GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

The French city of Toulouse is testing a system that displays available parking spots on drivers’ smartphones. The system can also tell when someone is illegally parked or hasn’t fed the parking meter.

“This technology comes from space travel,” says Patrick Givanovitch. “They were supposed to help find landing spots on Venus.” The French space agency CNES and Givanovitch’s Toulouse-based start-up company Lyberta helped develop the street-level sensors and refit both their hardware and software to map urban parking spaces. Over time, they plan to add data from global positioning systems as well.

“We know in real time where there is parking available in the city,” Givanovitch says. In addition to helping drivers find spaces and easing congestion, the hope is that city planners will be able to use the data to optimize traffic flows and parking arrangements throughout the city.

The sensors actually work by electromagnetism. They’re placed just below the street and connected in a network using ordinary coaxial cable. An occupied parking spot has a different magnetic profile than an empty one. If a garbage bin or service truck is parked in the space, they can sense that too.

Since they can detect the exact time a car parks and leaves in a space, the sensors can bust meter-cheaters as easily as overhead intersection cameras can detect cars running red lights. Just as the information that a spot is open can be relayed to a driver looking for a space, information that a car’s gone over its time limit can be relayed to the police.

Toulouse’s pilot program will eventually be expanded to cover the entire city; city planners in Paris and Los Angeles are also interested in implemented the technology.

Relief for Harried Drivers: The Parking Space that Finds You [Der Spiegel]

Image by Stefan Simons for Der Spiegel

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Source:wired.com

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Digital Inspiration’s Amit Agarwal has a clever Dropbox-based solution for printing documents from a smartphone or tablet, whether your printer’s down the hall or thousands of miles away.

The idea is so simple, you’ll be amazed you haven’t thought to try it yourself. Dropbox is a popular utility that allows users to sync and share files on different computers. Most smartphones have built-in Dropbox applications, and many mobile applications are now integrating Dropbox for remote syncing and storage. You can also add files to your Dropbox account via email or the web.

In this solution, use any of those means to get the file you want printed into a shared Dropbox folder — call it “PrintQueue” — that you’ve set up for this purpose. Your print-capable computer uses a script to monitor “PrintQueue”, automatically print its documents and then move them to a different folder. (Agarwal calls this second folder “logs”; I’d call it “Completed Jobs”). If you’re a clever hacker, you could even add scripts to send a remote notification that the print job has been completed.

For Windows, Agarwal has a downloadable VBS script that will set this up for you; as he notes, there are different scripting solutions for Mac OS X or Linux too.

Once you’ve got this rigged, the immediate use case is to send a document wirelessly from a smartphone or tablet to a local printer. And it is kind of magical to stand there and watch the whole process unfold, as in the video above.

But think beyond that. Suddenly, your printer is capable of networking with any computer, anywhere — with any phone, anywhere — that you approve and authorize. This is potentially so much better than hooking up a computer to a wireless router or navigating the virtual bureaucracy of an office printer network. It’s way better than a fax machine.

This could be one future of social networking and file sharing: instead of big, ad-cluttered feeds that push photos, status updates and Farmville notifications or anonymous networks that chop files into bits and reassemble them, imagine friends and acquaintances broadcasting to each other, wheels within wheels, each with different levels and fields of access. Designating someone a “friend” might not be worth very much in this cockeyed world, but automatic remote access to someone’s printer still means something.

Print Files from any Mobile Phone using Dropbox [Digital Inspiration] via Gizmodo

Source:wired.com

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Much to newspapers’ chagrin, these days everyone advertises and looks for work online. But how do you find work if you can’t read? Here, the new generation of touchscreen computers is light-years ahead of newsprint.

That’s the premise of Indian jobs site Babajob.com, with help from Microsoft Research’s ethnographic UI expert Indrani Medhi.

Besides the informal labor market, Medhi has also deployed and studied the use of text-free interfaces in mapping, mobile banking, and disseminating health information. Since many parts of the developing world are adopting mobile phones without books or traditional PCs, the implications of widespread text-free mobile computing applications are tremendous.

Medhi’s research is not just technological but anthropological, as the “ethnographic UI” phrase implies. Speech, for instance, is preferred over multimedia/video by her study subjects. The presence or absence of computing devices in the home has class implications. Medhi writes that her team is “also trying to understand characteristics of the cognitive styles of those with little formal education and their implications for UI design for this population.” Hindi, for instance, is like English read from left to right. It’s natural for us to arrange pictures from left to right to show chronology or causality. It’s not necessarily intuitive to a nonreader.

The demo video above of Babajobs’ text-free interface is in Hindi, without subtitles, but it’s not hard to make out what’s happening. (If you want to skip to the site in action, go to 2:50.) A middle-class couple is looking for domestic help. Meanwhile, one woman convinces another (who can’t read) that she can use a computer to find work. At the end, they find each other. Such a simple, happy story is easy to understand without letters or language.

Source:wired.com

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A ride to the stratosphere and back has now become a rite of passage for smartphones.

Space enthusiasts are attaching devices such as the Motorola Droid, G1, HTC Evo, and Nexus One — not to mention an array of digital cameras — to weather balloons or rockets, then sending them high into the stratosphere and beyond.

With integrated GPS systems, cameras and fast processors, smartphones are computing devices available to all. Thats why space enthusiasts are turning to them to do things that would have otherwise required custom components or a number of specialized devices.

What you are seeing is a grassroots initiative to reach for the stars, says Bobby Russell, founder of Quest for Stars, a non-profit organization that works with high school students to promote science and technology.

Driving the interest of hobbyists are the latest crop of smartphones and even digital cameras because the devices are cheap and fairly rugged.

