Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

It’s one thing to see competition unnecessarily push more and more megapixels into palm-sized cameras, but this game of leapfrog is one we can actually get behind. A pair of giant solar plants will soon be installed in San Luis Obispo County in California, covering 12.5 square miles and promising to generate around 800 megawatts of power. OptiSolar will be responsible for laying enough panels to generate 550 megawatts, while SunPower — the same company associated with the 14 megawatt installation at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada (pictured) — will provide the other 250. The energy will eventually be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, though any sort of pricing arrangements are strictly under wraps for now. C’mon Nevada, you gonna let the Golden State do you like that?

[Via Slashdot]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Just under two years ago, researchers at Boeing-Spectrolab managed to achieve 40.7% solar cell efficiency. Two years later, scientists at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory have demonstrated their nerve by trumpeting an all new world record… one that’s 0.1% points better than the last. Yes, your new record now sits at 40.8% — tremendous progress, wouldn’t you say? Looking outside of the numbers, you’ll find that these cells differ “significantly” from the prior record holders, which enable them to be thinner, lighter, cheaper and altogether swanker. That’s it for now folks — come back in a couple years, we hear 40.9% is just around the bend.

[Via CNET]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Household

Think your house is green? Think again. Japan’s own Nihon Telecommunication System has just revealed a line of windowpanes that actually include integrated photovoltaic cells. The windows are aimed at the (ritzy) residential housing market, and folks that snag a few will reportedly be able to power a PC and recharge their cellphones simply by tapping into the energy generated by these units. Additionally, the glass is designed to shun most of the sunlight from coming into your abode, thereby lowering air conditioning costs and satisfying your needs as an introvert. So, what’s the pain for helping out Mother Earth? Around $1,900 per square meter of windowpane — ouch.

[Via CrunchGear]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Home Entertainment

ESPN’s unleashing The Ultimate Remote, developed by tvCompass, complete with 2.2-inch QVGA LCD screen and 802.11 b/g WiFi stuffed in a 6.5 oz package. It’s certainly a serious contender with the Harmony One — and priced like it, at $300. The marketing info claims no PC is required for setup, recharging via USB, an internet browser with real time access to scores, fantasy info and TV listings for broadcast, cable and satellite from click365’s wireless partners. There’s even a messaging feature for texting from remote to remote, email, or to a cellphone. We got a glimpse of it at Microsoft’s booth during CES, and while it claims “Advanced Microsoft Windows operating software” it’s not talking about SideShow. It reminds us a lot of the Ricavision VAVE100 MCE/SideShow remote, but with a slightly different feature set. Father’s Day is coming up and suddenly walking over to the computer (or keeping a laptop or PDA/phone on the couch) is sounding like a lot of unnecessary work. Check after the break for a bigger pic with keypad breakdown, or head to Amazon to preorder.

[Via Electronista]

Continue reading ESPN unveils The Ultimate Remote, is WiFi worth $300?

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Original post by Richard Lawler

Filed under: GPS

Check it, Europeans — Clarion has just dumped a new duo of PNDs on the market, and they’re both geared up to route you all over your humble lands. It appears that the only major difference between the MAP680 and MAP780 are the actual maps loaded in; the former is available in four regional versions, while the latter features a full 43 European countries. Specs wise, we’re lookin’ at a 4.3-inch widescreen display, text-to-speech, built-in TMC tuner, 3D display of buildings / POIs, lane assistant, Bluetooth (with phone book transfer and audio streaming), a 400MHz CPU, multimedia player and 2GB (MAP780) / 1GB (MAP680) of internal memory. No word on a price or any of that good stuff just yet, but feel free to get more acquainted with the pair in the gallery below.

[Via NaviGadget]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Peripherals, Portable Audio

Chances are that if you do your duties on Vista and rely on one of Creative’s sound cards to get your dance on, you may have become frustrated by the firm’s inability to offer up a driver package that lived up to those loosed for Windows XP. ‘Course, if that rings a bell, you’re probably not too concerned — you know, thanks to those unofficial (but totally functional) drivers brought to you by Daniel_K. Unfortunately for users suddenly excited to gain some extra utility from their device, Creative has hopped on the offensive and is forbidding said compiler from distributing the firm’s technology / IP (not to mention collecting donations), and it’s also scouring the ‘net to remove other links to the software. Granted, we fully understand Creative’s right to disallow the distribution of untested, potentially harmful third-party drivers, but c’mon, how about redirecting the energy you’re spending on shutting this guy down to actually developing drivers that your customers are demanding?

