Friday, 3 May 2013

The incredible wide-angle camera inspired by a bug’s eye

Insects such as bees and flies see brilliantly through thousands of lenses in their “compound eyes.”
Wouldn’t that technique make a good digital camera?
Yes it would, according to the arthropod-inspired researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Writing in Nature, they say they’ve developed a digital camera with 180 tiny lenses that broadens a camera’s field of vision to 160 degrees - practically the entire panorama in front of a photographer. Now that’s a wide-angle camera.
The prototype has an “immense” depth of field - the portion of a photograph that is in focus - the BBC reports, noting, however, that it does not yet deliver high resolution because the pixel count is low.
The 180 lenses sure outnumber the single lens that defines digital photography today. But this technology ain’t seen nothing yet. A fly can have about 28,000 small eyes, and “that’s the direction we want to move in,” team researcher Jianliang Xiao from the University of Colorado told the BBC.
For those of you who know your bug eyes, lead researcher John Rogers put it this way for Wired: “The resolution is roughly equivalent to that of a fire ant or a bark beetle … We feel that it is possible to get to the level of a dragonfly or beyond.”
Wow. Vision beyond a dragonfly’s! But what good will that do, besides wide-angle phototgraphy? Scientists from Germany’s Max-Planck-Institute imagine disaster relief applications, not necessarily as image takers. For instance, they say the lenses could help a micro aerial vehicle see and navigate its way through a collapsed building while using other sensors to detect trapped people.
Illinois’ Rogers says they could be used in surveillance cameras and also in surgical endoscopes. Imagine a fly’s eye up your, er, nose. The photography community is abuzz.

Solar outlet gives power from your windows

Could future power be more personal?

Your window might be an unlikely place to plug-in your smartphone, but a team of designers has made that possible with a novel take on the portable electronics charger.
Industrial designers Kyuho Song & Boa Oh created a solar charger called the Window Socket that suctions onto glass and converts solar energy to function like an electrical socket. The units also contain a 1,000mAh battery, which is equivalent to a smartphone’s lithium-ion. The battery takes 5-8 hours to get a fully charged.
“This product is intended to enabled you to use electricity freely and conveniently in a space restricted in the use of electricity, such as in a plane, a car, and outdoors,” the inventors wrote in a design brief. “Thus, this product was meant to draw out a socket used indoors outward. We tried to design a portable socket, so that users can use it intuitively without special training.”
News about the invention was published in Yanko Design on Friday. The Window Socket appears to use the Korean specification for wall outlets, but could become more widely available in the future, the environmental news Web site Grist speculates. Note that there’s one downside: the charge only lasts for 10 hours. The designers do not appear to have created a product Web site with any further information.
An immediately available product is the “OffGrid” solar backpack by New York startup Voltaic Systems. They are available in a variety of styles, with either built-in or detachable solar cells. The solar charger powers an internal battery that connects to devices via an integrated USB port for an output of up to 4 Watts.
A less conventional alternative comes from another New York startup, SiGNa Chemistry, a maker of miniaturized fuel cells. All that’s required to power your smartphone is a tiny chemical hydrogen cartridge and some water, or even urine. The liquid initiates a chemical reaction that generates power instantly.
(image credits: Yank Design)
Related on SmartPlanet:

Are we still waiting for smart

thermostats to outsmart us?






