Just a customizable fridge that's powered by light... RIM's new CEO on Android hardware: 'they are all the same' To say it's been an interesting year for Research in Motion and BlackBerry would certainly be an understatement. It was about 10 months ago that we first learned that RIM's tablet would be capable of running full-fledged Android applications, and suddenly we had to start caring about what was coming out of Waterloo. This week RIM has undergone probably its most important change since realizing SurePress wasn't a sure thing -- co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie stepped down as co-CEOs, and chief operating officer Thorsten Heins has taken their place in the head office. There have been calls for RIM to adopt Android. There have been calls fro RIM to adopt Windows Phone. Really, everybody seems to know what's best for RIM. Our pals at CrackBerry got some one-on-one time with Heins this week, and we're learning a little more about his position on Android -- mainly that he's unimpressed with the hardware on which it's running.
Here's what Heins told CrackBerry's Kevin Michaluk: HTC Studio unveiled – tasked to help the company regain its edge. In order to combat the company’s recent financial downturn, HTC has announced a new group within the company that will report directly to CEO Peter Chou and will be tasked with developing “key products” for the company. Dubbed “Studio,” the new team will be made up of HTC’s most talented engineers and designers in order to get HTC back in front of the competition and “regain the edge in products.”
It’s unclear if HTC Studio is already operational, but this news does confirm all the recent stories we’ve reported about HTC focusing more on hero phones in 2012. HTC will also be introducing new products that feature a variety of components sourced from multiple companies in order to give HTC as much flexibility as possible to compete. In the past, HTC has only used chips from Qualcomm to power its Android phones, a strategy which hurt HTC last year as competitors turned to NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chip to power their high-end devices. Fujitsu Lifebook 2013.. wait.. what? 10% of South Koreans own a Samsung Galaxy S II. In case you hadn't noticed, Samsung is big.
Really big. And nowhere is that more evident than on its home turf in South Korea, where the company is a source of national pride. Not without reason, either: Samsung says that its 2011 workhorse smartphone the Galaxy S II has sold five million units in the country of 48.9 million people. In case your math's a little fuzzy, that means that just over ten percent of all men, women and children in South Korea carry a Galaxy S II. And why not? So what's next for the Galaxy S line?
[device id=56] [via SammyHub]
Digital infasctructure. Digital. Mechanic. Man gets smartphone dock built into prosthetic arm - Telegraph. New kind of high-temperature photonic crystal could someday power everything from smartphones to spacecraft | | Buy Rare Earth Industrial Metals, Buy Silver, Buy GoldBuy Rare Earth Industrial Metals, Buy Silver, Buy Gold. A microscope image of the tungsten photonic crystal structure reveals the precise uniform spacing of cavities formed in the material, which are tuned to specific wavelengths of light. Image courtesy of Y.X. Yeng et al. A team of MIT researchers has developed a way of making a high-temperature version of a kind of materials called photonic crystals, using metals such as tungsten or tantalum. The new materials — which can operate at temperatures up to 1200 degrees Celsius — could find a wide variety of applications powering portable electronic devices, spacecraft to probe deep space, and new infrared light emitters that could be used as chemical detectors and sensors.
Compared to earlier attempts to make high-temperature photonic crystals, the new approach is “higher performance, simpler, robust and amenable to inexpensive large-scale production,” says Ivan Celanovic ScD ’06, senior author of a paper describing the work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. MWC 2011: What to expect from HTC. Robotics. Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots. One Per Cent: Japan sends robots into Fukushima nuclear plant. David Hambling, contributor Hostile environment. Smoke rises from reactor buildings in this satellite image of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant taken on 17 March (Image: DigitalGlobe) The team working to contain the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant now includes a robot. The machine, known as Monirobo ("Monitoring Robot"), was on the scene today, according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun (in Japanese). Monirobo is designed to operate at radiation levels too high for humans. The 1.5-metre robot runs on a pair of caterpillar tracks and has a manipulator arm for removing obstacles and collecting samples.
Monirobo weighs some 600 kilos and is limited to a speed of 2.4 kilometres per hour. The robot was developed by Japan's Nuclear Safety Technology Centre in association with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry after the Tokaimura nuclear accident in 1999 in which two workers died.
Laptop.