Your smartphone: future air-quality data point
You know the good feeling you get when you think about how your computer is running Folding@home all the time, or that you’ve been careful to clip six-pack rings all your life? Well, soon you might have one more warm fuzzy feeling, if this project underway at Intel Labs Berkeley comes through. They’re designing portable air-quality sensors that monitor and sample the air around you throughout the day and allow it to be shared and analyzed later.
The current sensors are a little bigger than a phone, but one “long-term” plan is to ; just write an app, add a sensor to the phone (could be an accessory), and let people do their thing. It could upload quality, temperature, and GPS location in real-time. Sounds good to me, I just hope it doesn’t kill my battery.
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Nokia’s Design by Community makes smartphone concepting a multiplayer game, with limits
19/03/2010 - 00:49
Tags: community, concepting, design, game, limits, multiplayer, nokia, smartphone
Posted in Gadgets | No comments
Nokia’s community blog has opened up the floodgates, at least in theory. For “Design by Community,” users will be able to vote on smartphone features via a series of sliders, although within an arbitrary point allotment system. A new poll opens next week for size and shape, followed by materials, operating system (Symbian or being the only choices, unsurprisingly), and so on in the weeks that follow, with the last poll starting April 26th. After that, a concept sketch will be voted on and later rendered — but no plans to ever have it made into an actual retail product (boo). We can’t exactly say we understand all the selections here: why is a touchscreen keyboard less ambitious than T9 text entry? Does saying capacitive is more ambitious than resistive serve as a of trends to come? What in the world is the difference between hot key and one touch? It’s interesting to see how , , all come out as a Perfect Mixes, while last year’s E75 and the more recent all straddle the “less than ambitious” line. Oh, and just so we’re clear… a 5-inch, 21:9 ratio display without touchscreen but with a touchscreen keyboard is a perfect mix. Go figure.
[Thanks, Pratik V]
originally appeared on on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:49:00 EST. Please see our .
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Finance Investments for the Future!
03/03/2010 - 18:46
Tags: finance, future, investments
Posted in Monetize, News | No comments
Not only the Internet is good for the Financial Future… If you have cash flow and are ready to invest money for a future event, such as retirement or a child’s college education, you have several options. You do not have to invest in risky stocks or ventures. You can easily invest your money in [...]
Adafruit’s Monochron retro clock now on sale, changes time with every match point
27/02/2010 - 02:31
Tags: adafruit, clock, match, monochron, point, retro, sale, time
Posted in Gadgets | No comments
You might have the vaguest of memories seeing this piece before — it made a cameo in an — but here we are with a much clearer picture of Monochron clock, now also on sale! As is its modus operandi, the timepiece is open source… but should you plan on sticking to default, you’ll be gifted with a great retro-style Table Tennis for two. The best part? The time changes whenever the clock “loses” — something tells us that gives one side at least a 59-to-1 advantage. See for yourself after the break.
originally appeared on on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:31:00 EST. Please see our .
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Microsoft Says Google Shouldn’t Be So Quick to Point Fingers (PC World)
26/02/2010 - 23:10
Tags: fingers, google, microsoft, pc, point, quick, world
Posted in Search Engines | No comments
PC World – Microsoft and Google are stepping up their war of words. This time it’s Microsoft’s turn: It says Google is pointing fingers rather than addressing the European Commission’s investigation into the search giant.
Matias makes room for your smartphone on an otherwise vanilla keyboard
25/02/2010 - 18:30
Tags: keyboard, matias, room, smartphone, vanilla
Posted in Gadgets | No comments
We can’t count the number of times that we’ve longed for our Insert, Home, Page Up, Delete, End and Page Down buttons to be replaced with an angled slab of plastic, but obviously we’re in a pretty small minority. Matias has just issued its USB 2.0 keyboard + smartphone stand, which essentially carves out a slice of real estate for your phone to sit, though no passthrough USB cable / iPhone dock connector is provided for charging. The purpose? To put all of your mobile apps right at your fingertips, because keeping said phone on your desk is just completely and utterly unacceptable. Oh, and did we mention that the layout itself is nothing special? If you see something we don’t, feel free to part with your $49.95 and smile while thinking “I told you so.”