Americans are using less energy but are still failing to conserve energy.
That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. Because new homes are better insulated and heating and cooling system are more efficient, Americans burned around 10 percent fewer British thermal units to heat and cool their homes in 2009 than they did in 1993, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But during that same period, the amount of energy consumed for appliances, electronics and lighting grew by around 10 percent.
In other words, Americans’ love affair with flat-screen TVs, computers, smartphones and appliances is undoing the good work they’ve done managing the building envelope.
Fear not, say the makers of Nest, a Web-enabled, sensor-powered thermostat with an Apple pedigree that premiered to much fanfare among design fans in late 2011. The slick, small Nest uses sensors to manage heating and cooling output. Over time it “learns” user’s temperature preferences and sets itself to match them. Users can control the Nest remotely — say, they went on a ski trip and forgot to lower the thermostat before leaving — via a smartphone or computer.
The Nest isn’t the first “connected” or “smart” thermostat on the market – Ecobee and EcoFactor are two incumbents — but it was the first to garner significant attention and excitement among homeowners.
But will these reinvented thermostats really reinvent home energy management? The jury, says Alan Meier, senior scientist in the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is still out.
“There is a big question about whether consumers will persist using any of these wonderfully convenient devices,” he says. “Each appeals to a small group who will find it convenient and will stick to them. Whether the overwhelming, unwashed majority of us will convert, that to me is still a very open question.”
After all, most homeowners have largely failed to take advantage of programmable thermostats the Nest is meant to replace. Meier was part of a study that found around half of participants did not even use the programming features, which are designed to conserve energy when occupants are sleeping or gone for long, predictable periods (as in week days).
Even more disturbing are older studies that suggest when people forego programming thermostats and instead manually turn temperatures up or down, they often save more energy.
Perhaps that will turn out to be key to the success for Nest, et al — since these gadgets provide a way to virtually turn the dial up or down from afar (or from the couch).
Therese Peffer, a program director at the California Institute for Energy and the Environment, says she was an hour into her Christmas vacation when she remembered she’d forgotten to turn her Nest down manually. “I set the temperature down to 58 [degrees] on my iPad,” she says.
The ultimate goal of connected thermostats is that they will become nodes in the smart grid, linked to smart meters and acting as portals through which utility providers can better manage energy supply and demand (this is already happening in some parts of the United States). But in the near term, connected thermostats might best programmable thermostats not because they’re easier to program, but because they’re designed to accommodate both manual and automatic settings, seamlessly.
In the long term, says Peffer, smart thermostats will track our location via our smartphones and automatically adjust the temperatures in our homes based on our location. Heating or air conditioning systems will go into energy-saving mode automatically when residents leave, but then will sense as they (or their phones) make their way back home, so the temperature reaches a desired setting when they return.
ELECTRABEL SMART THERMOSTAT WITH TOUCH

Wednesday, 1 May 2013

Tuesday, 30 April 2013

REVIEW OF NEW HTC MOBILE.........
  
HTC and Microsoft go a long way back when the company used to exclusively make smartphones running Windows Mobile. Naturally, then, when Microsoft released Windows Phone, HTC was onboard with some really neat devices at launch.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, Windows Phone 7 did not
turn out to be quite the success the company had hoped it would be. Not to be deterred by the lukewarm response, they continued to iterate upon the product and released Windows Phone 8 last year. Once again, HTC was onboard at launch with two new phones, the 8X and the 8S. Today we are going to take a look at the 8X, the company's flagship Windows Phone device.

Design
If there is one thing you can always expect from HTC, it is to produce some attractive looking devices. At times, however, the company truly outdoes itself and the 8X is one such example.
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The phone is a real work of art in the way it seamlessly marries beautiful glass that curves at the edges with a matte unibody plastic shell. The back curves gently towards the rounded edges, making it just fit like a glove in your hands. The body is remarkably thin, and the curved edges further accentuate this feeling. It's also quite light, which makes it effortless to hold or carry.
The plastic shell employs a matte finish for all the color options (only blue and black are available in India). Being a unibody design, there are no panels or covers here to open. The microSIM slot is on the side and opens with a tiny tool provided in the box. The battery obviously is non-removable and there is no microSD card slot.
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Going around the body we can see the SIM slot, power buttons and camera shutter keys on the right, power button and headphone jack on top and micro USB port on the bottom.
While the design is certainly beautiful to behold, HTC has royally messed up the ergonomics of the design, once again. The power button is ridiculously difficult to access, no matter how you hold the phone. HTC also likes to place it closer to the front edge of the phone rather than the back, which makes it harder for your index finger to access it when you're holding it.
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The button also has a terrible feedback, where it's hard to tell whether you have pressed it or not. This applies to all the other physical buttons, particularly the volume buttons, which are hopelessly bad. It's almost impossible to tell at times if your finger is on them or not simply by touch and even if it is, it's harder to use them. The camera button is a bit better but still not completely usable.
The microUSB port once again is upside down, true to HTC tradition. Every major company that uses microUSB places the shorter side on top but HTC does it the other way around, so you have to remember to reverse the cable every time you plug it in.
It's these little things that annoy you every time you use the phone and no matter how long you use it (I've been using the phone for well over a month now) you just don't get used to them. Although I appreciate that HTC spends so much time designing these beautiful phones, they shouldn't let form get in the way of function.

