MIT researchers teach computers to recognize your smile, frustration
Wipe that insincere, two-faced grin off your face -- your computer knows you're full of it. Or at least
it will once it gets a load of MIT's research on classifying frustration, delight and facial expressions. By teaching a computer how to differentiate between involuntary smiles of frustration and genuine grins of joy, researchers hope to be able to deconstruct the expression into low-level features. What's the use of a disassembled smile? In addition to helping computers
suss out your mood, the team hopes the data can be used to help people with autism learn to more accurately decipher expressions. Find out how MIT is making your computer a better people person than
you after the break.
[Thanks, Kaustubh]
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Huawei files EU antitrust complaint against InterDigital
Huawei has filed an EU
antitrust complaint against
InterDigital to end its "abuse" of the allegedly standards-essential patents it controls. The company has urged the commission to examine its demands, which are considered too hefty to come under the protection of FRAND terms. The shoe normally resides on the other foot, with InterDigital previously instigating battles with
Nokia,
Samsung and
ZTE. This time, it looks like the Chinese giant was tired of being pushed around by what it's derisorily called a non-practicing entity -- which we've taken to be a
polite euphemism.
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Mystery LG LE970 claims next-gen Adreno graphics, can't quite prove it
Maybe our skeptic's goggles have fogged over with excitement, but there's something mightily interesting about an entry over at
GLBenchmark. First off, the model number and listing info vaguely suggest it
could be a variant of the LS970 superphone
rumored for Sprint, aka the LG Eclipse, although the ICS build ("geeb_att_us-eng 4.0.4") indicates this 1280 x 720, 1.5GHz device is one of Ma Bell's. One of the more unusual specs offers some corroboration: the Adreno 320 graphics, which only come in the souped-up
Pro or
quad-core variants of Qualcomm's latest Snadragon S4 chipset. That would make the LE970 a rare breed indeed, but unfortunately that's where the evidence runs out of steam. The handset's actual 2.1 Egypt Standard benchmark only shows a score of 59.5fps -- exactly what we get from an
HTC One S with its regular non-Pro CPU and Adreno 225 GPU. Oh well, where are those lens wipes?
[Thanks, Ketul]
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ASUS teases its 'next transformations,' will probably have screens (video)
There's really not much to go on, but ASUS has thrown its own brief snippet into the
Computex teaser hat. It mentions that "the shape of the
cloud is ever changing" -- and, er, not much else. Puzzle away this sunny public holiday by checking out the brief teaser after the break.
[Thanks Sal]
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Batman-themed Nokia Lumia 900 coming soon, utility belt clip not included
A befuddled Joker once pondered "Where does he get all those wonderful toys?" Soon you'll have a chance to inspire the same sort of wonderment amongst your friends -- at least the more eagle-eyed ones. Nokia has announced it's launching a Batman-themed
Nokia Lumia 900, with the minimalist logo of (spoiler alert) Bruce Wayne's alter-ego laser-etched onto the back. It's the same treatment that was given to a special edition
Lumia 800 earlier and, no surprise, it'll be available exclusively in Batman's favorite color. It's also exclusive to Europe, at least initially, where it's said to be going on sale in a few weeks. Act fast and you might have yours in time to listen to Christian Bale grumble his way through the conclusion of the
Dark Knight Trilogy.
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Absinthe 2.0 used to jailbreak nearly one million iOS devices in a single weekend
973,086 iOS devices were jailbroken in a single weekend thanks to
Absinthe 2.0, which was released on Friday. Chronic-Dev, one half of the
Jailbreak Dream Team tweeted the announcement yesterday, adding that 211,401 of those freed were third-generation
iPads. If you want to loosen your own Apple-branded handheld from the clutches of Cupertino's control, then the warranty-worrying software is still available -- with the promise that it's so easy, your grandma could do it.
Permalink Cult of Mac |
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GameStop gives in to its sweet tooth, stocks Android tablets at over 1,600 stores
GameStop selling Android tablets in-store isn't anything new, but we've been curious to see how well the initiative would take off following a
soft launch at 200 locations last November. Things seem to be going swimmingly, as the company now has "more than 1,600 locations" stocking the slates. If you'll recall, the devices all come with pre-installed titles of the retailer's choosing, with models from the likes of Samsung, Acer, ASUS and Toshiba. There's still yet to be any word about whether you'll eventually be able to
trade-in your own, but it would seem like a logical next step -- aside from becoming an
AT&T virtual carrier. Hit up the source link below to see if a store in your area is part of the lineup.
