Cool toys and Gadgets

Section: Communications, Cellphones, Cellular Providers, Smartphones, Mobile

Man, would I have loved to be in the crowd at the Symbian Partner Conference when AT&T’s Director of Next Generation Services, Roger Smith, stated the telecom’s lofty goal of having the company’s smartphone offerings on the same operating system.  You know what is coming: he said Symbian is “a very credible and likely candidate” to become that one operating system.

Symbian who?

Symbian, which garners 45% or so of the worldwide smartphone OS market, owes much of its success to Nokia.  The platform is stable, works well, and is loved in Europe.  As of late, Symbian was purchased by Nokia and is committed to going open source. 

iPhone effect

Other news this morning from Bloomberg states Apple’s iPhone is recession-proofing AT&T thanks the steady line of new customers for the device.  The company is expected to be the only carrier to post accelerating growth this quarter as companies hunker down for the economic storm.  While AT&T has announced layoffs, subscribers are not detered from obtaining these luxury phones.

“People still want those iconic devices and are willing to pay up for them,” said Will Power, analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co..  “Look at wireless and consumer behavior generally, this also applies to the lower- income demographics.”

Additionally, iPhone buyers are among the industry’s most wanted customers, those that pay 1.6 times what the average customer pays for phone and data services.  In a time where carriers are running out of new customers, they are looking to steal or hold onto these higher-paying customers.

Sucking up?

Perhaps Mr. Smith was sucking up the Symbian crowd?  Certainly a unified OS would make AT&T’s life easier.  One OS to support would be a welcome task to AT&T’s customer support team who currently deal with Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Apple, and then the home brew jobs from Pantech, Samsung and lots more.  Is it possible AT&T could narrow that list down to just one?

Perhaps, but at what cost?  When you remove consumer choice, demand will typically lessen.  Unless other carriers adopt similar rules (and who wants to be the first?), AT&T’s dream of one OS is just pie in the sky thinking.

Source: [Bloomberg]

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Photograph by Kim Dow

Scott Wade of San Marcos, Texas, thought he could do better than write "Wash Me" on the backside of a dusty car. He started drawing caricatures. His father was a cartoonist of sorts and had taught him to draw funny faces. It was Wade's idea to make a dirty car window his canvas.

"For the last 20 years living on a dirt road," he says, "there's always dirt on my car."

With the sun baking it, the dirt takes about two weeks to form a stable work surface. Wade began, like anyone else, by using his finger, and then tried popsicle sticks. To introduce shading, he decided to use brushes. Over time he developed a range of techniques, which included using plants and rubber paint-shaper tools.

Wade particularly likes the dirt of central Texas, where crushed limestone mixed with clay serves as a road base.

"It makes the perfect dirt," he says. "It's very light-colored and the contrast is great against the dark shadow inside the car."

As he got more requests to create his Dirty Car he realized that he had to figure out how to dust up a car himself. Now, he can prepare a car in minutes using a light coating of oil and pyro-lite, a less toxic alternative to fuller's earth.

At the Austin Maker Faire in 2007 (& 2008), Wade dusted up his Toyota and created Monsters from the Movies, featuring the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman. The next day he painted a tribute to Willie Nelson that included Waylon Jennings. "After a good rain," he says, "it appears to wash off, but in a couple days it comes back in a ghostly form."

Recently, he was asked to draw Biff Henderson for the David Letterman show. In addition to portraits, he enjoys dusting up the old masters. "I have this grandiose idea of parking cars all the way up the ramp of the Guggenheim Museum and painting in dirt reproductions of the pieces that are on the wall next to it."

>> Dirty Car Art: dirtycarart.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 14, page 23 - Dale Dougherty.

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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced today that their fourth-quarter revenue would be much weaker due to widespread weakness particularly among customers. Shares have recovered much of the 8percent premarket drop, but investors and analysts are seemingly unfazed.

Cody Acree, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus said, “the market was not surprised given the state of the PC industry, which is being crippled by poor demand.” AMD along with rival Intel have made virtually all the microprocessors for the world’s 1 billion PCs. Acree went on to say AMD has done a great job of making itself a better competitor to Intel. I think this has nothing to do with AMD individually, this is fully macro.”

