Samsung is in a roll since it started the Galaxy fever, and there’s no stopping the phone giant especially at the Mobile World Congress 2012, where it just unveiled its latest project: the Galaxy Beam.
Not to be confused with the Android Beam, Galaxy Beam takes its name from its built-in projector that can show HD projection of up to 50 feet wide with is ultra-bright 15 lumens.
The rest of the specs are not as impressive as its brothers Note and Nexus — running on Android 2.3, a 4-inch screen with a resolution of 800x400px, 5MP rear camera and 1.3MP front camera, HSPA+ connectivity, and 8GB of storage.
I’m guessing that in actual usage, this will deliver a much smaller image in regular use, say A4 size, if you want to conserve battery. More than it’s use for sales pitches and showing grandma your recent camping trip right then and there, it’s also great for apps like games and photo editors. That is if they open it up access to third parties. Stay tuned for pricing and availability.
Via: the verge

Willow Garage, a distinctive new venture in Menlo Park, Calif., has created a automaton recognized because the PR2 bears some resemblance with the Jetsons’ beloved Rosie. It is nonetheless under improvement, but currently the PR2 can fold clothes, fetch a drink from the fridge, set the table as well asbake cookies.The robot’s backers aren’tprepared to say just how soon the PR2 will hit the mainstream marketplace. At this time, it expenses an excessive amount of, does also small and is also slow to become of interest to most customers. But to numerous specialists, the concept of a skilled and intelligent household robot lastly appears to become drawing close to.”Thetechnologies is significantly closer than many people believe,” stated Andrew Ng, an associate professor of pc science at Stanford University. “We’re not but there, but I believe that in much less than a decade the technologies will exist to possess a helpfulhousehold robot.”Willow Garage, founded4 years ago by Scott Hassan, a software program developer who previously produced the business that became Yahoo Groups, is really a for-profit institution using the express objective speeding up improvement of such robots. Its investors, who, apart from Hassan, Willow Garage declines to reveal, evaluate the business on how nicely it issucceeding at its mission.Rather of tallying earnings, they take a look at issues like how rapidly developers are adding code to ROS, the operating system underneath the PR2; how numerous developers and institutions are utilizing that code in their robots and whether or not the function carried out using the robots or ROS is winning businessawards.”We’re

attempting to construct a individual robotics business,” stated Steve Cousins, Willow Garage’s CEO. “We wish toserve as a catalyst.”Willow Garage operates on the premise that a

main impediment to progress in robotics has been the lack of standards. Every time a business or study institution has had an concept for a brand new robotic function or job, it generally has began from scratch, developing its personal distinctive hardware and software program to test it out. Simply because the hardware and software program weren’t compatible with those created by other researchers, experiments usually couldn’t be duplicated and also the scientists had a challenging, if not impossible, time developing on function carried out by other people.Willow Garage’s answer was to

create a robot with lots of technical capabilities built on leading of an open-source operating system that it would distribute widely inside the robotics study community. Final year, the business gave away 11 PR2s to leading university and corporate-based robotics labs. It is because sold 13 other PR2s to comparableorganizations.The assumption

is the fact that if robotics researchers at various institutions all use exactly the same fundamental platform, they could quit reinventing the wheel and share outcomes, code and insights. The concept was to turn the robot into some thing like a Computer or smartphone, exactly where individuals could begin focusing on developing programs or apps, instead ofthe robot itself.So far, those robotic apps

happen to be impressive. A team in the University of California-Berkeley has programmed their PR2 to sort and fold laundry. A team at Willow Garage programmed a PR2 to play pool, sinking shot following shot. Along with a team in the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies programmed their PR2 to mix up some dough from raw ingredients and bake cookies inside atoaster oven.But researchers are taking the underlying code

nicely beyond the PR2. You will find now some three,100 “packages” of code which have been added to ROS, up from fewer than 1,300 a year ago, based on Willow Garage. And also the vast majority of those packages had been created not for the PR2 but for robots like four-rotor flying vehicles and autonomous vehicles.

Numerous businesses that within the past dismissed study on robotics as also costly are now taking a take a look at what may be carried out with ROS and affordable, off-the-shelf robotics components, stated Hyoun Park, a study analyst in the Aberdeen Group. Such experimentation “could truly alter the way we consider robotics,” statedPark.Analysts

like Park see a wide selection of possible applications for self-guided customizable robots like the PR2 and its possible successors. A real-life Rosie is an apparent 1, but might nonetheless be a systems off. Within the nearer term, individual robots might take on roles in little companies and warehouses performingrepetitive tasks or as mobile security guards.

1 region that might possess a large amount of possible for PR2’s successors is in-home well being care for the elderly or the disabled, stated Richard Doherty, study director using the Envisioneering Group. With an aging population within the United States, Western Europe and Japan, there’s a expanding require for nurses who can monitor and help patients. But there’s a shortage of going to house nurses, Doherty stated.But

prior to robots turn out to be widely employed, their price should come down. The original, two-armed PR2 retails at $400,000. Willow Garage has attempted to decrease the cost by providing a model with just 1 arm, but that model nonetheless expenses $285,000. The business provides each robots at a discount to researchers who contribute code to ROS, but even then the lowest priced PR2 expensesabout $200,000.Even at a

decreased cost, the robots will need to be a great deal much more capable than they’re now prior to they turn out to be a mainstream item. Even in the tasks they’ve began to master, like folding towels or fetching a drink, robots take far longer than humans. And frequently their efficiency is inconsistent at greatest.At UC-Berkeley,

for example, researchers have tried to possess a PR2 sort via and fold a pile of laundry. But even when the amount of various kinds of laundry articles is kept to just 5 or ten, the PR2 is effective at identifying them no much more than 80 percent from the time, based on Pieter Abbeel, a professor within the electrical engineering and pc sciences department. And if the selection increases, the robot has an much more challengingtime.”It’s

nonetheless a large challenge,” Abbeel stated.Robots

nonetheless possess a extremely challenging time performing any quantity of everyday tasks, like setting the table or placing objects away. That is simply because robots do not see issues the way you and I do, specialists say. Rather, they see “a large amount of numbers,” statedNg.

