Technology Effect

This year, the big national wireless carriers will be racing to stake their claims in the new frontier of service, ultra-fast data access, for smart phones and laptops as well as for gadgets like tablets. The companies are boosting their wireless data speeds and revving up the marketing hype. They’re moving away from talking about call quality and coverage, and focusing on data speeds, megabits in place of minutes. For consumers, there are benefits in the form of faster service and cooler gadgets. Yet some of the marketing campaigns seem designed to confuse consumers about the gadgets’ speed. At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, Verizon Wireless revealed the 10 gadgets with built-in access to its new high-speed wireless data network, including smartphones, tablet and laptops. Some are to launch as early as March. Along with Sprint Nextel Corp.’s subsidiary Clearwire Corp., Verizon is at the forefront of the move to a new network technolo...

Samsung Electronics is making its new range of high-definition 'smart televisions' the hub of compatible gadgets that can link via wi-fi and allow content to be viewed across different screens. This is part of the company's theme of 'The Smarter Life - Agenda 2011' that makes it possible to connect to 'cloud' computers where a variety of programmes optimised for each screen are stored. President of Samsung Electronics, B.K.Yoon told the Consumer Electronics Show here on Thursday that the television was set to strengthen its role as the dominant, central force of technology in human lives. The 'smart tv' with its ability to share content from multiple devices and also connect to the Internet was the place where everything was coming together. He highlighted the philosophy of 'human digitalism' that was necessary to embed technology with a human touch. The best example of this, he said, was the role played by a Samsung Projector...

You probably spend a good amount of your computing time within the confines of a web browser. But are you making the most of that time? You’re not if you are relying on the same old browser habits that you developed years ago. The good news: There are plenty of ways in which you can supercharge your web browsing without resorting to a bunch of tricks that you’ll likely forget. Read on to learn more. ** Discover caret browsing One of the best-kept secrets of both Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox is the caret browsing feature. Caret browsing essentially makes web pages more keyboard friendly -- and web surfing a lot more productive, particularly if you spend much time at all selecting and copying text or graphics from a website. With caret browsing activated, a text cursor appears within any web page, and moving the cursor around and highlighting text and graphics are very similar to performing the same actions in a word processing document. In caret mode, the Tab key mo...

One of the long-standing mysteries in solar physics is why the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface. Now, scientists claim to have finally solved the mystery after they discovered a major source of hot gas that replenishes the corona — jets of plasma shooting up from just above the Sun’s surface, the Science journal reported. Scott McIntosh of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, a member of an international team which carried out the NASA-supported research, said, “It’s always been quite a puzzle to figure out why the Sun’s atmosphere is hotter than its surface. “By identifying that these jets insert heated plasma into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, we can gain a much greater understanding of that region and possibly improve our knowledge of the Sun’s subtle influence on the Earth’s upper atmosphere.” Team member Rich Behnke of the National Science Foundation, which funded the research, said: “These observati...

German astronomers have discovered a long-sought missing chunk of matter from one of the solar system’s more mysterious objects, the proto-planet Vesta, they announced Friday. They trained telescopes on an asteroid known as 1999 TA10 and managed to assess its unique chemical makeup. The asteroid, which is one to two kilometres in diameter, comes within a few million kilometres of earth during its orbit. The chemical make-up, with extraordinarily low levels of iron and a high concentration of wollastonite and ferrosilite, makes it practically certain that it is the missing chunk of Vesta’s mantle long sought by astronomers. The discovery was made by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research at Katlenburg-Lindau in Germany using images from a telescope in Hawaii. Vesta, discovered two centuries ago, is 525 kilometres in diameter and one of the two biggest objects in the asteroid belt. It is believed to be the remnant of a proto-planet that wa...

ViewSonic has introduces the Android smartphone ViewPad 4 running on Android OS 2.2, Froyo at CES this week. ViewSonic’s VeiwPad 4 has equipped with Qualcomm’s 1GHz MSM8255 processor together with a  4.1-inch WVGA display, 5 megapixel auto-focus camera with 720p video recording capability. More over the smartphone includes 5MP rear facing camera and 3MP front facing camera for video callings.  The ViewPad 4 also offers GPS functionality, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and HDMI 720p display output. ViewPad is set to retail for $549 when it hits to market and will start shipping in the middle of 2011.

Motorola continues to unravel their arsenal of phones at CES, touting their latest model, the Moto XT806LX.  It’s extremely difficult to watch the video, knowing this device will never hit US shores.  The unique thing about this device is that it sports two different touch screens.  The top fold out screen is capacitive and works the way most Android handsets do using your fingers and multi-touch.  The bottom screen is a resistive touch screen, supporting a stylus hidden in the device, making it easier to input various Chinese characters.  To further add to it’s functionality, Motorola has added an antenna to the device for your TV viewing enjoyment.  And just to top it off as a classy and stylish phone, they have embedded 20 or so Swarovski crystals on the outer edge of the primary screen.  How many of you guys wish this baby was coming to the US?  Let us know what you think about the device in the comments below. ...

