Author: jitheshb

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Groqit – Personal Inventory Management Pen

Groqit

Groqit helps you keep track of what you own, and avoid buying it twice, by simply reading the barcodes on items you own.

You can use a Groqit without a computer. Just read the barcodes on items you own and take the Groqit with you. It will tell you when you wand a barcode in a store whether or not it has it already in your own inventory.

As a Groqit owner you can use the groqit.com website to translate barcodes, lookup items by author or title and store a backup copy of your personal inventory online (just in case) for free.

The Groqit is avilable from the groqit.com website for $95.

source :reuters

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Apple unveils higher capacity iPod, iPhone models

Ipod-iphone

aid on Tuesday it has introduced models of its popular iPod touch handheld computer and iPhone with double the memory available in previous versions.

Apple, which previously said it had sold more than 4 million iPhones since its introduction last June, says the iPhone will now also sell with 16 gigabytes of memory.

Apple has doubled the capacity of both its iPhone and iPod Touch allowing new customers to spend $100 more and get twice the storage for music, movies, pictures, and podcasts than available with previous models. Introduced today, the 32GB iPod Touch sells for $499 and the 16GB iPhone goes for $499.

Pricing on existing iPod and iPhone models stays the same. But if you’re in the market for a new iPhone or iPod Touch, spending $100 more to double your capacity is a pretty good deal.

Of course the larger capacities may rile some existing iPhone and iPod Touch users as was the case when Apple dropped the price of the iPhone.

Could this be seen as another stab at the early adopters? Of course that was not Apple’s intentions, but that is an obvious consequence of an upgrade of this magnitude less than a year after the initial release. But it’s okay, early adopters, pull that knife out of your back and listen to what Apple has to say is the reason for the upgrade.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod and iPhone product marketing said in the release, “For some users, there’s never enough memory.” This is definitely true, especially with music collections shifting completely digital, but Greg, it still stings for those of us picked up a 16GB iPod Touch merely months ago to have a new bigger and better model become available.

It’s kind of funny to think about it, but who would have thought the world would get so upset over a product improvement? Isn’t that what companies are supposed to be doing?

source:pcworld

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New Kodak Chips Could Improve Cell Phone Cameras

Kodak

Photography company Eastman Kodak Co. on Monday introduced chips that can boost the picture-taking power in mobile phones, and help manufacturers cut development costs.

Kodak says its KAC-05020 Image Sensor is the world’s first 1.4 micron, 5-megapixel device that allows capture of high quality images in small cameras, with quality that equals what is available from current devices using larger, 1.75 micron pixel designs.

“It will help manufacturers reduce their costs…because of the size – you can put more chips onto one wafer, for the same amount of money,” said Fas Mosleh, CMOS Sensors Marketing Director at Kodak. “This is the kind of technology that can help upgrade all camera phones to a real camera.”

The announcement is the latest from Kodak’s growing patent licensing arm, which has become a critical contributor to its profitability as the company emerges from an expensive transition into a producer of digital imaging and printing systems. Kodak expects to earn up to $350 million a year from royalties and related revenue through 2011.

“It could be very well happening that one of those years will be a lot larger than that,” said Antonio Perez, Kodak’s chief executive, on a conference call last week. “It may be another year, a lot smaller than that. We see significant legs to our program.”

Industry analysts have looked skeptically at Kodak’s rosy outlook, noting that few details have been delivered on its patent plans, and that incremental licensing contracts are hard to count on in the long term.

Still, Kodak has introduced some products from its patent portfolio, including its own consumer inkjet printers, which it says makes longer lasting pictures. In addition, last year it unveiled camera sensor technology that significantly increases sensitivity to light, allowing users to potentially take pictures in very low light.

Key to the performance of this new sensor is the “Kodak Truesense CMOS Pixel,” a reworking of the fundamental design and architecture of traditional CMOS pixels, the company says. A CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) sensor is less expensive to manufacture, while consuming less energy and performing more functions on a single chip.

Manufacturing customers interested in the design will likely get a chance to sample it in the second quarter of this year, but devices with the technology are not likely to hit store shelves until 2009, Kodak says.

source:pcworld 

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Cell Phones No Cancer Risk

Cellphone-cacer

Drinking coffee, using mobile phones or having breast implants is unlikely to cause cancer, according to a risk ranking system devised by an Australian cancer specialist to debunk popular myths.