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Angry Birds and PES 2012 join Skype: won't work on Windows Phones with 256MB RAM
Putting the squeeze on those hardware specifications has lead to several more app casualties on Microsoft's ever-growing
mobile platform. Unfortunately, it includes one of mobile gaming's biggest hitters:
Angry Birds. We gave installation a go on our own
Lumia 610 and were met with the unfortunate message seen above. According to
WindowsPhoneApps Spanish, it's not the only one affected by the reduction in RAM on these lower-priced smartphones.
PES 2012 won't run on the lower-specced smartphone, while videocall app Tango also joins its rival Skype on the
no-go list.
Permalink The Verge |
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Kyocera's Urbano Progresso to bring tissue-conductive sounds to Japan on May 30th
Kyocera's innovative
Urbano Progresso is set to launch in Japanese stores before the end of the week. The result of a team-up between the handset manufacturer and carrier KDDI, it uses a new
vibrational technology that forgoes the more typical earpiece, delivering sound throughout the whole handset. We've toyed with the technology already and it's good to see
Kyocera delivering on its promise of a real world application of its
smart sonic receiver in the same year. Aside from its audio chops, the phone houses some less ground-breaking, but still respectable, features like a dual-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon S2 processor, Android 4.0, an 8.1-megapixel camera, waterproof casing and a 4.1-inch screen. It'll be out in shops starting May 30th and tempted Japan residents can check out the hard sell -- condensed into a two-minute video -- after the break.
Continue reading Kyocera's Urbano Progresso to bring tissue-conductive sounds to Japan on May 30th
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The Apple II, as described by Steve Wozniak
Ask the average geek to describe the
Apple II and you'll probably hear something about its legacy or software. Ask Steve Wozniak circa 1977, on the other hand, and he'll write you a technical tome -- or at least he did for
Byte magazine. Way back when the classic computer was fresh, a young Woz penned an extremely detailed "system description" for the rig, pouring over specifics on the II's graphical capabilities, memory, peripherals, programming language and more. Perhaps in (slightly late) honor of the machine's
35th anniversary,
Information Week has seen fit to reprint the extensive examination for your reading pleasure -- assuming you're up to wading through the technical nitty gritty. No? Well, Woz
does have a few nuggets of wisdom for the layman. "To me," he says, "a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive." No arguments here, Steve. Read the man's words for yourself at the source link below.
Permalink The Verge, Daring Fireball |
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BBC iPlayer reaching Windows Phone within 'weeks,' will catch up with Sherlock on your Lumia (update: perhaps not)
We've see BBC iPlayer
reach many devices over time, but it's been conspicuously absent on Windows Phone. Nokia has stepped into give us some relief, and it's now promising that a port of the TV catch-up service will be ready for your
Lumia 800 "in weeks." Good news no doubt, although Nokia's encyclopedic knowledge of British TV streaming is also dashing hopes of using the
Sky Go mobile app on Windows Phone anytime soon: the same Nokia rep doesn't see Sky being ready for a "good few months" at the earliest. As such, you'll have no problems keeping up with
Doctor Who and
Sherlock when they're airing, but we wouldn't count on watching live football matches for awhile.
Update: Pocket-lint is reporting that it quizzed the BBC over this issue and got a firm denial about a Windows Phone version, which suggests that
The Inquirer's report, or its Nokia source, may have made an illogical deduction.
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How would you change Samsung's Galaxy Player 4.0?
Samsung's sub-$200 Galaxy Player offers up PMP-stylings inside a smartphone shell. When our reviewer
put it through its paces, we couldn't find much to commend it -- with poor sound quality and battery life that wouldn't manage a long-haul flight. The expandable storage and removable battery made it more desirable than the equivalent iPod touch, but given that it was retailing for $20 more (at the time), we'd have said go for a
GoGear or
D3 instead. But we suspect that despite our advice, some of you bought one, so tell us how you've found it on a daily basis and what should the company do when it comes time for a refresh?
