Apple this morning showed off digital textbooks at its education event in New York.
The operating system’s familiar pinch and tapping features are also available, giving users more interaction with titles.The service, dubbed iBooks 2, will allow textbook makers to create fully interactive titles for Apple’s iPad. According to the company, users will be able to swipe across the display to open textbook pages and view movies within each chapter.
The books can also be switched between portrait mode and landscape modes to make text and images easier to interact with.
It’s the interactivity that Apple was focused on. The company says that kids will be able to see 3D images and rotate them to get a better feel for what, for example a DNA structure looks like.
commentary There’s talk that the online protests against the cybersiblings SOPA and PIPA constituted some sort of political coming of age moment for the tech industry. As if the tech moguls had “largely steered clear of lobbying and other political games in Washington” until now. Really? I love The New York Times but c’mon. This is the sort of fairy tale that sounds sweet but fails the smell test.
Silicon Valley has been looking to buy influence in Washington ever since tech companies started making serious money. Witness the sundry battles waged in the last couple of decades over a range of bread and butter issues including Internet tax breaks, the DMCA, or Internet porn laws. And let’s not forgot that not-so-insignificant 1998 dustup between the Justice Department and Microsoft over antitrust.
Where would you find a four-wheeled smart phone, a tiny futuristic tank and a robotic mobility scooter straight from the pages of a manga comic?
That’s right — the Tokyo Motor Show. We’re looking East as we cast a wry eye on some of the most outlandish concept cars ever devised.
Japan’s neon-drenched capital city has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to dreaming up new gadgets and gizmos. But the engineers at Honda and Toyota have outdone themselves with their new car designs — which may or may not be heading to a showroom near you.
Visitors to the Tokyo Motor Show could be forgiven for thinking they’d somehow been teleported into a dystopian alternative universe where cars have evolved into sentient beings who’ll guide you around the city of the future, using blank-eyed holographic avatars in nurses’ uniforms.
LAS VEGAS–Nearly hidden away at CES was a $149 Sony SmartWatch (due in March) that doubles as a Bluetooth command center for Android phones.
The dust and splash proof SmartWatch is essentially the same story. The updated version is sleeker in appearance (and about 0.3-inches thick), has an accelerometer, can vibrate, and will launch with a colorful swatch of wristband accessories. A black wristband and wristband adapter is included.
This Android™ watch keeps you discreetly updated & your hands free. You can do many things through the techie timepiece , check out social media sites such as Facebook™ and Twitter posts. Catch up on tweets, texts and e-mail. See who’s calling, a pop-up caller id prompt appears during incoming calls (allowing you to accept or deny). Or escape with some tunes. Discover SmartWatch. An Android™ watch with a scratch & splash-proof multi-touch display. Clip it on. Wear it with any 0.78′ wristband. Enjoy your favorite SmartWatch apps. It’s up to you.
Predicting what will happen in 2012, therefore, is a shot in the dark: A year is virtually a lifetime in the digital era. And yet we can at least make a guess at what will happen in the early part of next year simply by looking at the trends that are shaping the latter half of this year.
Here’s the best estimate of some of the innovation we’ll see in 2012:
1. Touch computing
New input methods will be the dominant trend of 2012. Tablet computers such as the iPad might seem like a nice alternative to desktop and laptop computers, but they’re more than that: They’re replacements. Just as the command line (remember that?) gave way to graphical user interfaces, so the mouse will be superseded by touchscreens.
Fancy finding out what happened last week at the CES trade show in Vegas but don’t have much more than a minute? We’ve got you covered — hit play on the video above to see the hottest gadgets that were unveiled. All the goss, none of the dross.
First up we’ve got the Sony Xperia S — a hardware monster with a 720p screen, 1.5GHz dual-core processor and a 12-megapixel camera. Pretty tasty, no? The only fly in the ointment is that it’s not running Ice Cream Sandwich.
The Huawei Ascend P1S is another fancy mobile. Incredibly slim with a bright screen, unlike the aforementioned Xperia S, the Ascent is running Android 4.0. Marvelous.
It happens every time: as soon as we wax a load of cash on the latest gadget, the price of said tech will suddenly drop. A year later, regular as clockwork, the value of our gadget will have nose-dived to the extent that we’d be lucky to get 20p and a packet of wine gums for it on eBay.
Ho-hum — that’s the price we pay for being early adopters. But have you ever wondered why, in these austere times, everything else seems to be getting more and more expensive while technology is becoming more and more affordable?
The reason is, in a word, innovation. For over half a century, computers and chips have been getting simultaneously more powerful and less expensive. Moore’s Law — which states that the number of transistors on a given chip can be doubled every two years — has been the guiding principle of progress in computing since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first coined the phrase in 1965. And, for the same amount of time, people have predicted it would hit a wall.
Is OLED tech the future of TV? It’s looking more and more likely, as now both LG and Samsung have announced 55-inch versions of these slender-screened beauties.
Samsung’s own effort has been revealed at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, and is modestly dubbed the Samsung Super OLED TV. Read on for all the specs, and whether we reckon Samsung has managed to trounce LG’s recently-unveiled OLED tellybox.
We’d hazard that it’ll be quite pricey, so now might be a good time to start saving. There’s no word on pricing or availability yet, but we know the Super OLED TV will be out this year.
While 3D might be struggling to win the nation’s favour, here’s a cool feature that will help make for a more immersive experience. LG is due to announce a new surround sound system at CES, and it comes packing a feature called 3D Sound Zooming.
Now this is rather clever. It syncs sound with the location and movement of the 3D images on an LG 3D TV. So if something appears to come out of the screen, the sound will match it, and the same if something shoots off into the distance. Sounds great, and it should make for more immersive viewing.
The technology is LG’s own. It features on its snappily-named BH9420PW surround sound system and works by using an algorithm to analyse the depth of certain objects in the picture.
Twitter, Google Trade Barbs Over Google+ Integration in Search
Twitter has posted an official statement saying Google’s changes would make it more difficult for consumers to find breaking news often shared by Twitter users.
“As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter. As a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant (search) results,” the company said.
The statement continued: “We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations, and Twitter users.”