The cancer risk assessment reaffirms smoking, alcohol and exposure to sunlight as leading risk factors, but allays concerns about coffee, mobile phones, deodorants, breast implants and water with added fluoride.

The five-point system created by University of New South Wales Professor Bernard Stewart lists the risk of cancer from proven and likely, to inferred, unknown or unlikely.

“Our tool will help establish if the level of risk is high, say on a par with smoking, or unlikely such as using deodorants, artificial sweeteners, drinking coffee,” Stewart said.

He found active smokers and ex-smokers to be the most at risk, although the risk is reduced for people who quit smoking.

Drinking alcohol was also a high risk factor, particularly for people who also smoke, although Stewart said no specific type of alcoholic drink was most strongly to blame.

Drinking chlorinated water and using a mobile phone was far less likely to cause cancer, Stewart said, although the risks associated with the long-term use of mobile phones had not been fully established.

He said there little risk from drinking coffee, using deodorants, drinking fluoridated water and having breast implants or dental fillings.

Stewart’s research was published in the latest edition of the Mutation Research Reviews journal to mark world cancer day on Monday.

 source:pcworld

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Google Releases Code to Make Social Data Portable

Google

Google has unveiled a new API that it hopes will make data created by users of social networks portable.

The Social Graph API makes information about the connections people have with each other on different Web sites easily available, said Brad Fitzpatrick, a Google software engineer. Once the data is available, developers can solve the problem of requiring users to search for and add friends to new social applications and sites every time they join them, noted Fitzpatrick in a blog post.

“[The new API] makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful,” he wrote. “You can make it easy for users to bring their existing social connections into a new website and as a result, users will spend less time rebuilding their social networks and more time giving your app the love it deserves.”

This is better than asking users to search for and add their friends – because they likely will tire of the chore if its required for very social network, he added.

The API, unveiled late last week, crawls the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages, Fitzpatrick explained. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns data structures representing the social relationships discovered. When a user signs up for a new application, a developer can use the API to remind them who they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on the new site, Google said.

Social Graph marks Google’s latest effort to make content created on social networks more easily shareable across the Web. Last month, Google and Facebook both announced plans to join the Data Portability Project, which is working on standards to allow user-generated content to be more easily shared among social networking sites.

Josh Catone, a blogger at Read Write Web, noted that the Google API could be an important tool in the data portability movement because “it allows users to find and evaluate their public social connections and take control of that information. As more and more users are beginning to suffer the effects of ‘social networking fatigue,’ anything that helps automate and make easier the process of adding your existing connections to a new network is a useful tool.”

 source:pcworld

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Vista SP1 is Complete, Update Available in March

Vista SP1

Windows Vista Service Pack One is ready to ship, Microsoft says. PC manufacturers and consumers can expect the update in March. Microsoft has said that SP1 includes Vista OS improvements including reliability, security and performance. For a first look at those improvements read PC World’s review of beta SP1.

Unlike some of the reports and speculation from last week, Vista SP1 is not officially available today. Microsoft said that it will be available to new volume licensing customers beginning March 1. Existing Vista consumers will have to wait until mid-March, Microsoft says, when the download becomes available through Microsoft’s Windows Update Web site. Windows Vista users who have their systems configured to receive automatic updates will get SP1 automatically delivered in mid-April, Microsoft says.

One small catch is that Microsoft will not offer the update to a small subset of Vista PCs that have been found to have “problematic” device drivers. Those drivers, Microsoft says, were not installed properly initially and when Vista SP1 is installed OS problems ensue. For those systems, “if Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1,” according to the Windows Vista Team Blog.

No word on how many systems are impacted by this driver flaw. Microsoft says the fix for those systems is to reinstall the driver in question, however does not indicate what software program(s) create the driver problem.

