[CES 2008] We played with the (elusive) Optimus Maximus OLED keyboard from Art Lebedev and here are our first impressions: as we expected from the previous photos, the keyboard is quite bulky. The keys feel like one of the older mechanical keyboard (think IBM), which I personally like. Just as reported before, each key features a 10.1x10.1mm that displays clearly a letter/icon. They look great and the keyboard is very readable. Optimus Configurator, an image editor lets the user edit/add key icons/letters. In the back, you can find. To power the displays, there is an AC plug in the back. An anti-theft lock is also a nice detail. (See it in the photo gallery)

The keyboard runs on Windows/Mac and Linux and Art Lebedev is currently shipping pre-ordered keyboards. New orders will ship next month. 104 languages are currently supported (the image keys are stored in the SD card) and they keys are removable (that can come in handy if the tiny displays die).

Click to enlarge

via Textually.org, TechJapan

NTT DoCoMo and Panasonic Mobile Communications have successfully experimented with a contactless recharging mechanism by having a FOMA phone recharged by having it placed on a special recharging pad.

Using electromagnetic induction to send recharging electricity to the battery, this contactless electricity is delivered through a pad that has a coil for transmission, and a reception coil inside of the handset itself.

Click to enlarge

via TechDirt

Video gamers have received a lot of flak lately, mostly concerning the level of sex and violence and how it will warp the young minds of this generation. That remains a subject of debate, but we do have evidence in studies that show how video games improve one's visual skills.

Video game players scan their environment quickly much better than normal humans. Improved scanning speed is essential in avoiding car accidents and similar situations. Unfortunately, it takes a hefty amount of video gaming in order to attain such a highly tuned sense of sight. This is not an excuse to hole yourself up in a dark room mashing joypads but in certain situations, heavy amounts of video gaming does add up to your ability to scan the surroundings quickly.

Apple is receiving rave reviews about its new Mac OS X Tiger (released of Friday) while Microsoft was showing an early version of longhorn that did not really excite even the most hard-core Windows backers. OS X Tiger costs $129 and is the latest of a string of Mac OS X upgrade.

Apple launches upgrades on a regular time-frame that are good enough to entice customers to upgrade, paying about $130 each time. That’s a very smart strategy that allow Apple to provide incremental upgrades that targets desired enhancements along with some cash, that will in turn fuel development of the next cycle.

Microsoft on the other hand, is mostly releasing patches for its existing Windows XP operating system while building its next architecture, codenamed Longhorn, that promises to address many security issues and also show a new user interface. At his point, the release of Tiger is a kick in the teeth for Microsoft -at least in the media-, but I guess that this will not change any plans at Microsoft. Longhorn should be out in 2006: by that time I expect Apple will do at least another Mac OX release.

Sony just announced that it is open to the idea of having a single standard for the next generation of DVD discs. At this moment, Sony and Toshiba have formed two camps with the Blu-Ray standard for Sony and HD-DVD for Toshiba. Both are backed by major partners.

It is only recently that Sony realized that its traditional approach of using only proprietary formats is an obsolete way of doing business. In the past, Sony has been very good at creating a "Sony economy" where consumers wanted everything Sony. However, this time has long gone. Now consumers are savvier and the competitive landscape has dramatically changed.

Sony does not have the technology lead that it used to and the last thing that it wants is to engage in a standard war that it might not win. It has hapenned before: remember the VHS versus Betamax battle? Sony lost, although Betamax was better. Ken Kutaragi, the "father of the playstation" might have won after all: he wanted Sony to be more open and this might just be happening.

The movie and music industry is suing hundreds of people for downloading copyrighted songs and movies on the ultra-fast network internet2 only available to universities at the moment. The suit reaches 18 universities and up to 405 students who, according to the music industry, have shared files over the high-speed network. The penalties mounts to $750 per song, and with an average of 2300 songs downloaded (on average) per person, it's a whopping $1.725M that we're talking about. I guess that this will chill a lot of enthusiasm for copyrighted file sharing.

