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Palm Treo Pro Official
Posted by Matt Buchanan at 11:52 PM on August 20, 2008
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 320x320 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]
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":
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 
Yesterday's images of the 
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. [
If you're reading the back of the 
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).
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 
Speck's See Thru Hard Shell case for the iPhone 3G is one of the few cases I've seen that makes me go "Oh, interesting" instead of "bah, nonsense." Firstly because it's simple, just snapping in two polycarbonate parts around the sides and rear of the phone, with rubberised grips so it doesn't slip out of your mitts. Secondly, when you've snapped it in two, one half remains snugly on the phone while the other half acts as a stand, perfect for impromptu movie viewing. And that's just neat. It's in a variety of colours for US$30. [
The 
Last we'd heard about dual-core version of Intel's tiny Atom processor it was 
At last, iPhone copy and paste between applications is here. However, it doesn't come from Apple, but from 
We'd already drawn comparisons between Fujitsu's all-in one 
That 
I don't know who's designing Microsoft's gaming hardware after their brief hiatus from the market, but they're insane, in the best possible way--they've actually got some inspired, unique form factors, besides a huge Vader hard-on. The 
Perhaps in an attempt to shrug off its stodgy, all-business image, Dell has launched a handful of "Special Art Edition" Studio-series laptops with graphics by artist Mike Ming. Ming has 
It's one thing to tinker in your garage to restore that old gas-guzzling muscle car that you think will get you some action. It's something entirely different to invent an electricity-generating wind turbine out of scrap parts that could revolutionise personal power in developing nations, especially if you're in college. Max Robinson has done just that, designing a turbine out of spare parts that costs less than US$40 to build out of readily available parts and can power a home's lighting for up to two and a half days or a radio for over a day. No word on how long an OLPC would last. [
Exit Games has a multiplayer gaming platform, called Neutron, on PCs, mobile devices, game consoles, and BREW phones. It works across devices and hardware, so you can play someone on their PC via your handset. And now it's ready for the iPhone. Today it was announced that the Neutron system of social network-like gaming now has iPhone support, or will as soon as developers code for it. The iPhone, with its svelte shape and always-on connectivity, makes for a lust-worthy multiplayer gaming device, so this is really just the next logical step in being able to play games with your friend on the train from across the world. [
We just got word from Microsoft that the Xbox 360 is totally sold out in Japan, and that's just how they like it. Microsoft's console has been outselling Sony's Playstation 3 lately at a rate of almost 3 to 1, with the Xbox selling 28,116 last at the start of August while Sony sold only 10,705 PS3s. Nintendo beat both with over 41,000 Wiis, yet still has stock available. So we have to question, did Microsoft short Japanese stock on purpose just to claim "sold out" status? [Translation at 
The Inmarsat-4, or I4-F3 broadband satellite to its friends, is a big satellite. Almost as big as a double decker bus and with an unfurled solar wingspan as wide as a football field, it needed an appropriately big ride into space. And so it hitched onto a Proton Rocket, a 58m-high, 700-ton monster used for sat positioning since 1996, but before that, used in the 1960's to visit planets for scientific research and deliver parts of the International Space Station and Mir Space Station. The flight was perfect. [
The Motorola Q is finally getting the Windows Mobile 6.1 treatment through AT&T, who's stores are said to be taking in shipments of a new silver version of the handset. This is good news for enterprise customers who are tied into the WinMo world. No word yet on when these will hit the shelves, or if there will be an upgrade available for current AT&T Q9h owners, but it's likely we'll hear something soon. [
It seems a random app crash bug plaguing the iPhone 2.0 software has concerned El Jobso enough to make him personally reply to a user email. According to 
Steven Sinofsky, Senior VP in charge of Windows 7 development, has just posted some details on the Microsoft's Windows 7 Engineering blog on what the internal structure looks like for the upcoming OS. It sounds (at least to us) equal parts logistical nightmare and brute force "1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters", with 25 teams divided up to an average of 40 developers per team.
Microsoft hasn't released its own Xbox Live iPhone app (and we're kinda thinking they won't), but it's definitely cool letting developers fill the gap, on one condition: They can't charge for the app. Of the three Live apps in the App Store, two are free right now, though 
Lucid's HYDRA GPU pairing technology could soon allow PC builders to incorporate multiple video cards that - hear this, ATI and Nvidia - don't have to be identical. What this potentially means, among other things, is that gamers could leverage old hardware instead of just sadly setting it aside, though paired cards must be of the same brand. HYDRA differs functionally from Nvidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire solutions, which split rendering by sectioning off the screen and alternating frames between cards, respectively, by intelligently distributing highly specific rendering tasks between the GPUs. Instead of divvying up all the tasks equally, HYDRA will only send as many polygons or shader calls as each constituent card can handle (see right of the above pic for an example of what one of two cards might be rendering).
This isn't the first time we have seen a