Posts for 'Announcements' Category

Microsoft’s acquisition of Sidekick-developer Danger - which it first announced back in February - has finally reached completion, according to an announcement today.  The company will now be consumed by Microsoft’s Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) team, situated within the Mobile Communications Business (MCB) and responsible for making Microsoft’s mobile devices - particularly their cellphones - more palatable to individual consumers.  Danger co-founders Matt Hershenson and Joe Britt will both take up positions under PMX VP Rox Ho, and the company’s staff will continue to work from their existing offices.

Ironically, the news comes shortly after I suggested that Microsoft might buy in some GUI and interface expertise to increase the acceptability of Windows Mobile in the face of devices such as the iPhone.  While at the time I suggested the existing WM skin developers behind Point UI, Danger’s experience with a local handset/remote server model could be seen as the consumer version of Microsoft’s Exchange system.  Considering the developing demands of the consumer market, it wouldn’t surprise me to see a Danger-led multimedia handset, built around a Windows Mobile core but with a home-user version of hosted server backup and messaging, announced soon.

If you're buying an Eee PC in 2010, don't be surprised if it comes with Windows XP Home preinstalled.
If you're one of the many people dreading the removal of Windows XP from sale in the next few months, then you'll be pleased to hear that Microsoft has given the last-generation OS a reprieve – and it's pretty much entirely due to the Asus Eee PC.

Windows XP was due to reach its end-of-life stage in January this year, but Microsoft relented to pressure from customers not ready to make the switch to Vista and moved that date to the 30th of June. That was as far as the company was willing to go, however: they've spent far too much on Vista for everyone to keep buying XP.

But then along game the Asus Eee PC, and a raft of similar devices: small, lightweight machines that are underpowered when compared to their full-size brethren. With the massive success of these miniature marvels, Microsoft has been faced with a tough choice: as the devices aren't physically capable of running even the lightest version of Vista, does the company continue with its plan to kill off Windows XP and allow Linux the chance to flourish on these popular devices, or does it suck up its pride and offer a reprieve for the OS that wouldn't die?

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Students in Virginia Tech mechanical engineering Professor Mehdi Ahmadian’s senior design class developed a horizontal light bar to communicate slowing and stopping actions to a driver in a following vehicle. It had several drawbacks, including cost of production. A sensor circuit that will do the same job using the extra lights usually mounted on commercial vehicles has now been developed.

You are driving in heavy traffic. The brake lights on the car in front of you come on. Is the car slowing or is it going to stop? It slows to 25 mph and the lights go off. You drop back. The car in front of you stops suddenly! You stop just in time. The car behind you collects your rear bumper.

“The problem is that brake lights are yes and no – on and off,” according to John Hennage of Montross, Va., a Ph.D. mechanical engineering student in Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering. “The driver behind does not know the speed at which the car in front is slowing or stopping. The only other signal would be the smoke off the tires.”

The solution is an intelligent brake light system that communicates slowing and urgent stopping – rather than simply that the brake pedal is being touched. “A driver could be tapping his foot in time to music and the brake lights would blink. Or, a driver can rest her foot on the pedal and the lights would glow. It’s not enough information for the following driver,” said Hennage.

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Motorola just announced a new portable DVB-H TV to followup its DH01. The name? DH02, of course. The new mobile TV now features a GPS receiver and Tele Atlas maps, an HSDPA / GPRS back-channel for interactive media, and new "auto-flip" portrait to landscape (presumably via accelerometer) touch-screen display of unspecified dimensions. The UI takes advantage of the touch-screen with an "intuitive click, drag, and scroll" navigation. Moto does call the WQVGA display high-resolution -- which is anything but high if the DH02 carries the same 4.3-inch display of the DV01. Motorola also likes to call the DH02 a PVR since it includes a 5 minute buffer for timeshifting, live pause, and frame grabbing. Thing is, while the former DH01 could record video, that capability is not mentioned anywhere in the press release. Perhaps the microSD slot is dedicated to GPS maps now, instead of recording space. It does offer Bluetooth and, uh hem, "stunning" video playback. Really moto, stunning video from a sub 30fps play rate in a 480 x 272 resolution? Hyperbole of the press release aside, we're still looking forward to a hands-on at CTIA next week.

