Despite being left out of the Android fun & games, Nokia seem to be doing alright for themselves; over at Symbian-Freak they’ve been playing with a prototype of the upcoming N82, the latest in the Finnish company’s high-end cameraphone range. It should be enough to cause ructions over in the LG Viewty camp, too, with 5-megapixel Carl Zeiss optics, xenon flash and autofocus.
Remember the cute little Linux-powered MTube UMPC prototypefrom last week? Well, if you were having doubts that you could pack a VIA 1.0GHz CPU, 8GB of flash memory and 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen into a super-small casing, together with WiFi and WiMAX, andhave it actually work, then consider your doubts quashed; Bjorn Stronberg over at UltraMobileLife was allowed to finger the MTube for a whole minute, and of course he filmed the whole sordid experience.
A team at Vanderbilt University has been hard at work and has come up with a prosthetic arm whose characteristics are far closer to that of an actual human arm than anything else so far. The weight is pretty close to the same and its capacity for lifting and other tasks is pretty on par too.
I guess the biggest problem with battery powered arms was that in order for the arm to be able to lift anything it required a huge battery causing for a significant increase in weight making the bionic arm feel even more alien. This rocket-fuelled/steam-powered arm solves that problem by creating enough power on the fly to lift stuff and still managing to keep it all in a compact package.
Japanese are not the only people that can create cool gadgets, a phone manufacturer in China has got some nice prototype of wristwatch phone called Cect mobile watch phone.
Not much in the way of information, but it’s great to see one of Intel’s UMPC concepts apparently getting the go-ahead for production. Hyped to include the company’s latest McCaslin-based CPU, it’s a twisty, flippy device with full QWERTY keyboard, trackstick and dedicated mouse buttons; it also has a rotating webcam and stereo speakers.
Make sure you check out Steve’s video of the prototype in action, after the cut…
Oh to have the sort of friends Steve Paine does. My inbox fills up with “funny” photos of dogs doing silly things, or round-robin messages of good will, whereas he gets pictures of prototype Tablet PCs. Admittedly the latest is conspicuous for the absence of accompanying information, but if pictures speak a thousand words then I don’t have to write any more in the post anyway.
Judging by the look of the stylus I’m thinking passive digitiser, although others have pointed out what looks like a trackpoint on the lower right-hand side of the screen. Anyone know anything more?
Pre-production phones, eh? Who’d have ‘em. Software glitches, occasionally dodgy build quality, not being able to sell them on eBay – it’s a harsh life getting your hands on luscious hardware before anyone else. Enter stage-left the Nokia N95, not for our grabbing hands until next year but here in pre-production form getting the once-over by Jihad Abdullah Soaileek over at The Nokialist.
Does he like it? Well, it lacks the 802.11b/g and GPS chips that go partway to making the N95 so tempting, but otherwise it’s a promising start – he won’t rate it, but hints that if he were to it’d score in the region of 95%. This is a phone I’m very excited about!
Optimus keeps trickling out even more impressive photos of the Upravlator keyboard, a grown-up version of the Optimus Mini Three with a four by three key matrix that are larger to boot. This time using LCD rather than OLED screens, running at a far greater resolution, Upravlator is aimed at macro-using graphic designers, computer musicians and people doing video processing, hooking up to a spare graphics card port to drive the mini-screens.
As I was writing about the Sony Reader the other day, my housemate looked over my shoulder and asked “why would you pick an e-book over a traditional one?” Given that he’s a student, I rolled out the usual justifications of being able to carry all your textbooks in one far smaller unit, easier bookmarking, faster searching. Although he could appreciate that, at the same time he said he would find it difficult to justify the Reader as a) it’s in greyscale, and b) you can’t annotate it. Well, Fujitsu have just knocked that first negative into a cocked hat, with their new colour “electronic paper”.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the guys at Microsoft 10 have got their hands on a Zune, but two of them?! I’m shocked and appalled at this blatant favouritism, and you can be sure that as soon as I’ve finished watching their video of the music-playing marvels transferring songs between themselves I’ll be writing a letter to the Pope in complaint.
Seriously, though, this is a make or break one for the bods over at Microsoft. Wireless could be the must-have PMP feature with Zune riding the crest, but if they lock it down tighter than the underpants of a particularly devout nun then they run the risk of other, more moderate companies stealing their thunder. I mean, watch their video and tell me it’s not a cool feature!
SlashGear Japan