Update: Documentation about the keyboard indicated that “custom keypad and trackpad apps” could be loaded on to “control your Mac,” which certainly makes this more appealing, but unfortunately details on that are scant.
originally appeared on on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our .
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Smartphone GPS shootout: Google, Ovi, and Verizon go head-to-head
25/02/2010 - 16:54
Tags: google, gps, headtohead, ovi, shootout, smartphone, verizon
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shaking up financial markets worldwide. That was just the beginning of a shock and awe campaign that will leave no automotive interior untouched — and hopefully no driver unsure how many miles until the next Dunkin’ Donuts. was the first to really shake things up, while is a more recent addition to the battlefield and the latest , 5.0, lets and users join the fray. We’ve taken this sampling of the best built-in smartphone navigation options (the set of paid add-on options for iPhone is a beast we’ll be taming later), learning which you should trust to get you to where you’re going and to dodge construction and traffic on the way there. Read on for a turn-by-turn exploration of each option’s highs and lows.
Gallery:
originally appeared on on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:54:00 EST. Please see our .
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Modern smartphone radio design partly to blame for AT&T, O2 network woes?
24/02/2010 - 19:06
Tags: atampt, blame, design, modern, network, o2, partly, radio, smartphone, woes
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Even though AT&T’s already committed both in an effort to buck the butt-of-the-joke trend it’s been experiencing for the last couple years, there’s some evidence that it’s a recent trend in the way phone radios operate — not a lack of overall capacity — that should shoulder at least some of the blame for the issues. An O2 staffer (O2 carries the iPhone and has coincidentally experienced many of the same growing pains AT&T has in recent months) that reached out to Ars Technica says that Apple’s baby was one of the first widely popular phones to immediately drop data connections as soon as transfers were complete and re-establish them only when needed; that tactic saves battery power, but can overwhelm cell sites pretty easily if they’re not configured to handle it — even if there’s plenty of spectrum and backhaul available. Other handsets now employ the same strategy, compounding the problem. This seems like an awfully odd thing to miss during carrier testing, but who knows — we wouldn’t put it past anyone to gladhand the iPhone through the toughest parts of the gauntlet.
originally appeared on on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:06:00 EST. Please see our .
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Future iPads to have front-facing cameras, flash (bulbs, not software)
24/02/2010 - 13:51
Tags: Software, bulbs, cameras, flash, frontfacing, future, ipads
Posted in Gadgets | No comments
9to5Mac found these delightful buttons.
What the deuce? It seems that the new iPad SDK 3.2 Beta 3 has some very interesting bits of code and UI components that point to a front facing camera – a boolean called hasFrontCamera – and a boolean for a flash LED (not Adobe Flash) called hasFlash. There are also [...]
Ecolok?s flat-pack furniture will be handy in our dark, overcrowded future
24/02/2010 - 02:00
Tags: dark, ecoloks, flatpack, furniture, future, handy, overcrowded
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In the future, when overpopulation has forced us all to live in 6×6-foot pods, flat pack furniture will be indispensable. You’ll wake up, collapse your bed, and pop open a chair and coffee table for your morning bowl of nutrient gel. The hidden Illuminati of the world are already planning for this and hoarding them, which explains why you can’t order anything from Ecolok’s site, a company which produces tasteful and practical flat-pack stuff.
Over-the-Air Viewers Left Out of NBC’s Online Future – Public Knowledge Tech News and Comment
24/02/2010 - 22:32
Tags: News, comment, future, knowledge, left, nbc, online, overtheair, public, tech, viewers
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Public Knowledge Tech News and Comment
Its Internet coverage is also unavailable to the millions of Americans who watch TV over the air, undermining NBC's position that broadcast television …