[Via Slashdot, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Laptops

Quite literally, we’ve been inundated with e-mails from Alienware Area-51 m15x owners who have shelled out thousands of bucks in order to take home a serious piece of gaming hardware, only to find that their machine is overheating and / or developing cracks in the frame for no apparent reason. If you’ll recall, this isn’t the first time the laptop aficionados over at Notebook Review got all worked up over an issue with the m15x, but it seems the latest round of quirks have pushed the community over the proverbial edge. So, have any of you out there awoke to see your machine slightly more damaged than it was the night before? Are things getting way to heated for anyone’s comfort? Let us know what’s up in comments below.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Read - Area-51 m15x owners experience overheating and cracking issues
Read - Alienware’s reply to the issue (we’re warned it could be a hoax)

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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Household

Energizer is definitely on the right track with it’s new Light-on-Demand modular LED lighting system, which features battery-backed LED light units that plug into a variety of fixtures and keep going even when the power goes out, but we’ll wait until the designers can shake a little more ugly off this kit before we bring it home. The line is launching with several standard fixtures like the wired desk lamp and wireless wall sconce shown here, as well as a wireless motion detector and several emergency lighting solutions. Energizer says the gear was developed in response to research that showed people were “frustrated” by power outages and wanted lamps that stayed lit even during blackouts — which seems fairly obvious to us, but we’re not lighting researchers. Light-on-Demand units should be popping up in Targets later this month, but if Energizer really wanted to make a go of this, they’d hit us with a battery-backed LED light bulb, no?

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Cellphones

It’s pretty clear HTC customers and Engadget readers both are none too impressed with the manufacturer’s decision to omit the drivers necessary to enable hardware video acceleration on a number of their Qualcomm MSM 7xxx-based devices. We heard a little bit from HTC on the topic earlier this week, but we wanted to know more specifically: do they plan to meet consumers’ requests and release drivers for these devices? (And if not, why?) Finally, what’s going to be done about this video acceleration driver issue in the future? Here’s the response we got to these questions (and the reader poll we posted):

“HTC does plan to offer software upgrades that will increase feature functionality, over the air wireless speeds, and other enhancements for some of the phones being criticized, but we do not anticipate including any additional support for the video issues cited in customer complaints. It is important for customers to understand that bringing this functionality to market is not a trivial driver update and requires extensive software development and time.

HTC will utilize hardware video acceleration like the ATI Imageon in many upcoming products. Our users have made it clear that they expect our products to offer an improved visual experience, and we have included this feedback into planning and development of future products.”

More after the break.

Continue reading HTC further responds to video driver issue, will improve future products

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Original post by Ryan Block

Filed under: Cellphones, Features, Portable Video

In case you haven’t been following all the drama over at Engadget Mobile, Taiwanese smartphone kingpin HTC is seeing a rather unexpected customer backlash over sub-par video playback in recent devices employing Qualcomm’s MSM7xxx chipsets — apparently, handsets like the popular TyTN II and Touch Cruise were purposely shipped without drivers that would take advantage of the embedded ATI Imageon acceleration hardware. And now, instead of issuing a mea culpa or at least providing the drivers for a small fee, HTC has basically suggested in a recent statement that consumers will need to upgrade to future products if they want “high-resolution video support.” Obviously customers are outraged, with the statement only fueling further talk of a class action lawsuit.

We think it’s time for the Engadget community at large to weigh in on this snowballing controversy: what (if anything) should HTC have done differently in order to maintain the proactive, customer-friendly image that it has up to this point been known for?

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Original post by Evan Blass

Filed under: Portable Audio

While most seem to have learned from past date-related issues, at least some folks at Sirius appear to have overlooked the fact that this year is a leap year, and the company’s Stiletto 100 unit is now having trouble keeping up as a result. As numerous users have reported in the Sirius Backstage forums, the Stiletto has been dragging a day behind ever since the New Year kicked in, which, in addition to being an annoyance, has posed some serious problems for anyone doing scheduled recordings. Now, after a bit of silence on the matter, Sirius is reportedly telling customers that there is in fact a problem, and that it’ll fix itself on March 1st. Unfortunately, Sirius’s only “solution” in the meantime is to tell users to set up recordings for each day of the week.

[Thanks, Bill]

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Cellphones

Thanks to another set of ambitious iPhone hackers, we’ve officially got video on Apple’s wonder-device (that somehow omitted video to begin with). It’s not much right now, but if you want, you can see your phone recording five succulent seconds of real-deal video at around 15 FPS. The developers say this is just a proof of concept, and they’ve been able to get up to 45 FPS on the device — so hopefully we can expect a more robust version soon (like, say, one that lets you save the recording). Check the video after the break to see the gorgeous work in action.

Continue reading iPhone gets video recording capabilities

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Joshua Topolsky

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Just under a fortnight ago, we found that the audio input pins on the iPod touch were indeed active and able to record audio. Now, a modder has constructed a smallish dock appendage that plugs directly into the touch and enables you to input audio. Apparently, the gizmo sports a built-in microphone and pre-amp, which could theoretically be used in VoIP applications or for recording simple voice notes. It seems as though the creator is offering these up to anyone interested, but you’ll have to drop him an email to find out how much such an accessory will run you.

[Via Digg, thanks RadicalxEdward]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Not that it took a lot of convincing for us or anything, but it turns out the audio input pins on the iPod touch are apparently active and able to record audio after all. Unfortunately the site detailing the relatively simple hack has already been demolished by info-hungry touch owners, but this certainly opens an interesting door or two. Next stop: figuring out how to get the headphone jack to do the same.

[Via TUAW]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Ryan Block