Hasta La Gadget!

Scrotal hyperthermia — even its name sounds like a terrible, horrible thing. Yes, gadget enthusiasts, we’re talking about the vastly underrated problem that is the overheating of a techie gentleman’s reproductive parts. A study recently published in the Fertility and Sterility journal confirms what we’ve long known — that heat escaping laptops sat on laps can and will raise the temperature in your external offspring storage units — but adds a bit of handy additional info as well. Firstly, it turns out that keeping one’s legs together to balance the laptop is mostly to blame, as it doesn’t provide enough airflow to let heat escape, while lap pads have been found to be entirely ineffective in protecting testicles from rising in temperature. Another note of import is that the men in this study failed to notice when their scrotal thermometers rose above what’s considered safe, so we’d just advise doing your mobile blogging Engadget style: from a bar, a coffee table, the trunk of a car, or even a humble desk.

Shocker! Laptops placed on laps will overheat you where you don’t want to be overheated originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Switched, Reuters  |  Fertility and Sterility  | Email this | Comments

It’s certainly not a revolutionary new concept — whiz kids have been tinkering with brain-controlled interfaces for years on end — but a collaboration between UCLA scientists and colleagues from the California Institute of Technology has taken the idea one leap closer to commercialization. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at UCLA, kept a close watch (via embedded electrodes) on how a dozen humans reacted to certain images, and eventually, Fried and co. were able to show that Earthlings can “regulate the activity of their neurons to intentionally alter the outcome of stimulation.” In other words, they were able to move a mouse cursor with just their mind, and brighten a test image with a 70 percent success rate. By honing the process of controlling what actions occur when focused on a given subject (or input peripheral), it opens up the possibility for paralyzed individuals to not only check their email, but also control prosthetic limbs. It’s hard to say when this stuff will be put to good use outside of a hospital, but the video after the break definitely makes us long for “sooner” rather than “later.”

Continue reading UCLA / Caltech researchers help patients move mouse cursors with their brains

UCLA / Caltech researchers help patients move mouse cursors with their brains originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 04:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Gizmag  |  Nature, UCLA, Caltech  | Email this | Comments

A new report reveals that Apple’s iPhone has become the most popular handset in the United States, while Google’s Android platform dominates as the most popular phone operating system.

Technology research firm Canalys on Monday published its report on Q3/2010 U.S. smartphone market share. The data positions Android as the leading operating system, with 9.1 million Android-powered smartphones shipped during the quarter — 43.6 percent of the market.

Meanwhile, Apple shipped 5.5 million iPhones, which gives it a 26.2 percent share of the market, making iOS the No. 2 phone operating system. However, because iPhones are the only handsets running iOS, this figure also makes the iPhone the most popular piece of hardware in the phone market.

Before you Android and iPhone cheerleaders go off on each other in the comments, consider that these numbers are exactly what Apple and Google were shooting for, given their different mobile strategies. Apple, a hardware company, has achieved its goal of using an exclusive operating system to sell a lot of phones. And Google has achieved platform dominance with its more “open” strategy of offering Android to any manufacturer to use on any phone.

So while these numbers are huge, they’re not that surprising. I’m more curious about how market share numbers will look next year after new Windows Phone 7 handsets have been on shelves for a while. As I mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft’s mobile approach (i.e., sharing the OS only with manufacturers who meet quality standards) is combining the strengths of both Apple’s and Google’s mobile strategies, so it should be interesting to see how consumers react.

Updated 2:30 p.m. PT to correct an error on the number of iPhones sold during the quarter.

See Also:

• iPhone Loses Market Share As Smartphone Wars Heat Up
• Android Gains While iPhone, BlackBerry Lose Share
• Android Beats iPhone in Smartphone Sales
• Apple is Now the Third Largest Smartphone Maker
• Android Army Pumped for All-Out Attack on iPhone
• Can Apple’s Winning Streak Continue With the Next iPhone …

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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• Nokia’s Snazzy New Smartphones Stick with Symbian OS
• 7 Reasons Nokia Phones Get No Love in U.S.
• Future Phones to Read Your Voice, Gestures
• Water Flute Gives a Glimpse of Future Interfaces

Apple’s new MacBook Air borrows a lot of things from the iPad, including hyperportability and instant-on flash storage. But the Air won’t use an iPad-like touchscreen. Neither will any of Apple’s laptops. That’s because of what designers call “gorilla arm.”

