The NOOK Simple Touch from Barnes & Noble so happens to be a highly affordable electronic book reader that sports an E Ink display, and you know right from the get go (without any pretense) that it is designed for reading e-books and just about that. Well, the NOOK Simple Touch does come with Wi-Fi connectivity, which means all that you are able to do at the moment is to browse the Barnes & Noble book store and download content. Things might change sometime down the road, where it a leaked memo that was obtained by the folks over at TechCrunch could point towards the NOOK Simple Touch’s future ability to surf the Internet as well as help you remain on top of all the incoming emails.

I guess you could say that this potential feature might come about eventually courtesy of the kind of response that Barnes & Noble received after they introduced software updates for the NOOK HD and NOOK HD+, where we saw the introduction of Google Play Store support. Looks like folks always want to have the advantage of having additional functionality. How will this update affect whispers of Microsoft purchasing Nook Media for $1 billion eventually? We’re not too sure ourselves – what’s your take on it?

The current flagship smartphone from Samsung, which is the Samsung Galaxy S4, has picked up yet another first in its list of achievements, where it is the fastest selling handset to date – in addition to being the first smartphone in the world to pick up a TCO certification. Just to get a better idea on what TCO certification is all about, it happens to be a series of product certifications for office equipment (with monitors being the most notable items to be certified), where it has been set by TCO Development, which so happens to be owned by the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees, TCO (Tjänstemännens Centralorganisation). The certifications are given names after years, and recent revisions of TCO have also happened to define standards for computers, keyboards, printers, mobile phones and office furniture.

Well, we are glad to hear that the Samsung Galaxy S4 has picked up the TCO stamp which assures the purchaser that this smartphone has been manufactured without the use of hazardous elements such as nickel, beryllium, and mercury, and it is definitely a point for environmentally conscious users to take note of – as it approves of Samsung’s focus on sustainability. Do product certifications such as these help you make your device purchase decision?

For those who have been wondering what all the rage concerning Arduino has been in the past, well, just check out this Kissing Evaluator that is Arduino powered. In fact, many folks have already been taking advantage of the hugely popular Arduino DIY computing platform as you can tell by the example we quoted, while some others have used it to build robots in addition to a range of other computing devices. Arduino boards are definitely cheap (relatively speaking) and relatively easy to use devices which will also offer support for a range of sensors and motors. Enter the official Arduino Robot kit that makes life even easier to get started, where this kit would arrive with just about everything required for you to make and program a simple robot.

It will come equipped with a motor board that will assist the robot in getting around, while a control board features sensors which will enable the device to figure out just where it is and where it is headed to. Individual boards will feature an ATmega32u4 16 MHz processor alongside 32KB of memory, and the entire shebang would run on a quartet of AA batteries, although it too, can be powered from USB power. Other hardware specifications include an LCD display, LED lights, a speaker, compass, IR port, wheels, and there is also some more space to hook up additional sensors and other hardware. [Product Page]

Samsung initially rolled out their maiden attempt at a 4K Ultra HD TV earlier this year at CES, and they did mention that there will be other sizes to come later this year – where we are looking at the larger as well as smaller versions of the initial 85-inch model. Good to know that Samsung is a company that keeps to its promise, having announced that folks living in South Korea will be able to enjoy 55” as well as 65” models of the 4K TV range from June onwards.

There is one niggling question that needs to be answered – how will these smaller models (that are still relatively large compared to most homes that tend to stick to 46” or so TVs) fare compared to the big bad $39,999 MSRP 85S9 UHD TV model? Hopefully we will see a steep price drop to fuel a strong and fast growth of such a TV, and anything that is under $10,000 would certainly be more than welcome. We do wonder when will Samsung be a stiff competitor to the curved OLED TV market, where LG Display looks set to take the lead at the moment. [Press Release]

LG Display has some beauties to show off at SID (Society for Information Display) 2013, but we will concentrate solely on the curved 55” OLED TV that you see above, in addition to the 5” plastic OLED panel that you can check out in the flesh right after the jump. LG Display certainly intends to maintain its lead in the realm of display technologies, where it will showcase the latest TV, mobile, and other products that representing the future of display technology.

The curved 55” OLED TV is based on the same WRGB OLED technology as the standard set, which has been widely adopted at this point in time in the industry as the most effective OLED application for large-sized panels, while being an example to the future of TV design. Not only that, the masses will be treated to an unbreakable and flexible 5” plastic OLED panel for mobile devices, where such a development might prove to be crucial in changing the way we look at how smart devices will be developed sometime down the road.