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LG Display debuts five-inch Retina Display killer with 1080p HD resolution and 440ppi pixel density
Smartphone displays are becoming larger in size, and along with that, we're seeing a nice trend that's bringing greater pixel density. While
LG Display's newly-announced 1080p HD mobile display isn't the most pixel dense that we've seen -- a distinction that belongs to
Toshiba -- the five-inch panel is more appropriate for consumer applications and boasts an impressive pixel density of 440ppi. Its 16:9 aspect ratio was designed with HD content in mind, and the LCD technology isn't anything to sneeze at, either: it's a variant of IPS known as Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching (
AH-IPS), which is said to boast wide viewing angles, fast response times and improved brightness efficiency. Best yet, it seems that consumers won't have long to wait before the panel works its way into consumer technology -- the five-inch HD display is set for availability during the second-half of this year. To learn more of the Retina Display-shattering deets, you'll find the full PR after the break.
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Switched On: Facebook's ecosystem dilemma
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.
Despite amassing something close to a billion users, Facebook has mainly stayed true to the startup mantra of staying focused on a few core things. In this case, that has been promoting openness and sharing among friends and, increasingly, the world at large. Such was the case for its rival Google at the launch of the search company's IPO. Since then, however, the company has launched a pair of operating systems powering handsets and tablets around the world, a digital media store selling everything from apps to books, and its own social sharing service (at least twice).
With the vast capital infusion that comes with an IPO, Facebook has an opportunity to expand far beyond its own site and Like buttons that now line up in a row next to sharing buttons using Twitter and Google+. The company certainly has no love for Google and has kept Apple at arm's length, but it has had a
strong partnership with Microsoft, which made a financially shrewd $240 million investment in Facebook back in 2007. Windows Phone would be a poorer experience were it not for its tight Facebook integration. The giant social network would gain from entering the device market or spinning its own version of Android as Amazon has done, but there would also be significant challenges to striking out into its own ecosystem.
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Inhabitat's Week in Green: Jake Dyson's lamp, wooden light bulbs and weed-killing lasers
Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green.
This week Inhabitat has been reporting live from
New York Design Week, where we've witnessed countless innovative green designs from around the world. To kick things off, we were pretty impressed with
this desk lamp designed by Jake Dyson (son of the
vacuum god) that extends the life of its LED bulbs by a whopping 37 years. Also in the category of "bright shiny things we love" is
QisDesign's Aurelia lamp, which bears a striking resemblance to a glowing jellyfish. We were also dazzled by
UM Project's collection of retro, robot-inspired lamps, Light & Contrast's
cute LED flower lights, and we were absolutely floored by
Alessandro Jordão's larger-than-life LEGO chair. Can't get enough of
NY Design Week? Check out
all of our favorite green designs from this year's shows.
Continuing with the topic of innovative green lighting technology, artist Ryosuke Fukusada has created the impossible:
a glowing wooden light bulb. Confused? The light was created using a technique called Rokuro, and it consists of an LED light bulb wrapped with a very thin layer of wood. When the bulb is turned on, it illuminates the grain of the wood. As Fukusada's creation demonstrates, LED lighting technology has taken some incredible strides recently, and we took some time to round-up
24 of our all-time favorite green lamps that look great with LED bulbs.
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Refresh Roundup: week of May 21st, 2012
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging for an update. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery we could find during the last week and crammed them into one convenient
roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy!
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Nano vacuum tubes could give a second life to the guitarist's best friend
Pretty much the only place you see
vacuum tubes any more is inside a quality audio amp. But, once upon a time, they were the primary ingredient in any piece of electronic equipment, including computers. The glass tubes have since been replaced with the smaller, less fragile and cheaper to manufacture silicon
transistor. There are, however, disadvantages, to transistors. For one, electrons tend to move more slowly though the semiconductors, and two, they're highly susceptible to radiation. The second of those problems doesn't affect us much here on Earth, but for NASA it poses a major obstacle. Engineers have finally managed to combine the advantages of both vacuum tubes and silicon transistors, though, in what has been dubbed "
nano vacuum tubes." They're created by etching tiny cavities in phosphorous-doped silicon, bordered on three sides by electrodes that form the gate, source and drain. The term "vacuum tube" is slightly misleading however, since there is no true vacuum in play. Instead, the source and drain are separated by just 150 nanometers, making it highly unlikely that flowing electrons would run into stray atoms. In addition to their space-worthy hardiness, they can also potentially operate at frequencies ten-times as higher than silicon transistors, making them a candidate to push
terahertz tech from experimental to mainstream. For more, check out the source link.
