Hasta La Gadget!

Black-and-white e-readers are limiting while full color LCD displays such as those in tablets like the iPad can be power hungry and tough on the eyes. That’s why Qualcomm is betting that a new hybrid device that bridge the two worlds could be in the hands of consumers early next year.

Qualcomm is on track to ship 5.7-inch displays in the next few weeks that can shift between black-and-white and color, Jim Cathey, vice-president of business development for Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, told Wired.com.

These displays called ‘Mirasol’ will first go to device makers who are likely to introduce new products based on it early next year, says Cathey.

Last year, e-readers were one of the fastest growing consumer electronics products. But intense competition and pressure from Apple iPad has put many smaller e-reader makers out of business. Meanwhile, many consumers remain undecided when it comes to choosing between e-readers and tablets. Consumers want the convenience of a low power, display that’s lightweight and easy on the eye, with the advantage of a color screen.

With Mirasol, Qualcomm is hoping it can give companies such as Amazon that are reportedly looking beyond black-and-white e-readers an attractive option.

Mirasol displays work by modulating an optical cavity to reflect the desired wavelength of light. The reflected wavelength is proportional to the cavity’s depth. Mirasol screens looks more like glossy scientific books rather a full color LCD screen. But the displays consume very little power, are bistable and can play video.

Over the next few months, Qualcomm hopes to ramp up production of the displays. Qualcomm is building a new $2 billion Mirasol production plant in Taiwan, according to a report in DigiTimes.

A “major client has already started the design-in process,” using Mirasol, says DigiTimes.

See Also:

• Qualcomm Aims to Bring Color, Video to E-Readers
• Gallery: E-Readers Push Boundaries of Books
• 5 Things That Will Make E-Readers Better in 2010
• Up Close and Personal With the Pixel Qi Display
• Thin Film Turns Any Surface Into a Touchscreen

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

By Bryan Gardiner

They are road signs for your daily rituals – the instantly recognized symbols and icons you press, click and ogle countless times a day when you interact with your computer. But how much do you know about their origins?

Power

It’s plastered on T-shirts; it tells you which button will start your Prius; it’s even been used on NYC condom wrappers. As far back back as World War II engineers used the binary system to label individual power buttons, toggles and rotary switches: A 1 meant “on,” and a 0 meant off. In 1973, the International Electrotechnical Commission vaguely codified a broken circle with a line inside it as “standby power state,” and sticks to that story even now. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, however, decided that was too vague, and altered the definition to simply mean power. Hell yeah, IEEE. Way to take a stand.

Command

What do Swedish campgrounds and overuse of the Apple logo have in common? A lot, according to Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac development team. While working with other team members to translate menu commands directly to the keyboard, Hertzfeld and his team decided to add a special function key. The idea was simple: When pressed in combination with other keys, this “Apple key” would select the corresponding menu command. Jobs hated it – or more precisely the symbol used to represent the button – which was yet another picture of the Apple logo. Hertzfeld recalls his reaction: “There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain!” A hasty redesign followed, in which bitmap artist Susan Kare pored through an international symbol dictionary and settled on one floral symbol that, in Sweden, indicated a noteworthy attraction in a campground. Alternately known as the Gorgon loop, the splat, the infinite loop, and, in the Unicode standard, a “place of interest sign,” the command symbol has remained a mainstay on Apple keyboards to this day.

Bluetooth

You’ve probably heard the story of 10th-century Danish King, Harald Blåtand, as it relates to Bluetooth, right? He was renowned connoisseur of blueberries; at least one of this teeth was permanently stained blue; yadda yadda yadda. What you might not know is that the Bluetooth symbol is actually a combination of the two runes that represent Harald’s initials. It just so happens the first Bluetooth receptor also had a “teeth-like” shape, and was – you guessed it – blue. But the symbolic interplay doesn’t end there. As the Bluetooth SIG notes, Blåtand “was instrumental in uniting warring factions in parts of what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark – just as Bluetooth technology is designed to allow collaboration between differing industries such as the computing, mobile phone and automotive markets.”

Take a look on, inside and underneath the world’s largest self-anchored suspension bridge in this exclusive Wired.com video.

The Bay Bridge is nearing the end of a $7-billion-plus retrofit and reconstruction project. A $5.4 billion chunk of that project involves building the world’s largest self-anchored suspension bridge, a type of suspension bridge that uses a single cable, anchored to the span itself instead of to the ground on either end. When complete, this bridge will have a 525-foot tower and will be over 2,000 feet long.

To make the suspension bridge, builders must first create a “falsework” bridge: a giant, temporary structure that will hold up the road bed until the suspension tower and cables are in place. Then they place segments of the tower (shipped in from China), stack them up and bolt them together. Then they’ll place the road deck segments and lace it all together with cables. Once it’s under tension, builders will remove the falsework and the bridge will stand on its on.

