Remember the Joo Joo? Of course you do; we just covered it, after all. Letting you know that the future tablet from Fusion Garage got a bit of an upgrade in the User Interface department, before it’s ultimate release later this month. But, you know what’s better than knowing your latest gadget won’t have a bland, boring desktop? Getting to look at its insides, thanks to some documents found in the FCC’s databanks. And, believe it or not, the Joo Joo has some good things going for it.
First and foremost, we’ve got the NVIDIA Ion combined with Intel’s Atom N270. Second, despite the fact we’ve heard from Fusion Garage themselves that the Joo Joo won’t be shipping at the end of March with 3G on board, the FCC reveals that there is indeed a 3G card in there, so maybe something is changing. However, while we love the combination of Ion and the Atom N270, we have to admit that we’re not really sure the battery life is going to be anything to write home about. While the Joo Joo’s main competition is primed at a 10 hour battery life, there’s some speculation going around that the Joo Joo will barely make 5.
It’s going to just be a few short weeks before Fusion Garage unleashes their tablet, so before long we’ll be able to give you all the gory details, instead of banking on FCC documentation. Though, after seeing the upgraded User Interface and knowing that an application store of some sort is shipping with the fully HD-capable tablet makes our hearts flutter a bit. Essentially, we just can’t wait to get our hands on a new gadget.
We already got a look at Microsoft's little XNA show-and-tell as relates to Windows Phone 7 Series, but our colleague Andrew Yoon over at Joystiq had a chance for longer sit-down with Xbox Live general manager Ron Pessner and XNA Game Studio manager Michael Klucher at GDC today, and he's been kind enough to share the interview with us. The main topic of conversation was the company's plans regarding Xbox LIve and, specifically, how it would be integrating it into Windows Phone 7 Series. And believe us, there was plenty to discuss -- including the sweet science of porting games from Zune HD to 7 Series phones ("it's 90, 95 percent code reuse... in an hour or couple of hours, we're taking games that were written for Zune HD and putting them on the phone"), the importance of maintaining a consistent gameplay experience amongst different hardware, and the reasoning behind limiting devices to asynchronous multiplayer. What are you waiting for? Hit the source link to embark on this miraculous journey of discovery.
SEOUL, Korea (AVING) -- Kia Motors Corporation announced its global sales figures for passenger cars (export sales, domestic sales and sales from overseas plants), recreational vehicles (RVs) and commercial vehicles for February 2010, recording a total of 143,267 units sold. This figure represents a year-on-year increase of 39.5%.
In February, Kia posted double digit year-on-year sales increases all sales regions: 128.6% in China (25,435 units sold), 52.7% in general markets (32,578 units sold), 34.4% in Europe* (24,992 units sold), 21.6% in Korea (33,209 units sold) and 11.4% in North America (27,053 units sold).
Cumulatively, through the first two months of 2010, Kia's global sales increased by 50.6% year-on-year and reached 293,659 units. ...
SEOUL, Korea (AVING) -- Fujifilm Korea(www.fujifilm.co.kr) held a press conference to unveil two premium compact cameras 'FinePix Z700EXR' and 'FinePix Z70' in Korea market.
Equipped with a 3.5-inch advanced touchscreen LCD, the Z700EXR features a 12 megapixel Super CCD EXR sensor, Dual Direction GUI and Dual Image Display functions. Dual Direction GUI detects the orientation of the camera and automatically switches the direction of the menu button accordingly (for shooting, playback, multi-viewing and image search), while Dual Image Display splits the screen in various ways to view multiple images at once, so you can scroll through your images quickly and easily to locate the one you are looking for.
Palm just showed us the Unreal Engine 3 running on webOS, which apparently took a couple weeks to port over to the platform using that fancy new PDK. It runs at a pretty smooth clip, with just a tiny bit of artifacting in our enemy's death animation. As an added bit of wow factor, Palm has it currently setup to demonstrate the game at 1 fps when in card view. Like most touchscreen shooters, this doesn't really solve the problem of simulating dual analog sticks, but it's still a fun and good looking engine for a mobile device. We're still unaware of any games that have been built for the mobile engine, which has now been shown for iPhone, Tegra 2, and will be headed to the iPad as well, but we have to assume we'll be seeing some before too long. Check out the webOS video after the break.