[Image credit:
Shane Gorski]
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Facebook reportedly back to building phones, recruiting former iPhone engineers
If the
HTC Status' dedicated Facebook button fell shy of satisfying your obsessive social networking needs, sit tight: the house of Zuckerberg may be building a slab of tech
just for you. According to the
New York Times Bits blog, those
old Facebook phone rumors are making a comeback. A handful of Facebook employees and engineers familiar with the matter reportedly say that the firm is collecting former Apple engineers, specifically, ones that worked on the
iPhone and
iPad. Like
Zuckerberg said, mobile is the company's top focus, and one employee says the man at the top is afraid of getting overlooked in a sea of apps. "Mark is worried that if he doesn't create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms." Facebook has focused on
deep integration with
other devices for some time, but a dedicated handset could take the
freshly public company in new directions. Reports suggest that the rumored device is still in its infancy, and there's no word on form factor or OS, of course. Up for some speculation? Check out the source link below for Bits' full take.
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NBC lays out 2012 London Olympics broadcast plan on TV, internet, apps and in 3D (video)
Love it or hate it, we're
stuck with NBC as our Olympics broadcaster in the US, and the company recently laid out its full plans for the 2012 Olympics in London this summer. The good news first: NBCOlympics.com will live stream every single event (they'll even be
on YouTube, and in the UK the
BBC has its own plans) for the first time ever including streams of each of its channels, encompassing 3,500 total hours and the awarding of all 302 medals. The bad news is that if you're not a cable subscriber, many of those hours will not be available to you, and even if you are, you're looking at a (likely convoluted) authentication sign-in process. That's a little bit of pain, sure, but it should mean what we've been asking for -- the ability to watch all Olympics events as they happen, not tape delayed for prime time after viewing grainy bootleg streams over the internet. Also new for the internet are multiple streams for the same event, so for example, viewers can select a particular gymnastics apparatus or track and field event at will.
On mobile devices, NBC also has plans for two different apps on phones and tablets, with one that brings live video streams and another with highlight clips. It didn't specify what platforms they would be available for, but we'd assume the usual suspects (iOS, Android) will be first up. On pay-TV cable, satellite and telco providers it's also providing dedicated channels for basketball and soccer, although it's up to your provider to pick them up. The same goes for the
242 planned hours of
3D coverage it's producing in partnership with Panasonic, which will unfortunately air on 24 hour tape delay, just like the HD broadcast was back in 2004 (we've got chips.... and salsa!). For the full breakdown of all 5,535 hours of coverage across NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, Telemundo and everything else check out the press release after the break, plus an Olympics preview trailer. While there are some limits for cord cutters, sports fans with pay-TV should be ready to experience the best Olympics coverage ever with the ability to watch what we want, instead just what's on the TV schedule.
Continue reading NBC lays out 2012 London Olympics broadcast plan on TV, internet, apps and in 3D (video)
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Solid state solar panels are more affordable, say researchers, don't leak
Researchers at Northwestern University have found one way to stop a leak: get rid of the liquid. A new variation on the
Grätzel solar cell replaces a short-lived organic dye with a solid alternative. The molecular dye the solid substance replaces was corrosive, at risk of leaking and only lasted about 18-months -- by replacing it, researchers plan to pave the way for a more affordable (and less toxic) alternative. Northwestern's new design flaunts a 10.2-percent conversion efficiency, the highest ever recorded in a solid-state solar cell of its type -- but that's still only half of what traditional sun collectors can do. Researchers hope to improve conversion in the long run, but expect that the cost reduction alone will be enough to get the party going. It may not be the
greenest solar technology we've ever seen, but who are we to judge?
Permalink Gizmag |
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