They must do all this without interrupting the flow of more than 250,000 vehicles per day. They’ve got to anchor the bridge in deep layers of soft, squishy bay mud, without the benefit of bedrock, while making the bridge strong enough to withstand the most powerful earthquake expected in the next 1,500 years. And they’ve got to do it all without destroying the habitats for fish, birds, or other wildlife which still call the San Francisco Bay home.

It all adds up to an impressive high-tech engineering project. Take a look in this video, produced by Michael Lennon with sound by Fernando Cardoso.

See Also:

• Gallery: How to Build an Earthquake-Resistant Bridge
• Bridging the Future: Behind the Scenes at the Bay Bridge …
• When a Bridge Becomes a Lifeline

Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Not only does a “death grip” cut into your phone’s ability to connect, it also increases the amount of radio-frequency radiation it’s pumping out.

Now you can see exactly how much more radiation your head is absorbing, with an app that estimates the RF output of your smartphone, in real time.

Israeli mobile-software company Tawkon released a video Monday that shows its app measuring the impact a “death grip” can have on a mobile device’s radiation.  Using the app, an iPhone 4, BlackBerry Bold, and Google Nexus One all show a significant increase in RF radiation when held tightly in the user’s palm.

That’s to be expected: Whenever a cellphone has difficulty connecting with a cell tower, it increases its RF output in order to maintain the connection. Anything that interferes with that connection — be it a death grip, stepping into an elevator, or locating yourself in a low-signal area — will increase any phone’s RF output.

So is Tawkon suggesting that the infamous “death grip” can actually be detrimental to the user’s health?

“Tawkon doesn’t advocate that the death grip is necessarily unsafe, because final answers on the health ramifications of mobile phone usage won’t be known for decades, until researchers have had that time to track long-term usage and impact,” Tawkon co-founder Amit Lubovsky told Wired.  ”However, recent studies do indicate a health impact of mobile phone radiation on mobile phone users, especially on people whose usage is termed excessive and cumulative. Until the long-term studies are concluded (decades from now), Tawkon believes consumers should have the right and ability to minimize their exposure to mobile phone radiation.”

Most ongoing studies cannot yet draw a causal link between cellphone usage and physical disorders, and Tawkon should know, since the company follows many of these studies.

The World Health Organization’s Interphone study, released in May, could draw no causal link between glioma or meningioma and cellphone use. However, it noted, “There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma, and much less so meningioma, in the highest decile of cumulative call time, in subjects who reported usual phone use on the same side of the head as their tumor and, for glioma, for tumors in the temporal lobe.”

A 2009 study from the Environmental Working Group measured the radiation from more than 1,200 mobile phone models. While the EWG study could not draw any conclusions as to the risks of mobile phone use, it did provide the beginnings of the group’s database of mobile phones and their emissions.

Currently, the group ranks the Motorola Droid, iPhone 3GS, Google Nexus One, BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Samsung Instinct HD as the top five most radio-emissive phones. All of them, however, fall within the FCC’s acceptable SAR (specific absorption rate) limit of 1.6 watts per kilogram (1.6 W/kg).

The Tawkon application gets all its information about the phone’s radiation from the cellular protocol stack that manages the baseband modem.

“We use this information in the form of different RF parameters extracted from the device itself,” Lubovsky said. “We then take into consideration the proximity of the phone to the user –for example if the phone is held against the user’s ear or on the user’s lap– to help determine the actual exposure level at any given time.”

“As part of the production procedure we have, each device goes through a long calibration process in an RF lab prior to its release to make sure that our measurements meet the actual values,” he continued.

Tawkon is available only on the BlackBerry platform via App World, Mobihand and Handango, but not on Android or iOS as shown in the video.

“It works on the iPhone, but we’re waiting for Apple approval to make it publicly available,” Lubovsky said. “Android is expected to launch very soon.”

On the set, he plays a down-on-his-luck schoolteacher who turns to prostitution to make ends meet. Off the set, Thomas Jane wears the Vibram FiveFinger foot-gloves that have become a geek trend.

Jane, who says filming his many sex scenes in HBO’s Hung are “about as exciting as wrapping a dead fish,” joins Google co-founder Sergey Brin, lifestyle hacker Tim Ferriss and even the editor of Wired.com’s Gadget Lab in his admiration for the goofy-looking, ugly, but oh-so-comfortable foot coverings.

As Jane explains, going barefoot engages more of the muscles in your foot and leg, enabling each of your toes to articulate separately and giving you better balance, more ankle strength and possibly a more injury-free gait.

After taking heat for showing up to film premieres and other public affairs in completely bare feet, Jane switched to the Vibrams and hasn’t looked back.

We doubt that the Vibram FiveFingers will stop the gossip rags from commenting on his feet. To all you gossip writers out there, here’s a phrase tailor-made for this story: freaky plastic gorilla feet.

See Also:

• To Run Better, Start by Ditching Your Nikes
• Vibram FiveFingers KSO and Classic Running Shoes
• Vibram FiveFingers on GeekDad

Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.