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- Sony’s 3D Display For Gamers To Arrive In Japan In November
- Motorola Xoom Prices Are Dropping Fast In Europe As The Xoom Celebrates Its Six Month Birthday
- Microsoft’s Surface Garage: A Cross-Department Development Team, With Pizza And Beer
- Blu Cigs Smart Pack Alerts You When Other e-Smokers Are Nearby
- T-Mobile’s Next Big Android Phone Gets Caught On Camera
- Parrot’s AR.FreeFlight Quadricopter Piloting App Is Now Free On Android
- The Wicked Lasers Krypton S3 Will Fry Passing Satellites
- Deutsche Telekom Is Offering Pre-Orders For A Nebulous, Unnamed Apple Phone
| Sony’s 3D Display For Gamers To Arrive In Japan In November Posted: 06 Sep 2011 05:23 AM PDT  Do you remember the 3D HD display specifically designed for gaming that Sony Computer Entertainment unveiled back in June at E3? It took them a while, but now big S in Japan announced [JP] the final release date for the device in its home market: November 2. For the equivalent of US$582, buyers will get the 24-inch monitor itself, an HDMI cable, and a set of 3D glasses. A game isn’t included in the Japanese package – a separate set of (active shutter) 3D glasses will cost $78,. PSP games are displayed in full screen, while a system called SimulView allows 2 users to play 3D games on one display but to see full-screen images each. The display produces images in 1,920×1,080 resolution, comes with LED backlight, offers 5,000:1 contrast ratio, 3W×2ch+5W speakers and two HDMI interfaces. We’ll let you know when Sony announces the 3D display for markets outside Japan.
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| Motorola Xoom Prices Are Dropping Fast In Europe As The Xoom Celebrates Its Six Month Birthday Posted: 06 Sep 2011 04:31 AM PDT  With the Xoom now officially six months old, a major price drop is likely in the works. Various European tech blogs are reporting sales and/or price drops regarding the first Honeycomb tab. Register Hardware points to Dixons, a popular UK retailer, who is now selling the 32GB Xoom for £329 rather than £500. Blogeee goes as far to say that Motorola will officially cut the price down to £399. As they note, this would place the 32GB model at the same price point as competitor’s 16GB model. Smart, but a tad late. Retailers in the US, namely Amazon and Best Buy, recently cut the Xoom’s price as well but not as drastic. Amazon lists the 32GB version for $449 while Best Buy has it at $499, which while decent prices, are nothing to skip the first day of school over. Motorola surely knows how to make the Xoom a blockbuster: do an HP and cut it to $99. The European price cut is right on cue. The Xoom is now six months old and with the holiday season approaching, retailers, distributors and even manufacturers are likely looking to clear some room in their respective warehouses. The Xoom, while receiving a fair amount of pre-launch hype, hit the ground running but then fizzled out as consumers and reviewers found that Honeycomb was half-baked. Here we are a dozen Honeycomb tabs later and the product type is all but generic now, with all Honeycomb tabs looking the same save several trivial differences. Motorola has yet to make the price drops official but they will. They have to. The Xoom’s arbitrary amount of fame was over months ago. Now it’s time to hit the bargain bin and make way for the next generation — which will follow the same timeline to price cuts.
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| Microsoft’s Surface Garage: A Cross-Department Development Team, With Pizza And Beer Posted: 05 Sep 2011 02:46 PM PDT  Despite being the only TechCrunch writer in Seattle, I don’t get out to Microsoft nearly as much as one might expect. The fact is it’s on the other side of a big lake and getting there usually involves a lot of traffic. But when I get an invite like I did recently, to join a sort of unofficial Surface developers’ club for a meeting, it’s hard to say no. The promise of free pizza had nothing to do with my enthusiasm. I like the Surface. So it was that I got to join a group of developers from all around Microsoft as they spitballed ideas, compared new projects, and developed a new feature as I watched. They didn’t initiate me into the mysteries of the device or swear me to secrecy regarding plans of world domination, but I got to see some cool new Surface apps and contribute to the development of a new feature. Also, they had Alaskan Amber. I arrived at the Microsoft campus (one of them, anyway) around 6, and after wandering fruitlessly for a short time (navigating corporate architecture isn’t my strong suit) I was captured and conducted to a conference room where a dozen people or so were arrayed around tables as if for a weekly meeting. After some introductions, the purpose of this secret society was explained. It turns out that some people really just love working with the Surface. So much so that they can’t get enough during working hours! So this recurring event was created, with pizza and refreshments, to make it worth the extra time being put in. There were people from gaming, Windows, Kinect, marketing, a real cross section of Microsoft life. I was then given a short tour of some things that people in the group had developed in their spare time, for the most part on their own. A simple but versatile pamphlet presentation app, a sort of paperless coffee table, spoke to the Surface’s tragically commercial-only availability: But one developer, like myself a fan of “shmups,” had put together a rudimentary but promising shooter using real-life tokens to control your ships. You might remember some time back when we went to see a Dungeons and Dragons game for the Surface, complete with figurines, spells, and kobolds. As you can see below and at the top of this article, this game is a bit more frenetic. The dots emanate from various locations and it’s your job to navigate them. You move your ship around, point it where you want to shoot, and so on. Having a physical item to play with helps address the lack of tactility that occasionally makes