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Microsoft made it easier to create robots on Thursday bylaunching the final release of its Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4, which moves out of beta status. The free software can power moving robots that can “see” and understand their surroundings with the Xbox Kinect accessory. Using a Windows laptop, Kinect sensor and robotic base, developers can create relatively inexpensive but functional robots for the home or office.
Using the $1,250 Eddie Robot Platform from Parallax, Harsha Kikkeri, a member of the Microsoft robotics team, built a robot butler of sorts: The device can follow him on command. Kikkeri notes that he programmed the robot to follow because that’s what young children do once they become mobile. It’s a clever example and gets better when the robotic butler serves up drinks and snacks to Kikkeri’s pals. For the Star Wars fans out there: Shades of R2-D2 on Jabba’s pleasure barge, no?
When the Kinect arrived, I had a feeling it wouldn’t be limited to the Xbox 360 gaming console. Why? It added another set of sensors, similar to those found in today’s smartphones, that I suggested could power robots (subscription required). Since I wrote that, we’ve seen Kinect used in robots ranging from $499 all the way up to $400,000.
All it takes is a Windows laptop, the programming knowledge and a way to bring movement to a Kinect sensor, and you’ve got the foundation for a useful robot. Once you add in a near-limitless amount of data — support for cloud-based connectivity and information retrieval — you’ve got a robot that not only can see its surroundings but can also determine what the various objects around it are. Maybe Kikkeri’s next step will be to have his robotic butler tell you how many calories are in the drinks it delivers.
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The iPad’s new screen is a stunner. That’s really all you need to know about the new iPad (yes, that’s the name). That, and a reminder that pricing still starts at $499 for a 16GB Wi-Fi model, with 4G starting at $629.
Forget all of the minor tweaks and incremental updates Apple has made to its third-generation tablet. The faster processor, the upgrade to 4G data, the improved camera–it’s all housekeeping. It’s the stuff it had to do. It’s the stuff any manufacturer could have done
Now, increasing the iPad’s screen resolution to 2,048×1,536 pixels that exceeds any current tablet or laptop–that’s a move only Apple has the scale and industry muscle to pull off. At this point, if Apple decides that the next iPad will be made from unicorn tears, I wouldn’t bet against it.
But in this pre-unicorn era, we’re stuck with the new iPad and a design that is virtually indistinguishable from 2011’s iPad 2. The tablet’s glass and aluminum construction is still 9.5 inches tall and 7.31 inches wide. Thickness is now 0.37 inch, weighing in at 1.5 pounds. You get the same home button on the bottom of the screen, and a volume rocker on the right side along with the mute switch/rotation lock. Up top you have the sleep/wake button and headphone output, and the bottom edge retains the 30-pin port.
Apple knocked the camera quality up to 5-megapixel with 1080p video recording and backside illumination. The front-facing camera remains the same.
The screen
Remember the first time you saw an HD television? You were probably excited about the future but also a little sad that your current TV’s days were numbered. For tablet fans, a glance at the iPad’s new screen may offer this same emotional cocktail of envy and loss.
But what did you expect? You take a product that is 90 percent screen and a company hangs its reputation on making the prettiest products around, and you’re bound to arrive at this: the point when Apple ruins other screens for you.
And let’s be clear, here. Not only does the new iPad’s QXGA screen wreck your expectations for tablet screens, but your laptop or desktop computer screen will also look shabby by comparison. If you think I’m making too much of it, you can see for yourself soon enough. But as you find yourself wandering the Apple Store aisles wringing your hands together, whispering, “My precious,” don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Now, this isn’t the first time Apple has played the resolution card with its product announcements. With the advent of the iPhone 4, Apple introduced its Retina Display, boasting a 960×640-pixel resolution that was remarkable at the time. But for all its beauty, the experience of looking at a 3.5-inch screen compared with the new iPad’s 9.7-inch screen is like comparing a keyhole with a window.
iPhoto comes to Apple’s third-generation iPad.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
As such, they lend themselves to different content. A Facebook update is no more convenient on an iPad 3 than on any smartphone, but the Maps app on the iPad confers a feeling of omnipotence no other mobile device can match. Games, movies, photos, and magazines all take on a realism that seems almost absurd on a handheld device. It’s only a matter of time before someone gets motion sickness from this thing.
What else is new?
OK, enough of my love poem for the iPad’s new screen. Apple made a few other notable (if predictable) improvements to the iPad.
The iPad’s processor has been upgraded to an A5X. While the CPU remains dual-core, the graphics processor has been beefed up to quad-core. This seems to be a necessary measure for juggling four times the pixels of the previous model.
I never thought the idea of Siri on the iPad was as natural a fit as it is for the iPhone. Luckily, Apple feels the same way. While Siri won’t be coming to the iPad, voice dictation will. That said, voice dictation on a tablet still strikes me as weird. I’m assuming you won’t jog with your iPad and want to transcribe your every brilliant utterance, the way you would with an iPhone. Also, if someone asks you where to find great Thai food nearby, your phone is likely to be your first point of reference. Still, voice dictation is a welcome addition, and I suspect it will come in handy for dictating e-mails and bypassing the touch-screen keyboard when searching for information online.
I still contend that it’s a bit silly waving a tablet around to capture photos and video, but I understand the counterpoint and I’ll admit that the iPad’s screen makes a better display than any camera or smartphone.
Checking out CNET’s site on the new iPad.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
Bluetooth 4.0 is another feature that has trickled over from the iPhone 4S. With it comes the promise of one-touch pairing, and huge improvements in battery efficiency.
And finally, for all of you jet-setting, mobile-data-devouring types, the iPad is now available in a 4G LTE model. Prices for 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB come in at $629, $729, and $829, respectively.
What’s missing?
