Archive for the 'When' Category
October 7th, 2009 -- Posted in Other, What, When |
Dell introduced the Latitude Z business laptop, which includes a new wireless charging technology that could eventually find its way into other Dell systems, the company said on Tuesday. The Latitude Z can be placed on a special stand that generates an electromagnetic field to recharge laptop batteries wirelessly. The technology, which Dell calls inductive charging, takes the same amount of time to recharge laptop batteries as an AC adapter, said Steve Belt [CQ], vice president of business client engineering at Dell.
“There’s a coil in the bottom of the notebook and then there’s a matching coil in the stand. You set them next to each other and it generates a current that flows and charges the battery,” Belt said.
This is the first time Dell has included wireless recharging in its laptops. The recharging stand must be purchased separately, however, as an optional extra. The technology could help reduce the dependency on power adapters traditionally used to recharge laptops.
Dell is also adding new hardware that will allow the laptop to boot quickly while giving it “always-on” capabilities similar to those in a smartphone. The laptop includes an Arm processor — a type of chip more often found in smartphones — to boot a laptop quickly for fast access to commonly used Web applications like e-mail and a Web browser. The processor is included alongside an Intel processor, which is used to run the Windows OS. continue reading »
September 23rd, 2009 -- Posted in What, When |
It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we’ve all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft’s astonishing take on the tablet.
Courier is a real device, and we’ve heard that it’s in the “late prototype” stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.
Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft’s brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who’s spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies. continue reading »
September 17th, 2009 -- Posted in When |
Just two weeks after Google Chrome’s birthday, the search engine giant has unleashed Google Chrome (
) version 3. It’s faster, supports HTML5, and still does not run on the Mac OS.
While the new stable release doesn’t introduce anything groundbreaking (unless you just love custom themes), it does provide some important tweaks. The biggest one focuses on Google’s (
) #1 obsession: speed. This is Chrome’s () bread and butter. The search company claims that the new browser is 25% faster at executing JavaScript than Chrome V2, among other speed fixes.
While you may not immediately notice Chrome’s increased speed, it will be tough to pass by the new Chrome Tab page, which now sports a new, cleaner layout of your most recently visited and bookmarked websites. It takes out the right hand sidebar and extends your most visited websites across the entire browser tab. continue reading »
September 12th, 2009 -- Posted in When |
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.
“We’ve been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on,” the company’s green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Google in late 2007 said it would invest in companies and do research of its own to produce affordable renewable energy within a few years.
The company’s engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun’s energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun’s rays on the heated substance.
Weihl said Google is looking to cut the cost of making heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, by at least a factor of two, “ideally a factor of three or four.” continue reading »