Apple’s secret to selling.
Flash an exotic prototype, then—Presto!—get people to buy your more boring stuff. That kind of thinking still rules at most electronics companies. Apple under Steve Jobs only shows off actual products. The difference? Apple’s arcane secret to success.
3-D Technology Behind Avatar
James Cameron is stubborn. He decided nearly a decade ago to film his humans-versus-aliens sci-fi adventure Avatar in 3-D, but he refused to start production until technology could convince the viewer that he or she could step through the screen and pick up a bow alongside the Na’vi, the film’s 10-foot-tall, blue, cat-faced alien protagonists.
To [...]
Reading Brain Signals
Plastic tendrils are clutching my temples, reading electric signals from my brain. I’m sitting in a conference room in San Francisco looking at an orange box floating on a large flat screen. My goal is to make it disappear using nothing but thought. “Cheshire cat,” I think, and the box starts to fade.
No, I haven’t [...]
Flexible Readers
One product that already looks set to evolve out of all recognition is Plastic Logic’s much-anticipated electronic reader, the Que, which the Mountain View, Calif., company plans to release in January 2010.
On the surface, much about the Que seems familiar. Like Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500)’s Kindle — a $350 e-reader that has sold more than 500,000 units [...]
Invisible Power
Marin Soljacic couldn’t sleep. The problem was his wife’s Nokia cell phone. The tyrannical device beeped on the bedside table when it needed to be plugged in. It could not be disabled.
Instead of taking a hammer to the phone, Soljacic marveled at the fact that this device, and billions of others like it, was sitting [...]
Invisible Sound
At the offices of Emo Labs in Waltham, Mass., the receptionist’s desk and the meeting rooms look like an afterthought. The real action goes on behind a glass wall in a warehouse space where most of the 15 employees are soldering wires or fiddling with knobs on machines with sine-wave displays. For a visitor used to [...]
Next Little Thing in 2010
It’s 8 a.m. in a San Diego hotel ballroom, and the annual DEMOfall conference is under way. VCs and journalists stifle yawns and peck at laptops. After a morning of scripted pitches by startups that promise to “integrate smartphone remote mobile applications” or “monetize social networks by enabling live social interaction around content,” the coffee [...]
Samsung Behold II: T-Mobile
Hey, look! Someone forked Android again. The Samsung Behold II, going on sale next week at T-Mobile for $229.99, will be T-Mobile’s most powerful Google Android phone when it goes on the market. But this Android phone doesn’t look or work like other Android phones, and that may be a minus.
// [...]
Hey, look! Someone forked Android again. The Samsung Behold II, going on sale next week at T-Mobile for $229.99, will be T-Mobile’s most powerful Google Android phone when it goes on the market. But this Android phone doesn’t look or work like other Android phones, and that may be a minus.
// [...]
Sprint is now offering the Palm Pixi, a low-cost webOS-powered smartphone that is the successor to Palm’s Centro line. Like those earlier models, it has an easily pocketable design with a touchscreen, keyboard, and an afforable price.The Pixi is available now in Sprint stores and Sprint.com, where it is selling for $100 with a two-year service contract [...]
Dell is launching its Android-based Mini 3 smartphone in China and Brazil. The global strategy seems questionable at face value, but contains a flash of genius as well. Tony Bradley
Dell unveiled the Android-based Mini 3 smartphone today and announced that it will be available soon in China and Brazil. Venturing away from the familiar [...]
GUIDE
There are two different ways to convert music to ringtone.
Tools needed: iTunes and surely a music file!
OS: Mac OSX, XP and Vista.
1. Music that contains DRM and is bought through iTunes:
-Right click on the music in iTunes and select “Convert to Ringtone”.
2. Music not bought through iTunes:
Note: XP and Vista users click on “Properties” instead [...]
Google has launched Go, a new systems programming language born with concurrency, simplicity, and performance in mind.
Go is open source and its syntax is similar to C, C++ and Python. It uses an expressive language with pointer but no pointer arithmetic. It is type safe and memory safe. However, one of its main goals is [...]
No one loves a hackintosh more than me. So I was very sad to read that Mac OS 10.6.2 breaks Atom-based netbooks that have been hacked to run Mac OS X. Hackintoshes, as they’re known.
Wired has confirmed the bad news: 10.6.2 drops support for the Intel Atom processor. That’s the one found in most netbooks.
Apple [...]
After gaining a reputation for its immersive first-person Call of Duty action video games based in World War II, game developer Infinity Ward‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2′ : Creativity and controversy wanted to stretch its creative muscles with an original, contemporary game.
The result, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, won numerous awards as 2007’s [...]
Summary
The good: Strong design and Microsoft don’t always go together, but they do in Windows 7. Users might take a while to get used to the new taskbar and Aero Peek, but they’re a pleasure to use.
The bad: Performance is still hit-or-miss in Windows 7. At the ripe age of seven, Windows XP still performs [...]
If you’re looking for the performance of a MacBook Pro without the Pro price, then you’re going to like Apple’s newly updated MacBook.
The MacBook, unveiled with updates to the iMac and Mini lines last month, is still priced at $999 — $200 less than the 13-in. aluminum-clad MacBook Pro. But compared to the [...]
A new report from OTR Global says Apple plans to release a UMTS/CDMA hybrid iPhone in the third quarter of 2010. If true, the new iPhone will play nice with Verizon’s network and spell an end to AT&T’s exclusivity contract in the U.S. — which is already slated to end sometime next year.
The report also [...]