AMD is expecting revenue from operations ending December 27th, to decline around 25 percent in the 3Q to around 1.19 billion. The average 4Q analyst revenue estimate is 1.53 billion according to Reuters Estimates. Earlier this year AMD cut 500 out of the 15,500 jobs to try and cut costs.

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I know a lot of companies have been cutting jobs in the wake of the recession, but wow, this has to be one of the biggest job cuts we’ve heard about so far. AT&T announced they would be cutting 12,000 jobs, which equates to 4% of its employees in order to save money and switch their primary focus to wireless services.

AT&T has apparently been running into some trouble because less people are using landline services these days. However, they are quick to point out some of the job cuts will be made up for by hiring new people in the areas of the company that are doing well like Internet access and cellular services.

Last quarter, AT&T experienced a great surge in phone subscribers, but a drop in its profit margin. This is thought to be blamed on the iPhone 3G, as the carrier subsidizes the phone cost greatly and relies on data use fees to make up the loss on the device itself.

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EMS Labs has released PDF-documentation and some new programming libraries for their Meggy Jr RGB handheld game development platform. The Programmable Guide is really well-done, clear and concise. Even I can almost figure it out. The code libraries (The Meggy Jr Library) provide a software interface to the Meggy Jr hardware and macros and functions (The Meggy Jr Simplified Library) that float on top of that. The Meggy Jr Simplified Library allows you to get started quickly without having to deal too much with understanding Display Memory or the nuts and bolts of communicating with the hardware. It also simplifies some of the excesses of the Arduino environment, so in the words of Windell: "you can just use the darned thing."

Programming Meggy Jr RGB

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Plat'Home, makers of the awesome OpenBlockS MicroServer, had kind words (and an update for readers of the book!) for our Small Form Factor PCs book (by Matthew Weaver and Duane Wessels):

The explanations are detailed and hands-on. Even though it's filled to the brim with shell commands and console output the text is informative and easy to read. There is even a guide how to solder a cable to power the unit from a USB port (no, this is not covered by our warranty).

As the guide was written in 2006, it mentiones that all documentation is only available in Japanese. Even though the author claims it was fun to figure it all out, we want to make your life a little easier.
You don't have to worry about Japanese anymore, everything you need is available in English now: firmware, manuals, FAQ and support.

We're glad that the authors discovered our MicroServer and we wholeheartedly recommend this book. If you have a hacking streak and need a small firewall box to carry everywhere, this is for you!

Plat'Home MicroServer in O'Reilly hardware hacks book

Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs - (also available as PDF)
Make Projects: Small Form Factor PCs is the only book available that shows you how to build small-form-factor PCs -- from kits and from scratch -- that are more interesting and more personalized than what a full-sized PC can give you. Included in the book are projects for building personal video recorders, versatile wireless access points, digital audio jukeboxes, portable firewalls, and much more. This book shows you how to build eight different systems, from the shoebox-sized Shuttle system down to the stick-of-gum-sized gumstix.

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Photograph by Jeff Lieberman

Want robots to be musical, creative, and expressive? Better brush up on your engineering. Musician/ roboticists Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman constructed a web-connected "robotic mechanical orchestra" that plays a marimba by firing rubber balls out of a cannon, strikes traditional percussion instruments, and also rubs mechanical fingers along wine glasses. The machine, Absolut Quartet, uses artificial intelligence to creatively riff on melodies composed remotely by users on the web.

"At the core, the machine is just motors, metal, and software," say the MI T alums. "However, the design of these elements gives the whole machine a 'personality' and this is what allows a creative dialog to exist between the machine and the online user."

Of course, that dialog can't just work once -- it has to work over and over again. The guys wanted the technology to "disappear," leaving a purely creative experience. But that meant making 3,000 custom parts and 10,000 stock parts work in harmony.

And then there are the 500,000 custom rubber balls firing a 4-meter arc onto the keys.

