Phones don’t “remember” enough? More storage is coming. That means programability, which means rich functions, right?
The two companies it mentioned are Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Inc (HGST) of the United States and Seagate Technology LLC.
‘HDD makers are seriously thinking of using HDDs in mobile phones,’ said Hiroshi Suzuki, president and chief executive officer of the company.
…
In the world of one-inch HDDs, HGST has already launched ‘Microdrive,’ and Seagate announced in June that it will enter this HDD market.
Devices mobile phones, mobileTech, storage
Flexible mobile charging device for your car:
Enjoy the convenience of powering your iPOD in your car and the ability to use a single charger for many FireWire powered devices. Also, the convenience of charging cell phones, PDAs, other USB MP3 players and even Gameboy Advance SP on the road with a USB charger.
The USB port of the Firepod is regulated to the strict standard of USB power specification; works with popular bus-charging devices such as USB link cable for popular portable devices (PDA, cell phones, etc). The FireWire port of the Firepod outputs a steady and regulated current that is identical to your Apple FireWire port, so you don’t have to worry about battery-butchering power surge from accelerating and braking in everyday commute. …
Devices iPod, mobileTech, power, recharge, USB
Changing the way your office looks, and sounds.
I’ve gotten pretty used to reporting on bizarre products and services since starting TechJapan, but nothing could prepare me for what you are about to read about. If you only read one TechJapan article this week (which means you need to visit more often), make it this one. I will never look at flowers the same way.
They look like flowers.
They smell like flowers.
Wait, that’s because they ARE flowers.
Sound? Music? Where’s the sound coming from?
That would be the flowers.
Devices disguise, hidden, speakers
Might be worth looking into the ComCom conference in Japan this fall. The picture in this article doesn’t look like what’s described, but is clearly a media “outlet.”
“My favorite article was about Toshiko Sakai’s integrated home appliances for ComCom (Comfortable Communications). The original brief by ComCom was to design a remote control. Thank Toshiko, he looked further than the brief and designed a line of 22 integrated electronic products. One of them is this wall mount triple socket. It has a USB port and a built-in hard disk. You can store music and movies in it and send them to other products in the same product line. The system will be shown in October in ComCom’s show apartment in Tokyo.”
Devices design, electronics, hard drive, home appliance, remote control, Tokyo, USB
New squishy interface? Malleable computer imaging? Check this:
Their virtual clay sculpting system enables users to replicate in real time on a personal computer the physical act of sculpting a block of clay or other malleable material. The resulting 3-D electronic shape shown on the computer screen then can be fine-tuned for product design using standard computer-aided design/modeling software.
‘This technology will give product designers, or even artists, a tool that will allow them to touch, shape and manipulate virtual objects just as they would with actual clay models or sculptures,’ says Thenkurussi Kesavadas, director of the UB Virtual Reality Lab and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Devices 3D input, CAD, imaging, modeling, touch, virtual object
Wait… Windows Media Center Operating System?
Toshiba Corp. plans to announce a new laptop model next week that allows users to watch TV on it without having to boot up the computer’s Windows operating system – the first in what analysts say will be a new crop of multimedia notebooks to come.
Called Qosmio, (koss-me-oh) it will be Toshiba’s first laptop to fully integrate audio and video features, including a bright, near TV-quality display, DVD drive, TV tuner, and enhanced speakers. A user could click on the TV with the laptop’s remote control or watch a DVD movie without having to go through the all-too-familiar process of starting the accompanying Windows Media Center operating system.
Devices Microsoft, mobileTech, operating systems, TV, Windows, Windows Media Center
Two thumbs up! Thumb-driven Digital Assistant. A little expensive to start, but they expect prices to fall soon. Looks pretty customizable. Wonder if it’s as usable (content) as it is usable (thumbs)?
The first ever:Thumbs-only
> No stylus or handwriting recognition
> No mechanical buttons or keyboard
Fully customizable
> Removable Front-cover
> Control panels
> Multiple Soft-Keyboards
Totally reliable PDA
> Backups on memory cards
> Data automatically saved in internal Flash memory
Devices mobileTech, PDA, personal digital assistant, portable digital assistant
Underpowered, expensive sunglasses. Will cool-factor be enough?
Oakley, Inc. (NYSE:OO) today announced the introduction of Thump(tm), the world’s first performance eyewear combining patented optics with an internally integrated MP3 music player. Oakley will launch Thump(tm) in December for the 2004 holiday season under an exclusive distribution arrangement with Circuit City Stores, Inc. for the consumer electronics channel. Thump(r) will also be offered by Oakley’s own O Stores(r), online at Oakley.com and through limited specialty retailers. …
“Thump(tm) reinvents the experience of on-the-go music,” said Jim Jannard, chairman and CEO of Oakley. “The audio circuitry is built inside the eyewear frame, which means there’s nothing dangling from your body and there are no wires to get in the way.”
Oakley’s digital music player mounts the speakers to the eyewear frame with miniature extendible booms, enhanced with pivots. They allow the wearer to adjust speaker position for optimal ear placement and to reposition the speakers away from the ears whenever necessary. By pivoting the speakers, the wearer can control the balance between environmental sound and digital music. “When you want to carry on a conversation, you simply flip up the speakers,” continued Jannard. “We even designed the lenses with a pivot mount, so you can flip them up for low-light conditions.”
Devices eyewear, mobileTech, mp3 player, sunglasses
I am sad to note the passing of friend and mentor Keith Porterfield.
Keith was the person that introduced me to the web back in 1992 or so, and gave me certain values about Internet servers, connectivity, and communications. When Eric Raymond first wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar (now an evolving book), Keith pointed me to it. Over the years, Keith wrote a number of papers including one at NetAction: Information Wants to be Valuable: A Report from the First O’Reilly Perl Conference. He was a man of few but tremendously significant discussions. A white-bearded Internet geek at his core. And a really nice guy.
Identity, Life self-determination
New Scientist reports:
Researchers in Germany have developed software that can model traffic patters, and detect traffic jams–with 90% accuracy–as much as an hour ahead of time.
When engineers model the way road traffic flows they break the traffic down into three categories: freely flowing, jammed, and an intermediate state called synchronised flow in which dense traffic moves in unison, like marchers moving in step.
But this synchronised flow is unstable. One car pulling into another lane and forcing the driver behind to brake hard is enough to start traffic bunching up. This can quickly develop into a jam that propagates backwards through the traffic like a wave. Failure to predict this ‘pinch effect’ has stymied past attempts to model traffic flow.
…
The team’s trick is to be realistic about driver behaviour. ‘Real drivers tend to hinder each other when doing things like changing lanes. All this has to be taken into account,’ says Schreckenberg . And where previous models have simplified the way cars move – by assuming they can stop immediately without slowing down first, for example – the new model is more sophisticated.
Content, Scenarios behavior, flow, model, synchronize, traffic, traffic jam