Read full post →LG Display Shows Off Curved 55” OLED TV And 5” Plastic OLED Panels

YouTube has just turned 8, and I am quite sure that nobody ever figured out that a site like YouTube could have exploded to being what it is today. In fact, just as YouTube celebrates its 8th birthday (many happy returns of the day!), it has achieved yet another interesting statistic for you to mull over – where YouTube users actually upload over 100 hours of video each minute. That’s a whole lot of videos to go through, for sure, and imagine the immense amount of space required to handle all the new videos that are uploaded each day.

The world’s top online video service that is owned by Google came out with that particular statistic, and if you were to extrapolate it into a full minute, we get over 4 days’ worth of video. When you compare this figure to the one garnered in the year 2011, we are looking at just 48 hours of video each minute, with the figure jumping to 72 hours of video uploaded per minute last year. It seems that if you were to take just the past two years alone, we are looking at the average increase of 25 hours of video uploaded per minute each year. When do you think the saturation point would be reached?

Are you a trucker? Assuming you have answered in the affirmative, then you might have come across situations where your truck is a wee bit too large to fit into a tunnel, and there were no road signs before that informed you of the tunnel’s height – either due to the oversight of the road transport department in the municipality, or the sign was vandalized and taken down quite some time ago. Well, here is a novel idea that might get things moving – a huge red stop sign which will appear as though it will obstruct the road right in front of the tunnel entrance, which will obviously ask you to stop.

Needless to say, no truck driver, or any driver in his or her right mind, would want to overlook such an explicit warning, right? Actually, this particular sign was created using an instantaneously produced sheet of water and the help of lasers, thanks to light show company Laservision. This is rather unique as it has been part of an experiment which has taken place in Australia since 2007, where it has successfully done its bit to prevent semi trucks from shearing its top off without any prior intention of doing so. Pretty creative, don’t you think so?

Ever since Samsung decided to come up with the Samsung Galaxy S3 mini to keep company its previous flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S3, and making some success out of the situation, I guess the folks over at Samsung were more than encouraged to roll out more variants of the Samsung Galaxy S4 such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active and the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini, where neither have officially hit the market just yet, although where the latter is concerned, we have already seen images of it leaked for some time now. Here we are with leaked benchmark results of the device, and it so happens that the new result points toward a Qualcomm chipset instead of the expected Exynos 5 which made its rounds in earlier whispers.

Obviously, it cannot be released with both chipsets at the end of the day, so one of the rumors are obviously fake. There is, however, a possibility that Samsung could very well have a sudden change of heart and roll out a pair of different versions. The leaked benchmark points to 960 x 540 pixel display, with a 1.7GHz dual-core Krait processor and an Adreno 305 GPU to keep it going, running on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean as the operating system of choice alongside Bluetooth 4.0, GPS support and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11n connectivity.

How many of you would love to own a self-driving car? Well, some of us might put up our hands, while others could very well figure out that a self-driving car is not something they would look forward to, sitting in one as a passenger, since they would pretty much prefer to have things in their own hands. Thing is, this enterprising 19-year-old high-school student from Romania has managed to work on an artificial intelligence system for self-driving cars which could cut down on the cost of such technology, and he even went away with the top gong of a scholarship amounting to $75,000 scholarship last Friday at an international science and engineering fair.

Ionut Budisteanu did explain the situation surrounding his system, “The most expensive thing from the Google self-driving car is the high resolution 3-D radar, so I was thinking how I could remove it.” His solution? By relying on processing webcam imagery using artificial intelligence technology in order to select curbs, lane markers, and even soccer balls which happen to roll across the road. When this is merged with data from a low-resolution 3-D radar that is capable of recognizing “big” objects such as other cars, houses, and trees, you’ve got a winner here. Compare his $4,000 system to Google’s $75,000 system and you can see where he intends to go with this.

This is a record that is 9 years in the making – after a whopping 9 years of roving around, Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity has finally breached the previous limit that was set 40 years ago where extraterrestrial travels on the ground is concerned. Last Thursday marked the moment when the tenacious six-wheeled robot drove 80 meters (263 feet), which so happened to increase the total distance traveled on its odometer since landing on Mars way back in 2004 to 35.760 kilometers (22.220 miles). The previous record holder were NASA’s Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt when, in December 1972, they managed to drive their Lunar Roving Vehicle 35.744 kilometers (22.210 miles) over the lunar surface (and realizing that there were no Transformers spacecraft that crash landed there along the way)..

Of course, this might be NASA’s record-breaking ride at the moment, but it is still relatively far away from the international extraterrestrial land-distance record, falling short by a number of kilometers. In fact, it was in 1973 that the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 remote-controlled moon rover roved around for 37 kilometers (23 miles) across the lunar surface, making it the long time, undisputed champion of distance driving on an extraterrestrial surface.