Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso has arrived in Beijing for a visit expected to focus primarily on the economy. Japan and China, the world’s second and third-biggest economies respectively, are hoping to work together to combat the global downturn. But the visit comes at a sensitive time…
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By Christian Fraser BBC News, Cairo Cairo is now home to some 15 million people – a burgeoning population that produces approximately 10,000 tonnes of rubbish per day, putting an enormous strain on public services. In the past 10 years, the government has tried hard to encourage private investment in the refuse sector, but some estimate 4,000 tonnes of waste is left behind every day, festering in the heat as it waits for someone to clear it up. It is often the people in the poorest neighbourhoods that are worst affected. But in some areas they are fighting back. In Shubra, one of the northern districts of the city, the residents have taken to the streets armed with dustpans and brushes to…
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While avoiding the juicier questions surrounding the mystery of Project Pink and its potential ties to Verizon for maximizing Pink’s launch, a Microsoft spokesperson has issued new comments that reiterate the stance Redmond has held from time immemorial: there’s no Zunephone, and furthermore, there won’t be any Microsoft-branded phones.
Of course, the devil could lie in the precise wording, and the exact quote was as follows: “Microsoft is not going into the phone hardware business. Microsoft is not building a Zune-specific phone.” Just because there’s not a “Zune-specific phone” doesn’t mean you can’t steal some Zune tech for the phone business, and we have every reason to believe that Microsoft would want to be building Zune-esque features into Windows Mobile — you can start to see tiny slivers of that in 6.5 with the home screen design, for example — so we’re still pretty confident that Pink (or another project) will ultimately marry portions of the technology and branding. In other words: Zunephone, no; Zune on Windows Mobile, though? Yeah, sure, why not?
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Portable Audio
Microsoft reiterates what we knew: no first-party handset, no Zunephone originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Odds are you’re going to have the phone to your ear nine times out of ten when this screen’s showing, but it’s still somehow interesting — nay, mesmerizing — so we’re happy to see that a recent build of Palm’s webOS emulator for developers has a polished version of the call screen included. Other goodies in PreThinking’s new gallery include options for adding Google, Facebook, and Exchange calendars, the pop-up battery / WiFi / Bluetooth status display, Google Maps shots, and a bunch of miscellany that only true Pre aficionados could appreciate (you know who you are). Follow the break for another shot — and let’s hope the next time you’re cycling through screens, it’s on a Pre of your very own.
Continue reading New webOS screenshots pop courtesy of SDK’s emulator
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
New webOS screenshots pop courtesy of SDK’s emulator originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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European stocks fell early on Monday as fears of a swine flu pandemic hit airline, bank and commodity shares on worries that travel and trade would be hit. The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index of top shares was down 1.8 percent at 795.88 points following a 2.3 percent rise on…
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LLEIDA, Spain (AP) – Jelena Jankovic helped Serbia to a 4-0 victory over Spain on Sunday that secured its place in the Fed Cup’s World Group for the first time. What’s Hot: Rosen: Rondo not elite PG…yet Recap Day 2 with our NFL Draft Tracker Ellsbury, Red Sox sweep Yankees ‘Dega finish: Edwards slams into fence Bulls down Celts in 2OT, even series Top stories
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Color shifting has been a pipe dream for about as long as alchemists have claimed their studies to be legitimate, but now a brilliant team from the New University of Lisbon can finally say a breakthrough has been found. Essentially, these inventors have conjured up a transistor that changes the color of practically any surface (paper, glass, plastics, ceramics and metals, just to name a few). For what it’s worth, this same team already has quite a bit of display cred, as it has developed technology currently used within Samsung panels. With the help of a few good men and woman at the University of Texas at Austin, the team was able to register for a patent right here in the US, and with any luck, they’ll be giving OLEDs and e-paper a run for their money before we can snap our fingers twice and run around the block. Check a video (narrated in Portuguese) after the break.
[Thanks, Nelson]
Filed under: Displays
Inventors develop transistor to change color of any surface, your face notwithstanding originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ah, holographic storage — you’ve held so much promise for cheap optical media since you were first imagined in research papers published in the early 60s. Later today, GE will be trying to keep the dream alive when it announces a new technique that promises to take holographic storage mainstream. GE’s breakthrough in microholographics — which, as the name implies, uses smaller, less complex holograms to achieve three-dimensional digital storage — paves the way for players that can store about 500GB of data on standard-sized optical discs while still being able to read DVD and Blu-ray media. Better yet, researchers claim a price of about 10 cents per gigabyte compared to the nearly $1 per gigabyte paid when Blu-ray was introduced. The bad news? We’re talking 2011 or 2012 by the time microholographics devices and media are introduced and even then it’ll only be commercialized for use by film studios and medical institutions. In other words, you’ll likely be streaming high-def films to your OLED TV long before you have a microholographic player in the living room.
Filed under: Storage
GE microholographic storage promises cheap 500GB discs, Blu-ray and DVD compatibility originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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