Samsung's Anycall Haptic looks like a thinner version of Apple's iPhone, but adds a new dimension to the touch interface.

The phone, launched in South Korea on Tuesday, has a large touch-screen display that also provides haptic feedback, information transmitted via the sense of touch, when using certain functions on the device. It means, for example, that when the volume of the radio is changed, the phone simulates both the sound and feel of the "clicks" on an old-style volume knob on a real radio, said Samsung.

There are 22 kinds of vibration in total built into the phone.

The Anycall Haptic (model numbers SCH-W420 and SPH-W4200) phone has a 3.2-inch widescreen display, a 2-megapixel digital camera, full Internet browser, Bluetooth 2.0 and terrestrial digital TV reception.

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To meet the growing storage needs of laptop users, Samsung Electronics on Tuesday introduced a 500GB hard drive that could provide a notebook PC with as much as 1TB of storage.

The Spinpoint M6, a 2.5-inch hard drive, fits into the chassis of commercial and multimedia notebooks, said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales at Samsung Semiconductor. Two drives can be combined for 1TB of storage, he said.

The company was able to fit three 167GB platters in a small frame to achieve 500GB of storage in one drive, Higginbotham said. The hard drive spins at 5,400 RPM.

Priced at $299, the hard drive will ship to PC makers and retail stores later this month. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on which PC makers will be using the drive.

This is not the first attempt to put 1TB of storage in a laptop. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Asus announced the M70S laptop, which combined two 500GB drives from Hitachi.

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Sony said on Tuesday it will add the Skype telephone service to its slim PlayStation Portable handheld console in Japan this month, enabling users to make free or low-cost telephone calls.

Sony will start selling microphones for the PSP-2000 in the Japanese market on March 19 as part of its efforts to broaden the appeal of its video game consoles amid fierce competition with rival Nintendo.

After a system software update planned for March 18, PSP users will be able to chat for free to other Skype users and, for a charge, call landlines and mobile phones anywhere in the world, Sony's game unit said in a statement.

The service was started for the PSP in Europe and the United States in January but Sony was forced to delay the launch in Japan because the microphones did not meet the Skype specifications.

Skype, which was bought by eBay in October of 2004, uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to enable users to make free Internet telephone calls to one another through their computers.

Users can also use the service to call landlines or mobile phones at low rates.

We're not exactly sure what the special event is -- Breast Cancer Awareness Month isn't until October -- but we suppose you can celebrate the joy of pink whenever the mood strikes. Iriver is busting out pink versions for a bunch of its players, including the clix, MPlayer, D5 and recently-launched E100. Apparently a set of pink colored pencils is also included as a free "gift" with the purchase of any of these units, which should come in handy for that Precious Moments diptych we were thinking of doing.

Every smoker knows that lighters are limited by their gas charge. And when it runs out of gas you must throw your lighter away, or recharge it. If you smoke a lot, you will find it annoying to throw money away on lighters. What about a lighter that doesn't need gas at all?

This conceptual lighter named Kool is not a usual lighter that we use every day. It is flameless, needs no gas to work and is fully electric, using resistance coils to light cigarettes just like the car cigarette lighter. Battery is charged via USB port that is hiding at the bottom. We don't know how much time it'd be to fully charge that battery, but it seems that you will not depend on gas anymore. And the last but not least - it has a USB mass storage function, so this lighter can be a handy USB flash drive if needed.

It is amazing how the usual things can be refurbished with help of new technologies. This gadget is only a concept, but who knows, maybe in a few years this gadget will be widely spread amongst smokers. We only hope that battery in this lighter will be strong enough to last for a couple of days at least, if not it will be nothing but a useless toy.

Even in the digital era, photos are much better when they are printed on paper. They feel somehow... material when they are printed, after a century of usual film cameras we are accustomed to a printed image. That's why many owners of digital cameras prefer to print their best photos. If you remember the days of mid 90s, then you will remember the boom of instant film cameras that produced an already printed image. The main company behind that cameras was Polaroid. Now, film cameras look archaically, surrendering their position to digital ones. But Polaroid does not surrender - it comes with a similar idea, but adapted to the modern market.

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