage, or support for a new input or output cable. It’s fascinating to watch the competition unfold, but it’s even more fascinating to see how tightly grouped development is. These are ARM-based phones, for the most part. They share memory types, display types, cameras, chipsets, processors and often, original device manufacturers. They’re the same thing.

When you buy a smartphone, you’re stuck with its OS. Your carrier might toss you a few software updates, and if you’re particularly gutsy, you might install some custom-baked software of your own, though you’re generally stuck with slight variations on and customizations of the handet’s default OS. It’s as if everyone in the mobile world is emulating what Apple does in the computer space, except worse: at least Macs have Boot Camp, for fuck’s sake. (And before they did, they had the PowerPC excuse.)

I know something like this is miles over the horizon—you can’t just will new hardware support into existence, and the entire industry is currently built around the bound relationship between software and hardware—and that some hardware (guess which!) is probably doomed to live out its entire life in a hollow monogamous relationship, but it’s time for handset manufacturers, along with Google, Microsoft, the Symbian Foundation, and Palm, maybe, to start setting goals. Or at minimum, it’s time for us to start asking them to.

For the companies, this would mean working on driver support for common componentry, opening up to the enthusiast communities who already do so much amazing software work on their own, and agreeing on some kind of common bootloader, from which users can choose to install their operating system.

For users, this would mean freedom. Going into 2010, our smartphones are more central to our lives than ever, and it’s time to acknowledge that. Consumers treat smartphones like computers. The people who make them, though, treat them like dumbphones; prepackaged products, artificially limited for no good reason—at least, no good reason to the people who buy them.

Hey, you, your gadgets are disgusting. And wiping them with your greasy shirt sleeve isn’t making things any better. Here’s how to clean your gadgets, the right way.

HDTVs and Monitors

This is the number one cleaning question I get from friends and family, and it’s one of the simplest to answer. HDTVs and monitors are the worst kind of dirt magnets, begging to be touched—by your boss who wants to show you something on your computer screen, by your greasy little cousin who’s getting restless during his umpteenth viewing of Finding Nemo, by your drunk old buddy from college who somehow still thinks it’s funny to grope actresses onscreen on his way to the bathroom—and sitting in total vulnerability: in the case of your LCD screen, within sneezing range; in the case of your flatscreen TV, in your dusty living room.

The tempting, nearly instinctual response to a oily, dusty, mucousy panel of glass or glasslike material is to reach under the sink, grab that bottle of Windex and the paper towels and spray that stuff down. Do not do this. There are some TVs and displays for which Windex will do the job—CRT televisions, for example, and some glass-paneled screens—and if you’ve been using Windex in the past without incident, don’t worry too much. But also, stop.

Spraying any kind of cleaner onto a screen isn’t a great idea. These panels aren’t weatherproof, so if your sprayed solvent runs into the crack between the panel surface and the display bezel, there will be tragedy. Furthermore, Windex is a glass cleaner: a lot of your screens’ outer layers aren’t glass, or have some kind of delicate coating. Ammonia-based cleaners, for example, can microscopically abrade some plastic surfaces, causing your screen to become slightly foggy over time. And for your cleaning tool, paper towels aren’t terrible, but they’re also somewhat risky—screen coatings can be extremely delicate, and paper towels can sometimes be a little rough. Plus, they’re prone to leaving streaks, no matter what liquid you’re using.

So, what’s the trick? Water. Water and a soft, lint-free (ideally microfiber, which is better at picking up greasy smudges) towel. To clean your panel, dampen your cloth and strain it out as best you can—you don’t want any drippage here—then run it, folded, gently across your screen, repeating until the screen has been thoroughly covered and any sticky residue has been removed. (For larger displays, perform cleaning in sections, so as not to let the water dry or collect and run.) Now do the same with a dry cloth, applying slightly more pressure, to lift away the dirt and moisture. Repeat if there are still grease deposits. That’s it! A few bucks for some soft cloths, a little bit of water, and your screen is as good as new.