IBuzz has unleashed another dual SIM mobile phone named IBuzz i4400 MusicBuzz. IBuzz i4400 MusicBuzz mobile phone is occupied with a lot of sizzling features including GSM 900 / 1800 Mhz | GSM 900 / 1800 Mhz network support and 6.1 cms (2.4 inches) of QVGA 262K color screen display. Preloaded with social networking services like Facebook, and Twitter this IBuzz i4400 MusicBuzz mobile phone also comes embedded with 1000 phone book entries. Up to 8 GB of external memory is added with this IBuzz i4400 MusicBuzz mobile phone along with 320 KB internal memory. IBuzz i4400 MusicBuzz Mobile Phone Features 6.1 cms (2.4 inches) of QVGA 262K color screen display 240 x 320 pixel of screen resolution Dual SIM (GSM+GSM) GSM 900 / 1800 Mhz | GSM 900 / 1800 Mhz network support 1.3 mega pixels of VGA camera 1280 x 1024 pixels of resolution 4x digital zoom 500 SMS storage Social networking services Micro SD card slot GPRS Class 12 connectivity WAP 2.0 browser 1000...

Ambidextrous, capacitive, programmable, open source, five simultaneous touch inputs. The Misa Digital Kitara has quite the laundry list of goodies to boast about, but we couldn't let it slide through CES without getting our fingers on it and exploring for ourselves. The first thing that strikes you about this guitar-shaped synthesizer is its weight distribution -- it's no heavier than a good electric guitar, but a lot more of that weight is contained within its neck -- and the second will inevitably be its lightning-quick response to touch. Misa tells us latency is less than 5 milliseconds and it felt like it. There are two main modes of operation: a string mode, as seen above, and a ball mode allowing for even more adjustability. Both modes can then be further tweaked by choosing between the red and blue setting, with the former allowing for the performance of hammer-ons. Sliding your finger around the 8-inch touchscreen can do all sorts of wonderful things as well...

At CES, Motorola received the opportunity to put on display their XT800 smartphone with MotoBlur.  Looks like this device is headed to our friends in China.  The device features dual SIM card slots to support voice and data simultaneously.  It also sports some leather texture for it’s backing and gold accents along the edges of the phone.  In addition, it will have a 3.7″ screen, 1GHz processor and a 5MP camera.  Check out the video below for a hands on, thanks to our friends over at Android Central. You can view the full specs here.  Don’t forget to let us know what you think of the device in the comments below.

  Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, All Things Digital's Kara Swisher interviewed Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and started off with the most obvious question - what was Twitter doing at a gadget show? According to Costolo, Twitter had been busy meeting with several device makers to try to make it easier and more consistent to use the microblogging platform across multiple platforms and devices, including becoming an embedded feature of some phones. "One of the things we're trying to do this year is to become more of a mass consumption environment," said Costolo. "It's more and more important that Twitter become easier and simpler to use across more platforms and devices." What exactly does that mean? According to Costolo, Twitter has spent a lot of time this week with various companies like Samsung and other device manufacturers discussing the ways that Twitter could become a standard feature on devices. "It would be gr...

London: Experts at the NRI industrialist Lord Swraj Paul-funded Caparo Innovation Centre here have developed a new and innovative iPhone application that helps households reduce the amount of food they waste. The app "Consume Within" has already been listed as 'New and Noteworthy' in the iTunes App Store. It is an innovative and easy to use application that is the first to track the use by dates of both shop-bought and home-made itemsThe Apple iPhone application has been developed at the award-winning Caparo Innovation Centre (CIC), a partnership between Caparo and the University of Wolvehampton. The app monitors food items in three different locations - fridge, freezer or cupboard - and the user can set their 'consume by' dates set individually. Each entry can be accompanied by a photograph that makes the item easy to identify at a later date. For all those similar looking food packages that have spent a few days in the freezer, Consume W...

Nothing exemplifies the power of Wiki – the open and collaborative platforms for content creation – like the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. The site that everybody can freely and collaboratively edit is credited not only with having created a massive repository of knowledge but also democratising the presentation of content on the Web. Wikipedia, which turns 10 this January, has over 35 lakh articles. In 2010, we saw several Wiki Media Foundation bigwigs visit India, hold public meet-ups with the Wiki community and appoint the first Indian to sit on the board of the Wikipedia Foundation, Bisakha Dutta. Apart from the formal Indian Wikipedia chapter, that has been on the anvil for some time now, Wikipedia Foundation has also chosen India to set up its first offshore office. Why India? But why India? The large number of potential Net users here, and the ‘ground support' that exists in the form of a passionate community of Wikipedians, drive these “offshore effo...