Also over at the team blog, Mike Nash of the Windows Product Management group gets further into everything SP1 is looking to fix, including software compatibility and security. Many of the updates were made as requested by the consumers with the Customer Experience Improvement Program, Online Crash Analysis, and Windows Error Reporting.

source:pcworld 

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Opera Mobile 9.5

Opera

Opera unleashes innovative technology in latest mobile Web browser — Opera Mobile 9.5

Faster speed, new interface and Opera Widgets bring users closer to a full desktop experience
Exclusive preview at Mobile World Congress 2008 (February 11-14, Barcelona)
Oslo, Norway and Barcelona, Spain — February 5, 2008
Opera Software, the only company that puts the Web on any device, today announced the commercial release of Opera Mobile 9.5 — the latest version of its award-winning Web browser for sophisticated feature phones and smartphones. Participants at the Mobile World Congress 2008 will be the first to experience the improved functionality of Opera Mobile 9.5.

According to high-tech market research firm, In-Stat, the smartphone market will grow at more than a 30% compound annual growth rate for the next five years globally, exceeding unit sales for laptops, as users experience significant value from their smartphones. Users are downloading more applications and generating higher usage as measured by average revenue per user (ARPU) for operators. The main driver that has fueled this growth is overall user experience on the mobile Web.

Built on Opera’s unique core architecture, the Opera Mobile 9.5 desktop-like browsing experience has been enhanced with innovations such as zooming and panning that make it easier to navigate, load pages quicker and get users closer to the Web content and entertainment they want. With Opera Mobile 9.5, users can experience the real Web and interact with content exactly as they do on their PC.

Faster speed
The new version utilizes Opera’s Presto rendering engine to achieve page load speeds comparable to a desktop experience. The Opera Presto engine was modified and improves browsing performance significantly by accelerating the handling of Web pages. It dramatically improves page responsiveness on pages with heavy use of languages such as JavaScript and Ajax, ensuring smooth, hassle-free browsing.

Compelling experience
Opera Mobile 9.5 includes numerous features aimed at elevating the mobile browsing experience. Not only is the user interface (UI) intuitive enough to master in minutes, Opera Mobile 9.5 introduces several new innovations that elevate the Internet experience on a handheld device. Users can take advantage of the intuitive Opera Zoom™ to dive into the page and get closer to the content they want. In addition, productivity tools like the ability to save pages for offline browsing, Web address auto complete and password manager help busy users make the most of their time.

Fully loaded
Web 2.0-enabled, Widget-ready and Flash support turn Opera Mobile 9.5 into a fully loaded browser allowing users to access all their favorite Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace and more. With Opera Mobile 9.5, OEMs and operators will have the capability to include Flash Lite 3, empowering their smartphone users with access to the full Web including the ability to watch videos on YouTube effortlessly. In addition, Opera Widgets, which are mini applications that allow content to be accessed easily from the device idle screen with just a few clicks, are included in the new edition — automatically engaging the user through ease of operation and meeting consumer demands for quick access to information.

New revenue sources, bigger brand
Opera Mobile 9.5’s ability to serve Web content directly on the idle screen gets mobile OEMs or operators closer to users. By greatly reducing the number of clicks required to get to content, there is a real potential for operators to increase data revenue and user loyalty. In addition, access to the idle screen allows operators to place their brand strategically to interact dynamically with users. Opera Mobile 9.5 is everything that handset makers and operators have been trying to achieve for years.

“Opera Mobile is the result of Opera’s unwavering commitment to a vision that puts a true Web experience in the hands of mobile users,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “The improved functionality of Opera Mobile 9.5 and easy access to information has raised the bar on a more compelling mobile Web browsing experience and will further stimulate mobile Internet adoption.”

The Opera Mobile 9.5 experience includes many of the innovations found in Opera’s trend-setting desktop browser including:

Intuitive user interface
Tabbed browsing
Improved text wrap
Page overview, zooming and panning
Landscape mode
Save Web page for future offline access
Call phone number from Web page
Send link as SMS/MMS
Send image as SMS/MMS
Small Screen Rendering™
Password manager
Web address input auto-completion
History and bookmarks
Copy text
Opera Widgets
Opera Mobile is currently shipped on more than 100 million phones with many of the world’s top mobile OEMs and operators such as HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and others.

Leading software platform provider, UIQ, has realized the potential of Opera’s new mobile browser. “UIQ works with the world’s leading mobile phone manufacturers to create the ultimate user experience. Our long-standing partnership with Opera has given users the ability to access all their favorite Web sites and services,” says Mats Barvesten, EVP Product Planning and Product Management at UIQ Technology. “We look forward to introducing our upcoming handsets, featuring the groundbreaking Opera Mobile 9.5 browser.”