Continue Reading"Hollywood sues hundreds over downloading"

A study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project says that users are getting used to e-mail spam although such unwanted e-mails are still perceived as very annoying. 22 percent of the people in the survey said that they spend less time on e-mail because of spam.

Over the years, the content of junk email has changed. From pornographic advertisement, it has become “phishing”, an elaborate way of deceiving users to give up their passwords by pretending to be a respectable institution.

A lot of users also came up with their own way to fight spam, like setting up a special account that they use to subscribe to websites online. If you own a website, a contact form instead of an email address can help avoid spam.

I recently noticed that more and more people are using spamarrest, a service that put itself between your mailbox and the senders. When someone tries to send an email to you protected mailbox, spamarrest will ask the sender for a confirmation before relaying the email to your inbox. It’s a good way of avoiding junk mail sent by automated robots. It’s a paid service, but there’s a 30 days trial.

A study by AssetMetrix Research Labs shows that only 24% of North American companies using Windows XP have deployed the Service Pack 2 since it was released last year to fix critical security flaws.

"The popularity of Windows XP SP2 tends to decrease slightly as company size increases," according to the study. But overall "more companies are tending to hold back on SP2 than accept it," AssetMetrix said. It is not surprising that larger companies tend to hesitate before applying patches to a large number of machines. Such operating system fixes also have the potential of creating undesirable effects and create issues.

I think that not patching the system is a greater risk than doing so. I the last year, several attacks from viruses or worms (a particular kind of virus) could have been avoided if Windows XP machines had been updated.

Microsoft has given companies until April 12th to test Windows XP SP2. Beyond this date, updates will be applied automatically whether the user wants it or not.

Windows XP SP2

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announces that it will be able to push desktop drives capacity to 1 TB (1 Terabyte or 1000 Gigabytes) in 2007, thanks to the perpendicular recording technology. Up until now, hard drives were recording information on platters, or disks, in a 2-dimensional fashion called longitudinal recording, where each location on the surface could store a binary element (bit). The perpendicular technology allows the drive to write more information in the same space.

Hitachi could not only make larger desktop drives, but also smaller hard drives to be used use in small devices such as cellphones. This is the single most important evolution in hard drive technology for the past decade and it is a key element of what tomorrow’s storage will be: hard drives will be everywhere.

Next year, Sony will digitize its top 500 movies and make them available for mobile devices including cellphones, portable media centers and the Sony PSP game console. That what Michael Arrieta (VP of Sony Pictures) said during the Digital Hollywood conference: “"We want to set business models, pricing models, distribution models like [Apple chief Steve] Jobs did for music, but for the film industry".

Sony will try to leverage the box office success that they own, such as Spider Man or Hitch, to lead a trend to be as successful in mobile movies as Apple is in mobile music. The idea of having more digital content that’s downloadable creates fear in the movie industry. They have seen how file swapping can spread (pirated) music on the internet faster then their own distribution network and think that one way or the other this can is bad news for their future revenues.

I don’t know if I’ll watch a movie on my mobile phone, but I would certainly give it a try on a Sony PSP. In the next year, we will see if Sony can pull off the equivalent of an iTunes for movies.

Today, the internet search giant just doubled the email storage for users of its GMail service. As people use (and abuse) their inbox, some have been approaching the previous limit of 1GB.

Google has decided to allocate more space to let users stack emails. Behind this, there’s obviously a business motivation. It is known that we currently create data at a rate unseen in human history and while lots of emails might be junk, they still occupy some space and make information harder to find for users. Well guess who’s the king of search? Google of course.

So here’s the plan: let people fill up their Gmail accounts with thousands of messages, then help them to search through it, and eventually, place relevant ads in the search results to raise the company’s earnings. I personally have no problem with this, and I think that Google is pretty clever (business-wise), as the natural tendency of most users is just to stack up data. They create the need and they provide a solution. Additionally, the increase is also a response to the Yahoo 1GB mailbox. Another use these 2GB, might be this virtual drive using GMail :)