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HTC Touch HD Gets Beautifully Confirmed in Official Shots, Specs
Posted by John Mahoney at 11:50 PM on September 15, 2008
After the spyshots got us drooling, official images of the gorgeous HTC Touch HD have popped up on HTC's site, along with complete specs. Aside from the sweet WVGA 480x800 screen, GPS, Wi-Fi, TouchFLO UI and dual cameras are also confirmed for the WinMo Pro 6.1 beaut. Unfortunately, the 3G goodness is only for Euro/Asia bands. Hit the jump for full specs and shot gallery.
So indicates this internal VZW email sent that BGR has gotten a hold of. Word is verizonwireless.com/storm will launch some time today (right now it's a 404), with official word of the first touchscreen Blackberry from RIM, which should be getting a November 1 release. That gibes with 
It's the Holy Grail of Wii piracy—load DVD game backups without any sort of hardware modification. And it's just been demonstrated in a very legit-looking 
Now the credit-card sized plastic thing that mobile phone SIM units are shipped in can carry the mobile's associated data files, thanks to Gemalto's DVD-SIM "Smart Video Card." In the name of convergence (and possibly environmental friendliness) the company is making the cards for the Italian operator Wind, where the DVD segment has drivers for PCs to allow wireless internet access. The data segment will fit up to 50MB, and it's clearly better than having a blank bit of plastic (which you normally bin anyway) and an additional CD. But I can see two problems: snapping off the SIM portion of the device is bound to leave you with little plasticky bits that unbalance the DVD part when you put it in a drive, and it's only going to work on tray-loading drives. Convergence gone mad. [
The U.S. Defence Advanced Researh Projects Agency--aka DARPA aka The Guys Who Run Area 51 and Have a Pact with the Aliens to Abduct the Entire Human Race in 2012--has turned its eyes to coal for aeroplane fuel. There's only one problem: coal-to-liquid fuel technologies are too expensive and produce too much pollution. Until now.
In Jason's review of 
Leica have stumped up with a new digital version of the classic M8 rangefinder, after their original M8 
Canon dSLR users have long been able to use Carl Zeiss lenses, but the privilege required an adapter—a solution that's problematic in more ways than one. But Carl Zeiss has just announced two lenses, the Planar T 1.4/50 ZE and 1.4/85 ZE, both of which are stock-friendly with Canon's EF mount. Running US$660 and US$1,770 respectively, these manual focus lenses are 100% physically and electronically compatible with EOS cameras, transferring all usable data (like exposure) to the camera body. Both models will be available in the coming months with additional models on the way. [
Sony's 
Leaked photos of an Asus smartphone have hit the intertubes, and make it look like the maker of the Eee PC has the Samsung Omnia in its sights. The photos of the Glaxy7 show a slim candybar mobile phone that appears to be touchscreen-only—it looks too slim for a slide-out keypad—with a 5-megapixel auto-focus cam, front camera and a main touchpad/trackball controller. Specs are rumoured to include a 3.5-inch screen, Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro running Glide 1.5 UI, 3G, quad-band GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AGPS, and 4GB of on-board memory. Little else is known for sure about the mobile phone yet, particularly regarding pricing or timing. Watch this space. [
Back in 
Nokia filed a new patent last week trying to solve one of the problems of our digital lives: identifying what and who is in our digital photos. It's the digital equivalent of scribbling on the white bit at the bottom of a Polaroid pic (you know the kind of text: "Steve looking silly in Hawaii," "Me in hospital, April '08") and if you add in geotagging, it'd be a convenient way of keeping track. The patent details a system a little similar to Cover Flow, but when photos are flipped over to reveal a blank rear face, a user will have the option to annotate snaps with text entered on the keypad, and the text is permanently incorporated into the image file. If it makes it to reality, I hope they include that real "scribbling" option through touchscreen tech: I kinda miss writing on the back of my photos. [
That there is the grandpappy of those 
Last we left the Dream Car 123, the pyramid-shaped electric car that always gets picked last in kickball games, it was (in the words of Addy) 
Fibre optics have a new competitor, if a group of Italian scientists can get their claim of a new world record for wireless data transmission confirmed by the people who confirm such things. The scientists, based in Pisa, claim that during an uninterrupted 12-hour experiment, they achieved throughput speeds above 1.2 Terabits per second. They say the speeds beat the previous wireless data transmission speed record of 160 Gigabits per second, set by some speedy Koreans. The Italians also claimed these speeds were previously attainable only with fibre optics. That's fitting considering both methods involve communicating with light. Don't get too excited though, as there are major issues keeping this experiment from becoming widespread. At least, on earth.
All we have is a blurb in Popular Science magazine this afternoon, but it would appear there's a first look of sorts going down today with the XMp3. The portable device is an XM Radio player that can record up to five satellite stations at once. "Other portable players save only one channel," Popsci notes, "but the XMp3 can decode five incoming streams to snag multiple songs whether it's in the dock or in your pocket." That's it for now. Expect more soon or whenever XM decides to give up more info. [
Iowa State University researchers further blurred the line between wartime operations and video games this week when they revealed a "next generation control interface" for military UAVs. The US$4.2 million system, currently under development at the university's Virtual Reality Applications Centre, will provide ground control UAV stations with views of the drones, the surrounding terrain, and overall battlefield. If the program sees complete success, it will allow a single operator to control multiple UAVs, and monitor each of their on board instruments, cameras and, naturally, weapons. The system does this using a combination of eye-tracking, voice control and interactive large screen displays—in other words, the kind of rig many uber geeks already use to play an online FPS.
Our sister blog Kotaku already has all the 
Check this out this morning. This new iPhone app from the App Store, called XBMC Remote, does just that—it lets you control your XBMC from an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app is pretty open-minded, too. It allows for XBMC control on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. It's yours, if you want it, for US$5 (?!) and 0.8MB. [
