king talk

Controlling applications by your eyes is not a completely new technology. The known optical methods like you know it from Tobii are not user friendly enough, because the gadget always needs to be calibrated first and varying ambience conditions make it hard to track the eyes. NTT DoCoMo reveiled their latest development at the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona. Particulary this could be a good invention for small gadgets which lack of space for controls. It seems to react very directly. Maybe the next future way of interacting with tiny devices?

Tomorrow the envis team will be hanging around at Schwäbisch Gmünd to have a look at the latest work from the students. We expect some innovative concepts at the media lab like the last years project from Jonas Heuer and Jürgen Gräf. Notput is an interactive music table with tangible notes, that combines all three senses of hearing, sight and touch to make learning the classical notation of music for children and pupils more easy and interesting.

All basic clefs, note values and accidentals exist as single wood elements. Whole, half, quarter and eighth notes differ not only in their form, but also in their weight: Long note values are heavier than short ones. The idea is pretty simple and the experimental approach is enjoyable and informative at the same time.

Why don´t we use tools like that at school?

Does anyone know about the litl? It´s a so called »Webbook«, a tiny computer without anything, just made for browsing the web and reading RSS-Feeds. This gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. The hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by this Boston-based startup, rejects three decades of convention. But what can you do with it? Just browsing the internet seems to be nice, but the developers should asked theirselfs: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? (John Thackara)

If you want to buy a litl, you a get a small computer which is radically downsized for about 700 bucks (!!!). It has a 12″ display, an Atom Processor with 1,6 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 2 GB Flash Memory, 1x USB and a 802.11g Wifi chip, that´s it. It even hasn´t enough space for a operating system so they offer you »litl OS« which has two modes. A simple grid view and a 3D view based on the z-axis which reminds me of Apple Time Machine.

In my opinion these product has three main failures. First of all it´s a tool which can only do one thing, browsing the internet and receiving atom feeds. This is a nice idea, but chumby is already doing stuff like that. You can get this small device which is able to play wifi radio, play games and use one of 1500 additional applications for about 100 dollar. And chumby offers you a touch sensitive display,…

which brings me to the next failure. It is the way the user is interacting with the product. You can chosse between a reduced QWERTY keyboard, a touch pad and a remote… Why? What´s about touch? What´s about motion tracking? A radical product like these is screeming for new ways of interaction. The litl offers you a very light weight computer with a small display. A touch interface would be a more direct way of navigating and browsing the content especially in 3D mode. Last but not least…

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Something about four weeks agou envis jumped on the bandwagon of rumours about a new iPhone that will be released in the next months. Tonight Apple announced at their WWDC´09 event some new products like the new OS »Snow Leopard« which will hit the market in autumn one month before Windows 7. It will available later this year as a $29 upgrade to current Mac users. Apple also announced that the next version of the iPhone OS software (version 3.0) would be available in less than two weeks. In addition, Apple unveiled refreshed versions of its notebooks, which are headed to store shelves starting today.

But the most interesting part was the release of the new iPhone 3G S (S stands for SPEED). Let´s compare the rumours to the real product:

- 32GB and 16GB to replace current capacities & $199 and $299 price-points to be maintained within a 2-year contract
Right. The 16GB model will be $199 with a new contract and the 32GB model will be $299 with a new contract. They will be available June 19th 2009.

- 3.2 Megapixel camera
Not exactly. But it will have 3.0 Megapixel.

- Video recording & editing capabilities
Right, new iPhone will have a camcorder mode. You can shoot VGA-quality video in 30 frames per second.

- Ability to send a picture & video via MMS
New iPhone is featuring SMS and MMS.

- Apple logo on the back to light up
- Rubber-tread backing
- Sleeker design
- Discontinuation of the metal band surrounding the edge of the device
Design didn´t change. In my opinion the chrome surrounding could disappear.

- OLED screen (AMOLED)
I think it´s not the time for OLED devices, but in within 9 years we will see them everywhere.

- 1.5X The battery life
Right. They improved battery life. Apple promises that the iPhone 3GS can hold up to 9 hours in WiFi, 10 hours on video playback, 30 hours on audio playback, 12 hours talk time on 2G networks and 5 hours talk time on 3G networks.

- Double the RAM and processing power
Right. Apple boasts that you can load web pages and launch apps twice as fast when compared to the previous model. It also promises improved 3D graphics for games.

- Built-in FM transmitter
Still no radio, but who needs it, if you can have Wifi access to last.fm & myspace.com ; )

- Built-in compass & turn by turn directions
Right. It automatically reorients the map to the direction you’re facing. It works in conjunction with Maps to give you street view as well.

- Revolutionary combination of the camera, GPS, compass and Google maps to identify photo and inform about photo locations.

- July 17th, 2009 release date
A little bit earlier. The end of June 2009 will be release date. Maybe the shortened it because of the Palm Pre which came out this month.

Some features were not discussed, but they´re hot. For example the return of voice control for cellular phones:

- Voice control interface,…
but not just for calls. Not only can you manage phone calls with your voice, you can use your voice to play music. You can ask the phone what song is playing, ask it to play a particular song from an artist or an album, and even to play songs that are similar to the currently playing track.

- Bluetooth tethering…
is allowed, which means you can use the iPhone 3GS as a wireless modem with your laptop.

- Voiceover,…
an accessibility setting on the new iPhone 3GS that acts as a gesture-based screen reader.

- Compatibility with Nike+ iPod,…
where it detects the Nike+ sensor in your shoe to track your runs.

Many of the improvements were exactly what were rumored to be unveiled today. The one big exception was that CEO Steve Jobs did not come back from medical leave early to make the announcement.

via C.NET News & CBC.CA & washingtonpost.com

While we were searching for a current, refurbished, low cost iPod Touch for developing multi-touch applications we heard a lot of rumours about the new iPhone going through the blogosphere the last days. One of the main reasons was the latest article from iPhoneApps.com. Due to the news they had to suffer from an extraordinary amount of traffic that has overwhelmed their servers. They´ve had to redirect some traffic to a separate server to avoid a longer downtime. They juste reported about some of the new technical features according to insider information. Here are the rumored specifics:

- 32GB and 16GB to replace current capacities
- $199 and $299 price-points to be maintained within a 2-year contract
- 3.2 Megapixel camera
- Video recording & editing capabilities
- Ability to send a picture & video via MMS
- Discontinuation of the metal band surrounding the edge of the device
- OLED screen (AMOLED)
- 1.5X The battery life
- Double the RAM and processing power
- Built-in FM transmitter
- Apple logo on the back to light up
- Rubber-tread backing
- Sleeker design
- Built-in compass
- Revolutionary combination of the camera, GPS, compass
and Google maps to identify photo and inform about photo locations.
- Turn by turn directions
- July 17th, 2009 release date

We will see which features will pop out and we will compare the new iPhone to these speculations. A tutorial for getting started with the iPhone Development can be found at WebDeveloperDepot.

via iPhoneApps.com & MacRumours.com