And those specialty cleaning kits? They do work, for the most part, but they’re not necessary.

TV and Game Controllers

By the time your TV is in need to a deep cleaning, your remote—or your videogame controller—is probably in even worse shape. The kind of dirt a remote gathers is an order of magnitude more disgusting (and more human) than your panel, so you’re not just cleaning, you’re disinfecting. Interestingly enough, the cleaning method isn’t too far from the one above: A damp cloth, with some water. This time, though, you’ll want to throw a little isopropyl alcohol in the mix—a 40/60 booze and water split works—to help disinfect the buttons, and remove the oily brown buildups you can get between buttons. Again, soft cloth is better than paper towels, this time it tends to be a bit better at reaching between buttons than stiff, thin paper. Use wooden toothpicks for reaching into cracks, but nothing harder.

These are unique in that they’re shared gadgets. And shared gadgets are, almost without fail, fantastic vectors for germs. So what I’m saying is, clean them or die.

Cameras

Body: Cleaning your camera body is like cleaning almost any other gadget—a very slightly damp towel will do the trick. (Though be gentle around openings, since point-and-shoot camera guts lurk awfully close to the surface, and any intruding water can wreak serious havoc.)

Lenses: Lenses are dirt magnets, and if they’re dirty, you simply don’t get good pictures. They’re also delicate and expensive, so you can’t just reach in there with a paper towel and be done with it. Lens cleaning kits are available at every camera store, and include a light cleaning solution and microfiber cloth. These are safe bets, but don’t spend more than $15 bucks on them. Lens pens also work, but they’re a riskier proposition—there’s such a limited cleaning surface on those things, and I always get the sense that after a few uses, the cleaning element has been sort of tainted.

Again, though, stay safe with this one: Buy a microfiber cloth, and simply rub the lens with a circular motion until all visible smudges are gone. Never apply too much pressure—any dust or dirt on the lens can get picked up in your cloth and scratch your lens—and fold/refold your cloth to ensure you’re using a fresh surface at least once during a lens cleaning.

Two small notes on lenses: Don’t forget the clean the rear glass on any DSLR lens. There’s a lot less surface area there, and since it spends most of its time inside the camera or a locking lens cover it probably won’t be as dirty, so this should take much effort. And if you can, treat each of your DSLR lenses to a UV filter. While this is called a filter, it only block light that humans can’t naturally see, meaning that in most photos, the effect will be generally unnoticeable. (More on that here) Point is, you don’t have much to lose by buying one of the dirt-cheap filters, and it will provide a layer of transparent protection from dirt and scratches over your lenses at all times. And since they’re flat and thin, they’re easier to clean than convex lenses.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten a couple of emails from photo pros about this, and I think it bears mentioning: Before rubbing your lenses, it’s good practice to blast them with a little air. Air pumps (like the one mentioned in the following subsection) and canned air will do the job, as will, in a bind, your lungs. The thinking here is that you should remove any potentially abrasive particles from the lens before rubbing it, so as not to drag them around, causing permanent damage. —Thanks, Jody and Ned!

Sensors: Point-and-shoot and bridge camera users don’t have to worry about this, but DSLR users, who provide a chance for dirty to enter their camera bodies every time they change a lens, may need to clean a sensor one day. It’s not as scary as it sounds!

First of all, you’ll never have to actually clean a sensor, since DSLR sensors all have some manner of filter, either IR or UV, built in. But still, the surface is delicate, so you’ll want to be cautious. Most cameras include some kind of sensor-cleaning function in their software; since most sensor taint is comprised of a stray speck of dust or two, a quick, severe vibration will usually do the trick.

If that doesn’t work, and your photos are showing persistent, faded, unmoving spots in every photo, it’s time for phase II: air. For this, I defer to Ken Rockwell:

After 17,000 shots I finally got a speck on my D70. Remember I also change lenses a lot. The Shop Vac wasn’t enough. This time I used an ear syringe (blower bulb) from the drug store which you can get here. I put the D70 on BULB and pounded the bulb with my fist to create a jarring blast of air. That worked.

