GadgetyNews.com

UK Gets Very Own Kindles in Grey Business Suits

Jay Garrett — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:47:04 +0000

The Kindle is coming to the UK – it’s official!

Amazon is treating us with brand spanking new versions of the ebook reader.

The pair of Kindles aren’t that scary pricewise either. If you opt for the one loaded with 3G and Wi-Fi it’ll cost you £149 and the Wi-Fi only version will hit you for a reasonable £109.

The free 3G connection taken care of by Vodafone and should you take your Brit Kindle (UKindle?) on a trip to foreign parts you’ll be able to instantly browse and download ebooks as long as they have 3G. I reckon that it’s worth that extra £40 compared to the Wi-Fi only version.

Especially as the Amazon Web site for pre-ordering states that the new Wi-Fi browsing is “experimental”!

Both of these new Kindles wear stylish graphite coloured suits and sport a higher contrast eInk screen, 4GB of memory which is said to equate to “up to 3,500″ eBooks and a claimed battery life of up to one month even when frequently used.

For you social networkers – you’ll love that you can highlight sentences and passages and then bounce them off to Facebook and Twitter to share with all

Click here to pre-order the Kindle with Free 3G + Wi-Fi or here for the Kindle Wi-Fi only version.

Both will ship on 27 August along with a UK specific ebook store featuring over 400,000 titles, newspapers, magazines and over 1 million free books.

Sky 3D Launches in October – 3D Christmas Movies

Jay Garrett — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:22:39 +0000

If you’ve got yourself a 3D TV but are looking for more variety in your viewing – you’re in luck!

Sky is set to become the first company in Europe to pipe lovely TV into our living rooms in all three gorgeous dimensions as of Friday 1 October.

Sky 3D will kick off with more of a sport bias along with a smattering of the latest movies – so, now you wont have to nip down the local to get your 3D sports fix

This will start by showing live coverage of the Ryder Cup golf broken up with the first 3D TV showings of Bolt and Monsters vs Aliens.

Between its launch and Christmas Sky plans to expand the number of films it shows partnered with grabbing as many of the largest sporting, arts and entertainment events it can – so expect a load of Premier League football matches. There’s been tell of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince getting a 3D airing for those of you that don’t know your Arsenal from your Everton.

The best news is that if you already have Sky+HD you’ll get the 3D service and it will work with both passive and active technology. You’ll need a suitable 3D ready tele box and the specs though.

The Future is Bright for Solar Power – Graphene OPV

Sophia H. Walker — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:10:51 +0000

University of southern California experts suggest us a more powerful use of graphene photovoltaics

Can you imagine people powering their cellphone or music/video device while jogging in the sun?

A University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that may have great potential for a brand new breed of solar cells.

Inside a paper recently published by the journal ACS Nano, researchers stated that organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells have been proposed as a method to obtain cost effective energy due to their ease of manufacture, light weight, and compatibility with flexible substrates.

The new work suggests that graphene, a highly conductive and highly transparent type of carbon made up of atoms-thick sheets of carbon atoms, has high potential to fill this role.

While graphene’s existence has been known for decades, it has only been studied extensively since 2004 due to the difficulty of manufacturing it in high quality and in quantity.

The University of southern California team has produced graphene/polymer sheets ranging in sizes up to 150 square centimeters that in turn can be used to create dense arrays of flexible organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells.

These organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices convert solar radiation to electricity, but not as efficiently as silicon cells.

The energy provided by sunlight on a sunny day is about 1,000 watts per meter square, for every 1,000 watts of sunlight that hits a square meter part of the standard silicon solar cell, 14 watts of electricity will be generated, Organic solar cells are less efficient; their conversion rate for that same 1,000 watts of sunlight in the graphene-based solar cell would be only 1.3 watts.

But what graphene organic photovoltaic (OPV) lack in efficiency, can potentially be compensated by its lower price and, greater physical flexibility.

Researchers think that it may eventually be possible to cover with inexpensive solar cell layers extensive areas like newspapers, magazines or power generating clothing.

In the meanwhile Prof. Ruoff and his colleagues of the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin, are studying the basic science in the introduction of graphene-based ultracapacitors for usage in electronics and other fields.

