Emotiv’s brain-reading gaming headset, the Epoc, got plenty of coverage last year with gamers curious about controlling their favorite titles with the power of thought, but technical issues delayed its launch. Now Emotiv say they’re ready to push Epoc out the door on December 21st, and they’re saying it’ll feasibly work with any PC game.
Remember the HTC Touch.B (aka HTC Rome), spotted in the wild earlier this week? The handset was tipped to run Android initially, but MobiFrance have now revealed that in fact it’s HTC’s first Qualcomm Brew device. Rumored to be arriving in early 2010, the Brew smartphone will be HTC’s entry-level device; there’s a brief video demo of it in action after the cut.
Video demo after the cut
Looking for a guaranteed way to confuse press and customers alike, and dilute your new brand? Creative have a good example: they’ve called their latest iPod speaker dock the ZiiSound, which you’d expect to thus include some of the clever ZiiLABS “StemCell Computing” magic they’ve been discussing this week. Instead it’s a bog-standard speaker dock, with nary a whiff of a Zii processor.
Further hardware details regarding Intel’s imminent Pine Trail platform have emerged, suggesting that the next-gen Atom chips will be smaller, more efficient and cheaper for the company to produce than the existing processors. Set to debut in Q1 2010, according to Fudzilla the Pine Trail-M mobile chips will deliver a roughly 20-percent reduction in power consumption, when compared with the current Atom CPUs (measured in Mobile Mark 05).
Cake and party-favors all round – it’s the fifteenth anniversary of the Sony PlayStation. Unfortunately, rather than hosting a party for all of the gamers across the globe, Sony Japan have taken the easy route out and merely launched an anniversary site that flags up all the significant milestones along the way.
It’ll help if you can read Japanese, certainly, since the text doesn’t appear to be available in English. We imagine the Sony web beavers are working on a US version that’ll probably go live later on today, but for now you can enjoy yourself nudging around the logo – made up of controllers, cables and other gaming hardware – with your mouse, or looking at the pretty pictures.
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Someone needs to call Intel and remind them that they make money by selling more chips, not fewer; the company's research arm, Intel Labs, has been experimenting with a so-called "single-chip cloud computer", which utilizes a 48-core single-die chip complete with a high-speed on-chip network for inter-core communication. They reckon the super-compact chip could one day deliver high-performance crunching in ultraportable form-factors.
Video demo after the cut
Fujitsu have always been partial to tiny computers – the LifeBook U8×0 series still rank as some of the most appealing UMPCs around – and their latest model certainly looks endearing at first glance. The Fujitsu LifeBook UH900 has a more traditional clamshell form-factor than the mini-convertibles in the company’s back-catalog, but more than makes up with it with a 5.6-inch sunlight-readable WXGA multitouch display, 62GB SSD and optional integrated 3.5G WWAN.
Update: Pricing and more photos added after the cut
The future of Sports Illustrated is tapping and flicking at bulky men wearing lycra, at least that’s the intention of publisher Time Inc. The company has demonstrated a future magazine concept, and unlike the “firehoze” of Sports Illustrated on the web – and we use editor Terry McDonell’s own description there – the system will allow for both text and multimedia content in a more intuitive, manageable way.
Video demo after the cut
The most bizarre thing about this Instructable for converting a regular AC outlet into a USB outlet is that only this morning – dealing with various review phones bleating as their batteries expired on the mess that is my desk – I found myself wishing for such a thing. Apparently the work of 30 minutes and a mere $10, we’re not sure we agree with project author Hextor’s tongue-in-cheek prediction that “it will get your home ready for the future, when most appliances are USB” but for bringing new life to an unloved outlet it can’t be beat.
The neat thing about leaked ROMs is that often there are tidbits about upcoming devices to be discovered among the tweaked functionality. Supposedly buried in the recent Hero Android 2.1 ROM from HTC is a long string of device codenames, some of which – like the Hero and Dream – we’ve seen already, but many of which are new or, until now, merely rumored.
SlashGear Japan
