Hasta La Gadget!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two and a half years since Pixel Qi spun off from OLPC and promised to bring its dual-mode, power efficient display to laptops, tablets, and e-readers. For those who haven’t followed our small obsession with the 3Qi screen technology (shame on you!) it promises the best of both worlds: full-color graphics in a normal LCD mode, but also the ability to turn off the backlight to morph into a grayscale, e-paper like display. And while we’ve seen it demoed at tradeshows (and more tradeshows!), we haven’t been able to get our own grubby hands on the much-lauded display. Until now, of course.

No, the 3Qi display still isn’t shipping in any commercially available products, but Pixel Qi is at long last offering a $275 10.1-inch screen replacement kit for netbooks through MakerShed. Needless to say, we jumped — nay, leaped — at the chance to finally get the display into our laboratories, roll up our sleeves and get to crankin’. That’s right, we got out the screwdriver, wrangled up an old Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 netbook and swapped in the 3Qi display for Lenovo’s glossy panel. You’re surely sitting on a metric ton of questions. Was it hard to swap out? Has the screen been everything we’ve ever fantasized about and more? Is it really 80 percent more power efficient than standard LCDs? We’ve got plenty of answers as well as a step-by-step how-to after the break.

Continue reading How-to: install Pixel Qi’s 3Qi display on your netbook (and why it’s worth it)

How-to: install Pixel Qi’s 3Qi display on your netbook (and why it’s worth it) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  MakerShed  | Email this | Comments

If you ask us, Apple should be giving away free bumpers, lollipops, and anything else it can think of to keep its otherwise loyal followers from revolting. But the Great Bitten One isn’t doing any one of those things, and most of us are stuck either having to pony up $30 for the official salvation from self-inflicted signal harm or looking out to the grey markets. Entering this morose situation with a bit of ingenuity is Oliver Nelson, who alerts us to the fact that rubber wristbands of the sort your favorite cyclist wears are apparently an almost perfect fit when stretched around the 4’s antennae. He advises that a 1.125-inch long by 0.125-inch wide incision (into the unstretched band) is necessary to keep the 30-pin port and speakers open, but otherwise it seems like a pretty effortless and dirt cheap way to avoid all this drama.

iPhone 4 gets a $1 alternative to pricey Bumpers originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Wired  |  The iPhone Guru  | Email this | Comments

What, our ultra-special Droid dock‘s not enough for you? There’s now another way to avoid buying Motorola’s official accessories, though this one’s a bit more blasphemous. Thijs Bosschert over in the Netherlands has put together a fully fledged adapter for his Milestone (aka Droid European Edition), which allows it to interface with docks designed for iPods and iPhones. He’s done it using mostly parts he had lying around — and a well-placed magnet, of course — though he had to resort to using the 3.5mm headphone jack to extract audio from the device. The result might not look like a million bucks, but then it didn’t cost that much either. See more pictures and Thijs’ full how-to guide at the source.

Droid made to work with iPod docks using unholy homemade adapter originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Jun 2010 06:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Hack A Day  |  Thice.nl  | Email this | Comments

For Sven Killig, running Android 2.2 wasn’t enough. No sir, this dude wanted even more power for his Nexus One, so he went ahead and penned a few lines of code that have allowed his Googlephone to act as a USB host. As a result, he can now do cutting edge stuff like plugging in USB keyboards and webcams, as well as more useful things like watching movies off USB sticks or connecting to a monitor via a DisplayLink USB-to-DVI adapter. All these features are demonstrated in the video after the break, and you’ll find the downloadable binaries at the source — Sven expects them to work on Android 2.1 as well.

Continue reading Nexus One gets USB host driver from a dude with an oscilloscope (video)

Nexus One gets USB host driver from a dude with an oscilloscope (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Jun 2010 04:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Sven Killig  | Email this | Comments

Don’t act like you haven’t thought about it, every slate device is just begging for the perfect keyboard accessory that can also function as a hard case. Some industrious souls have gotten on the case of building just such a contraption for the iPad, titled it the LapDock, and given it no lesser a goal than to completely obviate the need for laptops. Shh, no need to ruin their halcyonic existence with talk of the added connectivity, functionality, and versatility of laptops, just let it slide. As to the current state of affairs, well, the LapDock looks like a nicely carved wooden case with room for your iPad and Apple Bluetooth keyboard and that’s about it. Not the highest of high-tech implementations, but it’s still at the, ahem, prototype stage. Go after the break to see if it catches your fancy.

Continue reading iPad LapDock asks why you’d ever need a laptop, we can think of a few answers (video)

iPad LapDock asks why you’d ever need a laptop, we can think of a few answers (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  iPad LapDock  | Email this | Comments