Nick: Acer unveils a Windows 7 netbook, Adobe blends an iPhone and unicycling robot rides across a balance beam, all that news and more on this week’s World Tech Update. Thanks for joining us here on World Tech Update, I’m Nick Barber, we’ll start our news this week with Acer. The company’s unveiled a new version of its Aspire One netbook running Windows 7 and plans to put it on sale simultaneously with the new operating system debut next week. The Aspire One D250 has a 10.1 inch screen, which is the same size as the current Aspire One computers, but the resolution has been increased to 1280 by 720 pixels. The computer features a 1.66 gigahertz version of Intel Atom’s N280 processor and a 160 gigabyte harddrive. The basic battery will last up to 3 and a half hours but Acer will offer an optional long life battery that can run as long as 7 and a half hours. In Japan, the Aspire One will ship on October 22nd with Windows 7 starter edition and cost 46,800 yen or about 553 US dollars. Prices and launch dates for other markets were not immediately available. In more Acer news, the company overtook Dell as the world’s second largest computer vendor during the third quarter. Acer’s shipment grew by a whopping 26 percent to reached nearly 11 million units, out pacing Dell, whose shipment declined 8.4 percent to about 10 million units. Both companies trail Hewlett Packard, which retained its spot as the world’s top PC vendor. HP held just over 20 percent of the market after shipping nearly 16 million PCs. Adobe systems held its annual developer conference last week in Los Angeles, where it announced versions of its flash player software for mobile devices. Flash player doesn’t run on phones today, but later this year, a beta will be release for Windows mobile and palm web OS devices, with versions for Android and Symbian coming next year. One hold out has been Apple, which isn’t cooperating with Adobe to put flash on its iPhone. CTO Kevin Lynch mock the company in its key note Adobe max, showing Adobe’s efforts to combine an iPhone and a flash CD in a blender, then by hooking up the phone to a car battery. In the end, Adobe announced a work around, flash player still isn’t available on the iPhone yet, the developers will be able to export their flash applications to run as a native application on the iPhone with the next release of flash professional due next year. Adobe isn’t giving up with the iPhone, but says this is the best it can do for now. We didn’t have the chance to get to everything from Ceatec in last week’s episode, so here’s some more for you. We’ll start with the new and improved Muratagirl. The unicycling robot can now go around a curve with the diameter of 75 centimeters and ride over a balance beam of just two centimeters wide. The 2009 model can also cycle at 15 centimeter per second, triple the speed of the 2008 model. The robot has a number of gyro sensors which it uses for balance and an ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles. Murata has been using the robot to promote science and technology to Japanese children. A low cost joystick from Japanese telecom operator KDDI, promises to add 3D motion control to cellphones. The system consist of a piece of hardware mounted over a cellphones camera and the accompanying software on the handset. The hardware unit is basically a spring with a magnet on the bottom that allows it to attach to the phones camera. Underneath the top of the screen are two squares that the camera focuses on. The software can track these squares as users move the spring side to side, up and down and in and out. Allowing control on X, Y and Z axis. For example, if a user push down the spring the software could interpret that as a mouse click or could zoom in and out on a photo. The unit can also be rotated which can control, say, the rotation of a picture. Once commercially available, the spring unit will cost 100 yen or about a dollar and 12 cents and can be bought through mobile phone stores. It will be on the market first in Japan in about a month and a KDDI engineer said it may be licensed internationally. In the electronic industry, companies are always competing to have the biggest display, but imagine one who’s size is potentially unlimited. Mitsubishi’s new OLED screen is made from blocks that can be combined to make a screen of any size. Up close the display’s a matrix of flashing red blue and green lights, but step back approximately two meters and the individual pixels merge in to a larger high resolution image.
Nobuo: In case example the LED, there are some limits of the resolution that should be the 3-4 millimeter. The physical limit and also cost, so in case of the OLED, like a transistor and the integrated circuit, we can go in more high resolution with reasonable cost.
Nick: But there is a drawback, the organic compound in the OLED pixels degrades over time and the screen is expected to have a lifetime of about 20,000 hours of normal operation. Mitsubishi wouldn’t say when the displays will be available or how much they expect them to cost. Yamaha has developed and iPhone application for collaborative piano playing. Finger Piano Share allows people to play songs using virtual keys displayed on the screen of an iPhone or an iPod touch.
Atsuko: What is special about this is first of all is really keys is, you only one finger to play piano and also if you have 10 iPhones around here, 10 people can play together on this piano.
Nick: Like popular video games, such as Guitar Hero, a series of visual prompts lets users know what keys to press and when to press them, so you don’t have to be a virtuoso to bang out a tune. Since it’s still under development, there’s no word on when and if it may be available. Gesture controlled has been brought to a new level with a research from NTT docomo at Ceatec, the company showed us a set of prototype in your headphones that can detect and measure the changes in a body’s electrical state when your eyes move. The company has harness this technology to control the music player on a mobile phone.
Masaaki: So basically, human eye have a small electrical current charge, basically float of the eyeball has a positive charge, but outside is negative charge. When our eyeball move, our, the electric potential around the eye have been change and it can be detected by the earphone.
Nick: Here when the user moves his eyes twice to the left, the music player skips to the next track, if he moves his eyes to the left then to the right, that pauses the music. A circular motion raises or lowers the volume. No word on when the technology will be commercialized. Well, that’s our show for this week, thanks for joining us here in the World Tech Update. Next week we’ll have coverage of the Windows 7 launch and of course all the major tech news. As we head out this week, we’ll leave you with some more shot of Japan’s Ceatec. I’m Nick Barber and from all of us here in the IDG news service, thanks for watching and we hope to see you next week.
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