Rockwell advises to use an ear syringe; I’d say go with a purpose-design lens blower, since they’re still only about $10, and you’ll get better results without running the risk of pulverizing your DSLR’s guts while trying to get muscle enough airflow through a hard rubber earwax remover.

Beyond built-in sensor cleaning and a few blasts of air, there are plenty more methods for cleaning a sensor, but they’re all risky to varying degrees. Unless you’re supremely confident (and careful) it may be best to leave this one to the guys are your local camera shop, assuming you still have one. A ruined sensor, in most cases, is a ruined camera, so tread carefully.

Laptops

Screen grime is the most common cleaning problem with laptops, and with the display cleaning section of this guide, we’ve got that covered. That said, laptops collect filth in a variety of other ways, and they can get real microbial, real fast.

To clean a typical keyboard—that is, a non-chiclet design—you’ve got three steps to try. First, use a damp cloth with the aforementioned 40/60 alcohol/water mixture, turn off the laptop, and run it across the keys. Fold it a few times and use the edge to reach between the keys. You can use this same cloth to clean the rest of your laptop as well, excluding the screen, but including the touchpad. If that doesn’t do the trick, and you can spot some dust or hair in between keys, it’s time for some canned air. You can pick this stuff up at most big box electronics stores or online for $10 or less, and using it is as simple as tilting your laptop sideways, and blowing air in the cracks.

If this doesn’t work, it’s time to start popping off keys. Since you’re disassembling a keyboard that really isn’t meant to be taken apart, there’s a definite inherent risk here, but the results are practically guaranteed to be good. Here’s an extremely thorough guide, if you’re game for it. To give you an idea of what this entails, there’s a point in this tutorial at which all your laptop’s keys are swirling in a cereal bowl full of soapy water. It’s gruesome.

Another problem area for laptops is fans, air intake vents and heatsinks. These all stand in the pathway between outside air and your processor, which needs said air to keep cool. Any blockage can cause your laptop to run hot, your fans to run high, and consequently, your battery to run low. Disassembly instructions will vary from laptop to laptop, and typically will involve removing your entire keyboard. Once you’ve done this, though, removing the dust is a matter of blasting with air, scraping with a clean toothbrush or even just wiping with your finger. It’s not about total cleanliness here, it’s about clearing your computers’ windpipe.

Another helpful trick: Those white, last-gen MacBooks have a disgusting tendency to accumulate a beige (then brown, then black) residue where users’ palm touch the laptop. This discoloration is more of a stain than a buildup, so you can’t fix it with water or alcohol. The fix? Acetone. Seriously, the best way to wipe that crap off is with nail polish remover.

Desktops

We’ve covered how to clean most of the external pieces of a laptop already: any plastic surface gets a moist wipe-down; keyboards get compressed air. That’s it! Your desktop is sparking clean! This feels so good! Now slide of your desktop’s side panel, and weep. If you’ve had your desktop for more than a few months, and particularly if you keep it in a carpeted room, it’s probably an absolute horror show.

The first thing to do is, you guess it, pull out that microfiber cloth. Wipe down every surface that’s finished, which is to say covered in rubber (wires) painted (the inside of the case, and the plastic shell of an internal optical drive, or the decorated exterior of a video card) or inert (the blades of a fan, or the exterior of your heatsink). You can slightly dampen the cloth to help pick up dust from the corners of the case, but your probably don’t need to, and it’s best to keep this a dry operation, beginning to end. Next, whop out that can-o-air, and have at it. Pay special attention to dust buildup areas, like the heatsinks on your processor and video card, and the fan inside your power supply. This will likely cause some dust to resettle elsewhere, so you may need to repeat your wipedown/blow process once more. Again—cleaning the inside of your tower is less about maintaining a spotless appearance than it is making sure dirt, dust and hair buildup won’t negatively affect your computer’s performance, so don’t get too anal about it, cosmetically speaking.

