Archive for April, 2010.
We heard through the grapevine back at CTIA that Nokia’s elusive N8 would be announced somewhere in the wide world this April, and sure enough, it looks as if the handset has popped up over in one of Russia’s eleven nine time zones. Our pals at Mobile-Review have worked their magic once more on an up and coming handset, this time landing some serious face time with the planet’s first Symbian^3 phone. Despite Nokia pushing the official reveal of said OS to Q3 (from Q2 previously), we’re getting an early look at what exactly is to come here — and if this review is any indication, Nokia’s woes are about to become even more woeful. In short, critics panned the new system for being little more than a polished version of what Nokia’s already offering, and they clearly noted that nothing here lived up to what Android and iPhone OS currently provide. In fact, they even went so far as to wonder who is inside of Nokia purposefully dragging down the brand; granted, it’s hard to say for sure how great (or not, as the case may be) the N8 is without touching it ourselves, but to say it’s off to a running start would be misinterpreting things quite severely. Have a look at the source link below for more of the machine translated goodness, and don’t forget to ogle a few shots of the phone itself.
[Thanks, Andria]
Nokia N8 gets handled, survives thorough Russian review originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Apr 2010 18:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.
Microsoft introduced the world to Pocket PC on April 19th, 2000 at a relatively small gathering in Grand Central Station in New York City. Pocket PC was the company’s response to Palm, which at that time was leading the PDA market — for many geeks, using a personal digital assistant was indeed a public display of affection. I was at the launch event — in fact, I was even quoted in the press release. Microsoft introduced four devices that day with their partners: the Casio EM500, the HP Jornada 545 & 548, the Symbol Technologies PPT2700, and the Compaq iPAQ. The iPAQ was the flagship of the Pocket PC line and the hottest handheld you could buy at the time: it had a slim form factor with “sleeves” that could be attached to add functionality such as Compact Flash or PCMCIA cards, a “fast” ARM processor and a killer indoor/outdoor screen. Availability was limited and prices on eBay quickly topped $1,000 for the scarce unit.
Continue reading Entelligence: Happy 10th birthday, Pocket PC
Entelligence: Happy 10th birthday, Pocket PC originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Apr 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Really now? KIRFing a phone and a UI is one thing, but claiming to have a 26-core CPU (!) capable of 8-gigaflop (!) floating point operation — or the equivalent of four iPads combined, apparently — is one helluva stretch for a smartphone. This is apparently how awesome the QderoPateo Ouidoo will be. According to the launch event at the Shanghai World Expo today, the too-good-to-be-true Divinitus CPU will help power the Ouidoo OS’s augmented reality articulated naturality apps and 3D social-networking virtual world. The rest of the specs include 512MB RAM, 4GB ROM, 28GB of built-in storage, microSD expansion, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, built-in 3D map, accelerometer, digital compass, 5-megapixel camera with flash, 220 hours of standby battery life, and a sharp 3.5-inch 800 x 480 screen. No prices or even videos of the UI available yet, but our friends over at Engadget Chinese are promised a review unit in July or August — around the time of the global launch (followed by an LTE revision in 2011), so it won’t be long before we find out whether this is just some absurd vaporware. A couple of pictures of the prototype after the break.
Update: Recombu has pinged us a link to Oxford University’s PTAM (Parallel Tracking and Mapping) augmented reality software, which is licensed to QderoPateo. You can see it demoed on an iPhone 3G after the break.
