Gizmag Team

Rolls-Royce, one of the most enduring brands of automotive excellence, is developing a fully electric Phantom. The 102EX experimental vehicle will be shown in Geneva on March 1, and will tour Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America this year to evaluate the opinions of its key stakeholders. The brand is launching a special web site which will be used to deliver information about the vehicle, the tour and to elicit stakeholder response. Read More

Many of today's global elite (those with enough brains, money or influence to affect the lives of large numbers of others), have become influential by doing clever things, such as inventing (or finding ways to popularise) things that make many people's lives better. However, some argue that many members of the elite—for instance, those in the financial sector—have profited from rules, whether on financial-sector bonuses or income-tax rates, that they have had a hand in deciding. And as the very rich have done far better than everyone else over the past couple of decades, inequality within countries has exploded. Should we accept, even laud, this inequality as the logical result of the greater rewards for brilliance in a globalised world? Or is it right to worry about its less savoury origins and decry its possibly disruptive consequences? This latest Economist debate has just concluded and with the world seemingly being reshaped before our eyes in the Middle East, it makes for some thought-provoking reading at a precipitous time in world history. Which side do you think won? Read More

WRC is the closest of all world class motorsport competition to the genuine road environment, though conditions vary considerably across the 13 race, five continent series from last weekend’s first round in Sweden where blizzards and -28ºC temperatures necessitated tungsten-tipped studded Michelin tyres, through to the gravel and rocks and 40ºC temperatures the cars will encounter a fortnight from now in Mexico. New “environmentally aware” regulations were introduced this year based around 1600cc turbocharged, 4WD cars, and Ford's all-new Fiesta RS made a dream debut with a 1-2-3 finish. Snow plough duty on day one and a puncture on day two stopped seven-time World Rally Champion Sébastien Loeb from getting near the podium but Loeb’s new Citroen DS3 challenger proved fast and reliable and recorded more fastest stage times than rally winner Hirvonen. Read More

Not only did NVIDIA announce its new quad core technology at Mobile World Congress, it showed it working and announced immediate sampling of the chip for its customers with an aim of having the new processor available in tablets in August and phones by Christmas 2011. This was after Qualcomm announced its quad-core processor wouldn’t ship samples until 2012. NVIDIA showed demos from web browsing to games and even a Coremark benchmark test (pictured). Read More

Mathematicians are creating their own version of the periodic table that will provide a vast directory of all the possible shapes in the universe across three, four and five dimensions, linking shapes together in the same way as the periodic table links groups of chemical elements. The three-year project, announced today, should provide a resource that mathematicians, physicists and other scientists can use for calculations and research in a range of areas, including computer vision, number theory, and theoretical physics. For some mental exercise, check out these animations that have already been analyzed in the project. Read More

Sony Ericsson finally showed the world the new Playstation gaming smartphone at Mobile World Congress in Spain today. The PlayStation-certified Xperia Play runs the Android Gingerbread OS and will be available next month, accompanied at launch by 50 titles downloadable from Android Market, but with a lot more coming. The phone has a slide-out gamepad that features a PlayStation-style D-pad, thumb sensors and X, O, square and triangle action buttons and combines a PlayStation-quality gaming experience with the very latest Android smartphone technology. Read More

The performance of Gumpert's Apollo places it among the supercar elite, with its recent Nurburgring Nordschleife lap record for road legal cars further emphasizing those credentials. Now the German manufacturer is to add a second model in 2012 which it claims will create a new class of "Fast Tourers" with attributes of superior efficiency, performance, space, comfort and pleasure. Though Ferrari, Bentley, Porsche et al probably consider such a class already exists, it'll be interesting to see what gets unveiled at Geneva in a few weeks from now. The first image of the 700 bhp central-engined V8 Tornante was released today, so it's probably worth summarizing what we know already ... Read More

Renault's recently reworked brand identity “puts people at the forefront” while the resultant design strategy bases each new concept car on a different phase of the human life cycle. The first such concept was the DeZir coupé shown at the 2010 Paris Motor Show, which expressed the passion of "falling in love." The second concept in the series was unveiled today ahead of the Geneva Motor Show, representing the next phase of “two people exploring the world around them together." Apart from the crock of marketing soup, the rather appropriately named CAPTUR is quite interesting technically, with a clever mechanical self-locking differential and an augmented reality system. Read More

A longstanding part of the Vacheron Constantin watchmaking heritage, the World Time complication is making a noteworthy comeback in the form of the Patrimony Traditionnelle World Time model. Developed and manufactured by Vacheron Constantin, this new mechanical self-winding movement is distinguished by its capacity to indicate the world’s 37 time zones, including those offset from Universal Coordinated Time (UCT) by a half or quarter-hour. Read More