Gizmag News - Apple's US$500 iPad - concise details of the announcement

Welcome to the newsletter for gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine. These are the headlines for January the 28th, 2010. Apple's US$500 iPad - concise details of the announcement The Apple iPad was announced today. In a nutshell, it’s a bigger iPhone that runs all the same apps on a 9.7 inch touch screen and has a 10 hour battery life and 30 day stand-by. It’s half an inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds, and is powered by Apple’s own custom 1GHz ARM A4chip and can run up to 64 GB of storage. It has all the wireless connectivity of the iphone (802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1), a built-in speaker and microphone, accelerometer and uses the same 30-pin Dock connector as the iPod and iPhone. The first iPads will ship in 60 days, with 3G models taking another month. Pricing starts at US$499 and runs to US$829. Read More Rubber sheets harness body movement to power electrical devices Engineers from Princeton University have developed power-generating rubber films that could be used to harness natural body movements such as breathing or walking in order to power electronic devices such as pacemakers or mobile phones. The material, which is composed of ceramic nanoribbons embedded onto silicone rubber sheets, generates electricity when flexed and is highly efficient at converting mechanical energy into electrical energy. Read More Smart Cameras: Exilim EX-FS10S analyzes your golf swing Casio's Exilim EX-FS10S is a compact digital camera with a twist - it's designed to help improve your golf swing. Using a special burst mode, the camera captures 1000 video frames in one second. While onboard software’s detect your club, the position of your elbows, arms and head, and once you swing your shot the camera compares your swing with an ideal swing plane on the monitor. Read More Autograph for iPhone app lets you sign on the dotted screen From Ten One Design - the creators of the Pogo Stylus (the first capacitive touch-screen stylus for the iPhone and iPod touch) comes Autograph for iPhone – a new iPhone/iPod touch app that lets you sign off documents by creating a digital signature directly on your device’s capacitive touch screen. Read More MHub removes desktop clutter and adds functionality Rather than merely keeping your iPod or iPhone upright while it charges, the Dexim MHub Dock Station offers a lot more connectivity for your Mac or PC. It’s designed to reduce cable and device clutter on a desk by combining the features of several computer accessories in a single housing, like a dock, a three-port USB hub, a mini USB port, and an SDHC/SD/MMC card reader. Mhub charges a variety of gadgets, including iPhones, iPods, BlackBerry phones, digital cameras … you get the idea. Read More World's oldest and most expensive camera to go under the hammer A Giroux “Daguerreotype” – the world’s first commercially-produced camera – is expected to set a world record price when it goes up for auction this May at WestLicht Auctions in Vienna. The previously undocumented camera has been in private ownership in northern Germany for generations and is in remarkable condition given it is 170 years old. Read More A first-ever human-powered Canada-to-Hawaii crossing? Back in January 2007, we brought you the story of Greg Kolodziejzyk, a Canadian adventurer who was planning to break the human-powered transatlantic record. What made Greg’s record attempt so interesting was that he was going to do it in a fully-enclosed pedal-powered sea kayak. The boat was still under construction at the time. Flash forward to January 2010, and Greg has had to call off the transatlantic attempt due to logistic problems. His new boat, however, is a marvel of marine engineering, and he’s planning on pedaling it from Canada to Hawaii. Read More World’s first Remote Light Source projector Today’s projectors are great at bringing to life big screen movies in the home or creating large visual point-of-sale displays for the general public in retail environments. However, a couple of downsides to projectors are the noise the fans inside them make as they cool the lamp, and then there’s the difficulty in changing a blown lamp because of inaccessibility to the unit (which usually means balancing on a ladder with your head pressed against the ceiling. Norwegian projector manufacturer Projectiondesign has created the FR12 Remote Light Source (RLS) projector – launched at Integrated Systems Europe 2010 (Feb 2-4) - which relocates the lamp from the projector to a rack-mount enclosure up to 30m from the projector head. Light from the RLS illuminates the projector head via an innovative Liquid Light Guide (LLG) lead. Read More Jaguar's Gas Turbine Electric Vehicle Project wins funding The UK government-backed Technology Strategy Board recently announced the recipients of carbon reduction technology research project funding which sees a consortium made up of Jaguar Land Rover, SR Drives and led by Bladon Jets taking a GBP 1,103,392 (about US$1,790,000) slice of the multi-million GB-pound cake to develop "the world’s first commercially viable - and environmentally friendly - gas turbine generator designed specifically for automotive applications." Read More AirMouse - the mouse that fits you like a glove It’s no secret... Studies have shown that excessive mouse usage can cause repetitive stress injuries. Unfortunately for most of us, “excessive” can mean anything more than a few hours a day. Fortunately, however, there are alternative styles of mice out there designed to be easier on the hands and arms. One of the more interesting ones to come along in a while is the AirMouse, made by Canadian firm Deanmark Ltd. What makes it unique is the fact that you wear it like a glove. Read More Apple creates special information site for iPad In all likelihood, a new era of computing began today as Apple’s long-awaited iPad finally stepped from scifi into reality and filled the massive gap between Apple’s iPhone/ iPod handhelds and its richer computing experience of the MacBook laptop range. It begins life with a headstart never enjoyed by any prior new device. As Steve Jobs emphasised when launching the device, more than 75 million people already know how to use the iPad (because it’s essentially identical to the iPhone and iPod, just bigger) and there more than 125 million customers with one-click shopping on iTunes, the App Store and hence, the new iBook store. The iPad adds books and newspapers to the convergence mix and must seriously threaten the business models of all those eReaders announced earlier this month. Apple has created a special web site to disseminate information on the iPad. Read More Neato XV-11 robot vacuum cleans up... logically Contrary to the expectations of the creators of The Jetsons, the robotic vacuums of today generally resemble a floor-crawling disc rather than humanoid Rosie the Robot. The latest device to join the ranks of circular-shaped household helpers alongside the Electrolux Trilobyte, iRobot Roomba and LG Roboking is the Neato XV-11 from Neato Robotics. Boasting Neato's RPS (that’s Room Positioning System) technology the XV-11 uses path-planning algorithms to outline the area to clean, which it then carries out in a systematic back-and-forth pattern. Read More Windows Mobile 6.5 reviews are in: better, but not good Recent mobile coverage at Gizmag HTC Dragon to put Android on the Snapdragon chipset? HP Mini 311 gets benchmarked App Store hits two billion downloads AT&T launches MMS support for the iPhone 3G and 3GS The Vertu Constellation Ayxta: yours for just 4,900 Euros BlackBerry Desktop Software for OS X coming very soon NTT's TOUCH WOOD concept phones Intel's Core i7 Mobile processors bring desktop performance to the road If you would like to refer this newsletter to a friend or colleague, please point them at our free subscription page. Please don't try to forward this email, as the formatting is unlikely to remain intact. And don't worry, we don't share email addresses. Please read our privacy policy if you are concerned. Watch for more of the best new innovations, ideas and practical technologies in your inbox. You are receiving this email because you signed up for our daily newsletter at http://www.gizmag.com. If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter please click here to unsubscribe. COPYRIGHT GIZMAG (C) 2010