The Technology Behind Virgin Atlantic's Mid-Flight Cellphone System. Your new phone booth.
Photo: Virgin Atlantic Whether you want it or not, phone calls are coming to commercial airplane flights. But like any new service, there are technical limitations, a premium price point, and a chance someone is going to be upset sitting next to a Chatty Kathy. On Tuesday, Virgin Atlantic announced that customers would be able to make cellphone calls and send text messages while traveling across the Atlantic. The airline announced the immediate availability of the service on select aircraft, with the feature expanding to 20 aircraft by the end of 2012.
So how will the airline keep passengers in contact with their friends back home? Flexible Touchscreen Could Prompt Sleeker, Curvier Tablets, Smartphones. Can your iPad do this?
Perhaps someday. Atmel, which makes hardware used in devices from Samsung, Acer and LG, this week introduced XSense, a flexible touchscreen the company claims can fuel a new wave of lighter, sleeker bendable smartphones and tablets. The video above, aimed at industrial designers, posits that the flexible touchscreens could also be used for "completely new products" such as coffee machines and watches. According to a press release, the company was able to make this breakthrough via a "proprietary roll-to-roll metal mesh technology.
" A rep says the screen is "very bendable" and achieves that flexibility by using polyethylene terephthalate (PET) rather than more common, stiffer materials. Atmel's not the only company that believes bendable screens are the future. Nokia also introduced a prototype handheld device last year that lets you bend and twist the screen to complete actions like scrolling and zooming. Does the future iPhone include Lytro’s technology? JQ.Mobi Is A Mobile-Optimized HTML5 Rewrite Of the JQuery Framework. HTML5 developers appMobi want to bring the definitive jQuery framework to mobile developers.
Dubbed jQ.Mobi, appMobi is releasing the new HTML5 framework to the open source community today, promising that it is faster and more lightweight than existing options and will give mobile Web developers the user interface and programming functions they have been looking for. jQ.Mobi is a JavaScript framework in the same vein as Sencha Touch, JQuery Mobile and JQTouch. Unlike those frameworks, which are built in HTML4 and rooted in Web browsers, jQ.Mobi is an HTML5 rewrite of the jQuery framework. "With jQ.Mobi we've given the mobile development world an HTML5-ready jQuery," said appMobi CTO Sam Abadir. The release of jQ.Mobi fits well within appMobi's vision of the future of HTML5 development. Abadir said that appMobi's focus throughout much of 2012 will be to give HTML5 developers better tools, frameworks, discovery and messaging in mobile HTML5 apps.
Advertisement — Continue reading below. Apple Toys With 3D iPhone Interface. The Galaxy Nexus From Samsung is Google's New Cell Phone and has a Funky New Operating System. Nvidia Demos Ice Cream Sandwich on Transformer Prime Tablet. Just days after Google released its latest Ice Cream Sandwich platform for Android to developers, Nvidia is offering a sneak preview of what the updated mobile OS looks like on a tablet.
Nvidia released a promotional video of Ice Cream Sandwich running on an Asus Transformer Prime tablet, powered by quad-core Tegra 3. The demo highlights various new features offered by Ice Cream Sandwich, including a seamless transition swipe between the apps and widgets menu and the ability to drag and drop icons onto one another to create a folder. The clip also showcases Ice Cream Sandwich’s sleek video playback with 1080p capabilities and how it beautifully handles the graphics-rich Riptide GP game. Tablet makers are now confronted with the task of developing devices with Ice Cream Sandwich that can better compete with the iPad. What are your first impressions of Ice Cream Sandwich on a tablet?
Africa set to reach one billion mobile connections by 2016 says report. 7 November '11, 03:10am Follow Africa is being tipped to pass one billion mobile subscriptions to become the world’s second largest mobile market by 2016 according to new research from analyst firm Informa.
Mobile activations in the continent, which currently stand at 616 million, are estimated to grow by more than 60 percent over the next five years making the region the world’s second largest telecom market behind only Asia. Informa explains that the development of the region’s “relatively immature telecoms market” — thanks to increased competition and lower costs — combined with the continued growth of Africa’s population are the primary reasons for its growth predictions.
The use of 3G is also tipped to rise at a strong rate from 6.6 percent of Africa’s total mobile subscribers today to 46 percent by the end-2016 . Africa is a vast and diverse continent and thus the rate of mobile advancement in each country is likely to differ considerably.