SEOUL, Korea (AVING) — Duoback Korea (Representative Jeong Gwan-yeong, www.duorest.com) has launched a functional floor chair with arm rests, ‘Duorest Idea’.
This Duorest product strategically targets Asian markets with developed floor sitting cultures and is the upgraded model of the existing ‘DR-920T.’
The company has attached a 360 degree spinning board underneath the chair to enable freely moving the body while sitting and also do simple back exercises.
In particular, its arm rests enable more comfortable resting. The design of the back of the chair has been enhanced, making it an effective stylish interior when using indoors.
Further, the back support can be folded, enabling easy storage in a relatively tight space. One …
The launch of the Apple iPad – and the iBooks ereading app – has kicked off an ebook war between Apple and Amazon, and it’s hapless readers who are caught in the middle. According to an NYT report quoting an industry insider, Amazon have “temporarily” yanked Macmillan books – both physical and electronic – from their US store after the publisher demanded the retailer raise prices from $9.99 to $15, the same price Apple announced it would sell ebooks for.
Macmillan was one of the five publishers named by Apple as initial content partners for their new iBooks store, which will distribute digital reading content in the same manner that iTunes does with music and video. According to the insider, Amazon “is expressing its strong disagreement” with the catalog change, which affects both Macmillan titles and those of its various divisions and imprints.
There’s also been some confusion in recent reporting over Apple’s pricing intentions for iBooks, after Steve Jobs was briefly interviewed by Walt Mossberg following the iPad keynote. While the Apple CEO has been widely quoted as suggesting that iBooks would sell titles for $9.99, in actual fact he suggested prices “will be the same” before going on to claim that publishers were unhappy with Amazon and considering withholding ebooks from the Kindle store. That certainly leaves room for Amazon prices to rise, though from everything the company has said it seems unlikely they’d agree to that without a serious change in policy.
Meanwhile readers are caught in-between, with those who have bought a Kindle unable to transfer their Amazon-bought ebooks from the platform thanks to the DRM in place, and those considering iBooks on the iPad likely to be subject to the same problems. As for those people who want to buy a physical copy of a Macmillan title, there’s currently no indication as to when Amazon will recontinue selling them, though of course there’s Amazon Marketplace to satisfy that niche for now.
Announced to the world in early November last year, the Xperia X10 has been Sony Ericsson’s paper flagship device for a good few months now, and unfortunately the latest official word seems to confirm that the wait will be even longer. NTT DoCoMo has already stated it’ll launch the handset in Japan this April, and T-Mobile has now also gone official with an April timeframe for the X10′s German arrival. Guess we can consider that February 10 “expected launch” in the UK dead and buried by this point. It’s all rather lackluster in our eyes — we’ve seen HTC produce the devastatingly versatile HD2 and even the Nexus One in the time it’s taken Sony Ericsson to iron out bugs in a UI we suspected was too ambitious from the start. Let’s hope the final product is worth the wait, eh?
Android was tipped as the open-source OS that could finally deliver true budget netbook-style devices – we’re talking around the $100 mark, not the $200-plus – and Hivision had just the thing at CES 2010 earlier this month. Over at ARM Devices, Charbax has been reviewing the Hivision PWS700CA, a 7-inch netbook based on a 600MHz ARM926 processor that could feasibly come in under $100 to consumers.
Video review after the cut
Despite the low-power Rockchip RK2808 processor, the PWS700CA is still 720p-capable; it also has WiFi, ethernet, audio in/out, USB 2.0 and 128MB of RAM, and weighs just 650g. You probably wouldn’t want to do everyday tasks on the WVGA display, but for use out-and-about there’s plenty of appeal.
As for that ultra-bargain price, Charbax is going from past wholesale figures and doing some reasonable-sounding extrapolation. Over a year ago, Hivision was selling similar netbooks to distributors at $98 apiece (bought in bulk, obviously); if a sufficiently large order was placed, and with the impact of falling prices since then, a sub-$100 sales price isn’t unfeasible.
HTC’s 2010 smartphone roadmap may have skewed heavily toward Android, but that wasn’t to say the company were planning to abandon Windows Mobile altogether. The first clear render of the HTC Trophy – a Windows Mobile 6.5 candybar with a 3-inch VGA capacitive touchscreen and a full QWERTY keyboard – has leaked, and despite the OS it looks to have potential.