Prof. Ruoff says batteries are relatively slow, they can store energy but require sometime to charge up, and then they distribute energy slowly, over time.

Ultracapacitors can be charged rapidly, within seconds, and discharge quickly, but, right now, they’re not able to store very much electrical energy.

The development of stable and cheaper ultracapacitors is seen as a key step in using wind or solar-generated power, especially if researchers can find methods to enable capacitors to store energy longer, that is not yet possible.

Even with their current storage capacity, the graphene devices could provide quick energy when needed in certain situations on the environmentally friendly way.

They can be used, as an example, to absorb heat generated in braking an automobile or train, and store it for a short time, and employ it for the electrical needs of the vehicle (i.e. starting the car or acceleration)

Check out Sophia’s solar battery charger blog, her personal hobby web site focused entirely on tips to help individuals save energy using solar energy for small devices.

Lumigon T1 Android Phone Released in October

Jay Garrett — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:44:45 +0000

If you’re in the market for an Android 2.1 phone but don’t want to follow the pack then check out the crisp lines of the Lumigon T1.

The Danish company boast that the T1 will have a 3.2″ capacitive TFT touchscreen with a 480 x 320 resolution, a Freescale 1GHz i.MX51 processor, and will be able to output video at 720p via the mini HDMI port.

It will also be rocking a 5MP camera buddied with a flash and the now expected Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, A-GPS and accelerometer.

Pre-orders will be taken for the phone from September 20th and the release party will be October 20th.

New Touchscreen BlackBerry 9800 Unleashed Next Week

Jay Garrett — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:15:04 +0000

Yup – weeks without any RIM-based news and then two come along at once!

It sounds like the new BlackBerry slider is expected to drop at a joint event with AT&T, who will have dibs on the new phone stateside, in New York on Tuesday.

The 9800 will busting BlackBerry OS6, a revamped web browser, touchscreen and full slide-out keyboard.

This could be excellent timing for RIM as, if the 9800 is all it’s cracked up to be could have a great reception (pun intended) after the complaints about iPhone 4′s antenna design.

“This is an opportunity for RIM to respond, not only on the operating system and browser-side, but equally importantly, that they have a nice smooth operating piece of hardware,” Mackie Research analyst Nick Agostino said.

The 9800 is hoped to show crackberry haters a thing or two and promises to have done away with the clunky web browser, a very meh app store and a range that wasn’t featuring a touchscreen mobile!

“We expect the new RIM slider to receive ‘hero’ treatment from AT&T, and for the carrier to promote the product aggressively,” Morgan Stanley analyst Ehud Gelblum said in a note to clients.

So – BB OS6 then?

Well, as you can see in the gallery below you’ll get five different screens to switch between depending on what you’re after:

Frequent – shows your most used apps
Favourites – for apps, websites and contacts
Media – vids, music and such
Downloads – for your…. errr.. downloads
All – guess

You’ll also have quicker access to menus for various connection settings, setting alarms and getting to the message centre.

There’s Flash support as well as the Spotlight alike search function which will sniff out your query throughout the BlackBerry’s entirety!

Expect RIM to officially take the wraps off the 9800 on Tuesday August 3rd and they should hit the shelves in the states by the middle of August.

The handset is likely to be launched in Canada and Western Europe later in the year, possibly October.

Are you excited by it?

Let me know

Microsoft Street Slide Bursts Google Street View’s Bubble

Jay Garrett — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:06:54 +0000

I’ve definitely found Google’s Street View very useful for virtually walking to venues from train stations in the hope that I don’t get hideously lost. Thankfully with the Street View/GPS combo it hasn’t happened – yet.

Well, Microsoft Research wants to push this tech further and have taken the street-view idea and developed a new perspective.

Yup – get a load of the seamless view and how lovely it feels to be freed from the bubbley perspective of Street View.

The new Microsoft prototype shows the user zooming in and then zooming out til you get the panoramic strip view

When you’ve zoomed out and get that strip the plan is to fill those black areas with store-front logos and address details – making it even easier to find that bank, coffee shop or venue. I wonder if there’ll be advertising/special deals attached to these as well?

Street Slide seems to give you better perspective of the buildings on the street and also offers more detail than you get in the Google bubble.

