Our week in the Southeast gave us plenty of memorable moments, but perhaps my favorite of the entire trip was when I stumbled upon the Elf — a pedal-solar electric hybrid vehicle from Organic Transit in Durham, NC. It’s one of those products that — given the right financing and marketing — could be completely disruptive in Urban areas.
The vehicles come in two models currently, The Elf which can hold up to 150lbs, and the TruckIt, which can handle an 800lb payload. Both have solar charged batteries that can last for 30 miles before switching to pedaling mode, and they have turn signals, brake lights and front head lights. They even have side mirrors.
I stole away Rob Cotter, CEO at Organic Transit, to tell us a little more about what I like to call “sunbikes.” → Read More
Intel released their 2012 Q2 earnings today, reporting revenue of $13.5 billion, up 5% from last quarter. PC market growth rose 3% to $8.7 billion. Intel blamed the slow-down on users waiting for Windows 8 before investing in new hardware.
The Data Center group saw revenue of $2.8 billion. Intel’s earnings per share were flat, rising 1 cent over last quarter. → Read More
The Oppo Finder currently holds the silly title of being the thinnest smartphone in the world. Measuring in at a svelte 6.65mm, the Finder is 1.95mm and 2.75 thinner than the Galaxy S III and iPhone 4S, respectively. But the thin size doesn’t mean the phone is fragile. In fact the company recently demonstrated the phone’s toughness by using it to hammer several nails into a wooden board. → Read More
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: taking pics with a tablet is offensive to the human race. That said, viewing pics on a tablet is a very natural experience and Instagram’s latest build adds support for the N7.
This comes a few weeks after it was discovered that Instagram didn’t run on the new tablet. Owners trying to run Instagram were greeted with an incompatibility message. But now, with the latest version of Instagram, owners can view and share pics along with taking mugshots with the 1.2MP front facing camera. → Read More
You deserve a break today, indeed. Augmented reality pioneer Steve Mann visited a Parisian McDonald’s with is family a month ago. Mann has a system called the EyeTap physically installed in his skull that records video and streams augmented reality data directly to his retina. Upon ordering, McDonald’s employees at 140, Avenue Champs Elysees, Paris accosted Mann and tried to tear the glasses out of his head.
That was after he ordered something called a Chicken Ranch Wrap. → Read More
Content is king, and so far Google TV is sorely lacking content. However, with the launch of the famed Xbox Media Center on Android, Google might have a chance in the battle for living rooms. The group behind the classic media player software announced the project and released the source code over the weekend. This could be big.
XBMC was a pioneer in media streaming software. Originally developed for the first Xbox (hence the name) back in 2003, the open source project is still the de facto standard of media streamers. I bought an Xbox just to run XBMC. The wildly popular project spawned many derivative projects and companies like Boxee, Plex and several others. Several key elements are still missing from the just-released Android port, but it reportedly runs on most devices — except Google TV. → Read More
Reviewing a drive isn’t very exciting. What can you say? “It contains a storage medium, is small, and surprisingly light.” Thankfully, the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt can add one important point to that litany of mundanity – a Thunderbolt port and cable that jacks the read and write speed up to amazing levels – thereby turning a ho-hum review into a real barn-burner.
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I’m still not convinced that mobile payments via NFC are on the road to ubiquity, but these fancy shmancy iPhone cases that double as card holders are all kinds of awesome. KillSpencer just debuted its latest, made almost entirely of exotic rosewood. It’s a beauty, to be sure.
The front and back are both attached using a removable adhesive, though there’s no side coverage for the iPhone. I’d have to review it and throw my iPhone across the room a few times before I could be sure, but it doesn’t look as though this case offers the most protection for your phone. But that’s not always what a case is about. → Read More
Another day, another leak.
On Friday we saw what was reported to be an iPhone 5 prototype unit, and today an entirely different version of the “iPhone 5″ casing has found its way on to the interwebs. Oddly enough, this latest leak looks an awful lot like images of iPhone 5 parts published by 9to5mac.
Of course, it’s possible that none of these leaks are the real thing, but it sure does help pass the time until Apple hops on stage in October. → Read More
Imagine this: you get an email message. Maybe it’s from someone important, like the Dalai Lama or Lorenzo Lamas. But how do you know that it came? Easy. The Blink(1). The Blink(1) is a little LED that lights up when something happens on your computer. You can run as many of these things as you have USB ports and, with a little creativity, you can really start to see the value.
For example, you can program the light with Applescript to blink in weird ways when a contact signs into Skype or when someone contacts you in chat. You can set it as a Linux command-line alert so it will turn red when your hard drive is on fire. You can make it turn green when you’re done downloading Furry porn on your Windows machine. The possibilities, as they say, are endless. → Read More
Blackberry’s future is the tech debate du jour, with pundits on either side promising either a BB10 renaissance or a slow-motion tailspin. While the jury was still out, we had a few moments to speak with RIM CEO Thorsten Heins about RIM’s way forward and where BB10 was going to put the company when it launches.