Display
The HTC 8X has a 4.3-inch, 1280 x 720 resolution, Super LCD. We have seen some amazing displays from HTC recently, with the One X being a prime example and the 8X is no different. Although considerably smaller than the display on the One X, the 8X display is just as good, with amazing colors, contrast and brightness and sunlight legibility.
Although HTC does not make as big deal out of the 8X's display as Nokia does with the Lumia 920, the two are very close, with the Lumia 920 edging out when it comes to the size and response time. The 8X, however, has a longer display, thanks to the standard 16:9 aspect ratio (compared to 15:9 on the Lumia 920), which means you see more information on the screen at any given time. You also don't see any black bars on the screen while watching widescreen videos.
Overall, I'm very pleased with the display on the 8X. The size could be a bit small for some but the upside to that is that it makes the phone a lot easier to hold and use with a single hand.

Hardware and Software:
The HTC 8X runs on a Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 SoC, with a dual-core 1.5GHz Krait CPU and Adreno 225 GPU. There is 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory with no microSD card slot, even though Windows Phone 8 does support expandable memory now. This wouldn't have been an issue if HTC had provided at least 32GB of internal memory but that's not the case. It's rather laughable that the company's flagship Windows Phone device lets you have only 16GB of memory.
On the software side, the 8X comes with Windows Phone 8 with some of HTC's applications pre-installed. Let's first start with the core OS. Back when Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in 2010, it was a woefully incomplete product. But since it was a v1.0 product and brought some fresh new ideas to the table, it was easy to overlook that defect.
Fast forward to 2013, things are now different. If the competition was heating up in 2010, it's glowing white hot right now, which makes overlooking the issues in Windows Phone 8 all the more difficult. Yes, the platform has improved considerably over the past two and a half years but the list of annoyances is yet to go down.
There are several things that can be used as examples to highlight this point. Such as how there is no notification center where you can check all your previous notifications once they exit the screen, how hopelessly useless the Bing Maps application is, particularly in India, how there is no orientation lock for the screen, how there is no way to have different volume levels for ringtones, music player, alarm, headphones, or anything else, how the browser still makes a mess of the fonts, how the search button only opens Bing in every app, how the multitasking view shows multiple instances of the same app, such as settings or the music player, this despite there being a limitation to the number of instances you can display (8), how you can't see notification bar icons all the time or at all in fullscreen apps such as the browser, how there is no VPN support, how you can't hide your SkyDrive or Facebook photos from appearing in the Photos app once you log into your accounts, why the camera software is devoid of any useful settings and features, how you won't even get the option to send files over Bluetooth unless it is enabled in Settings first, how you can't actually manage the files on the memory card even though the support for it has been added in the OS, how there are only three display brightness settings, apart from Auto.
The list goes on and on. Sure, other platforms have their issues as well, but none of them are as severely annoying as they are on Windows Phone. Also, other platforms can get away with the issues because you get access to a ton of great apps that you can use to make up for the loss of functionality in most cases. But with Windows Phone, you can't even do that.
It's been two and a half years and the application situation remains terrible. Big name apps such as Instagram, Dropbox, Google Maps, YouTube, etc. continue to be absent from the Windows Phone Store. The apps that are present are nowhere as good as their counterparts on iOS or Android. The situation with games is similar. The few games that do manage to port over don't run as well as they do on the other two platforms (recent example being Disney's 'Where's My Water?' and 'Where's My Perry?' games that inexplicably stutter on Windows Phone).
HTC doesn't really help to improve the situation, either. Unlike Nokia that at least provides some genuinely useful apps with their Nokia phones, HTC is content with providing second-grade converter, flashlight weather apps. I say second-grade because the UI of these apps is laughably bad and completely out of touch with the rest of the Windows Phone UI.
Add all of this and the software on the 8X leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I still love a lot of things about Windows Phone, such as the wonderful UI design, the smooth animations and the integrated social networking features but in the end these are not enough to make you want to use the platform on a daily basis, especially with what the competition is offering for the same amount of money.

