CrunchGear |  |
- Tele Scouter: NEC Announces Transparent Head-Mounted Display
- Hands-On With The Gingerbread-Powered E Fun Nextbook Premium9 Tablet
- Sony’s Playstation-Branded 3D TV Hits November 13th
- ARM’s A7 To Act As Sidekick Processor To More Powerful A15 And Friends
- Lytro Makes Its Debut: Unique Form Factor, $400 Price Tag
- Kobo Pits Its Vox Against The Fire And Nook As First “Social” E-Reader
- Netflix For Android Finally Gains Honeycomb Tablet Support
- DODOcase Adds Monogramming, Auto Wake/Sleep Magnet To Their iPad 2 Cases
- Google Promises Android 4.0 For The Nexus S, “Theoretically” For Gingerbread Devices, Too
- The Mega-Video: What’s New In Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0)?
- Striiv Gamifies The Pedometer Craze
- New Screen Technology, TapSense, Can Distinguish Between Different Parts Of Your Hand
- Sony Opens Up The PlayStation Store To Tablet S Owners
- A Child’s-Eye View Of Microsoft’s Kinect For Kids
- Droid Razr To Taste Ice Cream Sandwich Update In First Half Of 2012
- Asus Teases The Transformer 2 Android Tablet, Hints At The Next Transformation
| Tele Scouter: NEC Announces Transparent Head-Mounted Display Posted: 20 Oct 2011 02:59 AM PDT  NEC announced the so-called Tele Scouter [JP] in Japan, a futuristic, see-through head-mounted display (HMD) for augmented reality applications. The device is based on the AiRScouter, which Brother has been working on for years (and which we covered here, here and here). The Tele Scouter, which NEC calls a “Wearable Computer”, is sized at 75×40×35mm and weighs 64g. Powered by a Windows Embedded CE 6.0-equipped (portable) terminal, it produces pictures in 800×600 resolution that can be superimposed onto the real world. The terminal (pictured below) features a ARM 500MHz CPU, IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Ver2.0+EDR, a microSD slot, a mic, It’s sized at 140×90×55 and weighs 360g. NEC says that when worn, the Tele Scouter creates the impression of a 16-inch screen that's about one meter away from the user's eyes. The company sees the device used for device assembly, parts picking and selection, and remote operations in factories (battery life: 4 hours). No word yet on a possible international release, but the Tele Scouter will be priced at US$5,200 in Japan. The software goes for an extra US$24,000 (release date: December 26). Via AV Watch [JP]
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| Hands-On With The Gingerbread-Powered E Fun Nextbook Premium9 Tablet Posted: 19 Oct 2011 07:50 PM PDT  E Fun has launched the third in its line of Nextbook Premium Tablets, a nine-incher to round out its size offerings. Almost identical to the 7- and 8-inch models (save for a lack of camera on the Premium7), the Nextbook Premium9 tablet rocks a 9-inch capacitive display, a silver back panel and an added hint of red around the edge. The trio shares almost all the same specs, perhaps implying that size really does matter in the tablet arena. The Nextbook Premium9 runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread with a 1GHz processor under the hood. Other specs include a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, 4GB of on-board memory, a microSD card slot, and (somewhat oddly) a mini USB port. Honeycomb is on the way, which should be a blessing — Honeycomb was designed for tablets and Gingerbread just seemed a bit buggy here. As far as design goes, I thought the Premium9 was pretty easy on the eyes. It felt a bit hefty, but in more of a solid way than a cumbersome one. The Nextbook Premium9 should retail for around $269 in November, and I’d say this one is a fashionable — albeit desperate for a software update — option in the sub-$300 Android tab category.
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| Sony’s Playstation-Branded 3D TV Hits November 13th Posted: 19 Oct 2011 04:28 PM PDT  Remember that 3D TV bundle that Sony announced at E3? Well, it’s finally arriving. A little later than we’d hoped, but at least it’s out in time for the holidays. According to the Playstation Blog, the 32″ TV should be generally available on November 13th. They also answer a busload of questions about the TV, in case you were curious about the inputs, 3D glasses, and so on. It’s too late to get a copy of Resistance 3 with your pre-order, which is too bad because I’ve heard good things about the game. You will get a copy of Motorstorm: Apocalypse, however. The display comes with a pair of 3D glasses and an HDMI cable. It seems like a pretty solid TV for a dorm room or small apartment; Sony TVs are generally pretty solid and this one is probably a good performer as well. I’m happy with my six-year-old Dell monitor, but you might like this thing, what with its 240Hz and built-in speakers. Plus, with that shape, you can hold your hands up from a distance and pretend it’s a Vita.
