Palm users looking to be a little more social may not have to wait much longer, as a new patent filing reveals that the company may be working on a Google Latitude-esque location sharing service for their devices. According to the patent, a user would be notified if another user is in the proximity of another one, and it makes mention of sharing location information to social networking sites. Additionally, it alludes to location based reminders, such as reminding you to pick up milk if you’re at or near a grocery store. If this sounds familiar, that’s because Apple filed a patent for a similar sounding location sharing service very recently. Let’s just hope this doesn’t lead to another legal spat between the two companies, because it could get pretty ugly, pretty fast… again.
Palm files patent for GPS-based location sharing service originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Quanta, the company that produces plenty of the hardware you know, love and fantasize about today, is showing off a new tablet prototype at NVIDIA’s booth. The reason for its location is the Tegra 2 chip inside (you can see it in the nude over here), which can comfortably drive 1080p out via a HDMI cable and into your nearest HD display, while offering brain-melting battery life. Listening to music with the screen turned off can be done for 140 hours straight, and HD video playback can go on for up to ten hours — both figures that make current battery efficiency look kinda silly. With WiFi, 3G, and Android for an OS, this prototype could be quite a nice little device, but right now there are more things wrong than right about it. The display is shockingly unprotected from the back, and we saw ripples appearing on the screen from our fingers supporting the machine. Furthermore, the touchscreen missed plenty of our taps, leaving us with a sour taste from what looked like a tasty little morsel.
Quanta Tegra 2 prototype hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Another day, another company pimping a slew of e-readers here at CES. Up next is Hanvon, with its WISEreader lineup of 5-inch E-Ink display-based readers on display. They’re pretty basic in both the design and functionality departments, with support for text, images, and audio in the usual array of formats — including DRM’ed EPUBs. The N518 and N526 models both have touchscreens, though you’ll need to use a stylus for handwriting and note-taking. Other than that, there wasn’t really much of note, though we were told that there’s a capacitive version in the works but it wasn’t quite ready to bring out of their labs in Taiwan just yet. There’s always next year.
Hanvon WISEreader e-book lineup hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Beautiful viewing angle and legitimately wide viewing angle, the Studio XPS 16 OLED concept laptop was on hand and turning heads at Dell’s CES suite. It’s definitely a beaut, claiming a super-thin 2mm screen, a 0.004ms response time, and a contrast ratio “exceeding 10,000:1.” The big catch here, as you can see in some of the images below (the giant “Please Do Not Touch” sign deterred us from fixing ourselves) is that the ultra-glossy wrist panel is a beacon for dust. Feast your eyes below!
Studio XPS 16 OLED concept laptop hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It might not look like much, but it really isn’t. The new handset prototype from Teleepoch is a flip phone with a miniscule display cut-out and nothing else of note. All functionality is controlled by tilting the phone up and down to scroll through menus and shaking the handset a particular direction to drill in and out of menu options. There’s voice control for inputting numbers and quick-dialing, and everything of note is powered by a new “wearable device” WMDP chip design from Qualcomm that integrates the phone radio, processor and accelerometer into a board about the size of a quarter. With this few elements (the only pure mechanical interaction with the phone is the hinge), the handset should be dirt cheap, but it’s difficult to say if anyone will actually want to use it when it’s released later this year. Check out a video of an early version after the break.
Continue reading Teleepoch’s Qualcomm-powered WMDP gesture phone in action
Teleepoch’s Qualcomm-powered WMDP gesture phone in action originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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