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Panasonic is teasing us with a few details of the Lumix Phone, containing a 13.2 megapixel CMOS sensor and a 3.3-inch VGA LCD*. It will be the same size as the iPhone, only twice as thick, at 17.7mm.
At this point, you?re probably expecting the standard rant about tiny sensors and high pixel-counts in cellphones. I don?t think that?s what we have here, though. It seems instead that this will be a proper camera with a cellphone built-in, rather than the other way around. This could be a fantastic idea. Why?
I carry a camera with me pretty much all the time. I also carry a cellphone, but use it only a few times a week. If I could make the odd call and send an SMS from my camera once in a while, I?d be happy.
What?s more, I could upload pictures to Flickr and other services, and have my photos geotagged automatically. And because I?d be thinking of this as a phone, I wouldn?t mind charging it every night.
The specs are being slowed teased onto the Lumix Phone site, but so far we know that the camera will have a flash, a dedicated shutter button and a flash. It will also have a touch-screen. An image and full details will be published on October 5th.
Lumix Phone product page [Panasonic]
Lumix Phone press release [Panasonic]
*Camera LCDs are usually measured in dots, which is actually triple the amount of pixels. This makes the Lumix Camera?s screen an impressive 900,000-dots: 640 x 480 x 3 = 921,600. I think. My maths is quite terrible.
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1866: Sci-fi legend and determined futurist Herbert George Wells is born into the lower middle class in England. The prolific author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and many more immeasurably influential works will eventually produce an essential literary legacy that has since transcended time altogether ? while terrorizing minds with debilitating narratives of alien invasions, human-animal hybrids, nuclear apocalypse and worse.
Visionary H.G. Wells was raised by his Protestant mother Sarah Neal, who worked as a domestic servant, and his free-thinking shopkeeper father Joseph Wells, who actually made most of his money as a semi-pro cricketer. The family?s delicate financial situation was upended when Joseph fractured his thigh in 1877, and his sons were booted out of private schools and forced into apprenticeships.
The social demotion depressed Wells, who had broken his own leg in 1874 and spent the downtime getting lost in books procured for him at the local library. Somehow, the lover of literature?s endless scope couldn?t imagine himself as a draper or a chemist. That class stratification went on to influence the social novels of his middle period, like Kipps ? about a dead-end draper who suddenly comes into money.
The literary wish-fantasies of the bookworm Wells were destined for more galactic accomplishments. And once he finally secured a position as a student teacher after begging for release from his apprenticeships, his imaginative career took off.
He won a scholarship to London?s awesomely named Normal School of Science, which now has the more boring name Royal College of Science. He studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed ?Darwin?s Bulldog? for his evolutionary evangelism. (His grandson Aldous Huxley?s dystopian 1932 sci-fi classic Brave New World would compete with Wells? own predictive 1910 novel When the Sleeper Wakes for generations of readers.) By 1890, Wells finally had his B.S. in Zoology and a brilliant future as a cultural and creative prophet ahead of him.
Wells hit the literary mother lode on his first try in 1895, banging out the 32,000-word novella The Time Machine and forever popularizing the concept of time travel in popular culture and science. In fact, Wells himself became synonymous with it, skipping across centuries as a character in films like Time After Time and television shows like Lois & Clark and Dr. Who.
By the time the turn of the century arrived, Wells had eternally sequenced the cultural genes of mad scientists (The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man), dystopian social engineering (When the Sleeper Wakes), and alien invasion and total war (The War of the Worlds), all before turning 35.
Once the 20th century detonated, Wells? ceaselessly hungry mind churned out novels and treatises on political unity (A Modern Utopia), suffragettes (Ann Veronica), geopolitical conflict (The War in the Air), technology (The World Set Free) and even corny romance (The Passionate Friends). By a rough count, he averaged well over two books a year, some fiction and some nonfiction.
He was also highly productive in his love life, having multiple affairs with women like birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and writers Rebecca West, Elizabeth Van Arnim, Amber Reeves and others, some of whom bore him heirs to the sci-fi throne.
Wells also bore strange accidental fruit that changed the world in other ways. Robert H. Goddard, who invented the first fuel rocket and thereby the Space Age, was deeply inspired after reading The War of the Worlds at 16. Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction after reading about the then-fictional atomic bombs theorized in Wells? The World Set Free.
