With the news last week that Toshiba could have a fuel cell powered device on the market by Christmas, today it’s the turn of Panasonic to make some methanol promises. It won’t be a fight for a spot underneath the tree between the two companies, though; Panasonic say they’ll have fuel cells, capable of running a laptop computer for five hour, on the market by 2012.
If you have to take a train a lot in order to commute to work or around town, you no doubt get sleepy sometimes. That’s why Pyocotan, a manga artist, has come up with “Noriko-san,” a sleek mask that relies on the kindness of other passengers to work.
3D printers have been around for quite some time, but they’re just now getting streamlined enough to fit in an office space. That’s what makes the Alaris 30 Desktop 3D printer from Objet stand out.
The International Meeting on Information Display (IMID) 2008 kicked off in Korea yesterday, and both Samsung and LG Display brought along their latest OLED-based displays for a little screen-quality sparring. LG tried valiantly, with their 19-inch OLED panel, but Samsung’s smaller, 14-inch panel fought back with the lower power-requirements of AMOLED while their larger 31-inch full-HD panel won the war of inches.
Telson’s 3D UMPC prototype, last seen in June, could be closer to a commercial release than expected, after new company owners Digital Cube announced their intentions to bring it to market. With a 4.3-inch touchscreen, 1.2GHz VIA C7-M processor, 512MB RAM and 30GB hard drive, the Telson device’s particular talent is its 3D screen and – courtesy of a newly unveiled attachment – 3D video capture.
Hitachi at CEDIA 2008 showcases a concept digital camcorder that is capable of streaming HD video to a TV display wirelessly. The prototype video camera captures video on its HDD in HD MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 format, and has an SDIO standard IEEE802.11g module to transmit live feed or captured video to TV via an access point.
A lot of prototypes for all sorts of devices are showing up at CEATEC in Japan this week. One such prototype is a pair of “pseudo 3D” glasses from JVC that convert 2D video in real time to something that resembles 3D.
Sophia isn’t a name you’ll likely be familiar with, unless Mobile Internet Devices are your bread & butter, but you may nonetheless be interested in their Peartree MID reference design. On show at CEATEC 2008 today, Ubergizmo got some live shots of the lime-green touchscreen device. The specs are impressive for the size: an Intel Atom CPU, 4GB SSD storage and 5-inch WSVGA display (1024 x 600) display.
Ken Hinckley, of Microsoft Research, has been working on a dual-touchscreen multi-tasking prototype called Codex, taking two of OQO’s Model 2 UMPCs and using intelligent software to manage how information is spread between the displays. Rather than manually positioning different windows on a single large screen, Ken’s concept recognizes that, say, reference and in-progress documents are more appropriately separated for efficiency; it can therefore automatically adjust them to fit the two touchscreens.
Hitachi has today announced an ultra thin LCD display prototype at CEATEC Japan. Measured at a mere 15mm in depth, the new WOOO is 58% thinner than current production of Wooo UT series. The 37-inch prototype replaced IPS panel with newest and better RGB backlit LCD model and also boasted a huge color gamut of 150% wider than HD Rec.709 color space.
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