IBLOG SPACE

Better book your space holiday fast if you were hoping to spend a romantic weekend at the International Space Station. After 2020, when the ISS is decommissioned, it will be purposefully dumped into the ocean so as to avoid becoming another piece of potentially dangerous “space trash.” Such a chunk of abandoned detritus almost collided with the ISS itself last month, forcing crew to pre-emptively climb aboard their escape craft. “Right now we’ve agreed with our partners that the station will be used until approximately 202 … After it completes its existence, we will be forced to sink the ISS. It cannot be left in orbit, it’s too complex, too heavy an object, it can leave behind lots of rubbish” Vitaly Davydov, deputy chief, Roskosmos space agency Nonetheless, while it may not be as romantic as leaving the ISS to gently decay in orbit, or indeed fire it off into the coldness of deep space, the station’s looming 2020 demise still marks a longer lifespan than was originally intended. Russ

A new device has landed on the Samsung Developer Center and it has little in the way of details. The listing gives a part number of SHV-E120s. There is no mention of if the listing is a smartphone or a tablet. The screen resolution is listed as 1280 x 768 with 16 million colors. Geeks love a good new gadget mystery and this is one of the better ones we have had lately. The listing also shows that the tablet will use Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Some think we are looking at a new smartphone that would be the highest resolution Samsung has ever offered. I may be proven wrong down the road, but I don’t think we are looking at a smartphone. I think this is a tablet that will surface at IFA in a few weeks. The resolution of 1280 x 768 puts this device right between the Galaxy Tab 7 and the Galaxy Tab 10.1. We already know Samsung has plans on launching the Galaxy Tab 8.9 and back in May when Amazon in Russia put the device on its site the resolution for the screen was pegged at 1280 x 800. My m

Yesterday a single press photo of a new Sony Walkman MP3 player leaked. Today Sony has gone official with the leaked A860 from yesterday and a bunch more new digital audio players. The first player, which was the one in the leaked photo yesterday, is the NWZ-A600 coming in 8GB to 64GB capacities. It has a 2.8-inch display and will play common music formats. It also supports MPEG4, AVC, and WMV9 formats for video. The battery is good for 23 hours of audio or five hours of video. The player supports Bluetooth streaming and A2DP protocol. The A860 measures 51.8 x 96.9 x 9.3mm and weighs 77g. The S760 series comes in an 8GB or a 16GB version and has a 2-inch screen. It plays the same common audio files as its big brother the A860 and supports the same video files as well. It also has Bluetooth capability and will play 50 hours of music or 10 hours of video per charge. It measures 43.6 x 97.5 x 7.9mm and weighs 57g. The E460 player will come in 8GB and 4GB flavors with a 2-inch screen and s

Back in June, we caught wind that Garmin was looking to gobble up Navigon. Navigon is a company that is big in Europe and will also help Garmin make inroads into the OEM navigation space for vehicles. Navigon is also known for its navigation apps for the iPhone and Android smartphone as well. The particulars of the deal are still unknown. Garmin is also happy to be getting its hands on the Navigon iPhone app. Garmin made note in its announcement that the purchase was landing it one of the top-selling navigation apps on the iPhone and Android devices. It would be safe to assume that a big driver for the purchase was the navigation apps that Navigon offers. Lots of people are going to navigation on their smartphones rather than using the traditional navigation device. The cost of the deal is unknown. Navigon expects to have a new line of wares on the market in time for the holiday season.

How awesome is this dude at making replica weapons for video games! We have seen the work of Harrison Krix before back when he made the M8 Avenger replica weapon in his spare time for grins. The dude does some epic work and this time around he was asked by the folks at Bioware to make a replica of the new N7 rifle from Mass Effect 3 to be used in the marketing surrounding Comic-Con. The dude received the order and made the weapon in only 14 working days! I can’t imagine producing something this cool myself in 14-months, much less a few weeks. Krix even had time to take hoards of photos of all the steps of the build process for us to check out. This guys is a replica making god and should have his likeness in the video game me thinks. The weapon started at MDF and a bunch of glue. The cracks and gaps were filled with bondo, foam and clay, and then molds were made to get rubber parts. The finished weapon looks like it is waiting for someone to pick it up and start a firefight. I wonder h

The pieces of Amazon’s Android tablet puzzle continue to coalesce, with the retailer’s lengthy parts supplier lists leaking ahead of what’s expected to be a commercial launch of two slates later in Q3 2011. As well as NVIDIA’s processors, the slates will reportedly use CPT touch sensors, after existing Amazon supplier E Ink – which provides the epaper panels for the Kindle - helped get the display manufacturer’s foot in the door. Previous reports have suggested that Amazon will use a Fringe Field Switching (FFS) display technology sourced from E Ink to rival IPS panels as used in the Eee Pad Transformer and iPad 2. E Ink recently announced plans to invest NT$1.5bn ($52m) into CPT, in return gaining access to the company’s 6th-gen production line and thus increasing yield for E Ink subsidiary Hydis’ FFS manufacturing. Amazon’s 7-inch tablet – codenamed Coyote - will use a glass-on-glass touch panel, DigiTimes reports, provided to assemblers Quanta by both Wintek and CPT. The retailer is