The research paper mentions that only “2400 panoramas covering about 4 kilometres on 6 streets with 8 intersections” has been covered so far, but that the plan is “integrating our viewer into a larger database containing millions of bubbles of street level imagery”.

I am genuinely impressed with what I’ve seen so far and can’t wait to try it out – best news of all is that Microsoft are planning an iPhone version

Hopefully nobody’s data has been swiped in the making of this

All iPhone Models Racing Against Each Other – iPhone 4 Not Fastest at Everything

Jay Garrett — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:31:25 +0000

This is a question that’s raised quite often by people considering upgrading their iPhones – is the new one actually any faster?

Well here’s some video proof.

As you can see in the vid below – all four models are put through a variety of tests.

The iPhone 4 manages to launch Plants vs Zombies in 8.5 seconds and, at the other end of the scale, the original iPhone 2G took a total of 26 seconds to get its game on.

Don’t think that iPhone 4 got its own way throughout the tasks though. In fact, the iPhone 2G was the fastest to shut down at 8.2 seconds and the 3GS was the fastest to boot up.

The other thing I couldn’t help noticing is how the iPhone 4′s screen pops with colour

But it does look like the iPhone 4 is speediest where it counts.

Four Generations of the iPhone from Chris Pinnock on Vimeo.

isparade – Create Your Own Twitter Parade

Jay Garrett — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:29:45 +0000

Now, we’ve all Googled ourselves and looked at the amount of Twitter followers our friends have – but there’s a new (well to me) way of celebrating the narcissistic and megalomaniacal you that is generally hidden away until you’re alone on the puter.

Enjoy your own Twitter Parade!

Type in a Twitter ID or a random search phrase and watch as your trending research is marched in front of your very eyes to a jolly ol’ fan-fare

I can’t stop now!! You have to give it a blast

Thanks Michelle for this

Bump 2.0 Now Enables Instant Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Befriending

Jay Garrett — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:00:52 +0000

Righty – you’re at a festival, bar or club and you’ve made a new best friend. They totally get your sometimes ‘unusal’ sense of humour, they’ve shared the booze that they’ve snuck in with you and, before you forget, you want to keep in contact.

Perhaps you think that asking for their mobile number is pointless as you rarely call your family let alone your buddies and simply getting John/Jane Smith’s name to search on Facebook is going to be futile.

You need to get the new version of the free Bump app!

If you’re both rocking this app (which I’ve used a couple of times at Gadgety press things) you can friend each other instantly as well as the usual contact details you could before.

Instead of having to search for your new buddy and then hope they remember you and accept your friend request – Bump 2.0 lets you become friends instantly just by bumping phones together!

You’re then able to share pictures and see one another’s common connections over your favorite social network. It even hooks up with Twitter and LinkedIn.

This new version also lets you compare calendars and send each other event invites.

Being free – if your new drinking partner hasn’t got the app already they can download while you get the next round in!

Grab the iPhone app now and there’ll be an Android version appearing in a month or so

I’ve added the app store pics as mine were shoddy

Apple Magic TrackPad Brings Multitouch to Desktops and Makes Your Mouse Cry

Jay Garrett — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:06:54 +0000

Today Apple has brought the world of multitouch trackpads to the humble desktop!

That’s right folks – The Magic Trackpad has arrived!

The Magic Trackpad is a larger version of the MacBook Pro touchpad giving you 80% more space on which to pinch and swipe to your hearts content.

It shares the same design and angles as Apple’s wireless keyboard so should be comfy to use and hooks up to your puter via Bluetooth. The entire surface of the TrackPad acts as a button – is that the sound of weeping MagicMouses I hear?

As you’d expect – the Magic TrackPad is down with two-finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, fingertip rotation, and three- and four-finger swipes. If there’s some bits you don’t want you can just slip over and personalise your requirements over in the System Preferences.

The Magic Trackpad runs on batteries and so Apple has seen the pound signs and released the Apple Battery charger. It comes bundled with six AA batteries and boasts the lowest vampire draw of any “similar charger” out there. You can see it here but the Buy link doesn’t seem to work on the UK store so I can’t give a £price. It costs $29 in the States.

It hasn’t been a bad turn around since rumours started in February, FCC approval earlier this month and now can be yours for $69 or £59 if you live here in the UK