IBLOG SPACE

Images of Acer’s MacBook Air rival, the Acer Aspire 3951, have leaked, previewing the company’s upcomingultrabook. The shots, caught on Vietnamese site Sohoa, show a slimline 13.3-inch ultraportable that’s expected to weigh 1.4kg and be roughly 13mm thick, powered by a Sandy Bridge Intel Core processor. Interestingly, while Intel is billing SSDs as an integral part of the ultrabook experience, Acer is said to be planning to offer them as an option on the Aspire 3951. Buyers will apparently be able to upgrade the standard 250GB hard-drive to 500GB HDDs, or optionally to a 160GB SSD. We’re guessing that will be necessary if people want to take advantage of the super-speedy resume times, which are tipped to be in the region of 1.7s resume from sleep mode or standby times of 30 days. Runtime is expected to be in the region of 6hrs. Connectivity has been pushed to the back, rather than at the sides as on the MacBook Air, with HDMI and USB along with a memory card reader. There’ll also be Bl

On a normal vehicle with a combustion engine, the power needed to operate the various instruments inside the car is not that big of a deal since you have power as long as the fuel holds out. On an EV or hybrid the less drain on the battery, the longer the driving distance so in these vehicles shedding all the power drain possible from the batteries is a big deal. Cornell University and a company called MicroGen are working on a new type of instrument that harvests power from road vibrations to make the gear operate. The sensors used for the instruments able to operate in anything that spins, rolls, shakes, or jiggles. MicroGen and Corenell University’s Cornell Nanoscale Facility are working to develop the battery free sensors. The battery that generates the power for the sensors is a tiny sheet of piezoelectric material that makes electricity when mounted on a shock-resistant base when it is flexed. Vibrations created by things like the wheel of a car rolling or a dryer doing its thing

Boxee has released Boxee for iPad, allowing users to begin watching content on their Apple tablet then transfer playback to their HTPC midway through, optionally controlling the whole thing from an iPhone-based remote app. The free iPad app [iTunes link] is accompanied by the new Boxee Media Manager, which can be used to stream video to the tablet from your PC or Mac; Boxee Box owners, meanwhile, can stream content in the other direction. Meanwhile there’s Boxee Box 1.2, the latest firmware release, which adds NFS and AFP support, boosted HTML5 handling in the browser, OS X Lion compatibility as a source for video files, and – among other things – experimental AirPlay support. iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users can now stream directly to their Boxee Box using the Apple technology. There’s also a new Boxee “Watch Later” bookmarklet, which allows you to queue up online videos you encounter while browsing so as to later watch them when you’re in front of your Boxee Box or iPad. Facebook, T

There are fortunes to be made in teaching photography skill to those considering leaking tech info online. The photo you see below is almost pure gibberish, but according to the person that leaked the shot what you are looking at is the confirmation of the Nokia Sea Ray smartphone on AT&T is in carrier testing. This would be the First Windows Phone 7 handset from Nokia. The line of the page with the brownish line under it apparently reads “1211 mycingular.net Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; Nokia; SeaRay).” The listing showing Cingular and HSDPA band support doesn’t mean the device will come to AT&T, but it would be a safe guess me thinks. The image seems to prove the device is at least in carrier testing. I hope the device works well if it is in fact coming to AT&T. At this point with Microsoft making more off licensing Android than WP7 even if the Mango update proves as unpopular as the current version Microsoft will sti

A few days back we talked about AT&T moving to force customers that are tethering their smartphones via unofficial apps and hacks to pay more. AT&T went so far as to tell users that they would have their grandfatheredunlimited data plans cancelled if they didn’t stop. Verizon is now following AT&T into the battle to stop unofficial tethering. Verizon is going to redirect users that are tethering unofficially from whatever page they are trying to visit when tethered to a Verizon page that offers official tethering for $20 more monthly that is much cheaper than the AT&T rate of $45 monthly to move for unofficial tethering to the real deal. Until now unofficial tethering hasn’t been a big deal on the Verizon network. Blocking the illegal tethering is not a surprise considering that wireless carriers are moving to force more money out of their customers with tiered data plans and throttled speeds for those deemed heavy users. If you are on Verizon and use unofficial tetheri

If you have been reading SlashGear for a while, you might recognize the Light Blue Optics tech that has just crossed the FCC. We have talked about the projector and its touch interface in the past. The Light Blue Opticsturned up back at CES in 2010 as an interesting device that turned any flat surface into a color touchscreen. The tech turned up again later in January 2010 we saw the device demonstrated in a room with ambient light. If you liked that tech and thought it might be just what you need, Light Blue Optics’ pico projector with a touch interface has hit the FCC. The projector is still the same basic device we saw back in 2010 with the ability to turn any flat surface into a touchscreen. The projected touchscreen has a WVGA resolution and the projector uses holographic laser projection and infrared sensors. The main changes with the new version sitting at the FCC include support multi-touch gestures and it is more finger friendly. The projector also sports a 3.5mm headphone por

NASA thinks that it has found evidence that the building blocks of life may have come from asteroids and comets that stuck the earth. According to researchers that were funded by NASA, some of the building blocks needed for DNA have been found in meteorites and were likely created in space. The building blocks found in the meteorites are adenine and guanine. The new discovery adds to evidence that the chemistry inside an asteroid or comet is capable of making the building blocks for essential biological molecules. Researchers previously found amino acids in samples of comet Wild 2 obtained via the Stardust mission. The researchers ground up samples of twelve carbon-rich meteorites with nine of the samples recovered from Antarctica. The team extracted a sample from each meteorite using formic acid and then ran the sample though a liquid chromatograph to separate the compounds. The team found the adenine and guanine in the samples, which are nucleobases along with hypoxanthine and xanthi

Apparently, there are Star Trek geeks in all parts of the world as evidenced by the pending launch of a Star Trek theme park in Aqaba, Jordan. The park is set to open in 2014 and will be part of the Red Sea Astrarium. The entertainment resort will be built on 184 acres and the Star Trek park will be among the attractions. Apparently, the Jordan ruler, King Abdullah II is a huge Star Trek fan; in fact, he even had a non-speaking role in Star Trek: Voyager back in his teen days. The king is making an investment of $1.5 billion in the project according to a paper in the area. The resort that the park will be integrated into has all sorts of interesting things to offer. In addition to the Star Trek park the Red Sea Astrarium will also have all sorts of real world features. There will be a pavilion for instance where businesses, students, and others can learn about solar and wind power along with graywater harvesting. The park is being licensed by CBS Consumer Products so it will be officia

If you need to get an idea what is on the other side of a wall or other obstacle you can’t see over in a situation where looking over the obstacle yourself could get you or someone else hurt you need a drone. The catch is that not all law enforcement agencies have access to drone of any sort. A geek named Joshua Marpet showed off a new drone device he made from a 37mm flare launcher at the Defcon convention recently. The modded flare gun fires a cartridge that can send images back from a small digital camera that is inside the shell. The idea is that the weapon could be used by police to get an idea what the bad guys are doing. The flare gun uses the Firefly single-use spy cam developed by military contractors from Israel. The device has potential use in the civilian sector as well. It could be used to aid in search and rescue missions or for watching a kidnapper for instance. The camera is shot 500-feet into the air and can send back 8-seconds worth of video details to give a glimpse

Onkyo has announced that its line of network-capable AV receivers is now offering support for a new music service called Aupeo. Aupeo is a personal radio service that is free of charge and has over 120 specialized music channels for users to enjoy. The service allows the user to discover music by genre and has user-selected stations that can be customized with loves and bans to personalize the music experience. The service supports searches for specific artists using the Artist Radio feature and has a mood selector to match tunes to the mood of the listener. Onkyo has also announced that it is expanding support for Last.fm to all of its 2011 line of networked AV receivers. The new support requires an update. The firmware bringing support for Last.fm to existing receivers is available as of this week. Once downloaded and installed the user can take advantage of Last.fm content on their home theater. The service is already available on receivers from 2011 starting with the TX-NR709.

There has been speculation for months now that a new Kindle eReader or two was inbound. Amazon has registered a new domain name that is called KindleAir.com. The thought is that the new domain registration hints at what the next generation Kindle will be like. The assumption that the URL hints at a product is an easy one since the registration of kindlesocialnetwork.com and kindlesocialnetworking.com come after word of social networking features surfaced. The domain was registered by a firm called MarkMonitor, which Amazon often uses to register its domains. It’s worth noting that the domain may be nothing more than Amazon protecting its trademarks. However, with all the rumors of new Kindles inbound, we suspect the URL will be used. If Amazon actually intends to use the KindleAir domain, I wonder if the name hints at what we will see in the next Kindle. The MacBook Air for example is a much thinner and more portable version of the MacBook. It would be a natural assumption to expect th

If you have a computer or other device in your house that needs lots of fans to stay cool you know how loud these fans can be. I have a computer in my office right now that sounds like a small jet idling on the runway. It gets quite annoying. A company called RotoSub is licensing tech that might be perfect for those that want some peace and quiet in the home or office. RotoSub is a Swedish company and it makes an active noise cancellation system for cooling fans with tech that is sort of like what is used in headphones today. The active noise control (ANC) system the company uses doesn’t have speakers outside the fan to cancel the noise produced, in fact is doesn’t use speakers at all. The noise killing tech is inside the fan itself. The tech is said to work so well that users are left with little more than the sound of the air passing through the fan. The system has no speakers to produce the antisound wave. The RotoSub system bends the blades of the fans in a way that makes the fan t

If you say e-Paper, most of us will think of the e-Readers that have the displays needing little power and offering lots of readability. A new sort of e-paper has surfaced in Taiwan that has some very cool properties. The e-Paper uses a thermal printer like you would find in a fax machine and it prints on the e-Paper using that heat. The cool part is that the e-Paper can be erased at the flick of a switch and can be reused up to 260 times. The new invention comes from Researchers at the Industrial Technology Research Institute and the developers think that the new e-Paper is a good replacement for paper signs and posters. The key property of the new e-Paper is that it has a plastic film covered with a cholestric liquid crystal. The compound does not need a backlight to print and can produce different colors. Erasing the paper requires that it be connected to electricity. The researchers are using a modified printer to erase the paper by rolling it backwards. An A4 sized sheet of the e-

AMD has admitted that it ceded the smartphone processor space to rivals, arguing that the company’s strengths in graphics don’t lend themselves to the handset segment. Instead, SVP and product group manager Rick Bergman suggests, tablets are where AMD’s future lies, with the company’s Z-series APUs delivering a balance of video performance and battery life. Speaking in Colorado this week, PC World reports, Bergman also reiterated earlier denials of ARM-based chipset plans. “We haven’t announced any plans to go in that handheld space. We’ve got plenty of opportunities… in server, notebook and now tablets, that’s our immediate focus. But if the right circumstances come up and we can see a way to impact the market, we’ll obviously continue to look … We’re excited about what the tablet market can do for AMD” Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Product Group, AMD Just as Intel has positioned its Atom processors, AMD’s strategy is to deliver the “full PC experience” of g

Panasonic has outed a Pocket Server, the DY-PS10, a smartphone-sized box that can push digital media stored on SDXC memory card over a WiFi b/g connection to your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or other device. Owners of Panasonic DIGA A/V equipment – such as TVs, DVRs and Blu-ray decks – will be able to take the memory card out of their kit and slot it straight into the DY-PS10, then squirt the photos, music and video stored on there right over to their phone. A 64GB SDXC memory card (there’s SD and SDHC support too, obviously) is good for up to 88hrs of standard-definition video, while the battery in the personal media server itself is around 10hrs of active use. The 1,400 mAh pack recharges in around 4hrs, and you can hook the DY-PS10 up to your computer via USB and transfer files to a memory card directly if you prefer. The Panasonic DY-PS10 will go on sale on September 15, priced at 14,800 yen ($191). Unfortunately it seems those of us outside of Japan may have to wait a little longer f

The US ITC has confirmed it will begin an investigation into patent complaints against HTC by Apple, which could result in sales of the manufacturers smartphones and tablets being frozen. Apple’s complaint – filed last month - is titled “Portable Electronic Devices and Related Software” and is believed to cover alleged IP infringements by HTC’s phone range, its Flyer tablet and the HTC Sense UI customizations and apps. The new suit follows Apple’s success at the ITC over a previous suit against HTC, in which it was ruled that the company infringed on two patents. HTC subsequently claimed that it would not only fight the ruling in the appeal courts, but that it had reworked the contentious technologies and that they would no longer be an issue in its 2012 range. Apple hasn’t escaped censure in the ongoing patent wars, however, with judges finding it itself infringed on certain patents held by new HTC acquisition S3. HTC then filed a legal suit against its rival in the UK courts. Apple h

Leaked video purportedly showing a (very blurry) LG Prada K2 smartphone has emerged, doing very little to dampen our enthusiasm about the incoming touchscreen handset. The clip, passed to Pocketnow, shows a brief glimpse of the slimline slab, which is tipped to use LG’s NOVA technology for its 4.3-inch display and deliver 1,000 nits of brightness. To put that into perspective, the Super AMOLED Plus panel on the Galaxy S II is said to run at around 300 nits, and the iPhone 4 Retina Display at around 500 nits. Behind that bright panel lurks a dual-core processor, so the rumors say, along with HSPA+ for up to 21Mbps connectivity, network-depending. There’s also 16GB of ROM and twin cameras – 1.3-megapixels up front, 8-megapixels on the back – and a copy of Android 2.3 Gingerbread. That’s not bad for a smartphone that’s expected to be less than 9mm thick, taking on the Samsung handset for its dual-core crown. The original Prada phone – and its keyboard-toting successor – arguably had the l

Three new Android-based devices have been leaked for release in the USA, the first of which is destined to be another iteration of the soon approaching Samsung Galaxy S II. All of the following information comes from an anonymous tipster lending some logo-marks to the fray in a two-tone look at the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch (aka the longest name for a handset in the history of the world,) HTC EVO Design 4G, and Motorola Admiral. The tipster offers no additional information on any of the devices in this short list, but many conclusions can be inferred. It seems clear that given the names of at least two of these three devices that the Samsung Galaxy S II variant by the name of Epic 4G Touch will either indeed be a variant of the Samsung Within or will be replacing it entirely. Another notion you may find interesting is the previous set of tips which have decidedly shown the Epic 2 to be a WiMAX version of the Samsung Galaxy S II with a round-sided keyboard sliding out from benea

Both the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and IBM have cited unforeseen costs and greater than expected complexities amongst reasons for abandoning plans to create a petaflop-speed supercomputer this Monday. A petaflop, for those wondering, is a measure of the processing speed of a computer, that being a thousand trillion floating point operations per second – a computer with such speed capabilities being news in and of itself. Having started the project back in 2008, IBM reports today that it has terminated its four-year “Blue Waters” contract estimated at about $208 million USD, previously expected to have been delivered inside 2011. Technology pundits such as Rick Doherty (of Envisioneering Group) are thus far seeming to focus on the fact that IBM will be returning the money they’ve recieved from the project up to this point while the NCSA will be returning all IBM equipment, while both groups have promised to work on future petascale co

A sure sign that the next-gen iPhone is approaching fast is retailers eagerly dropping prices on current-gen models. RadioShack, which has just had a week-long sale on the iPhone 4, has now further cut prices for all iPhone models currently in stock. All models of the iPhone 4 now continue to get the $30 discount, which in the previous promotion had dropped the 16GB iPhone 4 from $199 to $169. On top of this, if you trade-in an iPhone 3G or 3GS, you can get as much as $150 towards the iPhone 4 purchase, bringing down the 16GB iPhone price to only $19 and the 32GB model to $119. This promotion will continue until August 20, which suggests that the iPhone 5 may be hitting in the second week of September after all. Some recent rumors have pegged the iPhone 5 for an October release, but with such aggressive promotions in the month of August, October looks to be too far out.

Although Google has made it clear that its Chrome OS for Chromebooks are not meant for the tablet, there are certainly signs that Google is working on a touch-friendly interface for its Chrome browser. A new demo video has been released showing an experimental touch UI for Google’s open-source Chromium browser that could eventually make its way to tablet screens. The experimental Chromium touchscreen UI features many of the things you’d expect from a tablet interface, such as larger icons and widgets along with a virtual keyboard that has enough space for the meatiest of fingers. It also incorporates handwriting and screen rotation support. It’s still in a very early stage and it’s not certain whether any of these features will indeed make it to the Chrome browser or the Chrome OS. However, there have been reports of Tegra 2 hardware being used to test the Chrome OS, including one that takes on a touchscreen tablet form factor and is codenamed “Seaboard.”

When Apple announced the iCloud at WWDC 2011, it also revealed that its MobileMe syncing service would be shutting down. Although the core services of MobileMe will be rolled into the iCloud, there are still certain features that will no longer sync due to the transition. To make things better, Apple may be offering MobileMe users 25GB right off the bat when they migrate to the iCloud. According to 9to5 Mac, Apple has revealed that MobileMe users will retain their MobileMe storage when their account transitions to an iCloud account. The 20GB of storage that MobileMe users pay $100 a year for will be added on to the 5GB of free storage that comes with iCloud accounts giving them a total of 25GB of storage. But this isn’t indefinitely. Apple has already made it known that MobileMe will shut down on June 30, 2012. The 25GB plan will expire on this same date when MobileMe users will have to renew at a cost of $40. They can also opt to upgrade to a full 50GB plan. Apple revealed the pricing

The iPhone 5 will land with much fanfare come this September or October when plenty of eager fans will line the streets to fork over some serious cash for this next-gen device. But what will they likely be getting in terms of specs? To answer that question, take a look at this “hypothetical” bill of materials. Bloomberg, which has deep industry connections, may have some insider information that they’re revealing in a chart titled “Apple iPhone 5 Hypothetical Gross Margin Analysis.” It’s essentially a breakdown of the component costs for the next-gen iPhone, listing its total bill of materials to be around $270. This figure is quite a bit higher than previous BOMs for the iPhone 4, but it may be because it’s also taking into account costs beyond just the hardware. There isn’t an accompanying article for the graphic yet and so there aren’t any specific details or explanations for the analysis. The parts listed are also generic component names such as “high resolution camera” instead of

The fellow you may remember fondly as the man who made Windows Phone 7 a place where developers could feel welcome creating any one of the 27,000 apps already in circulation has announced his intention to both resign his post at Microsoft and start a new venture of his own soon. Long-time Microsoft veteran Charlie Kindel had been with Microsoft for a total of 21 years and was instrumental in bringing the Windows Mobile platform to where it is today. His list of projects worked on move from Windows 2.0, 3.0 SDK and DDK Support, Windows Home Server and more. He writes his farewell letter and announcement of continuing to work under his own flag on his own personal blog at ceklog.kindel.com and goes from speaking about his work with Microsoft to thanking his closest family members for sticking with him along the way. Those of you having worked as long as Kindel has at a single company know such pains of coming home late and demanding that your children don’t use Google: “To my wife: Thank

The Lenovo ThinkPad tablet, one of the first two Android slates from the company, has just passed through the FCC, signaling that it’s on track for a late August launch. Unlike the consumer-oriented IdeaPad K1, which wereviewed earlier, the ThinkPad tablet is targeted at enterprise. The FCC filing includes a line drawing of the ThinkPad’s backside, but reveals nothing about the tablet that we don’t already know. We’ve seen plenty of leaked press shots previously that show both the front and back sides of the tablet in great detail. Plus, we’ve also gotten our hands-on videos demonstrating the tablets unique interface. The ThinkPad tablet will be sporting an NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, dual cameras, and plenty of ports including micro-USB and HDMI. An optional digitizer pen for the capacitive touchscreen will also be available, but at an additional cost. The tablet is priced from $499 for the 16GB model and from $529 for the 16GB model plus the stylus.

It’s time for Virgin Mobile’s “Sparah” to take on T-Mobile and AT&T in an advertisement that not only paints the stark white backgrounds of T-Mobile, AT&T, Apple, and etcetera commercials black, they take T-Mobile and AT&T’s characters down with them. Sparah is the name of Virgin Mobile USA’s summer 2011 marketing campaign, one in which two supposed complete strangers have been lifted from obscurity to be manufactured into a celebrity couple to promote Virgin Mobile – Spencer Falls and Sarah Carroll. Apparently they’re very popular and everyone in the celebrity world hates them or loves them or some combination of the two – now they’re coming down on T-Mobile and AT&T with some sweet video action. What you’re about to see is something so breathtakingly hilarious that you’d better sit down before you watch it. Virgin Mobile uses this advertisement to promote their unlimited web, data, messaging, and email plan at $35 a month, daring T-Mobile (and whoever else wants to jo

The Apple TV was just recently updated with support for Vimeo and TV show streaming, suggesting that Apple still has many plans for this supposed “hobby” of a product. With the upcoming iOS 5 and the iCloud, it’s likely that Apple TV may tap into these for more functionality later this fall. But for those less patient, you can hack your Apple TV for now to access HTML 5 apps and games. A hacker installed the Couch Surfer browser on a jailbroken Apple TV and was able to demonstrate an HTML5-based game, Casino BlackJack. Now, the game is fairly bare bones and although it may not be the most impressive of feats, it does remind us of Apple TV’s potential beyond movies and TV shows. It’s rumored that Apple may be bringing iOS to Apple TV, which is not surprising considering that rival Google has already announced Android 3.1 Honeycomb to power its next-gen Google TVs. This will provide a unified ecosystem that will allow access to Android Market apps, make it easier to develop for both plat

While this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of such a device, this is the most detail we’ve had in photos. What we’ve got here is a dual-screen slider smartphone device made by LG, utilizing some form of Android, and carried by T-Mobile. This device will most than likely use its lower smaller touchscreen to hold a drawer of apps along with whatever else developers find themselves developing into the platform. According to a leaked T-Mobile roadmap discovered back in May, this device will be released on the pink carrier by September 14th, 2011. Certainly what we’re looking at here is some competition for the ancient T-Mobile Sidekick, a T-Mobile favorite, or it’s much more recent Android version the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G. In both of those devices it’s the screen which flips up rather than sliding up as we’re seeing in the LG Flip II. There’s been only one other Android device on the market thus far that’s carried a dual-screen orientation, that being the Kyocera Echo. What the Flip II se

Spotify launched in the US less than a month ago and it’s already proving that it could be just as popular stateside as it’s been in Europe. Two weeks after launch, the music streaming service was rumored to have hit 70,000 paying subscribers. Well, new numbers are leaked now that reveal the service is still growing rapidly. According to the latest figures leaked, Spotify has signed up 1.4 million users total in the U.S. That may be impressive, but what’s more amazing is that the company has also more than doubled their paid subscriber base within the last two weeks. The majority of these paying customers are subscribed to the $10 per month plan that allows for ad-free streaming as well as the ability to stream to both iPhones and Android handsets. The latest count reveals that Spotify currently has 175,000 paying customers in the US. This is a huge difference from rivals such as MOG and Rdio, which have each yet to reach 100,000 users after a year. Longstanding Rhapsody took several y

The mobile world has been waiting for a device which combines a dual-core processor with the speed of Verizon’s 4G LTE network since CES this past January. It was at this Consumer Electronics Show that the DROID Bionic was originally revealed, a device which combined an unnamed dual-core processor with the ability to run at what Verizon was then noting was up to 10 times faster than 3G with their 4G LTE network. What we’ve got now is a mobile environment where LTE has been worked into three Android smartphones, dual-core processors are in more than five smartphones, but there’s still no combination of the two – by the looks of the photos in this post, that’s about to change very soon. This same device was seen on the 5th of this month as well in two photos, one showing the front of the device with a battery charging symbol, perhaps pointing to the idea that it needs more than your average charge during a normal day, and another showing the device’s display sitting next to the DROID Cha

When an iOS app for the fledgling social network Google+ was introduced last month, it quickly shot up to become the top free app on iTunes. And it’s interesting to note that the app wasn’t even available to iPads and iPod touch devices. A new update this morning fixes that and adds some other improvements. The Google+ app for iOS now supports the iPad and iPod touch, whereas previously it could only be installed on the iPhone. However, it is not optimized for the iPad interface yet and simply uses a double resolution version that’s bound to look more pixelated. With the update, the Google+ group chat offering called Huddle now gets some new settings, including the option to hide a huddle or to mute one. You can also reject huddles instead of just blocking the requesting person entirely. Additionally, notifications will now be grouped based on type so that each circle add, +1, or comment will get aggregated into its own group instead of appearing separately.

Skype released their iPad app just last week and their previous update for Mac came just a month ago that brought group video screen sharing and multitasking functionality. Now, they’ve just released version 5.3 for Mac that will be adding HD video calling as well as support for new Lion features. Now that the 2011 iMac and MacBook Pro’s come with a FaceTime HD camera, it makes sense that Skype should take advantage of this and offer the option for HD video calling. The new feature also works with a variety of add-on high-resolution webcams. But to receive clear HD video calls its recommended to have a connection speed of at least 1.5Mbps. The update also adds full support for Mac OS X Lion while promising backwards compatibility with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Other improvements include new contact sorting, searching, and viewing options.

So you’re in the mood for some hip-hop endorsed audio in the form of over the ear headphones but you’re not into the whole Beats by Dre fad, yes? Perhaps you’d like a slightly more GOLD solution? It’s time for Ludacris to come out from the shadows and plop some SOUL headphones on your head. The Over-Ear SL300 headphones by the name of SOUL by Ludacris are shipping now, retailers including the likes of RadioShack, Amazon.com, Best Buy, and Microsoft (the store you’ll find directly across the aisle from the Apple store in the Mall of America, of course.) Apple stores will be carrying them as well. This isn’t the first time we’ve come in contact with the Ludacris in audio situation, the first time being WAY back in 2009 when Chris Davies interviewed the rapper / producer / actor as he sat beside Monster’s Noel Lee. At the time they’d been speaking about “possible” projects. Now we’re talking about Ludacris matching up with Soul Electronics, completely separate group, to create these lovel

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, this being the real official FBI, have launched a totally legit FBI Child ID app in the iOS App Store. What this Child ID app does is allow parents to electronically store photos and “critical information” about their children for later use should their child turn up missing. In addition to being able to store info and images of your child, Child ID has an archive of information on how to keep your child safe and what your courses of action should be if they do indeed go missing. Our first question, us being part of a rather paranoid generation, is in regards to how secure this app really is, and how we’ll be able to know if this information really is being kept only by the FBI OR if it’ll be all too simple for predators to get the information we’ve shared. The FBI lets us know that “a child turns up missing in the United States every 40 seconds,” and that “many never return home” but as the majority of the 45 reviews done for the app

So you sit at your desk all day, do you? Sounds familiar to me – in fact more often than not I find myself sitting in several places looking for the best “desk” to meet my ever-changing daily needs; for example right after a meal or early in the morning are completely different levels of leaning back or sitting up. The folks at Herman Miller have heard the cries of you and I, ladies and gentlemen of the tech-using community, bringing forth the “Envelop Desk” that has the ability to move back and forth with the user, leaning down and towards the user when they need it most. While the desk may not look like anything extremely spectacular on it’s own (it being the modern minimalistic masterpiece that it is,) it’s the pulling back and down of the black piece of the desk that makes the most magic. You’ll see what’s going on in the video below, as Herman Miller specialists see a young lady working at her desk in the normal fashion, taking away the elements that aren’t working for her, replac

Down in Florida today, a group by the name of Operating Systems Solutions, LCC, has found it necessary to file a patent infringement lawsuit against no less than Apple. Their suit includes finding Apple’s OS X operating system using a fast boot operation which seems to infringe on a patent originally owned by LG Electronics. The original owner, LG Electronics, seems to have filed for patent back in 1999, another granted patent being assigned again in 2002 to LG Electronics Inc, but that in its reissued granted patent form is assigned to Protimus Technologies LLC in 2008 – it is this patent that’s being quoted in the court’s document – will Apple be forced to defend connections to said original LG filing? We shall see! The first Count of this new lawsuit reads as follows: “Apple sells or offers to sell within this district, computer systems, including but not limited to the MacBook Pro, that utilize the Mac OSX operating system that infringes at least claim 1 of the OSS [Operating Syste