touchscreen games so unsatisfying. Last was an interesting fusion of two innovative Microsoft products: the Surface and the Kinect. This is a sort of “morning briefing” app that is meant to run on your living room’s idle TV, which one can imagine may some day have a touch panel and depth sensing camera built in. Today it was an upright Surface 2.0 and a stock Kinect: You always see people in movies set in the future talking to their computers, controlling them with a gesture, and so on. This is a small-scale attempt at something like that that people might actually use. When you’re at a distance, it displays large-granularity info like the weather, upcoming appointments, and so on. You can say “mail” and it’ll switch to email, or “calendar Wednesday” and it’ll switch to that. And when you approach, it senses your proximity with the Kinect and switches to a touchscreen mode where you can touch the news and email items and read them. All put together by one guy, admittedly using APIs developed by hundreds, but a fun demonstration of what’s possible with the project right now. We then selected a proposed UI element to be coded tonight more or less from scratch. In this case, a sort of drawer menu was desired, something that could display metadata or properties for an item on screen like a photo. It would need some kind of UI cue to let people know it was there, a gesture to activate it and deactivate it, and some basic parameters to make it play well with other elements. For something as simple as this, there are still tons of design decisions. Right off the bat, there was the “just in time” question. Should the drawer’s “handle” be visible at all times? Should it show up when you tap, drag, or hold the object? How long after should it disappear? I asked if we could use the Surface 2.0′s ability to see things before they touched the screen and “magically” make the handle appear, but there wasn’t enough time to create the brightness-based blob creation I had in mind. And then there was the question of how far we wanted to dictate how the item was used. We shouldn’t make it right-side-only in case developers wanted to make it ambidextrous, for instance, and it was decided that handle visibility could be made flexible and left up to the software designers. It’s in situations like this that you can see some fundamental differences between how Microsoft and Apple work. A small sample size, admittedly, but it falls in line with the philosophies I observed at work last week in the Explorer ribbon debacle. First we discussed, then we whiteboarded, then we started coding. And by “we” I mean “they,” because I don’t know anything about it. I did make some suggestions regarding how to monitor certain types of touches, and I thought I had a rather clever idea regarding how to combine the gestures for opening and closing the drawer (we didn’t implement it, despite its brilliance). And piece by piece, with a few hilarious setbacks (including a not-so-hilarious pizza-related one), our UI element took form. By the end of the night, we could boast that we’d created a box that you could slide out from underneath another box. But its simple operation belied the many details that went into its construction: it was aligned with and moved along with the other UI element, it only pulled out to a certain distance, and it could potentially be filled with content very easily. We’d left ways for it to be configured one way or another, and despite a few bugs it was a working element — from concept to execution in two hours. And this is why Surface Garage exists. Because it’s fun to create things like this, to see the results of some collaboration and work after a short interval, and know that it was created that way because everyone wanted it that way. After this, someone will pick up the code for the drawer, clean it up, give it a few parameters, and who knows, maybe the next time you see a Surface, our drawer will be lying dormant under the virtual photos scattered in virtual piles on the screen. Maybe you’ll even see something like it in Windows 8. I’ve often written about how Microsoft tends to smother good ideas in the cradle, or else strangle them with internal conflict. It’s good that groups like this one (surely one of many) exist, as a blowoff valve for developers just interested in creating. They may not be building billion-dollar ideas, but beer, pizza, and time with like-minded colleagues is its own reward.
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| Blu Cigs Smart Pack Alerts You When Other e-Smokers Are Nearby Posted: 05 Sep 2011 11:56 AM PDT  So it looks like people are ready to slap the word “social” onto just about anything. Case in point: Blu Cigs Smart Pack. It’s a new offering from electronic cigarette maker Blu Cigs that comes with a homing device to find nearby e-cig smokers and Blu Cigs retail locations. Despite the fact that it sounds pretty ridiculous, I find this to be a rather clever move. Here’s why: Smoking is a social activity by nature. Total strangers will share their lighters, their cigarettes, and their stories all over the course of a ten minute cigarette break. Even when you start to hate the actual act of smoking, it’s difficult to give up because you get extra breaks during work where you can mingle with co-workers or strangers, and inevitably make friendships. When you’re toking on an e-cig, you’re more or less not welcome. Thus, the Blu Cigs Smart Pack. Its homing beacon will tell you when there’s another Blu Cigs smoker within a 50-ft radius, or if there’s a nearby retail location. Along with the “social integration,” Blu Cigs also added a few other fun enhancements to the product. There are a few battery enhancements to make changing batteries easier and extend battery life, along with an “Instant Inventory” feature. This lets you predetermine settings which automatically order you new cigs when your supply is low. Blu Cigs also included the “Convenient Cartomizer,” which gives the user control over nicotine strength and flavor. The Blu Cigs Smart Pack starter kit is available online for $79.95.