Naturally, we need to first disclaim this noise by saying that rumors of third-party multitasking capability in the iPhone are as old as the iPhone SDK itself. That said, it's hard to ignore a new reference to a "multitasking dialog box" buried deep within the iPhone SDK 3.2 beta that -- while not new to beta 4 specifically -- we're told didn't exist in 3.1.3. Now, the wildest possible speculation would have us believing that this is the very first by-product of a new multitasking system for developers that's being developed for the platform, presumably destined for an appearance in OS 4.0 when it's introduced along with new hardware this summer -- but it's just as likely that Apple will continue to keep the iPhone's multitasking capability to itself, a function it uses liberally among the phone and music apps, just to name a couple. For what it's worth, AppleInsider is citing a tipster claiming that Apple's got a "full-on solution" to multitasking that would properly address its main concern -- battery life issues -- for release this year, so maybe we'll be able to chuck those awful push notifications before we know it. Now if you'll excuse us, we'll be over here in the corner running a few dozen apps on our Pre Plus.
Whether or not you consider this three years in the making or not, this rumor has several thousand people out there breathing a large sigh of relief. One of the most highly regarded (missing) features on the iPhone, it seems that times are certainly changing, as Apple have gone ahead and included the feature into the new build of their Operating System. Oh, did we forget to mention? This is just a rumor.
Apple’s been thinking about multitasking from the get-go. They’ve mentioned it a couple times, at a few key points over the years since the launch of the iPhone, and there’s never been any question that the Cupertino-based company has been working on some kind of multitasking technology. There’s all sorts of reasons why Apple didn’t want multitasking on their device, primarily the concern for battery life, security, and resource allocation. But, there’s also the fact that the iPhone lacks the kind of User Interface generally seen for multitasking devices. The multiple homescreens are great for the iPhone, but unless Apple has created some new UI elements, it might be kind of hard for them to launch such a feature.
Luckily, they’ve got some pretty bright minds bunkered at headquarters. According to the words whispered into the ears of AppleInsider, it seems that Apple has found a “full-on solution” to the multitasking conundrum. Whatever that means, we don’t know, but we can guess that it’s going to be unlike anything we’d expect. The details of the feature, along with the entirety of the iPhone OS 4.0 are under lock and key right now, because apparently the OS isn’t ready for prime time. In fact, it seems that it’s still a ways off. As soon as we hear more, we’ll pass it on.
If you needed any more proof that Apple's lame cat-and-mouse game with the iPhone jailbreak community has only served to increase the scene's resourcefulness and creativity, look no further than the iDongle, a slick piece of hacker-made hardware that can jailbreak and activate an iPhone 3GS or iPod touch running OS 3.1.2 just by plugging it into the dock connector. What's more, it allows a jailbroken iPhone to be rebooted away from a computer, which is currently a problem for on-the-go hackers -- just stick this guy in your bag and you'll be good to go. There's only a dozen prototypes right now, but pre-orders are being accepted to raise funds for production -- we've got a feeling quite a few people are going to be interested. Video after the break.
Have you heard? The Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) is going on right now, which is why it shouldn’t go as a big surprise that all these companies are announcing things there. Yes, they’ll generally have a video game/gaming twist to it, but that’s okay. Especially when we have Microsoft presenting, and they’re giving details on how push notifications are going to work on the upcoming mobile Operating System.
Right up until the official announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series, there came a time when multitasking came under fire. Was it going to be included? Would Microsoft really ditch such an integral feature (and one that’s been highly scrutinized by the competition)? Well, at least in the form of their online “multiplayer” games, it looks like push notifications are going to be the rule, rather than the exception. As the video explains, this is going to be the best way to run these games. As we’ve mentioned before, asynchronous, turn-based games are definitely going to happen on Windows Phone 7 Series, and this methodology is going to make sure they run smoothly.
However, this is dealing with gaming. And while they do show that the live tiles, the ones that are displayed on the phone’s “home screen”, and explain that they are going to get updated in real-time, we’re wondering just what this means for third-party applications, as well as first-party ones. Will there be no multitasking at all? (Outside, of course, listening to music and the like.) Will Pandora, which was noted during the initial keynote, work while you’re sending a text message? These are the questions that people are still asking, and even though we may have just shed some light on it, we’ve certainly not illuminated the depth of the cave quite yet. MIX10 anyone?
Sure, you read reviews and take recommendations from friends before you buy a new cellphone, but have you ever stopped to consider what the inventor of the cellphone uses on a daily basis? C-SPAN has, and recently took the opportunity to ask the man himself, Marty Cooper, that very question during a wide-ranging interview. While Cooper said that he has used an iPhone previously, he recently passed it on to his grandson in favor of a Motorola Droid, which he says he chose because he wanted to get more experience with Android. But that's not all, Cooper also revealed that he carries a Jitterbug as well for when he just wants to make phone calls. Surprising for a pioneer of mobile technology? Not exactly, as Cooper actually co-founded Jitterbug with his wife, who he credits with inventing the phone. Head on past the break to watch the complete interview.