[image via]

Cellphones and Media Players

Cellphones, iPods and other media players are designed to be pocketed, so you can be a little rough on them during the cleaning process. A very slightly damp cloth or paper towel will remove whatever fingerprint or residue your shirt or jeans won’t.

As much as these gadgets are intended to live in pockets, they have an irritatingly high number of places for dust to hide itself. Cellphones have keypads, or, increasingly, sets up buttons at the base of a touchscreen or on the sideof the handset, all of which give dirt a place to accumulate. The grilles over cellphones’ mics and speakers is another refuge for sludge, and they’re totally immune to simple wipedowns. For this, you’ve got to go one step further. Luckily, you’ve probably got all the supplies you need in your house already.

Wooden toothpicks and old toothbrushes help reach into cracks and crevices, like those around buttons or running around the perimeter of some display panels. (Samsung and HTC are particularly guilty of leaving spaces in places like that.)

Sometimes, as in the case of the tiny little mic/speaker grilles on some phones, you don’t want to push dirt in, but rather pull it out. For those situations, lay a strip of scotch tape over the afflicted area, run your finger over it a few times, and pull it off. If that doesn’t work, upgrade to duct tape—though you’ll want to be a bit more gentle with that, since applying too much pressure can leave adhesive on your device, which is a pain to wipe off.

Your Tips and Tricks

If you have more cleaning tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides.

And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy housekeeping, folks!

Samsung, stop doing this.

The Omnia II is frustrating from the second you pick it up to the moment you lay it back on your desk, defeated and distraught. There was so much potential here, so much obvious potential. Through a series of bizarre decisions and grating software design, Samsung has managed to squander it. Every. Last. Ounce.

The Hardware Is Decent

This handset is categorically impressive, shipping with a 480×800 AMOLED screen, an 800MHz processor, a 5MP camera with 720x480px video capture, 8GB of internal storage with room for microSD expansion, and FM radio, complementing the standard smartphone trio of GPS/Wi-Fi/3G connectivity.

The screen is beautifully sharp, though the whites—as seems to be common in Samsung’s AMOLED screens—often render as slightly blue. It’s not that distracting as long as you don’t have a whiter screen for reference, and the screen’s brightness, sharpness and general color reproduction are satisfying. It’s a resistive display, which is still kind of a necessary evil on Windows Mobile; as much as I enjoyed the capacitive panel on the Touch HD2, Windows Mobile 6.5—and specifically, some of its app selection—isn’t quite ready to kick the stylus. The screen is no more squishy than any other 3.7-inch layered plastic display.

The design could be described as clean and conservative, if not for two features: the chrome buttons on the front, and the ill-advised secret red accents on the back. It’s a bit too tuner-car chic for my tastes, but neither detail is all that offensive. The sides of the phone, which are fairly narrow (the handset is only about 13mm thick—about as thin as a HTC Hero, and slightly thinner than a closed Pre) are littered with buttons and ports, including the 3.5mm headphone jack, the volume rockers, an “OK” button, a microUSB port for charging, and lock and camera shutter buttons, which are a bit close for comfort.

(sample shot)

The 5MP camera benefits from extensive settings options, and the sensor itself is good enough to replace an entry-level point-and-shoot in daytime. The video, though it suffers from motion distortion more than your average pocket camcorder, will suffice in most situations.

The conclusion here is unsurprising: Though it’s no HD2, the Omnia II is an impressive piece of hardware. This, sadly, doesn’t really matter.

The Software Is Terrible

The Omnia’s got a veritable arsenal of software tricks behind that spongy little screen, from the ability to broadcast video over DLNA, to the newest version of Opera Mobile, to the semi-lauded Swype keyboard, which lets you type without lifting your finger, and which takes fairly bold—but generally effective—guesses at what you’re gesturing toward. And the crowning achievement, the reason that the Omnia II is worthy of a review over the rest of the same-y Windows Phones that are flooding the market right now, is TouchWiz 2.0, Samsung’s take on total interface conversion, which reaches far deeper than the original TouchWiz did on the first Omnia.

