Mobile Technology

The Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo has recently developed and demonstrated a peculiar pair of headphones that can precisely detect a user's eye movements without a camera, and use those movements to control electronic devices such as mobile phones and portable music players. DoCoMo started working on this idea back in 2008 by adapting an electrooculogram (EOG), a medical device used for measuring eye response, to their purposes. An EOG works on the principle that the human cornea has a positive electrical charge. As the user looks to the left or right, the charge shifts in the space between the user's ears – a change that can be easily detected by appropriate sensors. Read More

Apple has defined the market for tablet computers with its iPad and every new release since has inevitably drawn the question – is this an iPad killer? By the looks of things, Samsung's first tablet offering – the Galaxy Tab – could well be. The device trumps its rival on three key points. It's significantly smaller, lighter and more portable, it includes a camera and it works as a phone. We got our hands on the Galaxy Tab during the official launch at IFA today. Read More

Apple’s September 1 event saw the announcement of updates to the entire iPod line with the sole exception of the iPod Classic. The iPod touch gains the same high resolution Retina display and A4 chip found on the iPhone 4, along with FaceTime video calling, HD video recording, 3-axis gyro and iOS 4.1, all packed into a new slimmer, lighter form factor. There’s also a completely redesigned square-shaped iPod nano with a multi-touch interface and a redesigned iPod shuffle that sees the reintroduction of clickable “ring” buttons. Read More

Power supplies are the bane of the regular business traveler. They're all different, heavy and if you have a few electronic items in your kit, they clutter your baggage and eat heavily into your increasingly stringently-policed baggage allowance. Innergie showed a new addition to its range of mCube universal adapters at IFA today which goes a long way to overcoming all these problems. The mCube slim weighs just 150g, is smaller than an iPhone, can charge two devices simultaneously, fits all common notebooks and will charge almost every other portable device. Read More

Apple has pretty much defined what many of us now consider to be a tablet computer. When the term is used, we automatically think of a 9.56 x 7.47-inch (242.8 x 189.7mm) iPad. Now, French consumer electronics company Archos is about to have us question that perception with the announcement of five new internet tablets with screen sizes ranging from 2.8-inches (71mm) diagonally across to 10.1-inches (257mm). The new devices will all run on Android 2.2 (Froyo) with support for Adobe's Flash 10.1 player, be powered by either 800MHz or 1GHz processors and sport built-in 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. Read More

Japanese gadget giant Thanko has joined the likes of the iLuv by offering a dual USB in car charger that lets you juice your mobile devices while on the go. Selling for US$19.99, iLuv charger certainly fills a need. Thanko's iPad compatible unit fills a need as well, at a significantly lower price point: 680 yen or about $8. Read More

Forget mobile device convergence, that's old news. Every smartphone on the market now handles everything from camera and calendar duties to gaming, GPS navigation, web browsing and social media. Differentiation is looking like the name of the game moving forward - offering do-it-all devices that distinguish themselves through a particular focus. Take Sony's reportedly upcoming PSP phone, which takes an Android 3.0 platform and mates it with a dedicated PSP gaming experience. Or this, the Garmin-Asus nüvifone A50, a fully-featured Android smartphone that comes pre-packaged with a car kit and built-in Garmin map data so it can shine as an in-car GPS navigation system. I've spent several weeks using the A50 as my primary phone, and if you spend a lot of time on the road, this new nüvifone is built for you and does a very credible job. Read More

Augmented Reality, or AR, is currently one of the hot areas for mobile app development – for some reason, people seem quite smitten with the idea of being able to point their mobile device’s camera at a street, and having information about the buildings and businesses that appear on their screen superimposed over the images in real time. Now, a prototype mobile AR device is being tested, that concentrates more on topography than urban exploration. The Marmota mobile AR can tell you things like what the names of those mountain peaks over there are, what their elevation is, and how far away they are. Read More

The Apple rumor mill has kicked into gear again suggesting Apple is planning to release a 7-inch “iPad 2” before Christmas. The Economic Daily reports that a number of Taiwanese companies have won a few component contracts for the device, while Taiwan’s Digitimes newspaper has reported that Taiwanese companies were already starting to assemble it. Adding fuel to the fire is the discovery of a block of code buried deep within iOS4 that apparently queries whether the device is either a CDMA iPhone or iPad 2. Read More