Nokia announces the Lumia 820 and Lumia 920

Posted on September 5, 2012 by melwin23

Nokia Lumia 820 and Lumia 920: Wireless Charging, High Hopes

Nokia is using a similar hardware design to its Lumia 900. It really doesn’t look like any other type of phone on the market. The polycarbonate glossy back, which comes in red, yellow, and gray, has curved edges and the screens are bright. The 920 has a large ClearBlack 4.5-inch screen and the 820 has a 4.3-inch screen. The designs of the phones are beautiful and truly different from all others out there. And both phones have high end specs too — a dual-core processor, new Synaptic touch screens that are ultra-responsive even when you have gloves on, Near Field Communication (NFC), and expandable storage slots.But there’s also some secret sauce inside the hardware that makes the phone stick out. The first has to do with camera technology. Nokia has brought over its PureView camera technology from that crazy 41-megapixel phone to this new line, and while the phones have fairly average 8-megapixel cameras, the secret is in the software

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Google’s Nexus Q takes on Microsoft, Apple in the living room

Posted on June 28, 2012 by melwin23

WRITTEN BY ZDNET
Google’s Nexus Q is expensive and odd-looking, and it doesn’t play well with devices outside of the Android world. It’s a pretty weak competitor to Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Apple TV, or even Sonos. Here’s what’s wrong.

Google’s Nexus Q takes on Microsoft, Apple in the living room

It’s also pricey, at $299 without speakers or cables, and it works only with Android devices.

Put those pieces together and you have to wonder whether Google is deliberately trying to limit the market for this product to diehard Google loyalists.

In the industrial design of its new media player, Google has broken out of the box, quite literally. The Nexus Q is a black orb, 4.6 inches in diameter, with a ring of 32 LEDs that “shift and change color in time to your music,” Google says. I guess that makes it a 21st Century lava lamp.

It also has its own 12.5 watt/channel amplifier and ports to connect to a living-room audio system or an HDTV. (If you want even more details, read the full specs.)

Google’s Nexus Q takes on Microsoft, Apple in the living room

The odd thing about the Nexus Q is that it doesn’t include a remote control. Instead, you must control it with an Android phone or an Android tablet using the Google Play and YouTube apps for Android. Nothing else will work.

The new $199/$249 Nexus 7 tablets will fill that role quite nicely, but when you add in that cost you’re up to at least $500. Add in Google’s $300 Triad Bookshelf speakers and $49 speaker cables with banana plugs, plus sales tax, and your total is over a grand.

But hey, you can watch YouTube videos and stream your music collection on that setup.

These design and pricing decisions are very odd indeed.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 already owns the living room, having sold roughly 70 million units. It has announced and demonstrated its Xbox SmartGlass controller app, which will “work with Windows 8 PCs and tablets, and iPads, iPhones, and Android devices.” At Amazon, the Xbox 360 with Kinect costs 5 bucks less than that odd-looking little Google orb.

Google’s Nexus Q takes on Microsoft, Apple in the living room

Apple TV might still be a “hobby” in Cupertino, but at $99 it’s actually a great deal if you’re an Apple loyalist. You can use any iOS device, including iPhones and iPads, to push content to an Apple TV via AirPlay. Or you can buy music and stream TV shows directly from iTunes. It doesn’t have its own amplifier, like the Nexus Q, but if you already have a decent audio system it’s an easy addition. And you just know that someday, probably soon, Apple is going to deliver a big, big upgrade to Apple TV that will make Google’s offering instantly obsolete.

The Xbox 360 and Apple TV also have other advantages that the Nexus Q can’t match. You can run both boxes using a remote control or an app. They have access to impressively large ecosystems of content and apps (and games, in the case of the Xbox 360). With years of experience, Microsoft and Apple have mastered the supply-chain and manufacturing issues, unlike Google, which is a newcomer to the large-scale hardware business.

Google TV, of course, is the logical competitor to both Microsoft and Apple here, but it appears to have been left behind in favor of the newer, hotter Nexus Q.

