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MSI’s Wind has proven, deservedly or not, to be one of the more popular netbooks. This might be down to a good combination of price, size, performance and looks. It might be because it is one of the easiest netbooks on which to install Mac OS X. Or it might be because, unlike Asus’ fractally burgeoning lineup of Eee PCs, MSI has so far offered only one model (in a variety of colors, of course).

This is about to change. The Wind’s first successor, the U120, was announced a short while ago. While that was essentially a Wind with a sharper looking case design and a 3.5G radio inside, two newly announced Winds will mix up the internals, too.

The new models are named the U110 and U115. The first surprise is the processor. Instead of the netbook favorite, the 1.6 GHz Atom N270, these new ‘books can be had with the Atom Z530. It has the same 1.6GHz clock speed, but supposedly sips less power.

Also new, and only in the U115, is a hybrid storage system. Winds come with HDDs, not solid state drives, but the U115 will offer a combination of both (paired thusly, in Gigabytes: 8/80, 16/120 and 32/160). This is, we imagine, another attempt at prolonging battery life by shifting virtual memory and other oft-used data onto the less power hungry SSD.

The result of this tweaking is, claims MSI, a ten-hour battery life. Hopefully this will be achieved with a more modestly sized six-cell battery rather than the cancerous growth that is the nine-cell, but we could even live with that if it meant true, all day independence from wall-warts.

MSI Announces Netbook: U110, U115 in addition to U120 [Netbook 3G via Laptop Mag]

See Also:

 
• Review: Just How Good Is the MSI Wind?

 

• It Lives! Gadget Lab’s Netbook Running OS X Leopard

 

• MSI Wind 2 Netbook Set for November Release

 

• MSI Unleashes Second Wind Netbook

After dismissing airport-destined full-body scanners as nonsense last month, the German government has decided to have another crack at the latest device in the game known as "security theater".

The T-Ray scanner, which sees through clothes to detect such hidden dangers as nail clippers and perhaps a ripe, potentially explosive Mozzarella di Bufala (yes, Naples airport — I’m still sore about that), has been nicknamed the "Naked Scanner" by Germans. The device renders a blurred picture of the body underneath the clothes, raising issues of privacy.

Now, remember — this scanner is likely to do nothing other than inconvenience passengers and add extra Euros to EU airports’ budgets. But attempting to discount the device on privacy grounds seems a little prudish. Here’s what the German Interior Ministry (irony noted) is doing about it:

 

Germany will begin laboratory tests in the next few weeks on full-body airport screening devices to see if they can produce images that do not show passengers naked. (emphasis added)

This is especially ridiculous when you consider the usual German attitude to nudity. I have spent many afternoons in German parks, and seen the rather scary sight of a big-bellied father, naked but for a pair of sandals, cooking sausages on a barbecue. That’s something the politicians should be looking into.

Germany plans lab tests for airport "naked scans" [Reuters]

See Also:

• Germany Says "Nein" to Full Body Scanners
• British Security Camera Can See Through Clothes

From the department of "Because We Can" comes Linux on the iPhone. Don’t get too excited — you won’t be running Ubuntu or Google’s Android OS on your iPhone any time soon (even if you wanted to). Here it is in action:

Right now, as you can see, this is strictly a proof of concept — there’s no actual interaction with any of the iPhone’s input methods. No touch screen, no nothing. Instead, the iPhone runs a USB client which lets you type in commands from another computer via the dock connector.

Still, it’s a good start, and once somebody slaps a few hardware drivers and a graphic user interface on there, it could be fun to play with. We’re actually more interested with the keyboard side of this hack. Would it be possible to run the regular iPhone OS and hook a keyboard directly into the dock connector? That would be killer useful for getting some real work done on the iPhone. It would also destroy my excuse for not blogging when I’m traveling, so maybe it’s not such a good thing after all.

Linux on the iPhone! [Linuxoniphone via TUAW]

Nikon has announced the D3X, a new full frame DSLR with a whopping 24.5 megapixels. It is, more or less, a D3 with a bigger sensor and a bigger price tag. How big? $8000 big.

About that sensor. It will give images of up to 6048 x 4032 pixels, and runs from ISO 100 to a rather conservative ISO 1600, compared to the ISO 6400 available on the smaller 12MP D3. The images coming off that sensor range up to a huge 138 MB, making a 2GB CF card look like a 12 exposure 135 film.

Amazingly, Nikon says that the D3X can still shift up to five frames per second in full frame FX format, and up to seven fps if you shrink your images down to DX format.

So, why would you buy this, aside from a need to fill up an empty hard drive quickly? Nikon is pitching this at the studio photographers who need all the pixels they can get, along with fashion and landscape photogs. It makes sense. If you are under bright lights or have the camera sitting on a tripod, you don’t need the amazing low-light sensitivity of the original D3 (or D700). We actually like the fact that there is a choice here: you get the same body and functions with both the D3 and the D3X, but you can choose the sensor. It’s, you know, just like changing films used to be. Only a little more expensive.

Is $8000 too much? If you stack it up against the alternative – medium format cameras – then $8000 starts to look cheap. And we’d be very surprised indeed if Nikon didn’t follow this up in several months with a D700X.

Product page [Nikon]

See Also:

 
• Review: Nikon D3 is Light-Years Ahead of Other Prosumer-Grade …

 

• Is Nikon Prepping A 24 Megapixel D3 Replacement?

