Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: Ask Engadget, Displays

Tim from Australia sent in a question via our super-sophisticated submission method (that’d be e-mailing one in to ask at engadget dawt com) regarding e-readers, and given that Sony just pushed out a new one of its own, we found this one particularly timely:

“I’m starting a PhD next year and I’m looking to get an e-book reader so I can read PDFs of journal articles on the bus. It would have to be readable in direct sunlight and have a display large enough to read pages of about 400 to 500 words. Stylishness would also be nice. I don’t know the going rate for decent e-readers but I’d be prepared to spend up to $500.”

So, intellects — what’s the best piece of kit to snag for visually inhaling those scholarly articles in PDF form? Will it handle the occasional FCC user manual, too? Because that’s really important, you know.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Transmeta’s wild ride is apparently coming to a end — having given up the chip game entirely in favor of lucrative patent licensing deals, it sounds like the company’s board is tired of being called out by investors and looking to sell off what’s left, saying it’s a way to “enhance value for all its stockholders.” Considering that AMD owns a $7.5M chunk of stock and most of Transmeta’s tech is already licensed out to NVIDIA and Intel, those seem like they’d be likely suitors, but you never know with these guys — we’ll see how this all plays out in the end.

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Om Malik has a video interview with Skype CEO Josh Silverman. Om asks about Skype on the Apple iPhone to which the Skype CEO simply says “Stay tuned…” Om presses some more, but is unable to get him to crack. Ah well. While we wait for the Skype gurus to get an official Skype client for the iPhone, at least we have some workarounds to get Skype running on the iPhone.

Tags: Apple, CEO, iPhone, Josh Silverman, mobile phone, om malik, Skype, VoIP

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Original post by nafiz

Filed under: Displays

LaCie plays with a lot of different products, like molten external HDDs and goofy UBS hubs, but is totally serious when it comes to displays. Its latest offering is a trio of professional pixel-pushers, the 720, 724, and 730, growing from 20- to 30-inches as you go. The $2,500 720 is 4:3, delivering a pathetic resolution of 1600 x 1200, while the other two stretch to 16:10, 1920 x 1200 on the $3,300 724 and 2560 x 1600 in the top-of-the-line $6,500 730. The top two models feature a 1000:1 contrast ratio, 6ms response time, 14-bit gamma correction, and accurate reproduction of 125 percent the NTSC gamut (guaranteed via included blue eye pro hardware calibration). That’s a huge leap over the paltry 10-bit correction and 92 percent NTSC supported by the old 324 — for a mere three times the cost.

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Original post by Tim Stevens

Rumours abound that the search giant is set to snap up Digg for $200m.

Original post by Mike Slocombe

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

We’d already heard that the Cowon A3 would be getting a bump to 80GB, and the company has now not only gotten official about a US release for it, but dropped word of new 80GB Q5W as well. You can look for the upgraded A3 to land in the US first on May 26th for $440 (a good deal less than the $691 Euro-to-dollar conversion we heard about initially), with the 80GB Q5W following in late June for $600. Both models are otherwise identical to their less capacious counterparts.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Quite a lot has gone on in Pioneer’s world since it wowed us all with the Project KURO at CES, but one thing hasn’t changed: it’s dedication to world-class black levels. Announced alongside several other fine pieces of kit today in NYC, the 2008 KURO family will posses black levels “five times deeper than the previous KURO.” According to company bigwig Paul Meyhoefer, the ultimate goal is “pure, absolute black,” and it’s well on its way with the latest line. You’ll also find a feature dubbed Optimum Mode, which “simultaneously monitors video and room light conditions” and then makes the most appropriate adjustments based on what it senses. Sadly, most of the nitty-gritty details have been omitted for now, but you can count on the June-bound models checking in at just 3.7-inches thick, sporting 1080p panels alone (no 720p), coming in 50- ($4,000) / 60-inch ($5,500) sizes (no 42-inch) and arriving with a new remote / redesigned HD interface. Jump on past the break for the full release, but we’re warning you, there’s an awful lot of gloating down there.

Continue reading Second-generation Pioneer KURO unveiled: 5x deeper black levels

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Desktops

Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: we can’t deny that the Iron Man Mark I case mod took some serious work (and skill). That being the case, it’d take a pretty hardcore fan of the character (or the new flick, we guess) to love this one with reckless abandon. Reportedly, the whole shebang was built in just three weeks, and while we’re still waiting for the full work log, feel free to hit the read link for an array of angles.

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Gaming

Sure, we’ve already got a wooden SNES, but sometimes we want to get a little rustic on some original SMB, and that’s where Parker Dillmann’s wooden NES comes in handy. Built around the guts of a Yobo NES clone and a 3.5-inch LCD, Dillmann did some major custom woodworking to get this rig going, and he says he’s already got ideas for his next case. Tons more pics at the read link.