In fact, the Nexus Q in its current incarnation looks like more of an answer to Sonos, which offers wireless audio systems that you can control with iPads and iPhones and Android devices and via apps on a PC or a Mac. The Sonos 3, which is the same price as the Nexus Q, includes a more-than-adequate speaker and appeals to all sorts of people who don’t want to be locked into an all-Android environment.

Google’s Nexus Q takes on Microsoft, Apple in the living room

There’s no question that Google has created a pretty device in the Nexus Q. The fact that it’s made in the USA is admirable and justifies at least part of the premium price. But it’s hard to imagine that anyone but Android diehards will find it worth buying.

Ghost Rider – chance to win 499 Bhp turbo Hayabusa

Posted on January 9, 2012 by melwin23

Of all the colorful characters in the motorcycle world, few polarize opinion as strongly as Sweden‘s mysterious “Ghost Rider.” It’s not hard to see why – with five DVDs full of heinous traffic law violations, including 300 km/h (180 mph) wheelies, police baiting and near-suicidal top speed time trials around the Swedish freeway system, he’s probably the most famous flaunter of road rules the world has ever seen. And now, his most famous steed, a 499-horsepower turbocharged, naked Hayabusa, is being given away through a website lottery. Only ridden to church on Sundays, it’s the perfect practical getabout to take down to the shops.

He shot to Internet fame back in 2002 with the release of Ghost Rider: The Final Ride – a DVD video featuring an anonymous rider, clad in black leathers, black helmet and a dark visor, pushing a black GSX-R1000 to top speeds of around 300 km/h on public highways around Uppsala, Sweden. The images of this maniac weaving between traffic and almost magically avoiding lane changing cars and trucks that could never possibly have seen him coming were an instant sensation, for better or worse.

To some, he signified the pinnacle of skill and sheer cojones, an ethereal figure flashing through the grey mass of law-abiding commuters, flipping the bird at traffic police and leading them on high-speed chases until either he tired of the game or the helicopters came out, at which point he’d stop hanging around, hit the gas and vanish.

Of course, to the vast majority of people he was viewed as the worst kind of road menace – the kind with the genuine potential to cause serious harm to others and not just himself. To people looking to demonize the motorcycling community at large, he was a symbol of every reason why these damned deathtraps should be banned from public roads. As a result, the majority of the riding fraternity hate him for the way his actions reflect on bikers in general, while perhaps just being a tiny bit impressed.

But there’s no questioning his skill or bravery – even in the legal world, Furstenhoff holds the official world record for high speed wheelstands, hitting a blistering top speed of 215 mph (346 km/h) on the back wheel. Anyone who’s taken a sportsbike on a racetrack knows how powerful a force air resistance can be as you approach 180 mph (300 km/h) – the idea of raising the front wheel at those speeds is frankly terrifying. The air itself would be like a brick wall – you’d be hanging onto the bars for dear life, let alone trying to deal with that force getting under the bike and trying to flip it over backwards.

There’s also no questioning the credentials of his machinery. The Suzuki Hayabusa was not only the fastest bike ever produced, with early models able to hit 200 mph (320 km/h) before they were reined back in to a governed top speed of 180 mph (300 km/h) in subsequent years – it was also massively over-engineered to make it a tuner’s delight.

With relatively few modifications to strengthen engine internals, you could turbocharge a ‘Busa engine and draw very serious power out of it – and that’s what Ghost Rider did to build his most famous ride – the 499-horsepower, naked Hayabusa turbo in the photos here.

You can see the bike in full flight by searching “Ghost Rider BusaTurbo” on YouTube – we’re a respectable publication, we won’t link to such shenanigans here, but you can see the bike in question, painted flouro yellow, pulling ultra high-speed wheelies down a runway and then doing similar stunts on the highway.

And now he’s giving it away, in a lottery through the official Ghost Rider website. I’ve already put in my entry – I need something practical to commute on. I wonder if I can fit a luggage rack on it?

Via :Gizmag