10 Androids That Outmuscle the iPhone. Apple's iPhone had a good run atop the smartphone league, but 10 Google Androids aim to bury the tuckered-out leader this year. Motorola Mobility, Samsung, HTC and LG have promised to deliver supercharged, ultra-thin, 4G Android devices in the coming weeks and months. But not always. Before the mobile phone industry got all busy with design makeovers and tummy tucks, there were -- and still are -- some delightfully hideous phones that represented the other side of the beauty trend. The Street has gone back through the past decade to dig up some of the best examples of designs that make you wince and stare in disbelief. The clueless stylings, the flights of fancy into odd shapes, the obsession with square versus rounded -- it is a wonderfully colorful history.
The giant Android attack features bigger screens, better cameras, faster processors and speedier 4G connections than the upcoming iPhone. Here's a look at the top 10 Androids that could dwarf the iPhone: Samsung Nexus S, Sprint. HOORAY -- INTERNETS FOR EVERYONE!: The $25 Computer On A USB Stick. 'Raspberry Pi' is a $25 computer on a USB drive. It's also delicious, so I'm more than a little miffed I don't have anything but a half gallon of Juicy Juice and a single expired yogurt in the fridge right now. Oh -- what's this?! Moldy cottage cheese. *tastes, begins retching in sink* What? You never know! [Game developer David] Braben has developed a tiny USB stick PC that has an HDMI port on one end and a USB port on the other. David plans to distribute the computers through the Rasberry Pi Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at teaching programming to children.
Hit the jump for another shot and video explanation by David (NOT after the dentist) himself. The Raspberry Pi Foundation andGame developer David Braben creates a USB stick PC for $25 [geek] viaA $25 PC On a USB Stick [slashdot] Thanks to JGD, who once made a chocolate-covered banana on a stick that couldn't access the internet but could access my stomach. Video: Predator Camera Studies You, Tracks You Relentlessly. The Predator tracking software, as any good predator should be, is an incredibly keen hunter. Once shown any object, such as a face or a car, the camera learns to recognize and follow the object with frightening accuracy. The algorithm was developed by Zdenek Kalal, a PhD student at the University of Surrey in England, who we can see rolling around on his desk chair in this video demonstration of the camera's tracking abilities.
After selecting something for Predator to focus on with a bounding box, the system begins recognizing patterns, learning how that object looks at different distances and angles, and even finding it amongst a sea of similar objects. When Kalal tells Predator to track his face, it is able to pick him out of a page full of small photos of other people. Kalal does an excellent job of explaining the potential uses for the technology, moving beyond the obvious implications for security and identifying criminals. [University of Surrey via Wired] How It Works: 3-D TV Without Glasses. Skip to main content 3-D Without Glasses MediMation One hitch in bringing 3-D motion pictures to home theaters has been the glasses—people hate them.
Yet viewers have been enjoying motionless 3-D images unassisted since at least the 1960s. At that time, VariVue was printing postcards covered with a lenticular array that sent each eye a slightly different view. This year Toshiba demonstrated a similar kind of glasses-free 3-D display, and Nintendo released its 3DS. Click the image above for an animation detailing how a parallax barrier glasses-free display works. More How It Works: This month's How It Works section is brought to you by Digi-Key. Recommended by Photo Galleries Rss + More Photo Galleries 14 Comments nrdybrdy 03/24/2011 at 5:38 pm cool... Log in or register to post comments Permalink prabadal 03/25/2011 at 8:16 am next step: multiplex what viewer at each position can see Permalink hackerslayer787 03/28/2011 at 10:12 am just thought i would point out, they are watching avatar XD Permalink Nix.
The Energy Harvesting Gadgetry Of A Ducati-Beating Superbike. In November 2009, after spending three months recovering from a broken pelvis, Chris Yates, a motorcycle racer, engineer, and defense contractor, began staging his reentry into racing. This time, he chose a new niche, where his training as an engineer would be a particular asset: electric motorcycles. He started by converting a gaspowered Suzuki GSX-R600 to run on a 194 horsepower electric motor that was built to power driverless U.S. Army tanks. Lithium-polymer batteries, 180 pounds of them, supply the charge. But to pack in even more power without adding extra battery weight, he designed a regenerative braking system that pulls otherwise wasted energy from both wheels to give the batteries a periodic boost. Yates and his team also custom-designed software that carefully manages overall energy usage. Lithium-Ion Batteries A 180-pound pack containing 102 individual battery cells stores 11.7 kilowatt-hours of energy.