Along with hands-on exposure to Opera Mobile 9.5, Mobile World Congress participants will also have the ability to experience Opera on a variety of devices: Opera Mobile on smartphones, free downloads of Opera Mini 4, improved Web browsing on gaming consoles and the ARCHOS Generation 5 Media players will be just a few of the exciting features of Opera’s 2008 exhibit.

Mobile World Congress will be held on the 11th through the 14th of February in 2008 in Barcelona, Spain. Visit the Opera Booth in Hall 2, 2C76 or email conference@opera.com to book a meeting.

Platform Support and Availability
Opera Mobile 9.5 will be available on all major platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux, as both a standalone browser and as a SDK. The public beta release of Opera Mobile 9.5 will be announced separately. For media inquiries, please contact julies@opera.com.

A video demonstration of Opera Mobile 9.5 is available on http://www.opera.com/b2b/solutions/mobile/video/

About Opera Software ASA
Opera Software ASA has redefined Web browsing for PCs, mobile phones and other networked devices. Opera’s cross-platform Web browser technology is renowned for its performance, standards compliance and small size, while giving users a faster, safer and more dynamic online experience. Opera Software is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices around the world. The company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol OPERA. Learn more about Opera at http://www.opera.com.

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Ultra Slim Credit Card Sized 1GB USB

USB-drive

Anyone who has ever tried to write down the key points raised in a board meeting or a lecture will know that, despite concerted efforts, unless you’re proficient with short hand, its often impossible to document everything in quite as much detail as one would ideally like – and that’s where gadgets such as this ultra slim USB voice recorder can prove extremely useful.

Compact enough to be stored with ease – thanks to the flip out, flush mounted USB connection the device measures in at a mere 6.5mm in thickness and is approximately the size of a credit card – this digital voice recorder comes with 1GB or internal storage which is enough to record up to 69.3 hours and has a battery life of around 4.5 hours for both recording and playback.

Ultra Slim Credit Card Sized 1GB USB Digital Voice Recorder

Supplied complete with earbuds and a neck strap this compact, stylish digital voice recorder can also serve as a standard USB flash memory drive as well as an MP3 player (would could prove especially useful in particularly boring meetings/lectures) and retails for around $70.

source:reuters 

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Cell Phone Watch

Cell-watch

This digital watch comes with the wireless Bluetooth technology and a cell phone with GSM 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz tri-band functionality.

They’ve also managed to squeeze in a 1,3 megapixel camera, support for MP3 and MP4 files and a place for a microSD card up to 2GB in size.

Specifications:

* Screen: 1.3 inch, 128 x 160 pixels, 262K color TFT LCD
* Network: GSM 900/1800/1900MHz Tri-band
* Interface language: English, Chinese
* SIM card: Unlocked
* Touch screen with handwriting
* Camera: 1.3MP
* Audio format support: MP3
* Video format support: MP4
* Memory extension: microSD card up to 2GB
* Data transfer: GPRS, Bluetooth A2DP (headset included)
* Color: black
* Dimensions: 64 x 45 x 18mm

Package Includes:

* Cell phone watch x 1
* Touch pen x 1
* Battery x 2 (700mAh Lithium)
* microSD card x 1
* Earbuds x 1
* USB connector cable x 1
* Bluetooth headset x 1
* Bluetooth charger cable x 1
* Charger x 1

The Cell Phone Watch is available from Global Sources Direct for $154.

source:reuters 

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LG New Slim SLider at GSMA 2008

LGKF510

GSMA 2008 is almost upon us, and LG has made it amply clear that its new KF510 mobile handset will make its debut at the event. The slim slider has LG’s famous touch-sensitive navigation under its display and is loaded with a 3 megapixel (and possibly auto-focus) camera.

It’s not just the intriguing design, but the colors too – such as Stardust Gray or Sunset Red – that will make the KF510 an eye-catcher. The phone is quite slim at 10.9mm, comes with an MP3 player, and is Bluetooth-enabled.

The LG KF510 will officially launch in March this year. We’ll have to wait a few more days, however, before we get more information on this new slider. Stay tuned.

source:tech2