Performance
Being a Windows Phone, there is one thing you can expect from the 8X is super smooth performance. The UI glides through in most cases at a very high frame rate and you can actually use the term butter smooth here unlike on Android where it has to be used very lightly, even in the newer versions. The web browser, for example, despite its flaws, manages to load even heavy pages quickly and scrolls smoother than most desktop browsers I've used. This trend continues in pretty much every app.
Moving on to the multimedia performance, HTC made a big deal of the Beats Audio on the 8X, mostly because it was their first phone to have a dedicated audio amplifier built-in. The Beats Audio feature is tied to the amplifier and the latter only seems to kick in when the former is enabled.
With Beats Audio disabled, the audio output of the 8X seems on par with most smartphones out there. Enable it, however, and the volume level gets a solid kick in the rear, which is consistent regardless of the volume level. That is, to say, the increase in volume doesn't reduce at higher volume levels.
If it was just the boost in volume levels, it would have been fine, but Beats Audio also alters the sound signature, which is something I have a problem with. The equalizer setting gets altered to boost the bass and treble and drops the mid-range, forming a v-curve (if the phone actually let you see the equalizer levels). Some may be fine with this but I personally prefer the sound to be as unaltered and true to the original as possible, so the only option is to leave the Beats Audio option off and never use that much advertised amplifier at all.
The loudspeaker on the 8X is very good. It's loud and has good audio quality. HTC claims that the loudspeaker is also powered by an amplifier and in this case you don't need to enable Beats Audio to take advantage of it (rather you can't because it only works with the headphones).
The music and video playback on Windows Phone 8 remains as underwhelming as before. The music player does not support FLAC or gapless playback and the video player only plays back MP4 files, with other formats requiring conversion before playback. There is also no subtitle support or any other kind of feature other than simple playback.

Camera
The HTC 8X has an 8 megapixel camera on the back with LED flash and 1080p video recording, the last bit being an improvement over the 720p video on previous Windows Phone 7.x devices.
The camera module on the 8X seems to be identical to the One X, which isn't the greatest thing in the world. I have expressed my disappointment with the camera on the One X in the past, which often tends to produce over-sharpened images with smudged details and that carries over to the 8X as well. The f/2.0 lens does a good job in low light, capturing decent amount of light but the noise levels are often alarming.
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What makes the camera on the 8X even worse than the one on the One X is the camera software, which remains barebones even in Windows Phone 8. Sure, for most people it would be adequate but it's not as feature rich as the default camera applications on Android devices.
The front camera on the 8X is a bit interesting. HTC is using a wide-angle lens, which produces some amazingly wide shots that lets you have a small group of people easily fit into the frame even with the phone just an arm's length away.

Battery Life
The HTC 8X has an 1,800mAh Li-Ion battery. In my testing, which involved calling,using the social networking apps, both built-in as well as the official Twitter app, maps application, web browser and music playback, the phone lasted for about ten hours, which in most cases should get you through a day.
While playing back a 1080p video on a loop, the 8X lasted for about five and a half hours.
Conclusion
The HTC 8X is currently priced at around ₹34,000. The few things about the phone that really stood apart for me were the fantastic design, the brilliant display and the smooth and fluid UI.
Unfortunately, the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages. The design has some fairly annoying ergonomic issues thanks to the awkwardly designed and placed buttons. The camera performance is only average. There is only 16GB of memory. But most importantly, it's the OS which really lets the phone down. Unless you are a big fan of Windows Phone, I honestly don't see why you should opt for it over Android or iOS. HTC doesn't even go the same lengths that Nokia does to make the OS bit more usable.
And ultimately, that's where the 8X falters. Had it been running Android it would have still been easy to recommend. But for this price I'd suggest you look at the One X, if you want something from HTC.
REVIEW OF SAMSUNG GALAXY S4


