At Palm Addicts they’ve somehow got hold of a leaked advert that looks like it’s for Palm’s update to the Centro, the Centro2 smartphone. Take a peek—it’s pretty convincing. There’s of course no way to know whether this is real or a piece of Photoshopped fakery and it’s difficult to glean much info on the device from the photos, though the advert is pushing the phone’s PDA organiser aspects. The big difference is the missing keyboard, but whether that implies a touchscreen or some sort of slide-out pad is unclear. It also seems to have media controls at the top, and Palm Addicts thinks it’s running Windows Mobile. Update: Sadly this is a fake, created for a marketing class. Sorry, Palm fans. [Palm Addict. Thanks, Sammual!]
We raved about the Sony Ericsson W760′s whizzy Walkman interface when we first talked about this phone in January, and now over at Cellphone Signal they’ve got information suggesting the mobile phone is coming to the US with AT&T. The confirmation comes from this leaked photo of a W760 bearing a teeny tiny little AT&T Deathstar logo. The guys at Mobile Phone Signal think that means you’ll be able to buy this 3.2-megapixel cam, GPS-enabled phone “within weeks,” though that sounds a little too like speculation. [Cellphone Signal]
Aiptek’s last HD camcorder we showed you did 720p recording for a budget US$170. But time and technology waits for no man, so Aiptek’s newest cam now records at 1080p. The AHD 300 actually manages 30 frames per second at this resolution, but if you’re into slightly high-speed filming, it can even stretch to 60 fps if you drop the resolution to 720p. It can squeeze an hour of 1080p footage onto a 4GB SD card, accepts SDHC, shoots 8-megapixel stills and has 4x digital zoom and media player functions too. Not bad for just US$250. [TFTS]
Graphene looks like it’s going to be one of the “wonder materials” of the future, and a science team at Cornell University has just demonstrated the world’s smallest balloon made of it. They stuck sheets of graphene over microscopic wells (1 to 100 square micrometers) cut into silica glass, trapping gas inside. By varying the pressure in the wells, they could make the graphene bulge inwards or outwards like a balloon, and the membranes proved pretty resilient: They could withstand several atmospheres of pressure. Though, like real birthday party balloons, the gas leaked out after a few days, it apparently did so through the glass, not the graphene. These tiny air pockets may have future uses as micro-sized weighing scales or even precise pressure sensors: It’s another case of an invention waiting to find a use. [New Scientist]
A local Beijing paper has revealed that some of the amazing fireworks in the Olympics opening show were digitally-crafted fakes, inserted into the live TV feed. The Beijing Times quotes the head of visual effects, who says that the 28 giant footprints that stomped through the air above the city, ending at the stadium, were advanced CGI. Though the pyrotechnics really were set off, the airborne camera view that the rest of the world watched was fake. Why go to these lengths? Apparently the Olympic committee decided that to follow the real trail of firework footprints was too dangerous for a helicopter camera. Instead a team spent almost a year crafting the fake segment, paying attention to even get the smog lighting effects correct. [The Telegraph]
It’s been a month since the iTunes App Store went live, and in an interview with the Wall St Journal, Steve Jobs has put the apps downloads figure at over 60 million. With the mix of free and paid apps, that brought Apple around US$30 million. That’s obviously encouraged Steve: He’s enthusiastic that maybe “it will be a US$1 billion marketplace at some point in time” adding that he’s “never seen anything like this in my career for software.”
In light of this thrilling aviation story out of Ireland today, let’s rethink this whole banning of the in-flight cell phone conversations, shall we? Sure, allowing for calls during that 6-hour red eye from San Francisco to Boston will bring out the jerkoff in a lot of people, but then again one of those jackasses could save your life! This was the case during a flight from Kerry to Jersey last Thursday, when a pilot lost all electrical power, radio and radar, and had to be guided in to land with nothing more than SMS and a quick-thinking air traffic controller. The plane landed safely, and the ATC is being heralded a hero, but mobile phones on planes still sucks, albeit slightly less so than before. [Irish Times via Slashdot]
Here I was, moments from having red LEDs surgically implanted into my retinas, when this DIY Terminator sunglasses hack comes along and rescues me from a lifetime of pain, blindness–and utter coolness. GEARFUSE soldering meastro Vince Veneziani said he did this in about five minutes, but newbies might want to take their time and save themselves a melted eyeball or two.
University of California scientists today announced that significant progress has been made toward developing “metamaterials” for use in a legitimate invisibility cloak. The researchers, led by mad scientist Xiang Zhang, were able to demonstrate for the first time that they could cloak 3-D objects with these materials. As the article notes, and as we’ve shown here on Gizmodo in the past, previous attempts at invisibility were successful only with tiny two-dimensional objects. Not anymore, as this heavily military-backed project is well on its way to producing superhero special abilities, today.
I don’t know if you guys have checked, but after the US team reviewed the NBC Olympics web player, I headed over to Yahoo!7 to see what was on offer locally. There’s good news for people who just can’t get enough of Mel and Kochy and the rest of the Channel 7 Olympic News Team, but bad news for anyone hoping for an immersive online video experience. Sure there’s video there, but sorting through what you want isn’t exactly what I’d describe as fun.
But now there’s a bit of hope for some diversity, with Valleywag detailing how you can hack your way into YouTube’s Olympic channel. As we discovered last week, the channel is geo-locked, but with this little hack, anyone can start watching.
Hit the link for the full instructions and fill the comments with comparisons between the YouTube effort and Yahoo!7′s attempts. Which is better?
