January 19, 2012
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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.
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January 16, 2012
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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.
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January 15, 2012
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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.
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January 12, 2012
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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.
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