As far as disappointments go, Apple could have been more aggressive with its processor performance, or perhaps brought the iPad’s cameras up to iPhone 4S specs. Perhaps it could have gone thinner or done more to extend its lead in battery life, which Apple claims is still 10 hours, or 9 hours on 4G.
Heck, let’s also throw in the age-old complaints about Apple’s reluctance to include microSD memory expansion, a dedicated port for video output, or a truly universal charging connection. Oh yeah, and Adobe Flash support while you’re at it.
Personally, there’s really nothing I can point to and say, “Apple has clearly doomed itself.” The company took its already excellent product and updated it with a gorgeous screen.
I suppose the only missed opportunity I can point to is the lack of a Kindle-priced competitor. The rumor mill suggests that Apple may release a smaller tablet later this year, but until then, it seems that Apple’s only answer to the budget tablet craze is its $199 Apple iPod Touch.
Buy it or skip it?
If you have an original iPad, by all means upgrade to the iPad 3. The used market for first-generation iPads is still alive and well and will hopefully afford you at least $100 toward the new iPad that is nearly half the thickness and four times the pixels as the original iPad.
You can buy the third-gen iPad with or without 4G LTE, in three storage capacities.(Credit: Apple)
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57390836-37/apples-new-ipad-hands-on/#ixzz1oVNcqgxw
Google leaves no leaf unturned when it comes to providing a great user experience and also challenging its rivals with something new. So continuing this trend, from today, Google’s Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore will be a part of Google Play.
And Check some coll exiting features of google play…
Android marketplace will also gonna change to GOOGLE PLAY
Check out this…!
Flip phones were ultra hot at the end of the 90′s and early 2000′s. As long as you weren’t a stuffy “business” person who owned a Blackberry or Palm, you probably had a flip phone. Then, Apple’s iPhone came and changed the world of cell phones completely.
Smart phones took over and the flip phone died.
It’s back. Kind of.
With 3 flexible touchscreens, a triangular design, and custom Android interface, this creative and functional design gives us a glimpse of how smart phones might be flipped themselves.
Looking for an Amazing Cutting Edge Cell Phone? See What’s New.
Excited by what you’ve just seen? Want a killer new cell phone? See What’s New.
While not launching the next Samsung flagship at MWC in Barcelona was probably the right choice for Samsung, that doesn’t change the fact that we’re itching with anticipation over when the Galaxy S III will show its pretty little edge-to-edge face.
We know most of the specs (well, rumored ones at least), which means we know we’ll see a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, a quad-core Samsung Exynos CPU running at 1.5GHz, and a little 4G LTE icon. What we don’t know, however, is when we’ll see any of this.
But reports are now leaking out of Korea, citing Samsung’s global marketing and advertising agency Cheil Worldwide, claiming that the phone we hate to wait for should show up in April. Things don’t get any more specific than that unfortunately, but this still gives us plenty to work with.
For one thing, we already knew that launch date rumors were circling around the March/April time frame. Secondly, Samsung itself confirmed that the phone would arrive “before Summer,” which leads us to believe that narrowing the launch period down to April seems correct.
We’ve also heard that the S III will launch simultaneously in over 50 major markets, rather than seeing an incremental roll-out like the S II. This means that whatever launch date is given will likely apply to us in the States, instead of Samsung’s home team getting early access.
Announcement of the launching – 22nd of September, in UK – brings OnLive officially in Europe! The event will take place at the Eurogamer Expo, in London, and it promised to reveal a package of over 100 new games for games devourers.
Let’s take a short look of what does cloud gaming actually mean for OnLive:
– Easy access from anywhere
– Gamers can play from any device: PC, mac, TV or any tablet
– Users don’t have to hold an up-to-date system configuration to play a “last generation game”, because their system is just an interface of the game.
The game is actually played in real time, on the OnLive’s powerful servers, within its datacenters. It will be needed an OnLive system which adapts games to run on the TVs
– There is access to free instant demo-games for you to play or for you to watch as others play, with the possibility of voice chat
– No more game-downloading, no further need of disks or any other special hardware
– Facebook integration.
Broadband is a key-factor regarding video quality and the required speed is 2Mbps.
The issue that came out in USA was also raised in UK – the delay. This is caused by lag and latency, which was officially recognized by the CEO of OnLive (Steve Perlman) to be 35-40ms, though in the US there were found played games at 200ms latency.
Microsoft’s history at CES, remixed. Watch our complete coverage of CES 2012 at
Like the exact opposite of a real commercial airline, free-to-play Microsoft Flight gets gamers up in the air and flying as quickly and painlessly as possible — or at least as painlessly as Games for Windows Live will allow. It does a commendable job of showing newcomers the ropes, and letting them freely take in the sights of beautiful Hawai’i… and that’s about all. Free content is as thin as the air at 30,000 feet, and Flight will need more than this to fulfill its huge potential of reinvigorating interest in the neglected genre.
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We love to envision what our mobile devices will look like in the future. Imagine if your cell phone wasn’t simply a rectangle, but was bent for you to wear as a watch. This seemingly crazy idea isn’t as far in the future as you might think, according to Samsung. An executive at Samsung has confirmed the mass production of flexible OLED screens in the next year, meaning some time in 2012, or early 2013 at the latest.
These crazy looking displays have quite a few advantages other than their novelty. They do not contain any glass, so shattering your phone would be a thing of the past. Another advantage is the freedom this technology will give to cell phone designers. The possibilities are endless, including phone watches, tablets you can fold and paper thin displays. It is likely, however, that the first devices featuring a flexible display will be the rounded displays that were not otherwise possible. Even if the screen is flexible, though, the battery and CPU will have to be taken into consideration. How would you use a flexible AMOLED screen? Shout out in the comments.
Technology Inspire 
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on March 3, 2012