Wells? conception of a polymath utopia that renders Christianity obsolete in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come ? which also predicted the outbreak of World War II, give or take a year ? so pissed off crusty moralist C.S. Lewis that he caricatured Wells in his less-interesting sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength. But Lewis never had a chance: Along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, Wells is now widely regarded as a father of science fiction, while Lewis is still lost in a wardrobe with lions and witches.
There is simply not enough time (that word again) ? nor words, really ? to fully explicate Wells? tectonic impact on culture, entertainment and science as we know it, and will know it. A year after the end of World War II, Wells died of unknown causes in the very London that helped him make his name.
His suggested epitaph in The War in the Air read: ?I told you so. You damned fools.? He was right.
Source: Various
Photo: via Wikipedia
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1920: The Joseph Horne department store in Pittsburgh advertises ready-made radio receivers that can pick up a local broadcast station. Commercial radio is just weeks away.
Frank Conrad was assistant chief engineer of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh. He?d been interested in radio since 1912. To settle a $5 bet (around $110 in today?s money) about the accuracy of his $12 watch, Conrad built a radio receiver to hear the time signals transmitted by the U.S. Naval Observatory.
Conrad won the bet, but that?s not the point. Notice that he had to build his own receiver. Just like the days of home-brew computers later in the 20th century, that?s what aficionados of the emerging technology had to do in those days.
If you didn?t want to start from scratch, you could ? and this, too, should sound familiar ? buy a kit with all the parts and all the instructions. They were advertised in magazines that appealed primarily to ? guys. Science magazines, the Boy Scout Handbook, cheap fiction, detective rags, and the kind of stuff you?d find in the barber shop.
In any case, Conrad was on to bigger things than building a receiver. Like building a transmitter. Under license 8XK, he started broadcasting from the second floor of his garage in nearby Wilkinsburg in 1916.
In fact, Conrad was a pioneer in using the word broadcasting. It was borrowed from agriculture, where it means spreading seeds far and wide. Radio in those days was conceived mainly as a two-way point-to-point medium. The idea of using one radio transmitter to reach a broad audience equipped only with receivers was something new.
Conrad tested and tweaked his equipment for hours on end in his spare time. But his voice got tired of making constant announcements of his call letters and location, so he started playing gramophone records to give it a rest.
Sure enough, those with their own transmitters started radioing requests for specific music. Those who had only their own scratchy receivers phoned or wrote in. Conrad was radio?s first DJ, and he was building an audience.
Horne?s department store had something new in 1920: the first shipment of ready-to-use radio receivers. Nothing to build, just plug-and-play. The store placed an advertisement in the Pittsburgh Sun heralding the miracle that you could listen to music over the air:
Air concert picked up by radio here. The music was from a Victrola in the home of Frank Conrad. Mr. Conrad is a wireless enthusiast and puts on these wireless concerts periodically for the entertainment of many people in this district who have wireless sets. Amateur wireless sets are on sale here $10 and up.
The signal was building a demand for the hardware. The hardware was marketing itself with the signal.
Harry Davis, Conrad?s boss at Westinghouse, saw some big commercial possibilities in broadcasting. With Conrad?s consent, Davis applied for a commercial license to supplant 8XK and was assigned the arbitrary call letters KDKA in mid-October.
The new station went on the air Nov. 2, just in time to broadcast the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election over its mighty 100-watt transmitter.
In 1922, 30 radio stations were in operation in the United States, and 100,000 consumer radios were sold. Just a year later, 556 stations were on the air and half-a-million receivers were sold.
Radio was on its way, and the commercial broadcast model would reign essentially unchallenged for eight decades until the advent of satellite radio and podcasts.
Source: NPR, KDKA
Photo: Listening to radio was a new experience in the early 1920s, and boys were ardent enthusiasts of the emerging technology.
Bettmann/Corbis
This article first appeared on Wired.com Sept. 29, 2008.
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When I saw this Raytheon XOS 2 suit, I immediately thought of the scene in Iron Man 2 where a poor ?volunteer? soldier is almost broken in two, his body snapped and wrung by an experimental exoskeleton he is wearing. So you can see how surprised I was to see Agent Phil Coulson from Iron Man wearing it in this YouTube video.
