Technology Effect

No longer can the iPad rest easy as numero uno in the tablet market. With a slew of launches from the competition, the tablet war is truly on. From the Samsung Galaxy to the Dell Streak, here is a look at some of the products on offer. . If last year was the year of Netbooks, 2010 seems to be the year of Tablets. Since the day, very first rumours of Apple Tablet iPad started floating in, IT hardware manufacturers of all hues have jumped on to the Tablet bandwagon. Joining the Tablet market is IT major HP, which unveiled its Tablet, called Slate, at the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas in January. The company recently released a video promoting its upcoming touchscreen Tablet which will run on Windows 7 operating system. Here’s looking into how HP Tablet stands vis-a-vis Apple iPad in specs like memory, display, connectivity, pricing and more

Bangalore: Dell India has added a new smartphone on its website, the Dell Venue, hinting it may soon launch in India. The device runs on Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system. No price or specific release date has been mentioned yet. Venue debuted worldwide last week in Hong Kong. Venue sports a 4.1 inch WVGA AMOLED capacitive, multi-touch display screen and is powered by a 1GHz QSD 8250 processor. The smartphone is the Android cousin of Dell Venue Pro that is Windows Phone 7 based. The phone measures 121 x 64 x 12.9mm with a 8MP camera, that has auto focus, digital zoom features. It also has a dedicated camera key for image and video capturing. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB and GPS. The phone ships with 1GB of internal memory, which is expandable up to 32GB with a microSD card. The phone with a 1400 mAh has other features like e-compass. Like the Dell Streak, the phone comes with the Gorilla Glass that helps in preventing finge...

Bangalore: With speculations abound in the Web about the iPad 2, the latest one says that iPad 2 will be launched in three versions. One will support Wi-Fi only, the next will see a combination of Wi-Fi and UTMS support while the third version will come with support of Wi-Fi and CDMA. DigiTimes reports that the mass production of the three versions will start in the latter half January 2011. Since the current iPad shipments are mostly of 3G models, Apple aims to offer more wireless connectivity solutions with iPad 2. Among other works to better the iPad 2, Apple is working on improving the anti-smudge and anti-reflective effects. It is estimated that the production of iPad will stop after January and the iPad 2 is expected to launch by end of first quarter or start of the second. iPad 2, when launched, is speculated to ship about 40 million units translating to 65-75 percent of global tablet market.

Toronto: Canada is the most web-addicted nation on the planet. Canadians spend more time on the web and its offshoots - Facebook, YouTube and Twitter - than people anywhere else in the world. They are neck and neck with Indians for the number of Facebook accounts, says a report. According to comScore, the leading online measurement service, Canadian online users log in more than 2,500 minutes a month, followed by Israelis with about 2,300 minutes. Users in a few other countries cross the 2,000-minute mark. Giving figures for the month of April, comScore said nearly 68 percent of the Canadian population was online, compared to 62 percent in France and the United Kingdom, 60 percent in Germany, 59 percent in the U.S., 57 percent in Japan, and 36 percent in Italy. In this country which leads the world in internet access, Canadians also lead the world in various offshoots of the web - Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, according to the report. "In Canada, Y...

A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that a face has to be quite similar to a human face in order to appear alive, and that the cues are mainly in the eyes. The face of a doll is clearly not human; the face of a human clearly is. Telling the difference allows us to pay attention to faces that belong to living things, which are capable of interacting with us. But where is the line at which a face appears to be alive? Several movies have tried and failed to generate lifelike animations of humans. For example, the lifeless faces in Polar Express made people uncomfortable because they tried to emulate life but didn't get it quite right. “There's something fundamentally important about seeing a face and knowing that the lights are on and someone is home,” says Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College, who cowrote the study with graduate student Christine Looser. Humans can see faces in ...

At the Apple keynote address in October this year, Steve Jobs jokingly asked the audience, “What would happen if a Macbook and an iPad hooked up?” But he wasn’t kidding then as he later unveiled the new range of Macbook Air laptops – they truly are the ‘next generation of Macbooks’. With the addition of 11 and 13-inch notebooks to the Macbook Air range, Apple is clearly sending a message - that the future of laptops are devices which are ultra light, ultra portable and ultra performers – all without the help of an optical drive. We tell you why the Air might be a worth considering – whether you swear by Macs or PCs. For the Macbook user If you’re an Apple loyalist, you’ll love it, though you might think that the Air would be a downgrade from the Pro. The folks at Cupertino have a different take on the subject though – they feel that the Air is the notebook of the future. The Pro has been marketed as a complete solution – a notebook to take care of your work and personal...

A Bangalore: Google Nexus S has been upgraded with the latest version of the Android operating system - Gingerbread (Android 2.3.1) that arrives over the air. The update brings with the latest version of Google maps and fixes bugs. The updates don't do anything massive to the phone. Plus if you have got yourself the Google maps for Android version 5, it won't make much of a difference to you. However, it appears that the slow browser has been fixed. But we must say that given the Nexus S has just launched, the upgrade comes pretty soon. The update is reported to be of 1.9MB. With no confirmation date for the upgrade, users can dial *#*#checkin#*#* to check if their phone has received the update or not.

In what could be called a major technological innovation, scientists have unveiled an ultra-fast chip which they claim could make desktop computers 20 times faster than the current ones. Modern computers have a processor with two, four or sometimes 16 cores to carry out tasks. Now, a team, led by the University of Glasgow, has developed a central processing unit, which effectively has 1,000 cores on a single microchip. The developments could usher in a new age of high-speed computing in the next few years for home users frustrated with slow—running systems; the new “super” computer is also much greener than modern machines, despite its high speed, say its developers. The scientists used a chip called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) which like all microchips contains millions of transistors —— tiny on—off switches that are the foundation of any electronic circuit, the Daily Mail reported. But FPGAs can be configured into specific circuits by the user, rather than ...