And it is a disaster.

It’s flawed in the most basic ways a phone interface can be, violently convulsing from one interface paradigm to another through a series of inconsistent, layered, and most importantly slow animations. Seriously, what’s going on here? How did all these images come from one phone?:

The widget menu feels like its always about to freeze, and the widgeting system as a whole is laggy and disorganized, more of a free canvas for thoughtlessly-sized shortcuts than an actual, interactive dashboard. The Cube—oh, that horrible fucking cube—is just a six-sided spinning shortcut menu for multimedia apps, which feels like an obstacle, not an interface. Ugh.

And stuff like this is everywhere on the Omnia II—you can’t avoid it. Windows Mobile’s new Start Menu has been replaced with an iPhone-style set of icon panels, which would be fine if they didn’t register half my swipes as taps, opening applications, sometimes more than one at a time, instead of just cycling between screens. The new dialpad crunches the inbuilt recent calls list into a two-item-tall sliver. The SMS interface has been replaced, but only in bits and pieces. Closing an app with one “x” button reveals a second “x” button of a different color and size, attached to that bright green start menu. The Wi-Fi selector is a floating orb of icons, in which you drag one bubble—representing a network—into a larger bubble—representing your phone. The task switcher alternates between a set of panels and a Cover Flow-esque turnstile. The media player app looks like it was hastily ripped from one of Samsung’s older PMPs, and the remaining Windows Mobile native elements have been doomed to wear a black and blue neon color scheme that harks back to Windows 98’s High Contrast Mode. Haptic feedback accompanies almost all animations, which makes the lagging transitions feel like they’re literally grinding.

I won’t go on too long about how this interface looks. Let’s just say it’s oppressively ugly, and leave it at that. But the way it functions is inexplicable, and inexcusable. It’s as if Samsung assigned each tiny piece of this phone’s software to a different team, and ordered them not to speak to one another under any circumstances. This isn’t design by committee. This is worse than design by committee. And the effect on user experience is crippling: Fiddling with this thing for a few minutes is akin to being yelled at by a panel of six men, none of whom speak languages you’ve ever heard before, and all of whom take pleasure in your cranial pain. You could conceivably get used to this with enough time, but it’s an order of magnitude less usable than the regular Windows Mobile 6.5 interface, which hey, isn’t that good. Perhaps more importantly, everyone I handed this to was visibly frustrated within seconds. You can’t turn it off, either: With a little effort you can kill the homescreen, but the rest of the modifications are there to stay.

The most alarming thing about this interface is that it’s Samsung’s entire design philosophy now. Matt said of the Android Behold’s UI:

TouchWiz is the first custom Android interface that’s worse than the standard one, and shows what kind of horrible things emerge when Samsung’s interface designers are left unchecked.

It only got more scatological from there. The Omnia II’s UI is essentially the same concept, adapted for Android and intended to penetrate a little deeper. There are even some striking similarities between the Omnia II’s interface and that of the Omnia HD, a Symbian-based phone from a few months ago. In short, TouchWiz is an epidemic at Samsung. And for all intents and purposes, the pathogen is fatal.

What To Buy Instead

At the $200 price point, it’s hard to recommend anything else but the Droid on Verizon’s network—it’s their clear flagship, and it’s an extremely capable phone. But even if you’re specifically set on buying a Windows Mobile phone, there are better options, like the HTC Imagio, which benefits from HTC’s vastly better TouchFlo or “Sense” UI overhaul, or even the Touch Pro2, which despite having Windows Mobile 6.1 (which you can probably just upgrade yourself) offers a much more pleasant experience. Because unless you replace the software entirely, a pleasant experience is miles from what you’ll be having with an Omnia II in your pocket.

It’s another in what I expect to be a long line of impressively spec’d Windows Mobile handsets


The camera is better than average, though it still suffers in low light


It’s a Windows Mobile phone, which will be a dealbreaker for some, and a feature for others.