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| ARM’s A7 To Act As Sidekick Processor To More Powerful A15 And Friends Posted: 19 Oct 2011 03:26 PM PDT  Here’s another entry to add to the alphabet soup of processors, chips, and components being bandied about by device makers. ARM, whose A8 core forms the center of a great number of mobile devices, has announced a little brother to their line of higher clockspeed processors. The A7 will form a sort of low-power sidekick to the more powerful A15 and its ilk. The A7 (no direct relation to Apple’s A4 and A5, though they’re in the same extended family and at some point these naming strategies are going to interact) is built on a 28nm process (compared with the others, made at 40-45nm), meaning it can be both physically smaller and draw less power. It’s intended to be used for things like always-on services, background checks and downloads for instance, while passing off more CPU-intensive stuff like media and gaming to the bigger chip. While running only the smaller A7, the system would draw significantly less power — up to 70%, they say. But it wouldn’t be a processing slouch: the die shrink allows it to fit enough transistors that it would provide the performance of today’s superphones in tomorrow’s budget phones. Naturally, the superphones will have advanced as well, though. It’s certainly not an unprecedented move (NVIDIA has a similar solution using multiple A9s), but ARM is smart to make the processor a modular addition, and of course they’ve designed it to work seamlessly with the faster processors and offload big jobs quickly. They’ve got big players on board to leverage the new “big dog, little dog” architecture, including Broadcom, TI, Freescale, Samsung, and more. Expect plenty of branded chips to have A*-A7 team-up configurations. Don’t expect them any time soon, though: ARM is aiming for 2013 at the earliest for the new chips to be introduced in products. They’d be aiming at smartphones initially, though of course tablets won’t be far behind. Anandtech has a bit more info and slides from ARM, if you’re interested.
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| Lytro Makes Its Debut: Unique Form Factor, $400 Price Tag Posted: 19 Oct 2011 12:50 PM PDT  The Lytro “focus later” camera has created a lot of interesting discussion on the web. With photography still in many ways the same as it was a century ago, this new way of capturing images has certainly struck a nerve. I’ve voiced my skepticism, but I wouldn’t want to pour cold water on this truly innovative device on its big debut. In case you’ve forgotten, the Lytro allows you to shoot a picture with minimal effort, then adjust the focus to your liking later, among other things. At an event in San Francisco today, CEO and originator of the Lytro’s light-field technology Ren Ng showed off the device, which only resembles traditional cameras in that it has a lens and LCD screen. It’s really more like a kaleidoscope than anything else. The front sports an F/2 lens with an 8x zoom — it was not specified whether that F/2 persists throughout the zoom range, but based on my understanding of the technology, I think it has to (update: yes, the f/2 is constant). Neither was the 35mm equivalent for focal length given. On the other end of the device, which is 4.4″ long and weighs only 8oz, there is a 1.46″ LCD touchscreen on which you can frame the shot and explore previously shot images. There are only two buttons on the device, one for shutter and one for power, plus a slider for zoom. You certainly have to give it to their designers: whether you like the shape or not, it’s unique-looking and practical in a way. The Lytro will come in two versions: $399 buys you an 8GB version (blue or grey) that holds 350 shots; $499 gets you a red 16GB version that holds twice that. This works out to about 22 megabytes per shot, which is comparable to many RAW shots being taken on DSLRs today. The actual “megapixel” value is hard to determine, and Ng described the camera as capturing “11 mega-rays” to an LFP file. I’m thinking that the final images are likely not that large in terms of square dimensions, but of course that square would contain far more data than a square JPEG. The specs say “HD quality,” which of course means very little. Notably, the pictures you take will be able to be hosted on Lytro’s site for free. Let’s hope they can scale that. They’re shipping in early 2012, but some questions remain. How long does the battery last? How does it hand low-light situations (we can’t take the F/2 lens at face value, though it’s certainly bright)? How will the photos be displayed — Flash, some kind of custom container? Will there be apps? And did they spend all of that $50 million? The camera is available for pre-order now at Lytro’s site.
