Hardware posts

Just in case you missed it, here’s a couple of video clips which pretty much underline the kind of amazing things talented people can do with their iPad and the app of their choice. The first video is just one to watch, partially because its backing track isn’t deeply unbearable, and partly because, well, it is pretty cool to watch artist, Kyle Lambert and his video presentation of just how he painted his picture of Beyonce using an iPad and the super-amazing Brushes for iPad app. The video makes it look easy — in fact it took the talented finger-painting Brit a good six hours to make the picture….

He may have written some classic hits, but Prince has no ‘Kiss’ to give in his latest ‘Purple Rain’ of vitriol against ‘teh internets’, which the diminutive pop star says ‘is finished’. Is this a ‘Sign of the Times’, or simply an attempt by the artist to propel sales of his latest album, 20TEN, which isn’t going to be made available in shops, instead it is to be given away in the UK with copies of the Daily Mirror. Speaking to the Mirror, Prince slammed, like, this whole Internet thing, saying it is over, finished, dead, last year’s number. At the risk of being a rock ‘n’ roll…

Better switch back to your old, yellowed PS/2 mouse. A trio of researchers have shown that USB devices represent in and of themselves a potential security risk. Your data will never be safe again! Well, this is true and it isn’t. Would you notice if, say, your keyboard was switched out for another one? Potential data thieves would have a hard time replicating the filth patterns on my keyboard, that’s for sure. But say they did, successfully. John Clark, Sylvian Leblanc and Scott Knight of the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, Canada have discovered that there’s a rather simple exploit…

There’s the possibility that Microsoft’s Courier may be, in fact, not as dead as previously thunk. Microsoft just received a patent for an ‘ornamental design for a dual display device’ – one that, by the looks of it, is the ghost of the Courier. Remember the Courier? It was a concept tablet creating a buzz back when the iPad was still called ‘possible Apple tablet??’ and the world was content with real portable computers that do real computer stuff.  Though never officially announced, it was officially shelved. It was widely believed that Microsoft had every intention of going toe-to-toe with…

The word ‘infinite’ is pretty versatile – infinite wisdom, infinite kung fu, infinite shrimp buffet. It’s a buzz word, and one that can make one stand in awe of whatever it is making a claim of infinity. Infinitec has it in their goddamn company name, so it stands to reason they’re hoping your aforementioned sense of awe will extend to all their products. Enter the Infinite USB Drive, a device whose description sounds too good to be true. The USB drive in my pocket as I write this has 8 gigs, and every time I need to transfer a season of Star Trek it seems it’s always 8.1. Infinite space certainly would be…

News of the day seems to be a series of job postings at Apple – no less than eight – for antenna engineers. Posted on June 23rd, the day before the launch of iPhone IV (or, 4, if you’re not into epic things), the postings raise some suspicion about the alleged signal failure problem, and whether or not Apple might have suspected something was up with the device before it hit the market – or at least after the flood of signal complaints on the afternoon of the 23rd. Whatever the case, Apple isn’t prepared to dick around. Applicants “will be expected to performance radiation performance measurements, create…

Apple has admitted to a widely-reported problem in which millions of iPhone 4 units are likely to lose signal when gripped by the lower left corner, saying there’s nothing unusual about the flaw, illustrated in this video. In an official statement issued late last night after hundreds of customers reported the flaw, which particularly impacts left-handed users, the company issued the following widely-published statement. “Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas….

Adobe has (at last) introduced a version of Flash it swears is suitable for mobile devices, Flash Player 10.1, and in an attempt to prove it isn’t sitting alone whistling its multimedia software’s song, claims HBO, Sony Pictures, Turner, USA Network, Viacom, Warner Brothers and others are already creating Flash Content for MObile. Adobe promises the software — which we all know has been heavily-criticized by Apple CEO Steve Jobs — offers performance and mobile specific features. If you’re on a Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm or Research In Motion smartphone, I’m afraid you’ll…

Oh dip. This is a sultry unit. Toshiba is celebrating its 25th anniversary by dropping a true iPad killer into the fray. Billed as a ‘concept product’, a limited quantity of the Libretto W100 are being released into the wild as a test to see if consumers will dig it. Hell, I, for one, dig it. Just look at this thing. With a 62gig SSD, 2gigs of RAM, dual 7-inch screens at 1024×600, Bluetooth, WiMAX, and, perhaps most importantly, Windows-goddamn-7, the Libretto W100 sounds a lot like the future of mobile computing we were all hoping the iPad was going to be. This is a real computer, running real, grown-up…

It may not be quite as pretty or compact as the iPad, but open source hardware company Liquidware is selling kits for a $400 build-it-yourself tablet utilizing the Texas Instruments single-board computer BeagleBoard. It all snaps together with relative ease, and the end result, while decidedly Frankensteinian, is sure to turn more heads than Johnny iPad down the street. To be fair, though, this isn’t exactly targeted at the average consumer – instead, Liquidware hopes to entice the hacker-tinkerer-developer crowd. Says Liquidware’s Justin Huynh: “With the iPad, you would have a hard…