The XOS 2 is an upgrade to the original XOS built for military use by contractor Raytheon. It is lighter, faster and uses half the power of the XOS, and ? according to one of the uninjured test-soldiers ? lets you press 200-pounds or do pushups with 150-pounds on your back without even feeling it. Check this thing out:
While the suit is clearly perfect for fighting, when it makes it into service in five years it will be used just like Ripley?s power-loader in the movie Aliens. A tethered, full-body XOS would be used for loading weapons and supplies (and, of course, fighting Alien queens in airlocks). A pants- only version, encircling legs and waist, could be used in the field to help troops carry heavy loads.
After seeing that soldier twisted like a pretzel in Iron Man 2, I have had an irrational fear of exoskeletons. But I?d love to take this one out for a spin. Imagine doing sports with this thing: you?d slug every ball out over the stadium walls.
For more on exoskeletons in the military in general, and suspiciously timely celebrity appearances in particular, check out the coverage over at our sister blog Danger Room.
Raytheon Unveils 2nd Generation Exoskeleton Robotic Suit [Raytheon]
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Updated at 5:30 p.m. Eastern to add comment from K-NFB.
This week, K-NFB, an e-reading company founded by Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation for the Blind, launched its much-anticipated Blio reading app and e-book store. Blio was immediately and widely panned by publishers, developers and readers.
?Many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility,? wrote Laura Dawson, a digital reading industry consultant, formerly of BarnesAndNoble.com. K-NFB initially promised to make e-books more accessible to blind readers; yet Windows, currently its only enhanced books platform, has known text-to-speech conversion issues.
K-NFB and Kurzweil responded by saying the software had been released before a fully-accessible version was ready, and that they plan to release an improved version next week.
?People understandably have very high expectations,? Kurzweil said in an interview with Wired.com Thursday. ?We believe Blio is very usable and has many features other book formats don?t. And there are many features that we want to add.?
In addition to bug fixes and other tweaks, an accessibility release scheduled for October 25 will work with Freedom Scientific?s JAWS, screen reader software for Windows specifically tailored for blind users. The 1.0 version released Tuesday relied on Windows? built-in text-to-speech capabilities.
K-NFB spokesperson Peter Chapman acknowledged the problems with Blio?s text-to-speech in an interview with Publishers Weekly, but blamed the platform, not the books: ?the TTS software on most Windows machines isn?t very good.? Yet many Windows XP users were unable to even install Blio?s software. (This has since been resolved.)
K-NFB also confirmed that an iOS 4 version for iPhone and iPod Touch is currently in private beta, and that an iPad version will shortly follow the iPhone, probably sometime after November?s release of iOS 4.2. Android and Mac OS X versions are also in development.
Users weren?t the only ones frustrated with Blio. Hadrien Gardeur, founder and CEO of free e-books site FeedBooks, complained on Twitter that Blio was offering downloads from FeedBooks? catalog without permission: ?Hey Blio, next time that you add our OPDS [Open Publishing Distribution System] catalog to a commercial product, send us an e-mail first.?
In a follow-up e-mail, Gardeur noted that FeedBooks only allows other systems to include their catalog under the following conditions:
For these reasons, Gardeur asked Blio not to include FeedBooks? content in its initial launch; according to Gardeur, K-NFB went ahead and included part of Feedbooks? OPDS catalog anyways. Since FeedBooks has a planned system update forthcoming, it will most likely break Blio?s access to the catalog.
Kurzweil stated Thursday that K-NFB was continuing to work with Feedbooks and other free book providers; he credited the dispute over Blio?s use of their feeds to a miscommunication.
Finally, as we noted earlier this week, Toshiba launched its own branded version of the Blio application, store and e-book catalog called Toshiba Book Place. Toshiba is offering 6,000 titles at launch; Blio 11,000. This puts Blio at a distinct disadvantage against the 700,000 e-books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers for sale from Amazon and Barnes & Noble?s library of over 1,000,000 e-books.
It?s not precisely clear why there?s a gap in the number of books offered by Toshiba and Blio. But the brand and store fragmentation is another confusing component of a deeply confusing product launch. It?s especially troubling for those who have been hoping for serious innovation in making e-readers accessible to users of all abilities.
Image via Blio.com
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