Hasta La Gadget!

The iPad presents exciting opportunities for digital board games, but consequentially it can eliminate the joys of grabbing physical objects, knocking over game pieces when you lose, and so on. That’s why I like the idea of Duo, a physical toy with iPad integration.

The video above demonstrates how it works. You place the Duo toy on top of the iPad, which is running a free app called Yoomi. Two objects appear on-screen in the Yoomi app, and one player picks an object by pressing a color-coded button on the Duo.

Then the other players place tokens on a color representing the object they think was chosen. The toy rotates to drop the winners’ tokens into the bin; after a number of rounds, the first player to get rid of all of his or her tokens wins.

It’s a silly game for kids, but it shows the potential for data and physical toys to blend together into a unique interactive experience. It’s sort of like a kiddy version of augmented-reality gaming.

The Duo costs $40, exclusively sold at Toys R Us.

Product page

Google’s Android boss Andy Rubin showed of a prototype Motorola tablet running the forthcoming tablet-friendly version of the Android OS, version 3.0 Honeycomb at the All Things Digital “D: Dive Into Mobile” event.

The tablet runs on an NVIDIA dual-core 3D processor (unspecified by Rubin) and looks to be around seven-inches in size, or maybe a little bigger. Rubin starts off showing a new super-fast vector-based version of Google Maps which not only allows a quick two-finger swipe to enter a 3D building-view, but also loads way faster thanks to those vectors. Currently, Google Maps uses image tiles, which is why you do so much waiting on a slow connection. Vectors are way smaller in file-size and are infinitely zoomable, staying crisp all the way.

Google has warned tablet-makers off the current version of Android because it’s not designed for their larger screens, leading to tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which comes on like a giant cellphone. Android 3.0 Honeycomb will be the first tablet-ready Android OS, and it sounds like Google is taking the same approach as Apple, making “universal” apps that run on both phone sand tablets.

These apps will pack two different views. On a phone, you’ll see one screen at a time, much like you do now. On a tablet, these views will be shown together. From the video, it looks like the tablet view will be somewhere between the iPad’s one-screen view and a desktop like approach, with several windows (from the same app) on-screen together. The actual layout will be up to the app’s designer.

This looks like it will be Google’s reference design. Rubin says that his team partners with a hardware maker and a chip maker to build the reference device, whether it’s a Nexus phone or a tablet. He gave away no details about availability, but when pushed by D’s Kara Swisher on the subject of price, told her that the tablet in his hand had cost around $10,000. Snap!

Google’s Andy Rubin Shows Off Prototype Motorola Tablet [All Things D]

See Also:

• Your Froyo Tablet Probably Won't Support Android Market
• Samsung Galaxy Tab Garners Favorable Reviews
• Google Unveils Nexus S Smartphone, Gingerbread OS
• Gingerbread

Over in the UK, something is happening that will bring cheer to the miserable, heavily-drinking denizens of that gray, cold land: Competition. To be precise, competition in iPad plans.

3G operator “3″ has entered the iPad subsidy game, going squarely up against Orange, which announced its own plans earlier this week. The prices for the iPad itself are the same as Orange is asking – £200, £250 and £350 for the 16, 32 and 64GB models. The difference is in the data plans. 3 offers a massive 15GB per month, or around 500MB per day. To get these prices, you’ll need to sign a two-year contract.

When I’m not trapped in my elevator-free apartment by a broken leg, my iPad is in constant use on my own 3G data plan. Even then, I have never come close to hitting the 2GB cap. So unless you watch a lot of streamed video, 15GB may as well be unlimited.

This is what happens when you have a lot of equally good operators all chasing the same customers. In the US, a Verizon iPhone can’t come fast enough.

iPad Plans on 3 [3 via Pocket Lint]

iPad owners have had less than a week with iOS 4, but a software update offering news and magazine subscriptions targeted at them could arrive in less than a month.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber reports that Apple’s Steve Jobs will join News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch onstage at a December 9 event to announce Murdoch’s new forthcoming tablet newspaper, The Daily.

According to Gruber’s sources, The Daily will be an app in the App Store, but make use of new recurring subscription billing on users’ iTunes accounts, and “developers at News Corp. building the app already have preliminary documentation on the new subscription billing APIs from Apple.”

Macstories’ Federico Viticci reports further that recurring subscriptions are part of a new version of iOS — iOS 4.3 — with a scheduled release date of December 13.

