Have you ever wanted multi-touch technology to control your computer in the palm of your hand? Well Elantech has developed a prototype of a Smart Remote Controller that does exactly that. It consists of two touchpads with some navigational buttons in the center. The Smart Remote Controller uses directional sensors to tell whether you are holding it like a joystick or like a remote control.
It has many different functions it can be a wireless mouse, TV remote control, joystick, keyboard, presentation controller, handwriting touchpad, and a biometric reader. It uses an onscreen menu to easily switch between each function. There is also a pop up diagram that shows what you are doing in each mode.
No word on when or if this controller will be made for the general public, so we will have to wait and see. Here is a video of the Smart Remote Controller in action going through all the functions.
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With this week’s release of the new Apple iPod Shuffle we have an overall look at this product even its inner guts. You can see what makes up this very simple piece of gadgetry. It measures just a little over 1.5 inches becoming the world’s smallest mp3 player. Inside the package you will find the iPod Shuffle, Apple earbuds (with in-line remote), USB cable, and a quick start guide. You will also need the newest copy of Apple iTunes 8.1.
• 4GB or 1,000 Songs
• Silver or black color options, aluminum case with a stainless steel clip
• Controls have been moved to a in-line 3 button remote
• “VoiceOver” Text to speech artist and track names and battery life in 14 languages
• 10 hours of playback (Down from 12 hours in previous gen)
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The free Internet broadcaster Pandora is now adding 15 seconds commercials to your playlist. The advertising campaign is only targeted to certain listeners. After about 10 songs you will hear a commercial for the new show on Fox called “Lie to Me”, you will hear it again after another 20 songs gets played. So if you are on of the lucky listeners that is targeted expect to hear a commercial every 2 hours.
You know what they say nothing in life is free so why would Internet radio be any different. I will still use Pandora because there is nothing else that can make a playlist like Pandora can. And maybe the commercials might work and i will end up watching that new show on Fox.
[via Gizmodo]
Ever since June of last year there has been talks of Verizon and Alltel merging, but now it is official. Verizon wireless has now become the largest mobile carrier with over 83 million subscribers. Alltel will continue to run under the Alltel name until a complete merger of the two brands later this year. Now you have fewer options on which carrier you can go with, between Verizon and AT&T taking up most of the mobile stock. We will now see a new breed of annoying mobile carrier commercials that you cant help to hate. Here is a Press Release from Verizon today with some more details.
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The Han Solo Carbonite USB Flash Drive is possibly the best USB thumb drive ever made. Created by Jasoncreations and sold through the craft site Etsy, the drive is currently sold out.
This doesn’t matter. The carbonite slab is just a piece from a commercially available playset, and anyone with a Dremel (or an X-Acto knife and the will to loser a finger) could whip one of these up in a few minutes. The real reason for this post, though, is to spread the word. Hopefully it will get back to Skywalker Ranch, and George Lucas can take time off from ruining the Star Wars franchise to put this into production.
And George — while we have your attention, could you do us one more favor? It involves Jar Jar Binks, an old bathtub, a sack of lime and a gun.
Product page [Etsy via the Giz]
So I took a little a break from working on gdgt to get on Virgin America’s inaugural Aircell GoGo WiFi party flight, posting this at altitude. If you haven’t already caught one of the early Aircell flights on Delta, American, or Air Canada, their now-active GoGo service provides in-flight internet. So far, as far as party planes go, this one hasn’t been to raucus — probably because everyone’s been geeking out on their laptops.
Quick facts:
- The service is a shared high-power EV-DO Rev. A connection, at 3.6Mbps downstream and 1.8Mbps upstream.
- By April, 100% of Virgin America’s flights will have GoGo service. Dayumn!
- So far I’ve been getting about 1Mbps down, and 200Kbps up — pretty good considering that this is about as pinned as the system is going to get. There are only about 150 people on it right now, you know?
- Latency is between 200-500ms, sometimes higher. Reasonable latency, though.
- The system uses 802.11a/b/g, although it’s an open AP (i.e. no encryption).
- Aircell intends to block voice and video chat to keep things less obnoxious for travelers. It’s working in flight though — people are doing iChat sessions. But part of this inaugural flight will have live YouTube streaming, so one should expect to have this cut off later.
- BitTorrent works! It’s not crazy fast, but I’m peering with about 8 nodes. I wouldn’t expect this to work when the service launches.
- GoGo has a built-in traffic shaper that keeps an eye out for those using more traffic than others. If you’re consuming too much, it’ll scale you back (although no one has a hard cap). If you’re the only one on GoGo (say, on a red-eye at 4am) then you can go crazy, you won’t be scaled back. Still, I’m sitting next to my old pal Brian Lam from Giz, and I’d wager the two of us are somehow taking up about 80% of the plane’s bandwidth.
- Virgin America isn’t filtering content, so feel free to cast a glance over your shoulder and engage your browser’s private mode.
Any thing else you want to know?
Filed under: Transportation, Wireless
On Virgin America’s inaugural GoGo WiFi flight: this post published from 35,000 feet originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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So Gizmodo recently challenged Wired to a game of Gears of War 2. We thought this would be a gentlemanly, civil interaction, devoid of childish name calling and smack talking that typically punctuates affairs of this sort.
Oh were we wrong.
Jason Chen just recently posted this clip on the Giz. Read between the lines; you guys can tell he’s not actually kidding!
Okay Giz, it’s on. Hope you enjoy being eviscerated every moment you turn a corner. Consider this your anti-warning.
[Via the Giz]
Belkin on Wednesday released a dongle that enables consumers to switch from a PC to a Mac in one simple step.
The $50 USB-to-USB dongle comes bundled with Migration Assistant
software, which automates the process of copying over music, movies,
photos, preferences and other files from a Windows PC onto a Mac.
Sounds nifty, but it’s likely you’d only use it one or two times. Plus,
the Apple Store will do this for you for free. $50 for self-sufficiency
and peace of mind. Worth it to you?
Product Page [Belkin via Gizmodo]
Photo: Belkin
A web site claims hearing from an unnamed, "reliable source" that the next major iPhone firmware update is just 10 days away.
The source told iPhone Hellas that iPhone 2.2 will be available for download Nov. 21. Earlier, iPhone Hellas published images purporting to be leaked screenshots
revealing new features, including direct podcast downloading, Google
Street view, a redesigned Safari browser interface and others.
As
always, rumors from an unnamed source should be taken with a grain of
salt. But Nov. 21 would be a realistic release date for iPhone 2.2.
Apple released iPhone 2.1
on Sept. 12 — two months and one day after the release if iPhone 2.0.
Therefore, it’s reasonable to expect a major upgrade very soon.
iPhone OS v2.2 to be released on 21 November! [iPhone Hellas via Gizmodo]
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