Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Phones
Palm Treo Pro Official
11:52PM Matt Buchanan | This week’s best kept secret just got official: The Palm Treo Pro is a Centro-sized Windows Mobile 6.1 phone (whither Palm OS?) with tri-band 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS with a 320×320 touchscreen, exactly like the recent Treo 800w. Powering the show is a 400MHz processor and 128MB of RAM. And yep, the proprietary Palm connector is ditched for micro-USB. Hurray for standards. They’re selling it unlocked through the online store for US$549 in the fall. [Palm] More »
Entertainment
Emily Isn’t Real, But Would You Have Guessed?
11:45PM Mark Wilson | The woman above is not real. I mean, she was real once, when real actress Emily O’Brien provided Image Metrics (you know their work from GTAIV) with 35 facial poses in front of a pair of digital cameras. From there, O’Brien was dismissed so the animators could go to work. Apparently “ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real.” And the results–while not always perfect–are pretty extraordinary. Here’s Emily’s “interview”: More »
Screens
Mitsubishi 40mm-thin HDTV Panel Packs External WHDI Wireless Tuner, BD Player
11:30PM John Mahoney | While there have been several other ultra-thin TVs to cheat on size by moving some of the set’s guts into an external box, we’re starting to see a few of the biggies taking advantage of the newly-codified WHDI spec to beam the signal from the external box to the screen wirelessly. Details are somewhat thin on these new concept Mitsubushi panels, which are 40mm (a hair over 1.5 inches) thick and should reach manufacturing before the year is up. But their use of WHDI (like these Sharp sets before them) to link the panel to the external tuner box adds an interesting twist to this trend. More »
Random Stuff
Real Sim City Comes to Life in the Desert
11:00PM Jesus Diaz | Yesterday’s images of the almost-finished Burj Dubai blew our minds with its scale and grandiosity. Today, reader David Hobcote zooms out his Canon 1Ds Mark III on board a Bell heli to show us the current state of some of Dubai’s new landmarks, including the stunning New Atlantis Hotel and the first house constructed on one of The World’s artificial islands. Yes, it looks like a new Sim City running in a PlayStation 3. More »
Phones
Samsung Omnia Comes With Marching Band and Semi-Naked Dancers so It Must Be Good
10:45PM Jesus Diaz | Here’s a viral video of the Samsung Omnia. I’m not sure if a troupe of minuscule, badly rotoscoped Vegas dancers and an orchestra will send the message home, but whatever works for the people who announced their alleged iPhone-wannabe on the worst day possible is good enough for us. [YouTube- Thanks Jack!] More »
Design
Kurage Fibre-Optic Chandelier Adjusts Brightness By Tweaking its Curves
10:27PM Kit Eaton | This chandelier-ish lighting design, dubbed Kurage3, allows you to change its level of illumination by changing how curved a shape it makes. Simple science really: If you make it curve past the critical angle for the 1.5-mm fiber-optic, instead of shooting through the tube of glass, the light from an LED light source leaks out at the corners. It’s a messy, organic-looking light fitting, which is how fibre-optic lighting should be, or so it feels to me… that way it’d fit into my organic-looking, messy home. It’s from Schemata Studio, but there’s no info on whether you’ll be able to buy it for real. [Yanko Design] More »
Phones
HTC Diamond’s Hidden Multitouch Revealed
10:22PM Mark Wilson | If you’re reading the back of the HTC Diamond’s box, it doesn’t show some little child laughing with glee as he pinches in and out of webpages or draws with two fingers at once, in fact, it doesn’t even list multitouch as a feature at all. But just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. When using the program NavDbgTool, HTC’s secret weapon is uncovered–the entire front case supports tandem touching: More »
Cameras
Tropical Storm Fay from International Space Station Video Camera
10:00PM Jesus Diaz | The International Space Station was passing at exactly the right time and angle to take this beautiful travelling shot of tropical storm Fay, which is now increasing force over Florida threatening to become a hurricane and close the Kennedy Space Centre. From space, everything looks so calm and harmless. And nobody can hear you scream, which is a plus unless you are the moron who decided to kite surf in Miami using the storm winds, logically crashing against a wall (the following video may be too strong for the sensibilities of some readers). More »
Hardware
Intel Spills More Beans on Nehalem Microarchitecture at IDF
9:39PM Kit Eaton | At the Intel Developers Forum Intel itself is turning the spotlight on the upcoming Nehalem chip microarchitecture. The chips will have integrated memory controllers built directly into the processor, as we mentioned before, which will allow three-times faster memory read-write speeds than previous generations. More »
Peripherals