According to Viticci’s sources, iOS 4.3 wasn’t intended to be released so quickly after 4.2.1, which was originally internally slated for an early November release. It’s possible that 4.2.1’s later official release might also push back the release of 4.3. But with Apple playing such a large role in The Daily, both companies may stick with mid-December announcement and releases, after all.

Subscription-based recurring billing would likely increase the number of paid magazine, newspaper, TV, video and other media applications on iTunes. Really, any application that depends on continuous content or service delivery could introduce a subscription model: online gaming, data backup, GPS, office applications and more. Many subscription-based services already have iOS apps, but have to establish accounts and recurring billing separately from iTunes.

Another technical challenge posed by subscriptions that could require an OS update is automatic background content delivery. If you’re being billed every week for a newspaper or magazine, you shouldn’t have to go through a long, complicated routine just to download a new issue.

A final open question: How much customer information will Apple and app/content makers share with each other about their subscribers? This data has value, too — as does customers’ privacy.

Image by Apple.

See Also:

• Apple iOS 4.2 Arrives, Makes Find My iPhone Free
• iOS 4.2 Goes Gold Master, iPad Gains New Multitask Bar
• IOS 4.2 Update 'Delayed,' Despite No Official Launch Date
• IOS 4.2 Beta Adds Tethering to iPad
• IOS 4.2 Changes iPad Screen-Lock Switch to Mute Button
• Apple, Newspapers Reportedly Agree on In-App Subscriptions …
• Subscriptions Could Be Apple's Second Attempt to Conquer Video …
• Why Steve Jobs Will Never Offer Music Subscriptions

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati have shown that under the right conditions, ordinary paper can be as dynamic as any screen.

“Nothing looks better than paper for reading,” says research leader Andrew Steckl. “We hope to have something that would actually look like paper but behave like a computer monitor in terms of its ability to store information. We would have something that is very cheap, very fast, full-color and at the end of the day or the end of the week, you could pitch it into the trash.”

Steckl’s e-paper uses electrowetting — moving colored pigments from pixel to pixel with electronic charges — on a paper substrate. Electrowetting offers color, fast response times and video capability that current E Ink electrophoretic screens can’t match, but with similarly low power consumption.

Companies like Liquavista and Plastic Logic have prototype color e-readers that use this technology, but apply the electrowetting chemicals to a sheet of glass. The Cincinati team says its electrowetted paper offers the same performance as glass, but with greater flexibility and at a lower cost.

Steckl and grad student Duk Young Kim of U of C’s Nanoelectronics Laboratory presented their findings in the October issue of the American Chemical Society’s ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces journal. It was then reviewed in the November issue of Nature Photonics. The research was part of Kim’s doctoral dissertation.

“One of the main goals of e-paper is to replicate the look and feel of actual ink on paper,” write Steckl and Kim in the ACS article. “We have, therefore, investigated the use of paper as the perfect substrate for EW devices to accomplish e-paper on paper.”

“In general, this is an elegant method for reducing device complexity and cost, resulting in one-time-use devices that can be totally disposed after use,” the researchers note.

The ACS paper on electrowetting illustrates technical details of the process.

It’s still not easy, and industrializing the process will likely take some time. For maximum performance, the process involves a specific grade of paper with a particular surface coating, roughness, thickness and water uptake and a carefully controlled contact angle at which the electrowetted material is applied to the paper support. Electrowetted glass e-readers may appear sometime next year, but you’re unlikely to see disposable paper screens in newspapers or posters for at least three to five years.

Meanwhile, the Nanoelectronics team will continue experimenting with electrowetting on various flexible surfaces, with different fluids and electronic components, trying to maximize performance.

There’s a historical irony here. In the 19th century, “wet plate” photography involved applying a silver nitrate collodion solution to a glass plate. Eventually, George Eastman was able to take a dry collodion emulsion and apply it to ordinary paper, creating the first camera that ordinary people could use. After Eastman substituted celluloid film, which was stronger but just as flexible as paper, the rest was history.

UC Breakthrough May Lead to Disposable E-Readers [University of Cincinatti Press Release]

Image (top): Electrowetted E-Paper Display Mockup from Liquavista.

See Also:

• E-Paper Closer to Delivery
• Flexible E-Paper on Its Way
• Slideshow: E-Paper's Killer App: Packaging
• Qualcomm's Mirasol Display Hopes to Create E-Reader Tablet Hybrids …
• Color E Ink Readers Coming to China in 2011
• Qualcomm Aims to Bring Color, Video to E-Readers
• How E Ink's Triton Color Displays Work, In E-Readers and Beyond …