Motorola XOOM 3G customers who have been patiently waiting for the promised 4G LTE upgrade, have gotten a little worried in recent months as rumors emerged that the company was pushing a new tablet and leaving previous customers in the cold. Well, thankfully that’s not the case and the company has just begun sending out emails to confirm with customers that the upgrade will be happening sometime in September. DroidLife obtained an internal memo informing employees that Motorola XOOM 3G customers will be receiving an email today notifying them of the good news. The upgrade from 3G to 4G LTE will be free, but requires customers to ship in their tablets to Motorola for a couple days so that it can drop in a mini PCI module for supporting LTE speeds. Customers are warned to back up their content. Apparently, the recent FCC filing of a 4G LTE Motorola XOOM was to get approval for the upgrade component. It was rumored to be a second-generation Motorola XOOM tablet instead, leaving many XOOM

RIM is expected to launch seven BlackBerry 7 OS smartphones before the end of this year, with one of them being the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930. Just yesterday, the company’s Twitter account hinted at a major announcement to come today, asking followers to check back for details on the upcoming phones, but it looks like Verizon beat them to the punch with a video demo of the device. The BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 is the thinnest BlackBerry yet, with many improvements over its predecessors while keeping the same form factor that BlackBerry fans have come to love. It now has a high-resolution 2.8-inch multi-touch display, a faster 1.2GHz processor, a larger QWERTY keyboard, 5-megapixel rear-facing camera with LED flash capable of 720p HD video capture, and 8GB of onboard memory expandable with up to 32GB microSD. We’ve known that the 9900 model is set for a GSM network, while the 9930 was to be a CDMA capable world phone, but what we didn’t know for sure was that it would be running on Veri

It appears that in addition to the HTC Puccini 10-inch tablet having its press images leaked today, there’s another AT&T-bound device hanging in the rafters. This handset is a Samsung device by the looks of it, employing a slide-out keyboard, an 8-megapixel camera on the back with a flash and speaker grille, textured battery cover, and by the looks of its model number SGH-I927, may well be a variant of the hottest Android device in the world, the Galaxy S II. This device appears to have the same 4.3-inch display the Galaxy S II is sporting currently in Europe, but because of the slide-out keyboard, will certainly not quite have the same Thinnest Smartphone on Earth prize attached to it. Additionally, the camera, flash, and speaker panel on the back of the device is a departure from what we’re used to with the original Galaxy S II, this time appearing to take on a much less stylish form – perhaps this is just an early model? This device also appears to have Android 2.3.4 installed w

It appears that HTC’s newest effort in the Android business has been revealed in real live photo form. That or there’s a rather talented mock-up artist amongst us creating a masterpiece when they should be working for HTC. This tablet takes a step away from their previous tablet, the HTC Flyer, in that it’s not White (though it’s HTC EVO View brother certainly isn’t either), and that it’s got one solid piece covering the entirety of its back instead of the EVO-ish three piece situation. This tablet will almost certainly be released before the dropping of Androids 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich this fall, and will therefor be running something along the lines of Android 3.1 or 3.2 Honeycomb upon release. This tablet also appears to have three speaker grilles on the back, this a bit odd for a mobile device, most mobile devices such as this only featuring two (and in some cases none at all. There’s a gigantic 8-megapixel camera sitting on the back of this device, the norm for recent smartphones,

Verizon Wireless revealed on Tuesday that they’d be releasing the world’s first 4G LTE enabled notebook, it being the model dm1-3010nr HP Pavillion. This notebook was revealed at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, aka CES 2011, now officially prepared for release by HP and Verizon on July 28th, a big launch day for Verizon as they also have prepared the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 LTE for this Thursday as well. This device will have 4G LTE capability built in, runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit out of the box, and is 1.2-inches thin. This newest HP Pavillion employes HP CoolSense technology, intelligent cooling software and advanced hardware that reportedly makes the notebook feel “noticeably cooler” to the touch. This HP Pavillion employs an 11.6-inch HD HP BrightView LED display at 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, carries a 1.60 GHz AMD Dual-Core Processor E-350, and has a 320 GB hard drive with HP ProtectSmart hard drive protection. Inside you’ll find 2GB DDR3 RAM, Wi-Fi 802.11 along b