[Via Ben Heck]

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Oh great lorf of frames per second shooters. Casio’s Exilim Pro EX-F1 just snagged a ship date. It’ll cost you ¥130,000 (tax inclusive) when it hits on March 28th in Japan. Still, we expect many people will be swayed by this 6 megapixel novelty with the ability to burst at 60fps while shooting up to 1200fps video. Still no US or European release where it’s expected to pop for $999 (pre tax), but it can’t be long now.

[Via I4U]

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Gaming

Alright, things are starting to get really good with these hacks. Just after seeing a GameCube / Wii Tetris, Linux build, SNES emulator, and the first homebrew MP3 player for Nintendo’s money-maker, we’re getting a totally radical, native Genesis / Megadrive emulator for the console. Coder-extraordinaire Eke-Eke has created not only the first of its kind for the Wii (and GameCube), but it’s also the first ever that’s capable of playing Virtua Racing, a milestone in Genesis emulation. This latest feat utilizes the same backdoor Twilight Princess hack, which is proving to be the best thing that happened to Wii development since… well… ever. Hit the read link and check it out yourself.

[Thanks, Craig]

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Gaming

Make no mistake, Nintendo’s Wii has been hacked to pieces, but there’s nothing like an all new method that keeps the soldering iron residing in the utility drawer to get us all hot and bothered. Unfortunately, what you can see in the video waiting after the jump is only a proof of concept at the moment, but it does show that Twilight Princess can be exploited and homebrew code can be booted directly from an SD card. Also of note, certain versions of the game — most notably, RVL-RZDE-0A-2 USA — have reportedly been found to not play nice with the aforementioned hack, but hey, it’s a start. Click on through!

[Via Exophase, thanks zshadow]

Continue reading Wii Twilight hack could enable homebrew booting from SD cards

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Cellphones

The well known and respected iPhone hacker Nate True has discovered some very, very interesting information concerning Apple’s latest update, 1.1.3. According to Mr. True, the boys and girls in Cupertino have all but prepped the device’s OS for native applications, altering the functionality of SpringBoard to display additional apps, changing the ownership of applications to a unified “mobile” user, and moving the location of preferences to the accompanying non-root directory. Additionally, SpringBoard now boasts widget support via a class called SBWidgetApplication. All of these technical and seemingly minor details will apparently make it easier for developers to create new applications for the phone, though Nate says they’ll also break existing native apps in the process. All we ask is that developers get those NES and SNES emulators ported quickly and safely to the new system.

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky

XO Communications tomorrow will announce bandwidth-based pricing offering for converged IP services. Instead of paying per minute for voice calls like both traditional TDM and even current VoIP offerings do, XO will be completely bandwidth-based pricing. Considering that voice is simply another application riding over IP, it certainly makes sense, but the premium of charging per-minute rates or per line rates even for VoIP calls is a hard habit to break. It’s just too lucrative to the service providers to change their billing practices.

XO Communications certainly changes the way voice should be charged. Whether you go to foxnews.com, cnn.com, or make a VoIP call, you’re using the same Internet data pipe (more or less since peering affects how packets are routed). Granted, the last leg needs to connect to the PSTN in most but not all cases  - SIP-to-SIP calling in-network being one exception. PSTN termination does have costs and maintainence associated with it.

Under its new XO IPfolio, XO Communications tomorrow will launch XO IP Flex and the nationwide availability of XO SIP. The new XO IPfolio includes XO IP Flex, XO SIP, XO One iPBX, XO MPLS IP-VPN, and XO IP Flex with VPN. XO espouses gow the XO IPfolio "introduces a unique and simplified pricing concept for businesses to better manage the consolidation of their voice and data networks over a single IP infrastructure."

Customers simply select an IP port speed from 1.5 to 45 Mbps, a calling plan and any additional features. Because voice is just another application on the IP port, customers pay nothing for incremental lines or voice channels provisioned within the port speed they have with their service.

Will XO succeed in this pricing model? Too early to tell, but they have broken the pricing paradigm the way voice is charged and you can expect others to soon follow.

Tags: bandwidth, pricing, VoIP, XO Communications, XO IP Flex, XO IP Flex with VPN, XO MPLS IP-VPN, XO One iPBX, XO SIP

Original post by Eric

Filed under: Robots

A totally ingenious robotics researcher named Sylvain Calinon has created what might be the perfect storm of art and science — a robot that can recognize and then draw portraits of human subjects. The bot, named HOAP-3, is able to distinguish a human face, take a still frame of that image, and then create a drawing by (robotic) hand based on what it sees. The demonstration is a part of designer Calinon’s research into creating robots which can learn through imitation, or in scenarios where they must react to humans. Unfortunately for us fleshpiles, it’s only a matter of time before this thing starts doing hilarious caricatures accentuating our worst features. Watch the robot work in the amazing video after the break, and check the read link for a lot more information on the HOAP-3 project.

[Via technabob]

Continue reading Robotic artist does portraits, hoping to get into nudes

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Original post by Joshua Topolsky