He was unsurprisingly forthright and more than accommodating even when we asked him the questions any BB fan would ask today: Why should I buy a new Blackberry device?
TC: In this interview we wanted to see what was in store for the consumer, what RIM is doing to maintain the energy that a lot of the BlackBerry users currently have, especially at work or in academia. What do you see as the best way forward for those folks?
Thorsten Heins: What we are doing right now is, if you look at the installed base, specifically in enterprise, corporate and consumers worldwide, there is still a lot of phones running BlackBerry 5, mainly in Asia-Pacific. So we are still working on a program to upgrade the installed base to BlackBerry 7, which from today’s view and perspective still is competitive, and I think an exciting platform. → Read More
I’ve been putting off writing about the Telikin because, arguably, any PC is suitable the older audience that the Telikin is aimed. I set my Dad up with a Linux machine and then a Mac Mini and he’s been surfing Drudge and listening to Polka like a champ for almost a decade now. Why spend $699 when you can feasibly hook Grandma up with a PC for $400 or so at Best Buy?
Well the Telikin is an entirely different sort of PC. Built as an all-in-one device, the machine includes an 18- or 20-inch screen, large-print keyboard, and a normal wired mouse. It runs an unnamed version of Linux and is completely locked down, dumping you into a kiosk-like experience that you can’t leave. The machine is, in actuality, a MSI MSI Wind Top AE1920 with some special software installed and you essentially pay a $60 premium for Telikin’s software. → Read More
As we were wandering through the Atlanta meet-up last week we stumbled upon a charming young man wearing a glove studded with circuit boards and embroidered with what looked like silver thread. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was a wild homegrown glove made by a pair of former design students.
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Competition in the tablet space has been heating up for a while now, and it’s not just the big guys that are feeling the strain. Take the tumultuous story of OGT Mobile, for instance — they tried to make their mark on the industry by creating their own Android tablet, but just couldn’t see the project through.
I can’t blame you if you’ve never heard of OGT before — back in April 2011 when the company revealed the Eros tablet, it made a few waves thanks to its claims of being the thinnest Android tablet in the world. → Read More
Over the past day or so, a few lucky souls have managed to get their hands on Google’s much-anticipated Nexus 7 tablet, leaving the rest of us to wonder when our time would come. As it turns out, the answer is very soon.
After their Nexus support phone line tipped users off earlier today, Google has finally come right out and said it — the company has begun shipping those wallet-friendly tablets to all those who pre-ordered from them.
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Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield just published a letter on the company’s website announcing that Apple has reversed its decision to remove EPEAT environmental certification from its products.
“We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system,” Mansfield writes. “I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.” → Read More
A solid chunk of my formative years was spent lurking under tables, peering around corners, and generally tiptoeing around whenever possible. I fancied myself a tiny James Bond (or Weng Weng, considering my heritage) and — strange as it may sound — there’s nothing I wouldn’t have given to have the bitplay BANG! remote controlled lamp help me live out my pre-adolescent fantasies. → Read More
Never mind that this is clearly an ad agency video; it’s clever. And smart. After all Huawei has big plans for the U.S. market.
“We’re not known to the general public,” James Jiang, vice president of product and marketing for Huawei, said at CTIA last October. “We’re taking the initiative to build a name for us.” The Chinese mobile company is a major supplier of white label cell phones with a major chunk of its products co-branded by a wireless carrier or 3rd party. But speaking at CTIA, Jiang revealed Huawei plans on being a top 5 mobile brand within the US within the next three years. That would put Huawei among the likes of Samsung, LG, Apple, Motorola, and HTC — an impressive goal to say the least. → Read More
As iPhone season amps up — and make no mistake, the rumor mill is already spinning at full speed — we’re bound to see “leak” after “leak.” The latest comes by way of a site called KitGuru.net, which claims to have a “test unit” of the device. That’s about where the post lost me, not to mention the fact that the image looks Photoshopped.
But let’s just set that aside for a moment. The images shown actually take into account most of what we’ve seen/heard before. The iPhone 5 is expected to have a larger screen with the same 640px width, and we also expect a new 19-pin mini connector instead of the usual 30-pin port.
So while 97 percent of me believes this isn’t the real deal (I’m not a total cynic), it’s still valuable to have a clearer look at what’s expected, even in blurry form. The real value is seeing the “iPhone 5 test unit” alongside an iPhone 4S. This should give fanbois a nice comparison look at what’s expected to be a 4.08-inch display.
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For a particular set of phone geeks, the problem with owning a popular flagship device is that plenty of other people will end up with the exact same thing. After all, it’s a proven fact — your phone isn’t cool if everyone else has one too.
That’s where carrier-exclusive color options come in, and both AT&T and Sprint have chosen today to spill the beans on their newest chromatically-tweaked handsets — AT&T’s red Galaxy S III and Sprint’s white EVO 4G LTE.
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