[Thanks, xleung]
Continue reading QderoPateo Ouidoo to pack 26-core chip, looks like Palm Pre and Windows Phone 7 love child
QderoPateo Ouidoo to pack 26-core chip, looks like Palm Pre and Windows Phone 7 love child originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Apr 2010 16:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Cloned in China, Engadget Chinese | 
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Reports are coming in that the iPad Camera Connection Kit has finally shown up on a couple buyer doorsteps, and that the pair of white dongles may actually have been worth the wait. While one is a simple SD card adapter that adds one-touch image and video import (including RAW, complete with EXIF data) to the iPad, the second provides a USB port with some exciting new functionality. TUAW reports one reader could type on an iPad via USB keyboard, and those rumors about USB audio were true, too: TidBITS was actually able to make a Skype call after connecting a USB headset. Before you get too excited, however, please note that the USB and SD image transfers are one-way, and not all peripherals are supported — for instance, TidBITS‘ iPad sneezed at an external hard drive. Also, according to the Apple Store, Camera Connection Kit shipments are still two to three weeks out, so don’t be surprised if it still takes some time to get yours. For now you can make do with the video after the break.
Continue reading iPad Camera Kit ships with USB headset and keyboard support
iPad Camera Kit ships with USB headset and keyboard support originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Good morning to you too,
Dell!
Android Central’s just gotten hold of
yet another leak from the Texan computer giant, only this time we have two new
Android or
Linux (as suggested by the Tux icon) Moblin devices. First, we have the Sparta netbook tablet featuring an 11-inch 1024 x 768 TFT display, ARM processor, optional connectivity modules (3G, WiFi, Bluetooth) and a unique swivel mechanism — the screen appears to be rotatable within its frame. The second device is the Athens sub-0.9kg (1.98 pounds) netbook sporting the same screen size, ARM processor and optional connectivity modules. If all goes well, the Sparta and Athens should be launched in early and late Autumn respectively, but there’s a lot more so keep reading after the break.
Update: thanks for pointing out the Moblin logo, thoughtmonster!
Continue reading Dell Sparta and Athens netbooks, Looking Glass Pro and Streak variants teased in Android roadmap
Dell Sparta and Athens netbooks, Looking Glass Pro and Streak variants teased in Android roadmap originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Apr 2010 10:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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At its f8 developers’ conference in San Francisco last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision of a cross-site social platform whose developmental state may already be quite far along. Essentially, he sees a kind of online social sphere wherein anything one communicates that he likes gets channeled to Facebook, where that like becomes a public fact. “Today, the Web exists mostly as a series of unstructured links between pages. And this has been a powerful model, but it’s really just the start,” said Zuckerberg.
At about this time last year, we received some skeptical comments from folks who questioned whether it was wise for Betanews to declare Windows 7′s automated troubleshooting system one of the new operating system’s Top 10 features — #8, to be specific. Saying a software publisher has improved its product by making it easier to find out what’s wrong with it is in one sense a bit ironic, and in another the sort of thing that typically smacks of the kind of messages brought to readers directly from the vendor without any filtering whatsoever.
Twenty years ago Saturday, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into low Earth orbit, beginning its journey to become NASA’s best-recognized, longest-lived and most prolific space observatory. To celebrate the milestone, NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Space Telescope Science Institute released a stunning new photo taken by the telescope, as well as a raft of online educational activities, including an opportunity for astronomy enthusiasts to send in their own personal greetings to Hubble for posterity.
IBM researchers in Switzerland said they’ve come up with a patterning technique that lets them create structures as small as 15 nanometers. One nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter. In comparison, a human hair is between .03 and .25 mm thick. Using the nanopatterning technique, the researchers have created a three-dimensional replica of the Matterhorn, a mountain in the Swiss Alps, that’s 25 nanometers high — a scale of 1:5 billion. They have also created a 3-D replica of the world that measures 22 by 11 micrometers. That works out to a scale of about 1:11 billion.
I hope your friends have good taste, because if you’re on Facebook, you’re about to learn a lot more about what they like, what they read, and what pages they surf. So are advertisers. Facebook hosted its f8 developer conference recently, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unwrapped new details about what the company calls “Open Graph.” The name sounds vaguely dermatological, and kind of gross, but what Open Graph is is a new API platform and strategy that one-ups the company’s old Facebook Connect platform.
