Author: Nic Boerma

ALL the little app called “Mirror” did was turn the green screen of the PalmV black, giving it enough reflectiveness to function as a mirror. It was 1999. here were many other clever “third-party apps”, as the computer industry called them at the time, but this very simple one demonstrated the innovative ware appearing on those small personal digital assistants. There were others that let you read Microsoft Word documents, or functioned as basic e-readers. When Mark Shuttleworth went into space, he used a Palm with a special app written by a South African company for his task management. It…

The company that was once called Apple Computers, which gave the world the personal computer, this week unveiled “the poster-child of the post-PC world”. Launching the “new iPad” as it’s being called, although we’ll think of it as the iPad 3, this week new CEO Tim Cook was full of hyperbole and statistics. He poured scorn on Apple’s many competitors, starting with other tablet makers – who made 100 last year alone, he said – while triumphing the iPad in San Francisco. He made an eloquent case for this “post-PC era” first mentioned by the late Steve Jobs. With PC…

DARPA have released footage of a legged robot that has broken the land-speed record for legged robots. The video shows the robotic quadruped, which has been dubbed the ‘Cheetah’, running on a treadmill that eventually attains a speed of 18 miles per hour (29km per hour), breaking the previous record of 13.1 miles per hour. The robot is based on the movements of real animals and has the ability to flex its spine, allowing it to increase or decrease speed. The Cheetah forms part of DARPA’s Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program and is intended to be used for unspecified…

The maximum size for Android apps will be taking one giant leap for mobile-kind according to an announcement on the Android Developers blog. Apps have previously been limited to a paltry 50MB, which is fine for conventional app downloads, but Google have opted to increase the file size ceiling to 4GB allow for other application types like 3D interactive games. The APK file that apps use will still be limited to 50MB but up to two 2GB expansion files (or smaller) can be attached to the primary APK, allowing for far more content per app. The Android Market will reflect…

Google and Motorola Mobility Holdings have been ordered to hand a hefty chunk of data over to Apple in a recent court judgement, including data pertaining to Android as well as information regarding Google’s $12.5 billion pending purchase of Motorola Mobility. Judge Richard A. Posner ruled that Google and Motorola Mobility had to turn over information regarding the development of the Android operating system to Apple as part of the ongoing patent infringement case being fought between Motorola and Apple. Back-to-back trials are set to start on 11 June this year. The first trial will attempt to determine whether Motorola…

Deutsche Telekom has successfully tested a a 512Gbps transmission over a single optical-fiber wavelength channel over a distance of 734km. The transmission was sent from Berlin to Hanover and back and, while Deutsche Telekom says that higher speeds are possible in a laboratory, this real-world test “…corresponds to a usable bit rate of 400 Gbit/s, or the simultaneous transmission of 77 music CDs.” “This tremendous transmission performance was reached using innovative transmission technology with two carrier frequencies, two polarization planes, 16-QAM quadrature amplitude modulation and digital offline signal processing for the equalization of fiber influences with soft-FEC forward error correction…

Comic book heavyweight Marvel has opted to plunge all the way onto Apple’s iBookstore and has released more than 80 graphic novels for sale. Marvel already has a dedicated iOS application that focuses on single issue releases but the recently-announced foray onto the iBookstore will collections being bundled into single editions covering everything from Amazing Spider-Man Masterworks Vol. 1 to X-Necrosha as far as the initial offerings go. Marvel will be releasing additional content on a weekly basis but have released The New Avengers #1 free for a limited time to promote the new venture. The graphic novels are available…

The innocuous little device on the right is a company’s worst nightmare, unless they have sanctioned its use with their network. Called the Pwn Plug, created by a company called Pwnie Express, this innocent-looking contraption plugs into a network and is pre-loaded with an array of hacking tools that are intended to allow access to the network infrastructure. The Pwn Plug is designed for use in remote testing network security and the company that makes it counts Fortune 50 companies and the US Department of Defense among their clients. The drop-box can be easily inserted into a network, allowing an…

Mercedes Benz have used a series of LED mats and cameras to render one of their new F-Cell hydrogen-powered vehicles somewhat invisible. This isn’t a new feature of the vehicles but was aimed at promoting their new zero-emissions car that is “invisible to the environment.” The motor vehicle company used the crude form of optical camouflage to confuse some pedestrians and to call attention to the new car, which is based on the Mercedes B-Cell. The publicity stunt saw one side of the car draped in mats consisting of LEDs that reflected images from the other side of the vehicle,…

Asus is hoping that they will be the first to offer Android 5.0 on their devices. The company believes that their relationship with Google will allow them to be first out the gate with Android Jelly Bean. Asus’ Benson Lin told TechRadar, “Asus is very close to Google, so once they have Android 5.0 I think there will be a high possibility that we will be the first wave to offer the Jelly Bean update.” Asus was the first company to ship tablets with Honeycomb and was also the first to provide updates to Android Ice Cream Sandwich for their…