Kinetic Energy Recovery Power-Management Software. Music is all in the mind. Video: Seagull Robot Takes Off And Flies On Its Own, Just Like the Real Thing. A new lifelike seagull 'bot is one of the most realistic bio-inspired flight machines we've seen. SmartBird takes off, flies and lands on its own, flapping its wings and turning its head and tail to steer. It is modeled on the herring gull and its appearance and movements are uncannily similar to the real thing. Designed by the German firm Festo, which also brought us the elephant-trunk-inspired robotic arm and the autonomous robotic jellyfish, SmartBird is Festo's newest entry in its Bionic Learning Network program, which involves several universities in the U.S. and Europe and aims to use nature as a model for mechatronic systems. The bird has a 6.5-foot wingspan, so it's much larger than a real gull, but it looks pretty much like the real thing, as you can see in the video below.
SmartBird flies like a seagull thanks to an active torsion system combined with a complex control system. Perhaps not as unobtrusive as the teeny hummingbird spy drone, but impressive nonetheless. [via IEEE] A Hexacopter That Sees Motion and Hears Breathing, Even Through Walls. About a month ago we wrote about robot maker TiaLinx Inc.'s Cougar20-H robot, a rolling ground-based 'bot with sensors so acute it can detect a person breathing through a concrete wall. But, as we (and others) pointed out at the time, the limited mobility of a terrestrial robot limited the Cougar's applications. Problem solved: TiaLinx this week debuted its Phoenix40-A, an unmanned hexacopter that can sense breathing and motion in buildings on the ground below.
The remote-controlled mini-copter can travel long distances while carrying out a variety of surveillance tasks, including recording video in both day and night-vision formats. But its ability to see through reinforced concrete walls with a narrow-beam of multi-gigahertz radio waves in real time is what should have the hunted--whoever they may be--shaking in their bunkers. The Phoenix40-A can land on top of a building and scan it for a human presence, or it can do so on the fly. But though the U.S.
[Discovery News] 2022 World Cup: High-Tech Way To Beat The Heat In Qatar. Martin Aircraft’s commercial jetpack looks to take flight. The Martin jetpack, a commercially developed jetpack, may soon be heading to a sky near you. It is about time man flew among the birds – alone. We may not have the homes on the moon, or the flying cars that our totally reasonable childhood imaginations ensured us would be waiting for us when we grew up, but with a little luck and a lot of money, we might soon be able to scratch “jetpack” off of our bucket lists. Imagine one day soon, you kiss the spouse good bye, walk the kids off to the school bus, then you prepare for the commute to work.
But rather than sitting in traffic and squeezing your steering wheel in frustration as the car in front of you apparently believes the old adage of “speed kills”, so they are driving 15 MPH under the speed limit, you simply throw on your jetpack, terrify a few birds, and make it to work in record time. The jetpack in question is being developed by the Martin Aircraft Company which was founded in 1998 and operates out of New Zealand. Quantum computing device hints at powerful future. 22 March 2011Last updated at 05:47 By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas Although comparatively small, the system's "scalable" architecture speaks to a bigger future One of the most complex efforts toward a quantum computer has been shown off at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas in the US.
It uses the strange "quantum states" of matter to perform calculations in a way that, if scaled up, could vastly outperform conventional computers. The 6mm-by-6mm chip holds nine quantum devices, among them four "quantum bits" that do the calculations. The team said further scaling up to 10 qubits should be possible this year. Rather than the ones and zeroes of digital computing, quantum computers deal in what are known as superpositions - states of matter that can be thought of as both one and zero at once. In a sense, quantum computing's one trick is to perform calculations on all superposition states at once. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote.