IBLOG SPACE

It’s time to get serious about the next big camera release from Canon, the 5D Mark III, also known with an X in the name to assure you its hardcore. This camera was spotted in the plains a few weeks ago sporting a gigantic lens and no less than a pre-build set of hardware surrounding it. The camera we’re looking at here is set to have official information released on February 28th, 2012 – if the tips are true, that is. This camera is ultra powerful at 22 megapixels, 61pt AF, and having the ability to capture 6.9fps. If these specs remain true, we could be looking at a replacement for the 7D. Shipping for this unit will likely be taking place in late March or early April. This camera does not trump the Nikon 36mp D800, so it seemed important for the man Masaya Maeda of Canon to destroy rumors that Canon was falling beyond recently: “Regarding how Canon responds to the competition from Nikon’s D800 and the concern of the successor of 5D Mark II, Maeda indicates that although he cannot le

Workstations are some of the most powerful computers you can buy… but man, are they boring. With the possible exception of Apple’s Mac Pro, there’s really no workstation-class machine that inspires desire, despite the backbone that they provide for high-end work in industry. HP may have just changed that with the unveiling of their Z1, the company’s first all-in-one workstation. HP showed off the new hardware at their workstation event in Las Vegas. Getting a high-performance machine into the size of a large consumer all-in-one is impressive in and of itself, but the really amazing thing about the Z1 line is that it retains the same level of access to the internals as a full-sized machine. The display slides down to a 180-degree view, at which point the top panel with the LCD pops up. From there you’ve got access to all the major components: storage, processor, memory, graphics cards, etc. and it all uses HP’s tool-less swapping system. All the components are full desktop parts, not la

It’s that time again, folks, time to take your love of destroying your auto-bound enemy to a whole new level of bright flashes of explosions and pain with Twisted Metal. In a 2012 release with the same name as the original murder-tastic car battle, this Twisted Metal is being sent out to the PlayStation 3 exclusively (at first, at least,) and will be available in all your favorite gaming stores right this minute (if you’re lucky) for $60 USD. Be sure you’re 17 years and older though, as this one’s going to get messy. This version of the game is made to work in your home for multiplayer, sure, but where it really explodes is its online play where you’ll get to rock out one of your four teams that correlate with one of the classic characters from the series: Sweet Tooth (The Clowns), Dollface (The Dolls), Mr. Grimm (The Skulls) and the Preacher (The Holy Men). Not only are you encouraged to play epic battles on the PlayStation Network, you’ve got several modes of play including the brand

At first glance, Porsche Design and BlackBerry might not make obvious bed-fellows. Still, the car firm’s aesthetically-obsessed arm has taken up with Canada’s finest, and the Porsche Design P’9981 is the result: maple syrup by way of Stuttgart. The less forgiving might draw comparisons between Porsche’s legendary reluctance to diverge from its original 1963 car design, and BlackBerry’s struggle to break free of its old OS. The frugal will likely be too busy gaping at the $2,350 price tag. So, Porsche or Pinto? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut. Hardware Porsche Design starts as it means to go on, with an oversized box first presenting the P’9981 and its desk-stand in one dense foam layer, before revealing different chargers for near-global use, USB cable and headphones, various documentation and your exclusive technical support card, complete with PIN, to access freephone assistance. It’s not quite Vertu’s Concierge, mind; the team will help you set up your P’9981 and f

t As one of the relatively few companies across the earth to receive Kinect for Windows & SDK before the official announcement, you know good and well that Microsoft has some faith in the group known as ETRONIKA. And what they’ve produced here is something that was bound to happen one way or another: Kinect-based online banking. Their solution includes analyzing user’s face, voice, and gestures to help them through the process of banking online. Will such a solution sweep the nation, or will we still be too afraid to trust the computer to know our wrinkles and nose shape? As you’ll see in the video below, the folks at ETRONIKA presented their most updated version of their software and hardware combination at the event known as Finovate Europe 2012. This event took place in London and showed the world what it meant to have their application mirror human identification by using the users face and voice, having them speak to the Kinect and look into the camera. This application and en

Google may have won European Commission and US Department of Justice approval for its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, but the search giant still faces close scrutiny by both regulators over concerns around how it may use its upcoming patent haul to strategically penalize rivals. While the deal itself appears to have passed muster, it’s Google’s attitude toward patent licensing – specifically those deemed essential to standards – that have raised issues. In comparison to Apple and Microsoft, “Google’s commitments were more ambiguous and do not provide the same direct confirmation of its SEP [standard essential patent] licensing policies” the DOJ antitrust division said in a statement. The EC’s concerns are more general, having been satisfied that it was not in Google’s best interest to limit Android to solely Motorola. “Upon careful examination, this transaction does not itself raise competition issues” competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement. ”Of course, the Co

Lensbaby has outed its latest unusual optic, the Lensbaby Edge 80, an 80mm focal length model that offers a “selective slice of sharp focus” in your frame. Mounting on the Lensbaby Composer Pro, Composer, Muse, Scout and Control Freak lens bodies, the $300 Edge 80 has a 12-blade internal aperture that can be adjusted from f/2.8 through f/22: it can either be used face-on for a flat field of focus, or angled to slice the focus through the picture at any angle. Five multi-coated glass elements, in four groups, are sandwiched inside, with a dial on the front used to adjust the aperture. Lensbaby is positioning the new model for portrait photographers as well as those wanting tilt-shift style shots; there’s a simulator here which can mimic the sort of effects it’s capable of. Close ups of 17-inches are supported, and because the Edge 80 mounts on Lensbaby’s existing lens bodies it’s overall a cheaper way of outfitting your camera bag with kit; assuming, of course, that you want more than o

Sony has pumped $50m into its US launch campaign for the PS Vita, targeting hardcore gamers and internet addicts who “Never Stop Playing” as the company attempts to challenge the rise of smartphone gameplay. The promo spend is ”the largest platform launch in terms of marketing investment we’ve ever had” senior director for PlayStation handhelds John Koller told the NYTimes, with some of the cash going on getting the PS Vita into gamers’ hands for a test play. Other elements of the campaign include sponsored Twitter messages, online and real-world adverts and radio ads on the Howard Stern show, along with a commercial filmed in Buenos Aires. One theme Sony is particularly keen to push is the relatively seamless integration of gameplay between the PS Vita and the PS3, with the advert storyline showing how one gamer picks up the same title on the portable that he began playing on the home console. The challenge, though, will be avoiding the same fate that befell the Vita in Japan. Despite

HP’s open-sourcing of webOS continues today, with the release of the underlying Isis web browser along with a governance model and more of the Enyo components developers will need to create their own webOS devices and apps. Enyo has already been downloaded 40,000 times in the three weeks since its release, the team says, and now there’s the Isis Project, “a fast, standards-compliant web browser engine,” to go along with it. “Isis Browser is a core application of HP’s webOS platform written using the Enyo framework. As of today, it is a work in progress aiming to incorporate the latest open source technologies, such as QtWebKit and JavaScriptCore, into the webOS platform. The source code of the Isis Browser stack, QtWebKit, and Qt 4.8 is available on GitHub where we will continue our development” Isis Project Isis is based on the QtWebKit engine, itself released into open-source by Nokia, and the webOS teams have apparently been working some time to bring the platform over to it. The pr

Having to dump your bottled liquids as you go through airport security has become a frustrating addition to flying headaches in recent years, but the awesome power of lasers could soon ensure your flask contains Evian not napalm. Cobalt Light Systems has cooked up the INSIGHT100, a laser scanning system that can differentiate dangerous substances from safe ones while they’re still in their container, opening the aircraft doors to water bottles, perfume and toothpaste. Lurking on the counter like an oversized microwave, the INSIGHT100 can identify liquids, powders and gels inside sealed containers such as glass or plastic bottles or tubs, even if those containers are opaque. The system is said to have a false alarm rate of 1.5-percent or less, and each scan takes under five seconds. The magic is in something called Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy (SORS), bouncing certain spectra of light off a substance depending on the molecules that substance is made up of. As each substance scatt

Reignited rumors of a second, smaller Apple iPad have flourished, with signs pointing to not one but two new models in 2012 as the Cupertino company branches out into a twin-tablet strategy. Despite Steve Jobs’protestations to the contrary, back in 2010, insiders claim Apple has long maintained plans for a “tweener” tablet of its own; in fact, while twin-tier pricing for Apple’s iPad has already been tipped for this year, with talk that the company might keep the current iPad 2 on as a budget model alongside March’s new iPad 2S/3, it seems Apple’s supply-chain may finally be up to the challenge of slotting in a new model. Even if Apple branches out into a second slate, it’s unlikely to subsequently follow Samsung’s path of a different tablet for every individual buyer. Part of Apple’s constraint is app resolution, or more accurately maintaining compatibility across multiple screen resolutions. Right now that means the initial iPhone (320 x 480), the Retina Display introduced by the iPh

HTC could be the first company outside Sony to offer PlayStation-certified mobile devices, according to the latest leaks, bringing titles previously limited to handsets like the XPERIA Play to future HTC phones and tablets. The deal could be announced as early as Mobile World Congress later this month, insiders tell Pocket-lint, with full certification in the second half of the year. Sony confirmed it was in negotiations with other firms for PlayStation gaming in late 2011. Sony’s Kaz Hirai – at the time chief of the company’s Computer Entertainment division, and since made overall CEO – said that the PlayStation Suite platform “isn’t an ecosystem where we want to keep everything within the Sony family.” Instead, it’s intended to be Sony’s first “cross-platform endeavor” he explained. The PlayStation Suite has, so far, been limited to Sony and Sony Ericsson hardware. As well as the gaming smartphone, certification has been extended to Sony’s Tablet P and Tablet S hardware, giving the s

Google‘s $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility may have been given the regulatory go-ahead on both sides of the Atlantic, but the prospect for other Android OEMs – and users – is still unclear. The deal, in question for several months over concerns that hardware and software control around Android might give Google an unfair advantage, is likely to send Motorola’s rivals like Samsung, HTC and LG scurrying to the drawing board as they face the challenge of competing with the dominant force behind their primary platform. Still, as Andy Rubin said last August, Motorola isn’t necessarily a lock-in for the next Nexus device. Attempting to pacify critics of the impending deal, Android-chief Rubin pointed out that Google intends to operate Motorola as a separate company. When it comes to partnering on future Nexus devices, he maintained, Motorola “will be part of that bidding process” but not guaranteed to win. Still, Rubin’s comments belie Google’s obvious interest in Motorola’s upcoming

I’m still more than a little sad that NASA retired the space shuttle fleet. The space shuttles were a source of endless wonder for millions of space geeks around the world for decades. One of the coolest things that NASA had to do with the space shuttle was to ferry the spacecraft from the landing site back to the launch site attached to the back of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet. NASA had two of the specially modified 747s in its fleet, and one of the jets is called NASA 911. NASA 911 took its final voyage this week on a short flight from NASA’s Dryden flight research Center to Dryden’s Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, California. The final flight lasted only 20 minutes. With the space shuttle retired and the program over, NASA only needs one of the special Boeing aircraft used to transport the space shuttle fleet.

A couple of new important details on the Acer Iconia Tab A510 have surfaced. A few details on this tablet turned up in November but the price, and the launch date have apparently changed. The A510 will have 10.1-inch display and run Android 4.0. The processor will be the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core and the tablet is tipped to have better power management than its predecessor the A200. The improved power management means that the 9800mAh battery is good for close to 18 hours per charge with use. The tablet has dual stereo speakers, 32 GB of storage space, a microSD port, and a five-megapixel camera. The tablet also has a SIM card slot allowing for 3G connectivity along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The new information we have is that the Wi-Fi only version will land in France and possibly the rest of Europe starting next month for €399. The tablet will come in black or silver and there’ll be a bunch of accessories available. That price is much more bearable than the original €499 that had been

I remember a long time ago when the OLED display first came to market. One of the intriguing things about the display technology was that the companies making them were saying in the future they could be printed using an inkjet printer on a roll-to-roll machine. That would certainly make the production of OLED screens faster and cheaper, making devices using the high-quality displays less expensive. Konica Minolta has taken the first step towards that roll-to-roll printing of OLED screens by unveiling the world’s first inkjet printhead capable of printing the displays. The printhead is called the KM128SNG-MB, and it is a high-precision inkjet printhead for printed electronics and OLED displays. The drop size the printhead produces is one picoliter. Konica Minolta uses silicon MEMS technology to manufacture the printhead. That same technology is we used in semiconductor processing and allows the development of a small printhead measuring 38mm wide with 128 nozzles a row capable of eject

A while back, I mentioned that Angry Birds was headed to Facebook. I think Angry Birds is a pretty cool game, but the thought of all the requests from other people on Facebook to play the game or help them wasn’t particularly appealing to me. Angry Birds officially went live with Facebook yesterday; it was supposed to debut officially today. Angry Birds has certainly become a phenomenon, and the game has been available on the desktop and just about every mobile device out there for a while. However, this marks the first time it has landed on a social network, and the Facebook version has some special features. The special features are power ups that can be used to help defeat difficult levels, in other words, you can cheat if you’re willing to pay. There are four different power ups that can be accessed using a lightning bolt on the top of the Angry Birds screen. These power ups will cost real money to use, granted it’s very cheap. The power ups cost you one dollar for 20 uses. The Fac

A Chinese company called Proview is really holding Apple over a barrel in China. Apple purchased the iPad trademark from Proview years ago when it started marketing its tablet. Apple claims to have the rights to use the iPad name inside China, however, Proview says the original deal did not include its home territory. This has led to a fight that so far Apple is losing inside China. Chinese authorities have seized the school had stock in retail stores around the country already. Proview is now asking Chinese customs to stop the import and export of the Apple iPad. China is a huge market for Apple and one the technology giant isn’t going to walk away from. Apple spokeswoman Carolyn Wu has said that Apple has the right to use the trademark name in China as part of the original deal. She also notes that Apple’s legal case against Proview is pending in mainland China. The big kicker in this case, is the call from Proview to halt exports. If Proview wins the export blockage it would mean iP

All the high-end space projects and space travel that go on at NASA require some serious computing power. For a lot of years NASA has operated IBM Z9 mainframe computers. NASA describes the Z9 mainframe as reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful. These machines were used mostly for transaction oriented needs that required lots of input and output such as reading and writing data from storage devices. These old school mainframe computers roughly the size of a refrigerator have been replaced by smaller and cheaper Linux and UNIX systems that are also faster and easier to manage. These mainframe computers certainly served an important role in NASA’s early space exploration programs. NASA is calling the retirement of its last Z9 the end of an era. NASA doesn’t mention what it will do with all the retired computer hardware. I would imagine the last Z9 would end up being sold off in some government auction. Apparently, the mainframe had been kept operating at NASA to support applica

iPhone manufacturer Pegatron has denied any knowledge of upcoming Fair Labor Association audits, despite Apple saying that all of its suppliers had “pledged full cooperation” with the plans announced yesterday. Pegatron is aware of Apple’s social responsibility policies, CFO Charles Lin told Bloomberg, but has not been informed of any upcoming inspections, which Apple and the FLA say will begin in the spring. Long-time Apple supplier Foxconn is up first for FLA inspection, not least because the company has seen several worker suicides over the past 18-24 months and come in for criticism over production line conditions. Apple said that Quanta and Pegatron would be next in line, with their investigations coming sometime in the spring. It’s possible that Apple’s comments that all of the suppliers “pledged full cooperation with the FLA, offering unrestricted access to their operations” relate to the company’s general contractual conditions, rather than any specific notification of the new

Photo tech firm Scalado has revealed its latest smartphone camera app, Remove, capable of automatically identifying and removing objects in-frame, and perfect for deleting an unwanted uncle from your family gathering. Remove, billed as the world’s first optical removal software for smartphones, builds a composite shot from multiple frames captured in swift succession, picking out possible flaws – such as passing cars or people – and letting you delete them with a tap of the screen. In fact, Remove can be set to automatically delete any problems it identifies, though you can switch over to manual mode if you decide you’d like to keep something in-frame instead. Obviously the problems themselves have to be moving, since Scalado is cutting out transient objects based on a stationary background. Scalado Remove demo: s Remove uses similar technology to Scalado’s previous photography app, Rewind. That used composite images to piece together the best group portrait shot, with facial recogniti

Huawei is set to rollout new products a Mobile World Congress when the show kicks off. Some of the new products debuting will be in the company’s new Diamond line of devices. All the products are expected to run Android 4.0. The new products will include a 10-inch MediaPad tablet, which is a follow-up to the original 7-inch tablet, and the company will also unveil the Ascend D1 Q. The D1 Q will be a quad core device, hence that Q designator in its name. It is expected to be the first Diamond smartphone, and we don’t really know anything about the hardware at this point. We’re hoping the new MediaPad has better software than its 7-inch sibling we are familiar with. The hardware was never an issue with that tablet; it was the software that bothered us. We don’t have hardware details on the 10-inch MediaPad right now. There is no indication that it will be a Diamond series device. Scuttlebutt says that there will be a pair of Diamond devices unveiled at MWC, so we are expecting at least o

Apple is testing smaller iPad models in a potential split of its tablet strategy that would see the existing 9.7-inch slate joined by a potentially 8-inch model, according to new leaks. The long-standing talk of a more bag-friendly Apple tablet has been reawakened by the WSJ, sources of which claim Apple is working with component suppliers to qualify possible displays, with both AUO and LG Display again cited as involved in the experiments. The smaller iPad will have a screen resolution the same – or “similar” – to the existing iPad 2, or 1024 x 768, one source indicated. That would suggest Apple was sticking with the 4:3 aspect ratio, sensible given iPad apps are currently designed for that. Similar rumors – citing the same suppliers – broke last October, with a 7.85-inch screen size tipped. However, while the supplier insiders say Apple has been showing potential designs for the new tablet around suppliers, it’s also pointed out that such product flirtation isn’t unusual: and, it oft

We’re still not sure whether or not the next version of Apple’s iPhone will be the one to plunge into LTE territory (signs are pointing to yes), but it has been confirmed through the Wall Street Journal that the iPad 3 will in fact be able to run on Verizon’s and AT&T’s blazing fast 4G data networks. This news comes in the same breath as the announcement of Apple’s official unveiling of the new device. According to the report, Sprint’s burgeoning LTE infrastructure will not be supported in the LTE model of the next-gen Apple tablet. Nevertheless, bringing it up to speed on Verizon and AT&T will make the iPad 3 even more attractive, and will lessen the impact of LTE-powered Android tablets in their attempt to differentiate themselves from the industry-dominant iPad brand. The prospect of an LTE-equipped iPad has been the subject of iPad 3 rumors previously, but as we now have an official date for the tablet’s unveiling and the time continues to clock down, details are sliding in

In the increasingly common world of startup acquisitions, Nintendo is usually not a major player. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc are usually the ones making news for snatching up a specialized technology company to better integrate its services into future software and products. This is because Nintendo is usually not on the front lines of emerging tech, but this time it’s a different story as the Mario company has just acquired a company called Mobiclip. Prior to the acquisition, the company focused on video and compression technologies that allowed video, including live content, to be streamed to mobile devices. Nintendo had an existing partnership with Mobiclip to help with video rendering and playback in some of its handheld games on the GBA and Nintendo DS. After the acquisition, Mobiclip posted a job opening for a “console software engineer” on its website. The company will reportedly bring its video technologies to the Wii U, Nintendo’s impending console successor to the Wii.

If you were to compare the marketing campaigns of each carrier, you’d have T-Mobile stressing its cost-effective plans and affordable smartphones, you’d have Sprint boasting about its exclusive offering of unlimited data, and you’d have AT&T still peddling the iPhone and other cool, innovative handsets. But what about Verizon? Can’t think of anything specific off the top of your head? Apparently neither could the writers over at Saturday Night Live, so they decided to do a sketch about it. The late-night sketch showed an exaggerated version of Verizon’s “kitech sink” approach, which is to throw a whole lot of jargon about 4G and LTE, while inundating viewers with a wide selection of phones without trying to focus on a single one. Back when Verizon’s marketing campaign was essentially all about the Droid, it managed to make that device the most popular Android phone in the market. Today, though, what is the equivalent of the ubiquitous Droid? There isn’t one, as the skit shows. Twit

New pictures of what is reported to be Research in Motion’s next-generationg Blackberry operating system have surfaced, and they show a platform that looks like a mix of Windows Phone’s large home-screen widgets and Android’s app selection menu. In other words, it’s a Blackberry OS that actually belongs in the 21st century, but the question is whether or not it’s too little too late. The story of Blackberry in the last few years is perhaps the most extreme example of how the mobile market has changed since the introduction of Android and the iPhone. Once considered a behemoth in the smartphone industry, Blackberry is now looked at as ancient and irrelevant. The problem is the company simply did not adapt to the changing environment. It thought it was too big to fail, and even when it started losing chunks of consumers to the Apple and Google alternatives, it had a mindset that at least it would always have corporate enterprise users in its back pocket. But that strategy didn’t work out

When it comes to toys, pretty much everything claims to be the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. They have to. That’s how they lure in weak-minded parents who succomb to their child’s every request. But based on the fact that this particular toy is the subject of a YouTube video that reached around 500,000 views in a single day, its manufacturer may actually be onto something. Wow Stuff calls it the “Greatest Toy in the Universe,” but that’s just a working title for now. The toy itself hasn’t actually been named yet but it’s already getting a lot of traction. So what is it? It’s a toy robot that can go into battle with a variety of different weapons. The little robots can shoot ping pong balls, flying discs, or darts. They can also be customized with removable armor. It’s all remote-controlled, and the idea is to have two or more of them duke it out in a Real Steel-esque battle royale. Creator Jaimie Mantzel has become almost as popular as the toy itself. In the teaser video for the robo

Can you feel the love in the air? Valentine’s Day is just mere hours away and for the next 24 hours, couples will be reunited with lavish dinners, treats, gifts…or if you’re like me, a last-minute bundle of flowers bought from the local grocery store. But if you happen to be away from your lover on the manufactured greeting card company holiday, Justin Wilcox has a solution for you. Wilcox is a former Microsoft employee who, during his time at the software giant, developed a hack that would turn an Xbox controller’s vibration function into something more romantic. The hack made the controller vibrate in response to music. He was so proud of the idea that he took it to Microsoft’s patent office, which flatly refused the idea because of its adult purpose. So instead, Wilcox decided to run with the idea himself and modified it for smartphones. Available on the Android Market and iTunes App Store, Closer ToGetHer is an app that allows one user to remotely control the vibration function of

PS3 gamers who have been playing through the latest Elder Scrolls epic, Skyrim, had been complaining of lag issues for months, and Bethesda finally released a patch this this month. Players have been rejoicing that the fix has indeed solved the game-crippling lag problems, but other glitches unfortunately still remain. On the official Bethesda forums, players are now concerned with the game’s framerate. “After all the wait skyrim ps3 is still inferior. The fps is a bit better though but frames still drop in certain areas,” one player wrote. Among the other complaints are that the game still occasionally freezes with no warning, forcing players to restart from their last save point. The lag had been attributed to the fact that as players progressed through the game, their save files grew larger and larger until they became so big that it caused the game to be overwhelmed and unable to process the large data in real time. Neither the Xbox 360 nor the PC version of Skyrim seemed to suffer

The app you’re about to see a very brief review of requires little introduction and only a small explanation as it’s only got a couple of functions, and it does them well. This app is made to do three things: capture video, capture photos, and upload media to Dropbox. This app does this uploading function in a unique manner as we’ve seen no application work with Dropbox in the background as effectively or in as perfectly simple a manner as we’re seeing here – it just works! You’ll download the app, open it up, snap a couple photos, and poof! They’ll be uploaded do your Dropbox. You’ll need a Dropbox account of course, and you’ll need to hook it up to your QuickShot with Dropbox app one single time in a rather simple manner, but that’s it! From there it’s just you approving or disapproving of the media the app collects through your iPhone’s camera. You can take front or back-facing photos or video, you’ve got the ability to use your flash, touch to focus, and that’s it! So really the bi