 

• Hands-On With the Nikon D700

 

• Video: Nikon D700 Shooting at Eight FPS

Oil Canvas, an iPhone app released Wednesday, is a neat piece of image-editing software that enables virtual finger painting.

The app allows users to choose a photo from their album to brush and paint with their fingers. You simply need to rub over the image, as the software automatically detects the colors from the base picture, treating it as a canvas.

Different brush sizes are available — from an extra small stroke to add finesse to an extra large one to smudge over the boring parts (e.g., solid backgrounds). After finishing your painting, you can share it with others in Oil Canvas’s PhotoShare community.

In its video demo, the software’s developer Big Canvas makes painting on the iPhone look extremely easy. Being a non-artist, I didn’t produce very good results; the photo to the right is the best I could do. But it’s a free app, so why not give it a dab?

Download Link [iTunes] (Thanks, Nate!)

We have seen a robot play the flute, violin and other musical instruments. Now a Japanese play is using robots to act alongside human actors.

The play called Hataraku Watashi (I, Worker) premiered at Osaka University and is being considered as one of the few examples of robot-human interaction on stage.

The robots were programmed to speak their lines as they moved about on stage. The robot in the play is the ‘Wakamaru’ from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

The Wakamaru was designed primarily to provide care for the disabled and elderly. It runs Linux operating system, has limited speech and speech recognition abilities.

The play itself has a very interesting premise. It’s about a young couple with two housekeeping robots. One of the robots complains about its "demeaning" work and that leads to a discussion about the role of robots in human lives.

It’s an interesting question and one that is likely to come up more often as use of homes robots become more widespread.

[via BBC]

Photo: The Wakamaru Robot

Getting your name laser engraved onto a notebook sounds like a cool idea. But you’d look pretty dumb carrying around a Rhodia notebook that quotes some guy named "Buddah" (photo to the right).

Otherwise, Notebook Engraver’s offerings look snazzy: The company sells a variety of notebooks from Rhodia, Quo Vadis and Clairefontaine. On the site, you can enter text you’d like custom engraved on the front or the spine ($5 per engraving). And just like that — Buddah-bing, Buddah-bam — you’ve got a slick notebook with your sexy name etched onto it.

Just make sure to check your spelling first.

Product Page [Notebook Engraver via Twitter]   

Most home robots available currently are designed for one specific use, like the iRobot Roomba for vacuuming, the WowWee Rovio for mobile surveillance or the Scooba for mopping floors.

Now, two students at the Louisiana State University’s department of computer science have created a prototype robot that can be fully customizable and used for multiple tasks such as lawn mowing and surveillance among others.

“What is most impressive about this robot is that it is
multi-functional and no one else is currently designing
multi-functional robots,” said S.S. Iyengar, chair of the computer science department at the university in a statement.

LSU’s robot called AgBot is solar powered and can move at up to six miles per hour for at least four hours.The robot comes with Bluetooth and GPS system that makes it easy to navigate.

In its avatar as a lawn care machine, it can be fitted with a seed dispenser and a fertilizer tank.

The robot is also equipped with a night vision camera positioned atop a 360
degree swivel, a high-frequency alarm system and advanced motion
detector.

So in its surveillance mode, if the AgBot detects motion it can sound an alarm, photograph the intruder and email the picture.

The ultimate goal for the AgBot is to be completely customizable. With minor adjustments, the robot can support five or six different
applications including picking up mail, say the students.

Here’s the video showing the AgBot at work.

Photo: Louisiana State University

Just because game designers are adapting their wares for multimedia phone apps does not mean that the games have to make any sense at all.

But are they good enough to make people act like crazy fools in public? Of course they are. Just take a look at the latest Chokkan (motion) game from Japan, Zuntata, from the old-school game developer Taito.

Zuntata is a downloadable music game built for phones with accelerometers. Using the game’s software, users simulate the playing of music (like in Guitar Hero) by simply strumming their fingers above or near the phone. This facility has led to several inexplicable acts of air guitar abuse being unleashed upon the fair citizens of Japan (see video below).

As far as we can tell, the simple point of the game is to ensure that a user swipes his hand at the same time a note is played. The sensor in the phone detects the accuracy of the strumming at the point the hand crosses the plane of the phone, in addition to the rhythmic motion provided when the player moves the phone with the other hand. The closest the player comes to matching the notes with his hands, the better his score. However, the ad for the game (above) shows the model barely strums near the phone at all.  

The app can also be used to simulate violins, drums, and several other instruments. In addition, several friends can play the same song by synching their profiles — each user is assigned a specific instrument to force the band to play as one.

According to Taito, one of the game’s favorite options is that any up-and-coming musicians can download their own jingles to their website, but it’s really the catchy, quirky sounds of the publisher’s house band and the game’s namesake, Zuntata, that is the most popular.

As Game|Life’s Jean Snow previously mentioned, Taito’s Zuntata band has written some of the best loved soundtracks for Japanese games, like the Bubble Bobble and the Darius series and even the modern version of Space Invaders. Nobody will say the music is good (it’s barely above simple blips), but it’s silly enough to use as an excuse when the other phone options have exhausted.

We’ll wait until a more accurate and true simulation comes to market before we terrorize the streets with our own air jamming.