Archive for August, 2008
Monday, August 25th, 2008
There are many formats in which PCs come nowadays. The need for portability is greater than ever, but the days when you had to choose among a limited offer of bulky laptops are long gone. We now have notebooks, sub-notebooks, tablet PCs, UMPCs, mobile internet devices and even OLPC devices. The Eee PC from Asus is in a class of its own and I guess there are other devices I may have omitted. Anyway, companies can sometimes combine these form actors and come with a new product altogether. This is the case of Albatron and their latest Tee PC (no actual relation to the Eee PC here).
Albatron’s Tee PC is a slate-style Tablet PC netbook. Here you have it, a new denomination for a hybrid device. According to Slashgear, Tee is running Windows CE, has a 7-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen, and it’s powered by a modest 400MHz ARM926 CPU coupled with 128MB RAM and just 128MB of flash storage. No need to panic, storage space can be expanded with SD cards.
Since it’s a netbook, the Tee PC comes with WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and you can choose a VGA or 1.3-megapixel webcam. Although the processing power is not quite up to par, the slate is capable of playing back VGA quality video at 30fps, or alternatively H.264 and MPEG4 content at 24fps. Albatron didn’t mention anything about battery life, although we know it’s a 10.8Whr battery.
The Tee PC measures only 188 x 113 x 13mm and weighs a mere 343g. It also comes bundled with a docking station that includes USB connectors, built-in speakers and audio ports. No info on availability and price for now.
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Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Want to beat Michael Phelps at the next Olympic Games? I guess you can’t really use fair methods in order to achieve such a feat, so why not use a Lunocet Monofin device? Just make sure you’re using it somewhere by the beach so Mike can’t see that you’re using it.
Phelps might be the fastest swimmer out there, splashing water at around 5 miles per hour, but when you get to use the carbon fiber Lunocet, you will be able to easily break the waves at 8mph. Maybe they can make a more compact version (read invisible) in the near future, so no one would know about our little booster.
According to Gizmodo, the Lunocet weighs about 2.5lbs out of the water, but in the water it’ll almost feel like it’s non-existent. It is constructed from silicon wrapped in carbon fiber with a titanium footplate, and can give you the same power on a downstroke as an upstroke. Coupled with a pair of strong legs the monofin could theoretically generate enough power to drive a human completely out of the water, just like dolphins are able to make their flips.
Lunocet could be selling for an estimated price of $1,250 to $1,800. However, the first tests are scheduled to be conducted by DARPA, so I don’t think we’ll be getting our hands on this baby that soon.
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Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
Apart from allowing us to move around and run, our feet might also save our lives in some delicate situations. For instance, when in your cubical and playing a game or watching some porn instead of working on your report or whatever you are supposed to do, the sound of feet is how you know when someone is approaching your cubicle. This way you know you have to cease what you are doing an make it appear you were hard at work. But how exactly are you going to move that fast? Well, this is where your feet come “in handyâ€, but you still need the Stealth Switch.
With the foot-activated Stealth Switch you can easily avoid getting caught fooling around at your computer by your boss. First, you have to install the special software and plug the hidden foot switch in (it goes either between the keyboard and your computer, or just into an available USB port). Hide it under your desk and your feet can activate it whenever needed. When you activate the switch, it can hide the current window, hide all windows, or hide all windows except for specified windows. Keep in mind that it doesn’t just minimize windows, but totally erase from your screen. The Stealth Switch can also mute the sound, hide the taskbar, hide the desktop icons, and password protect the restore function. When the coast is clear, another quick tap and you are ready to get to “work†in no time.
The Stealth Switch is available at ThinkGeek for just $24.99.
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Friday, August 22nd, 2008
I decided to skip the usual car prototype for today and explore some other vehicles. Don’t know if you can call this a vehicle, but at least it has a unique design. Here’s the SoulArc skateboard that is supposed to reinvent the way we ride such things.
The designers say that they really wanted to make this skateboard feel like a surfboard carried by waves. In order to achieve this, they placed a huge leaf-spring between its long deck and the wheels. According to Gizmodo, when you dig your heel in the board, the spring relaxes into corners, giving you more of a surfing-through-waves feeling. Check out the short presentation clip made by the designers:
We can see in the clip that the skateboard is more flexible and allows you to ride it in rougher than usual places. SoulArc was designed by college students Mitch Mulder and Salvatore Vilardi, and the guys have managed to obtain a commercial patent so we can actually buy this thing. The skateboard was already demoed at the Action Sports Retail show in San Diego, and the official release is expected in a couple of weeks but the two students didn’t mention any price point.
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Friday, August 22nd, 2008
DLP Projector prices have taken a dive lately, but in this case the price really measures up to the actual quality you are getting. You have a strict budget? You get what you pay for, namely less features and nothing to boast about. The thing is projectors haven’t yet been embraced as a true competitor for LCD and plasma TVs, since their specs still have to be improved. But with the Super Hi-Vision chips that will allow for images 6 times wider than the 1080p standard I think this is all going to change. Talking of advanced DLP Projectors, here’s a new model from Planar.
Planar Viper is a 3-chip DLP projector which knows how to handle true HD support for screens larger than 110-inches. Although its native resolution is 1280 x 720, it supports a wide variety of standards, including 1080p, 1080p-24, 1080i, 720p, 576p and 480p. Capable of contrast rates around 10,000:1 at 2,000 lumens brightness, the projector integrates a 10-bit independent dual image and motion adaptive processing system.
According to Slashgear, Planar teamed up with Texas Instruments to develop better performing DLP chips especially for the Viper. This way, the high-end model is can display a more detailed picture when connected to a 1080i source.
Among other options we find a five lens system which allows for improved power zoom and focus, plus horizontal and vertical lens shift, as well as an RS-232 automation interface with discrete on/off, input selection and aspect ratio control. Viper comes equipped with only two HDMI 1.3 connectors that are compliant with the Deep Color standard and will set you back $15,495.
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