And while Apple points to its own research on this problem, it’s a widely recognized issue that touchscreen researchers have known about for decades.

“We’ve done tons of user testing on this,” Steve Jobs said in Wednesday’s press conference, “and it turns out it doesn’t work. Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo, but after a short period of time you start to fatigue, and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off.”

This why Jobs says Apple’s invested heavily in developing multitouch recognition for its trackpads, both for its laptops, on its current-generation Mighty Mouse and on its new standalone Magic Trackpad.

Avi Greengart of Current Analysis agrees it’s a smart move, borne out of wisdom gathered from watching mobile and desktop users at work.

“Touchscreen on the display is ergonomically terrible for longer interactions,” he says. “So, while touchscreens are popular, Apple clearly took what works and is being judicious on how they are taking ideas from the mobile space to the desktop.”

But Apple didn’t have to do its own user testing. They didn’t even have to look at the success or failure of existing touchscreens in the PC marketplace. Researchers have documented usability problems with vertical touch surfaces for decades.

“Gorilla arm” is a term engineers coined about 30 years ago to describe what happens when people try to use these interfaces for an extended period of time. It’s the touchscreen equivalent of carpal-tunnel syndrome. According to the New Hacker’s Dictionary, “the arm begins to feel sore, cramped and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touchscreen and feels like one afterwards.”

According to the NHD, the phenomenon is so well-known that it’s become a stock phrase and cautionary tale well beyond touchscreens: “‘Remember the gorilla arm!’ is shorthand for ‘How is this going to fly in real use?’.” You find references to the “gorilla-arm effect” or “gorilla-arm syndrome” again and again in the scholarly literature on UI research and ergonomics, too.

There are other problems with incorporating touch gestures on laptops, regardless of their orientation. Particularly for a laptop as light as the MacBook Air, continually touching and pressing the screen could tip it over, or at least make it wobble. This is one reason I dislike using touchscreen buttons on cameras and camera phones — without a firm grip, you introduce just the right amount of shake to ruin a photo.

Touchscreens work for extended use on tablets, smartphones and some e-readers because you can grip the screen firmly with both hands, and you have the freedom to shift between horizontal, vertical and diagonal orientations as needed.

On a tablet or smartphone, too, the typing surface and touch surface are almost always on the same plane. Moving back and forth between horizontal typing and vertical multitouch could be as awkward as doing everything on a vertical screen.

This doesn’t mean that anything other than a multitouch trackpad won’t work. As Microsoft Principal Researcher (and multitouch innovator) Bill Buxton says, “Everything is best for something and worst for something else.”

We’ve already seen vertical touchscreens and other interfaces working well when used in short bursts: retail or banking kiosks, digital whiteboards and some technical interfaces. And touchscreen computing is already well-implemented in non-mobile horizontal interfaces, like Microsoft’s Surface. Diagonalized touchscreen surfaces modeled on an architect’s drafting table like Microsoft’s DigiDesk concept are also very promising.

In the near future, we’ll see even more robust implementations of touch and gestural interfaces. But it’s much more complex than just slapping a capacitative touchscreen, however popular they’ve become, into a popular device and hoping that they’ll work together like magic.

Design at this scale, with these stakes, requires close and careful attention to the human body — not just arms, but eyes, hands and posture — and to the context in which devices are used in order to find the best solution in each case.

See Also:

• New MacBook Air Disses Adobe Flash
• Apple Unleashes New MacBook Airs
• Hands-On With Apple's New MacBook Airs
• Video: Command and Control Robots with Microsoft Surface
• Thin Film Turns Any Surface Into a Touchscreen
• Beyond the iPad: Massive MultiTouch Displays Have Big Social …
• Apple's Magic Trackpad Brings Multi-Touch to the Desktop