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| Kobo Pits Its Vox Against The Fire And Nook As First “Social” E-Reader Posted: 19 Oct 2011 12:04 PM PDT  The increasing socialification (as opposed to socialization) of our everyday activities is food for thought. What is it that makes people want to share everything about every activity? Reading especially, to me, has always been more of an escape from the social sphere. Except for on the rare occasions on which I have had to read out loud, books are a way to completely disengage from the constantly and insistently connected online world. Yet I can’t deny that the urge to share and be shared with must be as compelling for some regarding books as it is for their lunches, activities, and so on. So when Kobo shows off its e-book reader and touts it as the world’s first social e-reader, I am skeptical. Firstly because I’m pretty sure there are plenty of socially-enabled e-readers out there, and secondly because I’m not sure social is a basket into which that Kobo should be putting all their eggs. The competition is fierce as hell. Amazon’s Fire is widely recognized as a potential powerhouse, and the Nook Color has already captured a nice little piece of the LCD e-reader market. I’ve had a soft spot for Kobo for a while now, being a fan of their original and updated touch-based e-readers, but I have no confidence in this new venture. The reason Amazon is able to make the Fire a compelling device is because of the vast stores of content they have waiting to serve up. Movies, shows, music, and more in addition to books. The Nook Color was able to carve out a niche because it had an actual identity, and was far cheaper than other Android tablets. What does the Kobo have? Well, to its credit, it has social features that are very desirable among social readers. You know, book clubs and such. If you and your friends have the wherewithal to put together a book club, this is definitely the platform to do it on. The Kobo Pulse integration lets you detect and join discussion of passages and pages as you read them, and the Vox is the first e-reader to get Facebook Ticker integration. “Devin turned a page in The Aeneid – 12 seconds ago.” And who doesn’t like stats like these: But outside Kobo’s unique and potentially interesting social e-reading platform (collectively called Reading Life), it’s just another slightly out of date Android tablet with a skin on it. The specs aren’t anything to sneeze at (they were leaked a while back), but they’re also nothing special. It’s priced competitively at $200, certainly, but I’m not sure I could advise anyone to pick it up over the Fire, based strictly on the potential I see in them. That said, I haven’t used either, so I don’t want to make any real recommendations here. But I don’t think there’s anything Kobo has that Amazon can’t whip together in an update. That’s a dangerous position for them to be in. If you’re interested, you can learn more about the Vox over at Kobo’s site. You can pre-order today and I think they’re shipping soon.
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| Netflix For Android Finally Gains Honeycomb Tablet Support Posted: 19 Oct 2011 11:55 AM PDT  If you’re running out of things to do with your Honeycomb-powered Android tablet, why not load up the newly-updated Netflix app? The fresh new 1.5 update finally adds support for tablets that run Android 3.x, in addition to spreading the streaming video love to tablets in Canada and Latin America. “Wait,” you may be saying to yourself. “Hasn’t Netflix worked on Android tablets for a while now?” Well, sort of. You could coax your tab to run Netflix provided you went through the trouble of digging up and installing a dumped .apk, which in fairness is a pretty trivial process for those with a few minutes to kill. It was a less-than-official solution for sure, but hey — it worked! This time, though, there’s no such fuss involved. It’s already live in the Market, and while the app is free, you’ll of course have to subscribe to Netflix’s stream-friendly monthly plans. Some may say the quality of Netflix’s catalog has slowly been going down the tubes, but I think $7.99 a month is a small price to pay to see Troll 2 whenever I want. Update: Droid-Life has already started playing with the updated app, and it doesn’t seem to be optimized for all that extra screen space.
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| DODOcase Adds Monogramming, Auto Wake/Sleep Magnet To Their iPad 2 Cases Posted: 19 Oct 2011 11:43 AM PDT  Dodocase makes fantastic iPad and Kindle cases using traditional book binding techniques and equipment. They’re just great. The San Francisco-based company recently upgraded their offering with several welcomed features. First off, the iPad 2 cases now ship with a tiny magnet hidden in the liner to automatically toggle the tab’s wake/sleep function. This is a feature that Dodocase owners have long requested and until now, had to use ugly DIY solutions. Dodocase doesn’t do ugly. Monogramming is also now available on the $59.99 iPad 2 case for $9.99. Lettering is done in either gold and black and elegantly placed on the bottom right of the front cover. For an additional $5, buyers can opt for several new liners instead of the traditional colored ones. The optional Dream Clouds (pictured up top) and The Woods liners add a bit of character to the otherwise straight-laced product. We’ve tested several Dodocases since they first hit and they never disappoint. For better or worse, Dodocases age beautifully like a well-bound book. Hand-assembled out of black Moroccan cloth and bamboo, these cases will sadly not last a lifetime. However, they’ll serve you admirably and as Greg stated in our review, they could probably get you laid. The DODOcase philosophy is simple, manufacture things locally and help keep the art of bookbinding alive and well by adapting it to a world of e-readers and iPads. Each DODOcase cover has its own unique character as it was handmade in San Francisco using techniques developed hundreds of years ago.
