Nick: Google flips through the news, AMD demos new graphics on the USS Hornet, and the critter cam lets us see wildlife in action, 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 in Taipei, where Asustek unveiled a new family of thin light laptops called the unlimited family or UL notebook PCs. They update in earlier line of new series devices designed around consumer ultra low voltage or CULV microprocessors from Intel. Both series were designed with Apple’s mac book air in mind. Some laptops in the UL family have features the macbook air lacks. Such as lower prices, larger screens and DVD drives, but the macbook air beats the entire UL series on processing power. Every laptop in the new UL series is less than one inch thick, a feature Asustek CEO Jerry Chan was eager to show off. The company claims the laptop’s offer up to 12 hours of power depending on the configuration and usage, but third party assessment were not available. All the Asus’ UL series laptop come with the latest 1.3 gigahertz inter core 2 duo SU7300 processors and Intel GS45 chip sets inside as well as .3 megapixel webcams. All four of the UL series laptops will be in stores starting September 22nd. Google’s developing a product that called Fast Flip, that aims to make it simpler and faster to browse news articles on the web. Fast flip let’s readers glance on the pages and browse through them quickly without having to wait for multiple page elements to load. The idea is to try to replicate online the ease which people flip through the pages of print magazines and newspapers in the offline world. People who try out Fast Flip will find articles from 36 publishers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon and Newsweek as well as relevant ads. For now Fast Flip will only feature the content from the publishers Google has been working with, but it plans to have more in the future. The application can found at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Lenovo announced a new line of touchscreen laptops including the Thinkpad T400S, which the company claims is the first laptop to support four finger multi touch input. Lenovo also introduced simple tap, which allows users to access hardware controls through a touchscreen interface.
Aaron: Simple tap offers easy access to functions like turning on and then off your think light, maybe muting and unmuting your microphone. You can also add some custom tiles, so I placed a Youtube tile here, tapping on that tile brings up particular video. Let’s say while you’re watching that video, you wanna adjust the brightness, so you tap the brightness tile, and it will give you nice slider to adjust the brightness. Have a similar access to slider for volume.
Nick: Dell and HP also offer two finger touchscreen laptops, the Thinkpad T400S starts out about 2000 US dollars and will be available at the end of September. Motorola announced its first smart phone based on Google’s android operating system. The touchscreen phone are being targeted at users of social networking services and will use a Motorola platform called Moto Blur. Moto Blur integrates contacts from services such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into a single or customize list.
Sanjay: What consumers are finding today is that they have multiple different ways of communicating, they have email, they have SMS, they have Facebook, they have MySpace, they have multiple different ways of communicating. They gather they’re content from multiple different places and what Moto Blur does is aggregates all of that and delivers it to you on the home screens so that you can use all of that content in an easy way.
Nick: The phone has a slide out keyboard and supports wi-fi and 3G, has a 5 megapixel camera with video function and GPS. It will be available in the fourth quarter from Tmobile USA as the click and as the Dex in other countries. In France and the UK, through Orange, in Spain with Telefonica and in latin America through America Mobile, the price wasn’t announced. We have a few items for you in our news and brief this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zakerberg announced on Tuesday that the popular social networking site passed the 300 million member mark worldwide, and said that it turns free cash flow positive ahead of schedule. Intel has asked Europe’s second highest court to annul last May’s antitrust ruling against the company accusing the regulators of erring and law and producing a sloppy analysis. The European commission fined Intel a record 1.45 billion US dollars in May for abusing its dominant position in the microprocessor chip market in Europe, at the expense of its only significant rival AMD. Attention gamers, you can now order pizza from your PS3, Poppa John announced a partnership with Sony that will let gamers order pizza between games. The ordering option is on the PS3 browser’s main start up page, and brings gamers to a Playstation’s pacific version of the Poppa John’s web site that includes gaming ads and a different lay out. AMD announced new products on an event held on the USS Hornet, a retired aircraft carrier considered one of the most decorated ships in the US navy. The company talked about new technology called iFinity, which allows just one video card to run six displays. The technology maybe seen in AMD’s upcoming ATI radion graphics card as soon as later this year. AMD, said new ATI radion graphics cards will support Microsoft’s direct X11 technology, which could bring smoother and more realistic graphics to the upcoming Windows 7 OS. The company also announced a new laptop platform, Tigress, which includes faster Turion and Athlon laptop processors that draw less power than it’s predecessors. Earlier this week, I was over at MIT at the HEMBI or Human Environment Mobile Interaction’s workshop where I got to see the critter cam. It’s a ragged camera that has been attached to about 60 different species, ranging from lions to whales.
Greg: These systems were also very sophisticated now, back in the old days, it was the added value of the image that was really different, nowadays this of course still have the imaging capacity, but they’re also sophisticated audio recorders and environmental data logging systems. They include accelerometers, pressure transducers, temperature thermosters, magnetometers, you can really contextualize the entire range of the animals behavior, while you’re seeing what its actually doing and how it’s engaging its world.
Nick: The unit provides standard definition video as well as audio for researchers and Marshall hopes that more work that critter cam can be shrunk down and be attached to even more animals. He also liked to add HD and extend the recording capabilities pass the 8 hours that it can do now. Well that’s our show for this week, thanks for joining us here in world tech update. Next week we’ll have reports for you from the Tokyo Game show, so be sure to tune in. And speaking of Tokyo, mark your calendars for October 9th, that’s when I’ll be in Japan for Ceatec, bringing you all the latest news and gadgets. As we get out this week, we’ll leave you with shots from the Drink tech show in Frankfurt. 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.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services