"For any reasonable maintenance, this can only fail roughly 1 in 10,000 times," the duo explains. They tried four fundamentally different shooting mechanisms before they found one that worked -- springs and a rotating arm.

They then consulted an engineer to settle on magical, maintenance-solving ingredients such as polyethylene glycol dimethacrylate, which they used to make the suede fingers resonant. But they also needed the skills of a professional glass harpist so they could get 35 tuned wine glasses.

"Being both musicians and roboticists, we have always been interested in combinations of the two," say Paluska and Lieberman. In the finished work, centuries-old percussion and glass armonicas meet modern industrial robotics. Musician/inventor Benjamin Franklin, who built the first glass armonica, would have been proud.

>> Absolut Quartet: absolut.com/absolutmachines

>> The Build: bea.st/sight/absolut

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 14, page 18 - Peter Kirn.

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FROM GAMERTELL - Amazon has 500 160GB consoles that include a copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a voucher for PSN title PAIN and a Dualshock 3 controller for $499.99.  The deal here is that Amazon is throwing in LittleBigPlanet for free… MORE »

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Section: Peripherals, Mice / Keyboards

Yesterday I talked about the keyboard and how it is rooted in the history of computers, but this week is also important for another input device: the mouse.  The 40th birthday of the mouse also coincided with history being made, as Logitech announced that they had shipped a billion mouses (or mice) since they started production.  But how did it start, why is it so good and what is the future of the mouse?  Read on.
The first “mouse” was invented by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute as a prototype for a way of manipulating a GUI.  It was one of many suggestions (including using the head) for how to control the computer.  The mouse won because of its accuracy, ease of use, and the fact that it did not cause too much inconvenience to use.  No one is quite sure who first coined the name “mouse” and it was only intended for use as a nickname and not as an actual product name, but the wire/tail resemblance is definitely there and so the name as well as its plural problems stuck.
Since then we’ve had the horrid ball mouse which was an improvement on the two external wheels that the original had, to a ball controlling two small interior wheels, and then onto the optical and laser versions that we use today.  This has meant that mice are now more accurate and easy to use than ever before, and as science and medicine come to rely upon computers more and more this is increasingly important.
However the fact that the mouse has lasted four decades is not the only amazing thing, the fact that Logitech has shipped 1 billion is also amazing when you think about it.  I’m not sure that there is any other product that a single company has consistently sold for this period of time, and managed to rack up 1 billion of them.  This really is an astonishing number for one company, and it goes a long way not only to showing the popularity of the mouse, but how big the computer world is.

“It speaks volumes to the success of the mouse that they (Logitech) have produced a billion and good luck. But past performance is not a guarantee of future success.  The world has changed and the nature of machines has changed.  The multi-touch interface I believe really does seal the coffin of the mouse,“ Gartner analyst Steve Prentice

This is perhaps a little presumptuous, touchscreens have never taken off in the home computer world in the past, but is this now the time for the mouse to hand over the baton?  There are many advantages for using touch screens.  With multi-touch, they are now much more versatile.  Advances in technology have allowed them to become more accurate, but there are still problems and many cynics believe this is just an excuse to drum up interest in Windows 7 and associated touchscreen products.

So please, sit back, and celebrate the wonderful product of design and manufacture that is your mouse, take a moment to be amazed by how big this little product actually is and think about what will happen in the future.  And then sing happy birthday to it, have a party or maybe even bake a cake… I know I have! (there is a virtual prize if you know where this is from!)

Source [BBC]

Full Story » | Written by Christian Milsom for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Section: Apple, Audio

Stephen Colbert is trying to push his Christmas album to the top of the iTunes album charts.  How?  He’s organizing “Operation Humble Kanye” to game iTunes.  Kanye West’s album was #1 when Colbert started this plan (currently, Britney Spears is in the top spot). 

His plan is to get everyone to buy “A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All” today, December 3rd, at 5PM Eastern time. 

Can this actually work?  Will a concentrated surge of purchases propel the album to the top of the charts?  I guess we’ll find out later today.

Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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