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| Google Promises Android 4.0 For The Nexus S, “Theoretically” For Gingerbread Devices, Too Posted: 19 Oct 2011 11:25 AM PDT  With a few hours of Ice Cream Sandwich familiarity under our belts, the looming question in everyone’s mind is: when will the Android 4.0 update roll out to existing devices? Well, nobody knows. But after talking with a few authorities on the subject, we at least have a few hints. Google’s Android Product Manager Gabe Cohen and Android User Experience Director Matias Duarte have promised Ice Cream Sandwich for the Nexus S, and hinted that all other Android 2.3 Gingerbread devices should “theoretically” get ICS as well. Here’s the official quote: “Currently in the process for releasing Ice Cream Sandwich for Nexus S. Theoretically should work for any 2.3 device.” According to Engadget, there still isn’t a clear plan for the Nexus One. HTC has decided to rest heavily on the fence for this one, saying that they do hope to release ICS to the masses, but will have to figure a way to lay their Sense UI on top of it first. Just like Cohen and Duarte, HTC refuses to give a timeline. In my quest to dig up some answers, I decided to reach out to the big four carriers as well. T-Mobile never responded, while the rest had either no comment to give, or no information regarding the ICS update schedule. Many owners of Froyo devices purchased early this year are still waiting on Gingerbread, so hopefully the carriers and phone makers have a more efficient plan for Android 4.0. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....
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| The Mega-Video: What’s New In Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0)? Posted: 19 Oct 2011 10:35 AM PDT  Sure, other sites might have footage of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.) They grabbed a Galaxy Nexus, fumbled with it for a second or two, and then shot 2-3 minutes of video with a device/interface they weren’t really familiar with. And that’s fine. But I didn’t want to do that — I wanted us to do it right. Late last night, I caught up with Android’s Engineering Director Dave Burke for an in-depth, 15 minute video showing the full array of Ice Cream Sandwich’s finest features. Want to skip around a bit? Only care about one or two features? I’ve broken down the timestamps below, so feel free to scrub the timeline. 0:00 : The Galaxy Nexus Hardware (Sections with *’s are those that are particularly awesome and absolutely worth watching even if you don’t have time for the whole thing) You might recognize this video from our hands-on impressions last night — but given just how much is really shown off here, we figured the video was worth breaking out of that wall of text. Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information.... Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes Google-developed software libraries, but does not support programs developed in native code. The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards...
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| Striiv Gamifies The Pedometer Craze Posted: 19 Oct 2011 10:35 AM PDT  The pedometer – those little things you wear to measure your steps – has always been a weight loss gimmick. Only recently, however, have pedometers gotten smart enough to do more than just vaguely shame us into walking a little further. Take Striiv, for example. This keychain-sized device measures steps walked and stairs climbed and includes a unique set of cute little games that should, in theory, get you off your bum. Like the FitBit, Striiv senses strides and stair climbs from the comfort of your pocket. It has a small LCD screen and lasts one week on one charge, making it quite Tamagotchi-like in its size and interface. To use it you just slip it into your pocket and it gives you goofy little badges (“Good start” for your first 150 steps, “Average Day” for 4900 steps, the average number of steps an American takes each day) and you can track your daily stats. Then it gets a little weird. First, you can “donate” your steps to causes like “Clean Water,” the Rainforest, and Fighting Polio through GlobalGiving.org. You can also take little challenges like running 1300 steps in a few minutes or actually standing up off the couch at night. Then there’s Myland. Myland is like Farmville in that you buy and plant trees using the “gold” you earn while walking. The less we say about this strange game the better. Striiv syncs with Macs and PCs via a MicroUSB cable (it doesn’t support wireless connectivity) and costs the same as the new Fitbit Ultra, $99. The sync system sends your “donations” and other data to the server and updates your goals. I’m a big fan of these sorts of tools. They encourage folks to exercise through what seems like play and they allow you to see how much you’ve walked during the day. Is Striiv better than Fitbit? I’m not sure — it’s a different demographic. The Striiv is a lot bigger and designed to actually sit on your keyring, and the Striiv offers more in the way of on-screen interactivity whereas Fitbit shines online. The Fitbit is also much smaller, which is a plus. However, the Striiv is fun, cute, and entertaining which is more than I’ve ever asked for any piece of exercise equipment, let alone a pedometer. The device will be available this weekend in stores. Click to view slideshow.