It’s almost always laggy, despite a fast processor


It gives you a headache to use, like reading tiny text in the dark, or reciting the alphabet backwards when drunk

Remember the Creative/ZiiLabs StemCell system-on-a-chip from a while back? The one that spawned that Android PMP design? Well, the Zii project is marching on, which means new hardware, including the dual OS Trinity phone, 360º HD webcam and more.

Creative and ZiiLabs are showing off a pile of Zii reference hardware to potential hardware licensors in China today, in hopes that someone will manufacture it. The Zii phone reference design, pictured for the first time above, is the only one we can see right now, and promises full 1080p video playback over HDMI, OpenGL 2.0 accelerated gaming, and support for both Android OS and ZiiLabs’ Plaszma software. And that’s just the phone—ZiiLabs also has a 360º full HD webcam, a PCI-E video coprocessor, a pocket synthesizer and, well, lots.

But before we get to the rest of the new stuff, a little timeline for you. Back in January, Creative announced, with of an offshoot company called ZiiLabs, “Zii StemCell Computing.” There were not adjectives strong enough, no superlatives super enough, no words wordy enough to describe the wonders of this StemCell computing. Unlimited Flexibility! Incredible Scalability! High Energy Efficiency! ET! CET! ER! A!

But wait, what is this thing? The Zii StemCell processor is basically an extremely flexible system-on-a-chip, which is to say a multi-talented slab of hardware with an ARM Cortex chip at its core, intended to power all manner of multimedia devices, from PMPs to phones to settop boxes to, well, whatever. Creative promised low power consumption, high processing power, and plenty of uses. The platform would be licensed to hardware manufacturers, and eventually, we’d find these Zii-powered gadgets in our possession, under familiar brands. (But not necessarily Creative itself.)

Then we were shown the Zii Egg—pictured above—which is an Android-powered PMP with an alternate OS called Plaszma. This was actual hardware—that’s more like it—and it looked compelling: media playback was strong, and the device itself was hot, and most importantly for Creative, new. But this, like anything else out of ZiiLabs, was reference hardware—unless someone picked it up for manufacture, it was strictly for developers.

Fast-forward to this month, and the project is finally springing some leaks. A smartbook shows up out of nowhere. Rumors about netbooks, which could leverage the Zii chip’s power for 1080p video playback, real-time encoding, HD video conferencing, Flash acceleration and more, emerge. And finally, today, an announcement. ZiiLabs is pitching more reference designs, like the Zii Egg, to manufacturers:

The line-up of Zii Powered devices on display include a dual OS concept mobile phone which supports the Plaszma OS and Android OS, a desktop touch screen video conferencing device, a web-box, a 360° multi-view camera system, a PCI Express add-on card that instantly empowers notebooks with HD video encoding for high quality video conferencing, a pocket-sized synthesizer that can emulate the sound of some of the world’s best pianos, as well as the world’s smallest credit card-sized Blu-ray quality media player – based on the ZMS-08 chip.

The headliner here is obviously the Trinity phone, which can count itself among the first wave of 1GHz Android phones, and promises serious media and 3D support. The reference hardware, as you can see, is conservatively designed, though undeniably nice—and apparently iPhone skinny.

But the other Zii Wares are compelling in their own ways. The videoconferencing system can apparently process a distortion-free 360° view in full HD. The PCI Express add-on card will do video offload duties, a la Nvidia’s GPGPU systems. And that little “Blu-ray quality” media player, well, I really don’t know. All of the Zii hardware is propped up by the Plaszma-centric ZiiLife suite, which includes videoconferencing software with media sharing, educational software, and an app store.

As they are now, these gadgets will probably never see the light of day—it’ll be up to hardware manufacturers to pick up the reference designs, after which they’ll undoubtedly put their own spin on each concept. And as far as the associated software goes, it’ll most likely remain under wraps until there are actual products to use it with. At any rate, over the next few months we can probably expect to see some of these Zii-powered gadgets show up as actual, buyable products, whatever forms they may take. And honestly, I’m eager to see them. [ZiiLabs]