Now, its all there off-the-shelf for the taking, says Russell. So why reinvent the wheel?

Photo: A Google G1 phone gets ready to head into the atmosphere, surrounded by members of the Noisebridge hacker space. Photo courtesy: Mikolaj Horbyn, Andrew Gerrand, Christie Dudley.

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Source:wired.com

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If size matters, Modu’s extremely tiny and lightweight phones that come with interchangeable casings are an interesting idea. Go beyond that and the phones seem rather dated.

That could change as Modu is likely to introduce a new version of its phone that will run Android OS. A video showing a tiny Modu phone and some of the key screens has surfaced.

Israeli company Modu, which makes these phones that are sold outside the U.S. and most of Europe, has engineered devices that weigh just 1.4 ounces. An iPhone 4G weighs about 4.8 ounces. So far, Modu’s phones have used a proprietary version of the operating system, giving rise to complaints about the tired looking user interface.

Android OS could fix that. But it looks like it may not be enough. The new Modu phone has some glaring omissions such as the lack of 3G capability and a capacitive touchscreen, says Phandroid. The phone includes a stylus and a microSD card slot. It also seems to be running version 1.5 or version 1.6 of Android.

Clearly, Modu become so captivated by the idea of a small phone that everything else–specs, OS, user experience– has become secondary. A pint-sized phone is enough to get consumers’ attention but when its peers are on Android 2.2 and turning into powerful little computers, Modu can’t just count on its looks to be accepted.

Source:wired.com

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Dell’s new tablet called the Streak is set to make its debut in the U.S. this summer. But while temperatures have been soaring, there’s still no sign of the device. The Streak, which was launched in the U.K. last month for 450, is expected to be available on AT&T for $500.

Dell now says it has been testing the device and hopes to have it in the hands of U.S. consumers soon. The company still won’t disclose the exact availability. Meanwhile, Gadget Lab got some hands-on time with the U.S. version of the Streak.

Nearly 30 percent thinner than the iPhone 3G S, the Streak bills itself as a tablet but also offers the option of a SIM card in it so you can make phone calls. The device includes 3G connectivity and a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

Think of it as a turbocharged phone.

“The 3.5-inch to 4-inch screen devices are optimized primarily around the phone experience,” says Kevin Andrew, product manager for Dell.”The Streak is for those who want something bigger than a phone but not something so big they have to carry it separately.”

The Streak fits the bill. It is ultra-thin, lightweight (7.8 ounces) and extremely easy to use. Read on for our hands-on impression of the tablet.

The Streak’s five inch touchscreen display is just a little bigger than the latest crop of Android smartphones (HTC Evo and Droid X sport a 4.3-inch touchscreen) but significantly smaller than the iPad’s 9.7-inch display. That puts the Streak in an awkward netherworld: too big to be a phone, too small to be directly take on the iPad.

But the Streak’s 5-inch display looks much better in real life than it sounds on paper. The screen is smooth, responsive and big enough to comfortably type and access different widgets.

The device itself is ultra-thin, just 9.9 mm thick compared to the iPhone 3G’s 12.3 mm thickness and almost on par with the iPhone 4. It slips easily into your jeans or the jacket pocket and doesn’t feel awkard if you hold it up to your ear to make a phone call.

The Streak has just one 30-pin connector and no USB port.

The Streak runs Android 1.6, which seems ancient considering that Google has released Android 2.2 or Froyo.

But Dell says it has created an enhanced version of Android 1.6 that puts it almost on par with Android 2.2 or ‘Eclair.’

“If you compare Android 1.6 on the Streak to Eclair, the only feature that is missing versus Eclair is the live wallpapers,” says Andrew.

The Android experience on the Streak is very similar to what we have seen on the latest Android cellphones. The Streak supports up to six home screens. The main screen (shown above) has icons for phone, calendar, messaging, browser, maps and market among other things.

A small round dot at the top left corner of the screen acts as a shortcut to applications. Streak users can download apps from the Android market.

The Streak has a 5-megapixel camera on the back and 0.3 megapixel VGA camera in the front. It can also shoot videos upto 720p (1280 x 720 pixels resolution). Sharing photos is easy and should be familiar to most Android phone users–click on the photo, choose the share button from the virtual menu and pick Facebook, Twitter or Flickr to upload it to.

Dells also offers an accessory dock, with an HDMI output that can be connected to a TV.

The Streak will have a user-replaceable battery, internal storage of 2 GB and additional storage using a microSD card for up to 32 GB.

Overall, the Streak is an exciting, well-engineered device that should appeal to consumers who want to super-size their phone. But that’s also means its unlikely to have Apple or iPad fans quaking. The Streak seems like a tablet for a very different audience than the iPad.

Photos: Dell Streak/Priya Ganapati

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Do you care more about superficial gadget upgrades like backlit keypads or can you live with an ugly brick that’s simply better?

In this week’s Wired Gadget Lab Videoblog, Daniel Dumas and Steven Leckart take on that age-old gadget quandary when they review Motorola’s newest candybar phone, the Zn5. Although much prettier than the average Miami beach face, the $500 Zn5 can’t stand up to the much older Nokia N95 on features alone, not even with a five megapixel camera.

In addition, Bryan Gardiner joins Daniel for a review of the newest Motorola RAZR, the VE20, which is essentially the same phone as the one from four years ago but a little sleeker. Which means it’s definitely worse. Do the de-evolution baby!

If the video below is not working, please click here to view it: Gadget Lab Videoblog: Motorola Serves Up Candybar Phone With Less Filling.

You can also check out all of our previous videos at Wired’s channel on YouTube.

This episode of the Gadget Lab Videoblog was created by Annaliza Savage (producer), Henry Young (camera), and Fernando Cardoso (editor).

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