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| New Screen Technology, TapSense, Can Distinguish Between Different Parts Of Your Hand Posted: 19 Oct 2011 09:06 AM PDT And you thought multitouch gestures were annoying – how about mashing your whole hand on your screen to close an app or rapping on it with your knuckle to summon Siri (or Iris?). A new technology from Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute allows your device to distinguish between different types of taps using a microphone and touchscreen. Created by Chris Harrison, the same guy who brought us Omnitouch, the technology “doubles the bandwidth” when it comes to touch interaction.
The system can also sense different tools including foam, multiple pens types, and brushes. The system could sense who was using which pen, allowing for collaborative drawing. You can check out the project page here. The project is obviously in its research stage but I wouldn’t be surprised if it showed up in real world applications in the next year or so.
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| Sony Opens Up The PlayStation Store To Tablet S Owners Posted: 19 Oct 2011 08:51 AM PDT  Owners of the Tablet S from Sony: listen up because your Android-powered slab of glass just became that much more fun. The PlayStation Store for PS-certified devices has officially gone live, with 10 PS1 titles available at launch. The Store is now accessible in nine countries, the U.S. and Canada included. Sony says that most of the Tablet S-optimized titles will cost $5.99 to download. The company hasn’t mentioned anything about PS Store availability for the Tablet P, but it’ll likely take longer to optimize games for the dual-screen Sony tab. Game titles currently available in the store include:
Obviously the selection here is a bit measly, but “Sony is working closely with developers around the globe to expand the variety of PlayStation games and content accessible on the Sony Tablet S and future PlayStation Certified devices.” Owners of the Tablet S should receive a notification (if they haven’t already) informing them of the availability of the PlayStation Store. To get yourself gaming, simply follow the direction on the screen that direct you to download the PS Store App, at which point you can start downloading games. Sony is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics, video, communications, video game consoles, and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets.
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| A Child’s-Eye View Of Microsoft’s Kinect For Kids Posted: 19 Oct 2011 08:37 AM PDT  I took my six-year-old son Kasper to Microsoft’s Kinect For Kids event yesterday in hopes of better understanding Microsoft’s efforts at grabbing the younger demographic. While he’s already an avid weekend gamer, I wondered if Microsoft’s latest immersive play solutions would stir him in anyway. I discovered two things: that the Kinect for Kids initiative, as evidenced by the image above, is a sometimes sad but immersive Kinect playspace and that Microsoft has a very narrow age window into which they release most of their games. First, the good stuff. I’m pleased to report that the Kinect version of Puss In Boots is the winner this season with a protagonist that allows for some fun, immersive play. You’re Puss (he of the boots), late of Shrek fame, and you’re outfitted with a sword, hat, and a pair of botas of Spanish leather. You slash, kick, and punch your way through the game, occasionally jumping from rope to rope as you make your way through the slums of Far Far Away. It’s one of the more immersive adventure games we saw and Kasper loved it. A close second was Kinect Star Wars although the interactions and gameplay are still too wonky for my liking. The on-screen Jedi flail around and it feels more like a rails shooter than anything else. Another winner was Kinect Sports 2. This adds skiing and tennis to the mix and it worked as well as the original Sports which is to say that the faux sports were realistic enough to simulate actual sports. Then we degenerate into the interactive “little kids” games, Once Upon A Monster, an interactive Sesame Street and National Geographic “show,” and the Disneyland Adventures. These games simulate, in order, being a monster, Sesame Street, and Disneyland. For example, in Once Upon a Monster you become Elmo or Cookie Monster and run around in the woods and balance on stuff. In Disneyland Adventures you go to Disneyland. In the National Geographic interactive television program you pretend to be a bear eating moths. This is Microsoft’s checkbook development writ large. By paying for the hearts, minds, and trust of parents wholesale through these brands, they don’t have to generate it themselves. To recap, my own six-year-old test subject, then, found Puss In Boots quite fun, Star Wars Kinect pretty rocking, and the Disney and Elmo stuff pretty juvenile, even for, well, a juvenile. He also enjoyed Kinect Sports 2 because he’s an avid (if reckless) skier. The games are truly interactive and immersive, that much is true. You can actually play as one of your favorite Sesame Street characters and, as we reference above, you can “hug” princesses at Disney World. But these are video games. There is some basic reading and counting involved for the wee ones, but these games are aimed at the youngest kids and will quickly bore children