Nonetheless, in spite of all of the challenges, individualhousehold robots are moving from science fiction to reality.”I

really feel like we’re on the cusp of a revolution, stated Ng. “Fifty years from now, when somebody is writing a book on the history of robotics, I believe Willow Garage and ROS will have played a large function in obtaining robots into our houses.”

Here is a link to PR2 Robot page at over at Willow Garage.

Specs aren’t always accurate, especially when it comes to the frequencies supported by the devices we review — something we learned the hard way with T-mobile’s G2x last year. While both Samsung and AT&T list the radios in the awesome new Galaxy Note LTE as quadband GSM / EDGE, tri-band UMTS / HSPA+ (850 / 1900 / 2100MHz) and dual-band LTE (1700 and 700MHz, bands 4 and 17) we’ve read emails, tweets and comments suggesting that Samsung’s giant phone (or little tablet?) is also compatible with AWS (1700 MHz) for HSPA+, which is used by T-Mobile in the US. Bell, which carries the same Galaxy Note in Canada, shows it supporting 1700MHz for HSPA+, further adding to the confusion. Of course, it’s possible the Canadian handset is slightly different, but we wanted to verify the radio specs for AT&T’s model so we unlocked our white review unit with the help from our friends at Negri Electronics. The verdict? AT&T’s Galaxy Note does not support AWS for HSPA+ — it’s EDGE only on T-Mobile USA. Sure, it’s rather unfortunate considering Samsung’s flagship unlocked Galaxy Nexus features a pentaband HSPA+ radio, but to be clear, the same restriction applies to the global non-LTE version of the Galaxy Note that we reviewed last year.

via: engadget

In 1971, Hewlett-Packard commissioned a marketing study to see if anyone would buy a $395 pocket calculator. The marketer’s verdict? Make it the size of a typewriter, because nobody wants a small machine.

Luckily, Bill Hewlett ignored the marketers, and the next year, the company introduced its HP-35 Scientific Calculator. The pocket calculator was a hit, eventually making slide rules obsolete. In 2009, it was honored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers as a “Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing.”

The HP 35 is part of the storied past of a company that went on to dominate the printer, server, and personal computer markets.

But after all the turmoil of the past decade, can HP come up with the next pocket calculator? You bet it can, says Prith Banerjee, the head of HP labs. He thinks that HP’s project Moonshot, announced late last year, could give birth to a big hit for the company: computer systems that are ideal for processing the 35 zetabytes (that’s 35 billion gigabytes) of data that research firm IDC expects to be created in 2020.

Banerjee may be bullish, but HP has stumbled badly in the past few years. It spent $3.3 billion trying to turn the TouchPad into an iPad killer. That project was unceremoniously dumped after just a few months on the market. And in 2007, then-CEO Mark Hurd slashed the company’s research and development budgets by 20 percent — $700 million dollars. “He burned the furniture to please Wall Street,” HP Chairman Ray Lane told Reuters last summer, saying that it would take time for HP to turn the company around.

“The problem is the constant budget cutting in R&D has a long-term impact,” says Phil McKinney, who until last year was chief technology officer of HP’s PC group. It could take years for HP to get its next hit product off the ground, and HP will have to have the stamina to stick with new products long enough to turn them into winners.

That’s the opposite of what happened with the TouchPad. “Going into the acquisition of Palm it was well understood that this needed to be a multi-year investment,” McKinney says. “All of a sudden, a year after the acquisition, they ended up killing the program.”

A few months after that, Lane and the rest of the HP board tapped Meg Whitman to run the company. But she’s walking a tightrope. With her second quarterly earnings call set for next week, Wall Street isn’t going to wait years for another killer product.

Prith Banerjee, Director of HP Labs
Photo: Robert McMillan

All signs are that Whitman really believes that HP is going to crank out the new products that will keep her company growing. In a November earnings call with financial analysts, she said that HP will bump up R&D spending in 2012 — HP won’t say by how much — and that it will count on internal development efforts for for what Whitman calls “evolutionary innovation” in 2012.

As for the next pocket calculator? It will come, but Whitman concedes that it will take time. “Listen, R&D in the technology business is a longer-term gain,” she said during the call. “I think the investments we make in 2012, you’ll start to see in 2014 and 2015. I wish I could tell you differently, but it’s not true…. We cut out a lot of muscle in R&D at this company, and we have to invest back in it.”

Since taking over, Whitman has very “engaged” with the labs and has made Banerjee a direct report. Previously, he had reported to the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. “She felt that HP Labs, the central research arm, is so important in terms of innovation for a technology company that she felt no this needs to be a direct report to me,” Banerjee says. “So we feel honored and thrilled, but it’s not just on paper. I mean, she is now tracking us on a very regular basis.”

That means that she’s tracking Project Moonshot too. Moonshot means low-powered servers right now, but HP has a few other technologies: its memristor memory chips — essentially a low-power alternative to flash — and photonic optical interconnects that could link up servers or even processors themselves. Banerjee thinks that new nanostore chips, which marry low-power processors with memristors, could be the ticket.

“Moonshot is step one of this big dream that we have. Our end point is we are going to have these tens of millions of low-power processors connected right next to these nonvolatile memory, based on memristors. And how are we going to connect these things up? Through optical interconnects?”

“Once we do this, it’s going to be a complete killer,” he adds. “Better than the calculator.”

via: wired