Update: Too good to be true; this isn’t HTC’s work but that of ElCondor from xda-developers; somewhere along the line his watermark has been edited out. He’s done a great job, too: compare it to the fuzzy image in the leaked roadmap. If the Trophy looks this good in real life, we’ll take one! [Thanks Sohaib!]
The Trophy is tipped to run a Qualcomm MSM7227 600MHz processor with WiFi b/g, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, dualband (900/2100) WCDMA/HSPA and quadband GSM/EDGE. There’s also a 5-megapixel autofocus camera, microSD card slot, GPS/AGPS, a g-sensor and 512MB flash/256MB RAM. Connectivity includes a 3.5mm headphone socket and microUSB port, and HTC’s TouchFLO 3D UI with People and Super Search is preloaded on top of WinMo.
Best of all, it’s a skinny little devil, measuring just 11mm thick. While Windows Mobile might not have the fashionable allure of Android or iPhone OS, there are still plenty of businesses who won’t use anything else and the Trophy could prove a reasonably slick alternative to a BlackBerry. No word on when it might launch, though with Mobile World Congress 2010 fast approaching there’s a chance we’ll see it sooner rather than later.
At this particular point, 50-something days away from the earliest iPad deliveries, we doubt too many people are up in arms about the iPad’s ability to act as a jumbo iPhone. On the other hand, if we told you you can take pretty much the entire iPad experience and distill it down to your iPhone OS device, well you’d probably care a lot more, wouldn’t you? To get that extra 3D flavor to your UI, including the fetching iBooks shelf and other iPad-specific touches, you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch, access to the Cydia app store, and the manpower to click past the break for the full instructional video. Come on, you know you want to.
We here at Engadget Mobile tend to spend a lot of way too much time poring over the latest FCC filings, be it on the net or directly on the ol’ Federal Communications Commission’s site. Since we couldn’t possibly (want to) cover all the stuff that goes down there, we’ve gathered up all the raw info you may want (but probably don’t need). Enjoy!
Animetrics Launches FaceR Celebrity in Apple App Store
PR Newswire
CONWAY, N.H., Jan. 30
CONWAY, N.H., Jan. 30 /PRNewswire/ – Animetrics, Inc., developer of next generation 3D imaging technologies for facial biometric systems, today announced that they have launched FaceR™ Celebrity in the Apple App Store, the first of its planned FaceR™ applications for the consumer marketplace connecting mobile devices to Cloud-based photographic stores. FaceR™ Celebrity Edition provides a simple and entertaining new way to use your iPhone among friends matching the iPhone user to their most similar celebrity. The elegant simplicity of the iPhone makes this application both easy to use and fun sharing the power of the iPhone amongst friends and fa…
Every indication we’ve had out of Microsoft is that Windows Mobile 7 is on track for a grand unveiling at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month, and indeed, Fox Business has none other than CFO Peter Klein on record saying as much — the closest thing we’ve had to a confirmation outside of Robbie Bach’s analyst remarks a few weeks back. At the 4:07 mark of the video, Klein says that the company is “heads down” on WinMo 7 and expects to have “much more to say” about the product out in Spain, which would mark the one-year anniversary since the announcement of 6.5 at the same venue. Considering the brutal response that last version endured over the better part of 2009, let’s hope they’re coming to the table with something much, much more delicious this time around.
Sling has given the Windows Mobile community a little love this week with the release of SlingPlayer Mobile 2.0, blessing it with a totally redesigned “sleek and intuitive” interface and a handful of new features that bring it to parity with its counterparts on other platforms. First off, the UI’s been reworked to make styli a thing of the past — everything should now be usable with a finger — and they’ve added multiple viewing modes for widescreen and zoomed content. You’ve also got support for Sling Accounts, an improved guide and DVR control, and fully-blessed streaming over both 3G and WiFi on any network. Anything running WinMo 6 or up with a touchscreen should theoretically work and it’s a free upgrade from 1.6 — only catch is that you need a Slingbox Solo, Pro, or Pro HD to use it (older models are being blocked, an annoying habit that we’ve seen with other recent SlingPlayer releases). It’s available for download now.