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| T-Mobile’s Next Big Android Phone Gets Caught On Camera Posted: 05 Sep 2011 11:19 AM PDT  If you recognize the phone up top, ye ol’ hypothalamus is probably already hard at work churnin’ out the “Do Want” signals. If you don’t, here’s all you need to know: it’s called the HTC Amaze 4G (or the HTC “Ruby”, if we’re goin’ by its internal codename), it’s T-Mobile’s next flagship Android smartphone, and it’s a beast. While this is by no means the first time Ruby has found its way behind a lens, it’s the first time we’ve seen it in any state of operation — in other words, it’s the first time we’ve really seen it turned on. As you may note, this specific unit lacks T-Mobile branding — that’s because it was snapped by Thai Android site DroidSans at an event over in their home turf, where HTC is seemingly a bit less worried about keeping this device under wraps. With that said, this is very much the same device as what’s been floating the rumor mil around as T-Mobile’s Amaze 4G. So, why is this one worth firing up the ol’ dopamine production center? Check out the specs, as confirmed by the rather blurry shot #4 below:
Now, the only question that remains: why the heck hasn’t T-Mobile made this thing official yet? Sure, they need to give their Galaxy S II some breathing room — but come on, guys, get this thing on the shelves. T-Mobile is a mobile telephone operator headquartered in Bonn, Germany. It is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. T-Mobile has 101 million subscribers making it the worlds sixth largest mobile... HTC Corp, (TAIEX: 2498) produces smartphones running the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems for themselves and as an OEM to other manufacturers. Since launching its own brand in...
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| Parrot’s AR.FreeFlight Quadricopter Piloting App Is Now Free On Android Posted: 05 Sep 2011 10:23 AM PDT  If you keep up with the TC/Gadgets crew you know we can’t resist a good R/C anything. We’ve reviewed AR remote control cars, and just recently a Syma S107 R/C chopper, but those are toys compared to what launched today: AR.FreeFlight for Android. AR.FreeFlight is a free augmented reality piloting application you can use with the Parrot AR.Drone quadricopter, which will basically make you the coolest kid on the block. And probably the coolest grown-up too. The AR.Drone first took to the sky back in 2010 at CES, and since, iOS users have been the only ones lucky enough to get in on the fun. But today an Android version found its way onto the market, along with a free SDK for developers to make their own AR.Drone games. FreeFlight is the primary piloting app for Parrot’s AR.Drone platform, but there are a few other games already available on iOS like AR.Race, AR.FlyingAce, and AR.Pursuit. What makes AR.Drone so much more badass than your average flight simulator or R/C helicopter is that the connects to your phone via WiFi and relays images from the quadricopter itself. So, in other words, you’re flying this little chopper around not only by inputting directions into your iOS/Android device, but you’re actually seeing what the quadricopter sees on the screen of your phone/tablet. Like this: The app is supported by any iOS device or Android 2.2 Froyo-powered device with a multi-touch screen at least three inches in size. As proven by multiple videos, the quadricopter works just fine outdoors and comes with not one, but two cameras. One faces forward and can pan around under the control of just one finger, while the other faces the ground. A small button on the interface lets you switch back and forth between forward facing view and ground view. But there’s just one catch: Even though the app itself is a free download, the Parrot AR.Drone Quadricopter costs a pretty penny. The chopper is availble from Parrot for $300, and a full list of resellers can be found here (brick-and-mortar) and here (online). Check out the video after the break.
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| The Wicked Lasers Krypton S3 Will Fry Passing Satellites Posted: 05 Sep 2011 08:35 AM PDT  For a little under $300 you, too, can ruin passing satellites with what is purported to be the brightest legal laser available. The Krypton S3 goes up to 1000mW for an output of 86 million lux – “8,000 times brighter than looking directly at the sun.” That kind of power will cost you, though: the 1000mW unit costs $999 compared to the $300 300mW laser. How dangerous is it? Well, Wicked Lasers advises:
Why would you need something like this? Well, it’s fun for astronomy and experiments but – trust me on this – don’t give it to your kids. I’ve used some of their lighter lasers and found myself temporarily blinded just by glancing at a laser reflection off of a matte balloon I was trying to pop. This is not a toy. Sharks and shark-mounted laser hardware sold separately.
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| Deutsche Telekom Is Offering Pre-Orders For A Nebulous, Unnamed Apple Phone Posted: 05 Sep 2011 07:57 AM PDT  In, according to Bloomberg, “anticipation of supply bottlenecks,” Deutsche Telekom aka T-Mobile is offering pre-order coupons to folks who call in asking for the next iPhone, whatever it may be. The move is quite clever: customers won’t have to stand in line, DT is promised a huge rush of sales during the post summer holiday slump, and it allows anti-fanboys to crow about the iSchafe on this gloriously slow federal holiday. Win-win-win. Stunt or actual effort to prevent “bottlenecks?” You decide.
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