The Galaxy S 4, Samsung's latest and greatest, has a cute feature we'll probably see in a lot of phones soon: You can shoot both yourself and your surroundings at the same time, using the front- and back-mounted cameras. It's a bit like having a two-camera film crew follow you related storie

But other than that, it's hard to point to anything that will set the world on fire in the new phone, revealed Thursday at an event in New York. The S 4 has what you'd expect from a new smartphone: a bigger screen and a faster processor. It may prove to be unfortunate that didn't stop there when it presented the successor to its hit Galaxy S III, because the phone has a grab-bag of features that don't come together as a pleasing whole.
The phone will go on sometime between late April and the end of June period, from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, US Cellular and Cricket, Samsung says. If history is any guide, even smaller phone companies will get it, if not right away. The phone companies will set the prices; expect this phone to start at $200 with a two-year contract.

Samsung's new Galaxy S4 is seen during its unveiling on March 14, 2013 at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Photo: AFP
Samsung provided reporters with some hands-on time with pre-production units, which revealed the S 4 to be, in terms of hardware, a solid successor to the III. The screen is slightly larger, at 5 inches on the diagonal compared to 4.8 inches for the III and 4 inches for the iPhone 5. It sports a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, as much as you'd find on a high-definition TV set. This should mean that the resolution chase is over in the smartphone area: the eyes just can't discern any more pixels on these small screens. Competing top-line Android phones already have the same resolution, so Samsung isn't breaking new ground here.

How Samsung's Galaxy S4 matches up vs iPhone5

People interact with the Samsung Galaxy S IV, March 14, 2013 in New York City. Samsung, the world's largest handset maker, revealed their successor to the Galaxy S III. Allison Joyce/Getty Images/AFP
The bigger screen is crammed into a chassis that's actually a hair narrower and thinner than the S III's. This is quite a feat. Samsung shrank the frame surrounding the screen to make room. Shrinking other internal components allowed it to make the battery 20 percent larger than III's, but Samsung isn't saying whether that translates into longer battery life - the added battery power could be eaten up by software and hardware changes.
The body is still dominated by softly molded plastic, and the S 4 doesn't really advance the aesthetics of its predecessor the way competitors Apple, Sony and HTC have done with their latest phones. Apple and HTC, in particular, have put a lot of sweat into machining metal into jewel-like enclosures; Samsung doesn't seem to care all that much about looks.

Samsung's Galaxy S4 emerges to do battle on Apple's home turf
Samsung does care about trying to push the envelope on what the phone does, but it may have poked through the envelope, tearing a hole or two in it. It's probably not a disaster, because most of its features can be turned off, but first-time users could be confused.

People interact with the Samsung Galaxy S IV, March 14, 2013 in New York City. The Galaxy S IV features a five-inch 1080p screen, a 1.9GHz quad-core processor, a 13-megapixel rear camera and ships with the latest Android version, Jelly Bean. Photo: AFP/Allison Joyce/Getty Images/AFP
For one thing, Samsung is taking the whole "touch screen" thing further by now sensing when the user's finger is hovering over the screen. In other words, you don't even need to touch the phone to make it react. Hovering over a thumbnail of a picture in the Gallery will reveal a bigger thumbnail, and hovering over one email in a list will show a preview of its first lines.

The idea is similar to the "mouse hover" feature on a PC, which sometimes reveals things before the mouse is clicked. Implementing it on a smartphone is trickier, though. On the PC, you have to use the mouse, so you'll discover the hover functions in the normal course of use. But since the feature is new in a smartphone and there's normally no reason to have your finger hovering over the screen, users are likely to discover this feature by chance. That wouldn't be so bad if all applications responded to hovering in a consistent manner, but very few applications react to it all. On the S 4, the "Email" app will show previews, but the "Gmail" app won't. The built-in "Gallery" app will show picture previews, but other photo apps won't. I suspect users will get tired of trying to hover with their fingers and give up on the whole thing.

