10 Types Of People

Ever thought if it were possible to make and, or and xor gates from dominoes? Yes? Then this video is for you.

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Or…yet another edition of my following of e-readers.

This, I have to say, looks like it could be the best yet. And my goodness does it look beautiful. It is called the Notion Ink Adam. It is a 10.1 inch touchscreen device. It includes

• wifi/bluetooth
• 3g/hsdpa
• dual-core arm processor
• supposod 16-hours of battery life watching hd films (140 hours audio)
• nvidia tegra graphics card
• android
• multi-touch
• 16/32 GB internal storage
• 3.2 MPx swivelling camera (yes, swivelling)
• usb ports
• hdmi port
• sim card slot
• microSD card slot (if 16/32GB isn’t enough for you)
• docking port (hmmm, sounds ipodish…)
• accelerometer
• rear-facing trackpad (not sure what it means myself…)

Now, if you are not looking at that going “Ok, I want this…” then you are obviously an Apple fanboy. However, all of these features are not why I am spotlighting this e-reader. And many of you may have already realised that this isn’t really an e-reader. It sports the 1 thing that makes it not an e-reader. An LCD screen. Well, the next feature is the one that I am really excited about. Let’s see what Notion Ink say about this next feature.

Dual Display

A full color :LCD transmissive mode; a low-power, sunlight-readable, reflective e-paper mode; and a transflective mode, which makes the LCD display visible in sunlight, all in One! Proprietary Algorithms for automatic brightness control.

Wait…what? Did I read that correctly? Are they saying that this is 1 screen, but 2 screens. It is an LCD screen AND an e-ink screen? Yes…that is exactly what it is saying. This is the first device I have heard of that does this. It is not totally clear when it switches, but it looks like it automatically does it when you open their e-book application. There are questions that pop up if this is the case. What happens if you want a different e-book application from the android market. Will it do the same thing? I’m not sure.

So, with all of these features added up, this is what a tablet should be. Take note apple. iPad 2.0 should be like this. But, of course, your fanboys won’t care, and everyone else will not go back to you cause you mucked up the first version.

The only thing that is confusing me is the battery life specs. They say it has 140 hours of music playback, and 16 hours of HD video playback. Now, I know it has an arm processor, but my phone doesn’t even get through 1 day sometimes. So, we’ll just have to see what happens with this.

I am not sure about pricing, as they don’t mention it. They also just say it will be available in “spring 2010″. So, not sure when, or where, that will be. But I will certanarily keeping track of it. If I hear anything I will keep you posted. Have a look at this video while you are waiting (which you could watch for 16 hours straight on this device supposodly). And look at the picture, it is beautiful.

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Nothing really can be said…

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Last night I went to the UX bookclub, Glasgow, with a bunch of people from Geeksoc. We used the book “The Design of Everyday things”, by , and we discussed a whole number of things (sometimes going very off topic) from the iphone user interface to having different coloured links for visited links.

One of the things we discussed was about how simple user interfaces should be. For example, not having a filesystem that you can browse on the iphone. Or having a simple browser-only interface like ChromeOS. The discussion led to me thinking a lot about how user interfaces should be. Bad examples of user interfaces, and how we could fall into a dangerous trap when trying to be simple. Read More »

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Theres not much to say about this video. 1 sentence:

best…promo…video…ever

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I do like the muppets new videos. Very well made, and also they have full 1080 on their videos (which looks beautiful on my screen btw). So, enjoy this new one from them. (ps, you’ll have to go to the youtube page if you wanna watch it in hd).

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Thought I would do another blog post with lots of exciting tech news. So, here is what I’ve been seeing over the past few days.

• Amazon buys “TouchCo”. Touchscreen kindle in the works? One might wonder if they are going to be using this company for just that. The other question, however, is “If it is made, when will it be available in Britain?”
• Symbian is officially opensource. Symbian^2 (previously S60) is now open-source. It turns out the #symbiancountdown was the number of packages left until Symbian was totally open source. Well done Symbian. Now you need to step up and make sure than Symbian^3 is amazing and it better really step up and do what Symbian^2 hasn’t done. It needs to do a lot to be any good.
• JooJoo near launch. Fixes lots of problems that would make you not want an iPad (except the price).
• With or without you: Arm Ceo to Microsoft. The market will grow with or without Windows arm support. Good news for linux?
• Sonic 4 in production. A blast from the past, in high definition. Thats right, Sonic 4 is being made and will be available in the summer on PS3, xbox and wii. On PS3 and Xbox it will be in 1080p. Thats great!!!
• Apple yet again show how pathetic they are, by turning down an app because it is “not interesting enough”.

So, theres just a few bits of random news that I thought I would share with people. Have a great weekend guys!

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What is there to say about this video? Except – roll on summer!!! If this isn’t a reason to finally get a PS3, I don’t know what it.

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Now, you may be thinking “Man alive…no posts for days, and now a post about that iPad thing.”. Well, yeah, I know, it is shocking. Sadly, there hasn’t been much for me to blog about. I’ve been trying to think of something else, and my mind has been mulling over whether or not to blog about this “iPad thing” constantly for the past week. So…I decided that I would hurry up and post about it so I can free my mind to think about other things. So, I’m just going to talk about random things about the iPad.

What the iPad is not:

• E-book reader

The iPad is not an e-book reader. At all. Why would you buy an e-book reader rather than a laptop/netbook? The e-ink screen. It is nice to read, and it is very low power. Weeks of battery life and no strain on the eyes are the main reasons why you would buy an e-book reader. Now lets look at the iPad. No e-ink screen, wouldn’t be good in sunlight (I’d imagine) and would cause strain after reading lots. And battery life – 10 hours. That is not even a full day. It has less battery life than my phone, but it has a similar processor. Therefore, the iPad is not a replacement for an e-book reader. Don’t buy it to read books.

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No, this is nothing about the iPad. Take a look at this link.

What do you think? Pretty nice in my opinion. Not a huge amount of information about it yet, and I’m assuming it’ll take longer to actually get over here to britain. But it shows that my perfect e-book reader is getting closer and closer.

Looks beautiful doesn’t it. The screen looks amazing. I’d have to see it in real life, but it looks like it could be as good as OLED. And in that case, it would be much better because OLED is rubbish in sunlight, e-ink is nicer on the eyes, and e-ink lasts much much longer.

It also is a really nice size. 13.1 inches is amazing for an ebook reader (about the size of an A4 piece of paper), and look at the size of that border, it is tiny! None of this 7″ screen with 2″ either side of border. Well played. It also has wifi and 3G connectivity, although no details on what networks you can use with it.

A couple of things I want to know about this:

• Battery life. How does colour change the battery life? Is it much shorter?
• Refresh rate. How fast is it? Fast enough for video?
• Video. Related to the last one, can it play video?
• Content. Are there any content providers with this? What can I view on it? Can I view pdfs and epuds?
• UK availability. It only says that it will be available in “Q2″, which I assume is just in US.
• Price. There are no details on price at all.

So, all in all, this looks like a really really nice device that I would love to get my hands on. It has note-taking abilities, so it includes almost everything I want in an ereader. Maybe this is the device I will finally buy. Or maybe not…

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