who have already left the Sesame Street demographic. Microsoft is caught in the traditional trap of so-called “educational” gaming: either the educational portion is too preachy or the game is too thin. Games that got it right – Mavis Beacon, Math Blaster, Oregon Trail – are classics because teachers and parents treated them as treats given once the regular work was done. The question I have as a parent is where is the value in simulating Disneyland? In creating mini-games based on Sesame Street characters? In dumping an interactive portion into a show about a man who tamed a grizzly bear? I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but how are these games teaching anything? The anti-marketer in me, for example, find Disneyland Adventures cynically mercenary, an attempt to give pressure kids into wanting to go to Disneyland. No harm in that, I agree, but why else does it exist? The image of a child hugging the air is the saddest I’ve ever seen and to suggest that a digital simulacrum of Snow White will please a child is wildly off-base. It’s this image that my ire returns to, like my tongue probing a sort spot in my mouth: that Disney and Microsoft think you can hug nothingness. As I said before, Microsoft has a very narrow window into which it must inject its kids’ content. Children under 2 shouldn’t watch TV at all while pre-schoolers and first graders are already forming some very strong attachments to Pokemon, Bratz, and other brands. Microsoft hasn’t yet cracked the Nintendo code which, as I noted before, is essentially the creation of umami for the heart. Xbox hasn’t quite reached that family demographic in a way that makes sense for them and, like Sony, they’ve depended on marquee mature titles to keep them afloat. Kinect is clearly for kids – adults flailing around in a living room is an invitation to spill the scotch but, as of yet, Kinect Adventures and maybe the dancing game have grabbed any traction. But what happens in the year or two between Sesame Street and early literacy? Does Elmo look as appealing to a kid who is familiar with more mature fare? While I know these games aren’t in it for long-term enjoyment, isn’t it a little cynical to hope that kids will pester their parents to buy the game (“It’s educational! It’s Disney!”) only to have them abandon it once they realize Cookie Monster is for babies? My son enjoyed the adventure games and I’m certain my daughter will enjoy some of the Disney games although, at 3, she lacks the coordination to actually play with the Kinect. The helicopter parent in me wants Microsoft to keep its nose out of my kids childhood whereas the neophile wants to see where this immersive gameplay is headed. In the end, neither will win and Kasper will start to play New Super Mario Brothers for a few minutes ever weekend, abandoning Digi-Minnie and Mickey to their soulless kingdom while we, if forced, will walk the streets of the real Disneyland as a family.
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| Droid Razr To Taste Ice Cream Sandwich Update In First Half Of 2012 Posted: 19 Oct 2011 07:02 AM PDT  Motorola’s Droid Razr made quite the splash yesterday thanks in part to its impressive hardware, but the Android build that it runs seems bit quaint now thanks to Ice Cream Sandwich. No worries, though: if you pick up a Droid Razr when it ships in November, you should be getting the Android 4.0 update in early 2012. News of the Ice Cream Sandwich release window came courtesy of Alain Mutricy, Motorola Mobility’s SVP of Portfolio and Product Management. He seemed to be very forthcoming while speaking at a Berlin press conference, mentioning that Droid Razr users will receive the update sometime in Q1 2012, and that Motorola is working to get the Droid Razr’s hallmark features working in Ice Cream Sandwich. Among those features is Motocast, a nifty way to directly stream media and content from your PC to your Droid Razr. And who could forget Smart Actions, the context-sensitive app that manages device settings according to user-defined situations? The Droid Razr wouldn’t be the Droid Razr without them, so a little extra time to get things working is to be expected. It’s a bummer for those who wanted (or hoped) to see Motorola’s hardware combined with Google’s latest-and-greatest OS, but at least the Droid faithful have something to look forward to. Update: A Motorola representative has reached out to us to to clarify that ICS will make its way to US Droid Razrs sometime in the first half of 2011, and not the first quarter as originally reported.
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| Asus Teases The Transformer 2 Android Tablet, Hints At The Next Transformation Posted: 19 Oct 2011 06:05 AM PDT  Gasp! A new Asus Transformer tablet is in the works. This of course calls for a YouTube teaser trailer that doesn’t show a damn thing. The Next Transformation hints at the future of Asus’ convertible tablet. Giving Asus’ recent marketing strategies, prepare yourself for a healthy dose of viral campaigns until this thing is officially announced. But chances are the likely upcoming videos and teaser pics won’t hint at the only thing I care about: Does this tablet run Ice Cream Sandwich? ASUS is well known for high-quality and innovative technology. ASUS offers a complete product portfolio to compete in the new millennium.
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