People check out Samsung's new Galaxy S4 during its unveiling on March 14, 2013 at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Photo: AFP / Don Emmert
The hovering feature also sets the phone up for another problem. In my testing, I found that the phone sometimes registered a close hover as a touch. In other words, the screen was overly sensitive, thinking I was touching it when I wasn't. This may be fixed by the time the phone is in production, but it's potentially an annoying issue.
The S 4 tries to divine your intentions in two additional ways. It has an infra-red sensor that looks for hand movements up to about 4 inches away from the phone, and it uses the front-side camera to figure out if it's front of the user's face. Thanks to the IR sensor, the phone's browser responds to an "up swipe" in the air above it with by scrolling up, and to a "side" swipe by jumping to another tab. This could be pretty useful when the smartphone is the lunchtime companion and you don't want to grease it up with foody fingers, but again, the "air swipe to scroll" shows up in only a few applications.

Samsung Galaxy S4: Screen can be controlled by looking
The camera is supposed to engage when you're watching a video, pausing playback if it thinks you're looking away. This didn't work in the preproduction unit I tested, but it's hard to imagine that this is a feature to die for.

Event goers experience Samsung Electronics Co's latest Galaxy S4 phone after its launch at the Radio City Music Hall in New York March 14, 2013. Reuters/Adrees Latif
The list of user interface innovations goes on, but they don't amount to a coherent new way of interacting with the phone. Nor do they turn the phone into something that's intelligently aware of what goes on around it. It's more like Samsung is throwing a bunch of technologies into the phone to see what sticks. Sometimes, that's how progress works, but consumers might not appreciate being guinea pigs.
The S 4 presents an interesting contrast to the BlackBerry Z10, which is coming out in a few weeks. Research In Motion Ltd. jettisoned the old BlackBerry software and rebuilt it from the ground up. The phone's hardware isn't as impressive as Samsung's, but the software is easy to use, and it's based on a strong idea: taking the pain out of communicating across email, text messaging and social networks. The S 4, unfortunately, doesn't have the same clarity of purpose.



Here is what the tech websites had to say...

Samsung Galaxy S4 keeps calm, carries on with big screen
If you're looking for Samsung's new Galaxy S4 to define a novel new era of smartphone greatness, it's time to temper your expectations. The brand-new flagship smartphone, which runs the latest Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, improves hardware significantly and it piles on the features. CNET says...
Samsung Galaxy S 4: Review
As if it could be any other way, the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S 4 is Samsung’s, and perhaps even Android’s, best phone yet. In fact, it very well may be the best smartphone on the market, period. TechCrunch says...
Hands-On with the Latest Android SmartphoneSamsung has been making waves with its new Galaxy S Android-based smartphone. We recently put its AT&T variant, the Samsung Captivate, through the paces. Eschewing the single-carrier trend of most Android devices (in the U.S. anyway), Samsung is releasing a version of the Galaxy S for each of the four major U.S. carriers, all with the same basic hardware and software specifications. Mashable says...
Samsung Galaxy S4 release date, news and features
The Samsung Galaxy S4 is here. One of the most anticipated handsets in a while, Samsung took the wraps off the device at a glittering event at New York's famous Radio City Music Hall. For those who weren't lucky enough to get into Radio City Music Hall, Samsung also gave fans a chance to join the live stream from Times Square. Techradar says...
Samsung Galaxy S 4 software: What’s new?
With the Galaxy S 4, Samsung has adopted an Applesque policy of a tick-tock product iteration cycle. While Galaxy S III brought a new design language to the table which was adopted by almost the entire Samsung mobile portfolio, the Galaxy S 4 builds on the success of its predecessor and bring all the expected hardware iterations to the plate. BGR says...