First Look: Official Twitter App for iPad Feels Smooth as Butter
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
The official Twitter app for iPad is finally here, and star developer Loren Brichter has polished yet another gem. Twitter for iPad sports a really elegant interface that’s significantly faster and more intuitive than competing Twitter clients we’ve tested (such as Twitterific and Tweetdeck).
Mobile Devices Need Custom Maps
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
Development Seed is engineering tools to create custom maps that work in a wider variety of situations such as natural disasters and in the developing world.
IBM Unveils Fastest Microprocessor Ever
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
adeelarshad82 writes “IBM revealed details of its 5.2-GHz chip, the fastest microprocessor ever announced. Costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, IBM described the z196, which will power its Z-series of mainframes. The z196 contains 1.4 billion transistors on a chip measuring 512 square millimeters fabricated on 45-nm PD SOI technology. It contains a 64KB L1 instruction cache, a 128KB L1 data cache, a 1.5MB private L2 cache per core, plus a pair of co-processors used for cryptographic operations. IBM is set to ship the chip in September.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Canon Develops 8 X 8 Inch Digital CMOS Sensor
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
dh003i writes “Canon has developed a 8 x 8 inch CMOS digital sensor. It will be able to capture an image with 1/100th the light intensity required by a DSLR and will be able to record video at 60 fps in lighting half the intensity of moonlight. There are already many excellent quality lenses designed to cover 8 x 10 inches, although Canon may develop some of their own designed specifically for their requirements.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Video Appliance For a Large Library On a Network?
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
devjj writes “For the past year or so I have been trying (and failing) to figure out a reasonable solution for bringing my large media library to my living room. All of my media lives on an Ubuntu server that sits on my network. It’s been very reliable and it’s fast enough for streaming purposes. My content is exposed via SMB. It’s the living room side where I keep running into problems. I am currently using Windows 7 and XBMC, but the case is too big and noisy, I don’t particularly care for Windows, and the whole thing just seems overkill. What I want is a device that can present a decent UI that the non-Slashdot crowd would be able to use, but that is still powerful enough to stream full-fidelity 1080p. I dream of a small box that can transcode video over a network, but that’s probably a pipe dream. The new Apple TV would be great if it could connect to network shares. What say you, Slashdot? Is what I’m looking for possible, or should I just give in to the iTunes/Amazon/whatever juggernauts?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Wireless Power Group Has ‘Qi’ Prototypes
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
judgecorp writes “Steady progress on inductive wireless charging. There are now certified prototypes of chargers for Blackberry and iPhone devices that meet the Qi specification of the Wireless Power Consortium, which was announced last year. The spec has advanced from version 0.95 to 1.0, too.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
HP Backs Memristor Mass Production
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
neo12 writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Hynix Semiconductor, the world’s second-largest producer of memory chips, to mass produce memristors for the first time. Quoting the BBC:
“HP says the first memristors should be widely available in about three years. The devices started as a theoretical prediction in 1971 but HP’s demonstration and publication of a real working device has put them on a possible roadmap to replace memory chips or even hard drives. … Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, explained that the potential benefits lie in the fact that memristors are ‘much simpler in principle than transistors. Because they are formed as a film between two wires, they don’t have to be implanted into the silicon surface — as do transistors, which form the storage locations in Flash — so they could be built in layers in 3D,’ he told BBC News. ‘Of course, the devil is in the detail, and I don’t think the manufacturing challenges have been fully exposed yet.’”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Exclusive Gallery: 1983 Nintendo Family Computer Teardown
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
In 1983 Nintendo released the Famicon console. Now 26 years later we tear it apart to see what makes it tick.
Electric Kettles Are Steeped in the Future
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
Blazing fast (four minutes and nine seconds!), streamlined and full of highlights, Cuisinart’s PerfecTemp puts its kettle competition to shame.
Samsung Introduces Its 7-Inch Tablet to Rival iPad
Sep 3, 2010 Hardware
Samsung has announced the launch of a tablet that could become the first major Android-powered challenger to the Apple iPad.