The Nexus 4 was lost in a bar… Why is this so familiar?

Following in the footsteps of Apple, one of its biggest competitors, a Google employee left a Nexus 4 prototype at a bar in San Francisco. Refusing a free phone, the man who found it decided to leak details of the device to media outlets.

Turns out Apple isn’t the only one who knows how to lose a smartphone in a bar because it looks like someone at Google did the same thing. To refresh your memory, a man named Brian Hogan found an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar left behind by an Apple engineer. Hogan ended up selling it to Gizmodo for $5,000 and consequently ended up in a lot of trouble. This story ends a little differently.

The bar this time around was the 500 Club in San Francisco. It happened on a Tuesday of last month. Jamin Barton, a bartender nicknamed “Sudsy”, found the phone while closing. At first, he didn’t think anything of it.

“We find about 20 a week,” Barton told Wired. ”Most people come back for them in 15 minutes.”

But this particular phone didn’t seem like the others. Nobody came to pick it up and Barton noticed quite a few peculiar features like a lack of SIM card and a “not for sale” sticker accompanying a Google logo on the rear panel. Once he showed it to fellow 500 Club employee, Dave, it was confirmed to be the upcoming Nexus 4.

The Nexus 4 is the smartphone Google was planning to unveil in New York on October 29, but that event has since been cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. And, we might add, every detail about the Nexus 4 has already been leaked, including photos of the device. It will be manufactured by LG and have a 4.7 inch display, a quad-core processor, and ship with Android 4.2. If it was meant to be a secret then Google clearly dropped the ball.

Dave took over from there, offering to call Google HQ and explain what had happened. And much like Apple, Google blew the whole thing out of proportion. Brian Katz, Google’s global investigations and intelligence manager, was sent to the 500 Club almost immediately. Dave assured Google that Barton would hand over the phone as long as whoever picked it up confirmed their affiliation with Google.

Long story short, after some drama involving a riot and the local police station, Dave handed the phone over to Katz. In exchange, Katz offered Barton a free phone if he would agree to keep the incident under wraps and not discuss it with the pubic until after the official announcement. Obviously, Barton refused the offer and was paid a freelance fee by Wired for providing photos published alongside the article. Looks like isn’t the only one that’s lost control of its secrets. 

Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/nexus-4-lost-in-bar/

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Prototype E Ink Android phone puts your AMOLED screen to shame (but only in direct sunlight)

Onyx International, a company known for its range of e-readers, has shown off a prototype Android smartphone with an E Ink display. While the outdoor legibility and battery life are both excellent, the screen does let it down in other areas.

As every owner knows only too well, smartphone screens are difficult to view in direct sunlight, and while pushing the brightness up to maximum can help, it doesn’t do wonders for the battery life.

Here’s an interesting solution to the problem from a company named Onyx International, a smartphone with an E Ink screen. Onyx has plenty of experience in the world of E Ink screens, as it produces the Boox series of e-readers. The handset is only a prototype at the moment, but you can see a working version in the video below, where its screen is compared to a Galaxy Nexus.

The result is spectacular, as the Nexus device just looks like it’s turned off the entire time, while the Onyx phone’s display is crisp and sharp, despite being viewed outdoors. This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has used an e-reader over the past few years, and the superior performance of an E Ink screen in sunlight formed the basis of a recent Amazon Kindle ad campaign.

Surprisingly, the Onyx phone runs Google Android, which has been extensively modified to run on a monochrome screen, but as you can see, the core functionality is still there. Because E Ink screens only take little sips of battery power, the standby time on the prototype is a week. Try that on any other smartphone.

There are, however, one or two little drawbacks. E Ink displays aren’t known for their speed, and sure enough the refresh rate is terribly slow, meaning any multimedia or gaming would be impossible. Viewing text webpages is good though.

While it’s an impressive technical feat and the use of an E Ink screen on a phone certainly has its benefits, the thought of enduring those long refresh times and not being able to do the things that almost all other smartphones can do, would probably make ownership too frustrating. After all, If I wanted a long standby time, a monochrome screen and little else, I’d buy a basic feature phone.

Take a look at the video showing the phone in action and see what you think.

Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/prototype-e-ink-android-phone-demonstrated-on-video/

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Panasonic launches world's thinnest laser projector module

The future of projectors?

A prototype of the world's slimmest 100-lumen laser projector module has been spotted in Japan.

The laser projector module (or OIU, as Panasonic prefers to call it) throws out a picture at 800x480-pixels. That's not too impressive, but considering the device is just 75mm thin, it's a wonder Panasonic could fit any processing power in there at all.

Also on display was a scan-type OIU, which manages a resolution of just 400x300-pixels. Again, it's far from finished, especially considering Panasonic wants to shrink it down and install it in mobile phones.

But this tech is quite interesting. It's different from normal projectors in that it doesn't need focussing. The light doesn't travel through an LCD filter like regular projectors, and instead is just one single laser beam producing the image.

Early days

It's still early days with this tech. And as ever with a new technology, the devices are too bulky at the moment (relative to when they'll be on sale, anyway) and crazily expensive.

But if the resolution improves and the price comes down, we could see a whole new era of pico projectors hit the shelves.

Samsung is the only company to have launched a mobile with a built-in projector in the UK. The Samsung Galaxy Beam is a neat piece of kit, with great battery life and a decent camera. But it's too expensive, and the projector really struggles in daylight.

Will projectors one day be as common as cameras in phones? We'll have to wait and see.

Via Engadget

Source : http://www.techradar.com/news/home-cinema/projectors/panasonic-launches-worlds-thinnest-laser-projector-module-1101839

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