Mobility Watch

device boasts approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes of charge time, projects and image anywhere from six ro sixty-three inches, and features a 0.5W (mono) speaker. In case this particular handset isn’t on your short list, the proj is also compatible with AU S001, VA001, H001, W63CA, W63H, W62CA and W62H series phones.

PC Authority reminds you about 5 things you need to know:

Guerilla cinema
Pico projectors are the ideal way to unleash the video on your PMP or iPod. Just plug it in, make sure you’re in a dark room and you can be watching those once shackled videos with a 50in picture. Not quite SIM2 quality, but great if you’ve got something to show a group of mates.

They’re tiny
While the LG HS102 and Acer K10 might call themselves pico projectors, they’re not nearly as slimline as their rivals. The RXS Redshift PPR4803 comes in at just 115×50x23mm, its rival the 3M MPro11 measuring the exact same size. That means that if you love baggy jeans, they’ll fit snug in your pocket.

You don’t always need an external source
The Aiptek V10 comes packing 1GB of internal memory, plus SD support, meaning you can fling footage wherever you are without having to slap in a PMP or laptop. That means you can start having those impromptu screenings without the need to lug around extra gear.

They’re for TV, not movies
While Optoma’s dinky PK 101 has a battery life of around two hours, pico projectors are not designed for watching 50s Biblical epics. Think short, arty movies, low–rent music videos and a couple of episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and you’re on the right track.

They’re not the brightest in the box
Light is definitely an issue with pico projectors. If you’re not in a virtually pitch black room, then getting a crisp image can be a real pain. The Aiptek V10 is where it’s at if you’re after a decent effort, seeing as it doesn’t need to be as dark as your local Odeon to get a crisp and bright picture.

From Engadget: company has just launched the well rounded RoadMate 1470 on Amazon, which packs a 4.7-inch touchscreen, NAVTEQ maps of the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, multi-destination routing, highway lane assist, spoken street names, AAA TourBook and a Roadside Assistance menu. Motorists looking for live traffic updates can plug in the optional Traffic Link device, but those kosher with doing things the old way can procure just the PND right now for $229.99.

The Magellan RoadMate 1470 GPS device boasts a unique 4.7-inch color touchscreen and ultra-thin design, delivering powerful navigation in a compact package. This easy-to-use device gives you confidence while on the road with premium features, including AAA TourBook, highway lane assist, spoken street names, multi-destination routing, and pre-loaded maps of North America.

Powerful navigation in a compact package. Click to enlarge.

The exclusive Magellan OneTouch personalized search icons let you easily bookmark favorite destinations so you can find them anywhere you travel. Find your favorite café or restaurant in any city with a single touch. The RoadMate 1470 device delivers your favorites at your fingertips. Features include:

Ability to personalize OneTouch search icons with your favorite places
Announces street names and directions at each turn
Ultra-wide 4.7-inch touchscreen display
AAA TourBook and Roadside Assistance menu
Permits multi-destination routing
Maps of United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico
4.7-Inch Color Touchscreen
The large wide-format color touchscreen shows your position on the map, route, destination, ETA, surrounding Points of Interest (POI), signal strength, next maneuver, street names, and more–all at a glance.

6 million Points of Interest
Easily find what you need. Gas stations, restaurants, hotels, ATMs, and hundreds of other businesses and services are intuitively categorized and searchable from the built-in POI database. Most include the phone number.

Garmin® Gives Fitness a Facelift with Forerunner® 310XT, the Waterproof Multi-Sport Watch with Longer Battery Life

The swimmable Forerunner 310XT is waterproof to a depth of 50 meters, so you can wear it in the pool or the lake to time your swim. And its slim design, simple interface and flexible wristband mean Forerunner is easy to wear in any conditions. When you’re ready to jump out of the water and onto the bike, Forerunner 310XT moves easily from wrist to bike with the optional quick release and bike mounts, making the transition between sports effortless. Forerunner 310XT categorizes multisport activities in one workout and can also log transition time in the process, so you can analyze your performance from start to finish. And the extended battery life – up to 20 hours – means that endurance athletes can push themselves farther than ever.

Positioned around the large, vivid display, intuitive buttons provide a simple interface without sacrificing space on the customizable data screens. And even in the loudest gym or largest crowd, users won’t miss their milestones as Forerunner 310XT’s audible signals and/or vibration alerts tell them when they’ve reached integral parts of their race or workout.

Garmin® Makes Every Calorie Count with New Forerunner® 405CX

Using algorithms developed by exercise scientists and world-class athletes, Forerunner 405CX monitors the micro changes in a user’s heart rate and uses that detailed information to better calculate the number of calories burned during aerobic activity. Whether out running, on a bike, in step class or on a hike, Forerunner 405CX users will get instant gratification as they see the results of their hard work. And those workouts will be more comfortable than ever, as users will have the choice of two additional form-fitting bands to accommodate large and small wrists alike. At only 60 grams and available in a new deep blue color, Forerunner 405CX fits in at the gym or around the office.

In developing the Forerunner 405CX and its heart rate-based calorie computation, Garmin worked with Firstbeat Technologies Ltd., a technology company based in Finland. Firstbeat is an industry leader in heart rate analysis, specializing in developing user-centered software solutions for heart beat signal analysis in exercise and sports, weight management, and stress monitoring applications.

Used mainly by tactical assault groups and SWAT teams, throat microphones are something you rarely see on the street. This will change now with Sanwa’s latest hands free system, a Japanese phone design based on a military throat microphone.

It might not be used all the time, but if you work in a noisy environment it could greatly improve a phone conversation.

From Engadget:

Throat mics have been around for decades. However, unless you’re manning a tank or involved in black ops, you’ve likely never seen such a set beyond the reach of a typical paintball turret. Sanwa’s throat mic (pictured) is an urban take to the otherwise, combat-inspired gear design you’ll find at retail. Unfortunately, we can’t find any additional detail beyond the images. We can, however, drop in a hardcore video of the $50-ish US Special Forces Throat Mic (as it’s called) from Real Action Paintball. This rugged mic with voice-box positioned transducer is compatible with VOX-capable radios and features four styles of discrete listening devices (special forces, secret service, SWAT, and Socom) and a remote push-to-talk (PTT) switch that can be strapped to the index finger supporting your sniper rifle.

Gizmodo states Sanwa’s hands-free throat mic looks like a military headset, but it’s made for use with your cellphone.

This is a great take off of mic’s for cell phones. I wonder what the quality is, if the volume is adjustable, does it take out surrounding noise? Could not find technical specifications for Sanwa’s Throat Mic, so if anyone has them, feel free to share.

To mark St Patrick’s Day, Faith Central has compiled 10 celebratory tidbits, some myth, some fact, on the Patron Saint of the Irish.

1. The potato crop was traditionally planted in Ireland after March 17

2. Blue not green is the color originally associated with St Patrick. “St Patrick’s Blue” is used on Ireland’s Presidential Standard or flag, while the Irish Guards sport a plume of St Patrick’s blue in their bearskins. The emphasis on green is thought to be linked to “wearing the Green”, a symbol from the 18th century on, of sympathy with Irish independence.

3. St Patrick is patron of fishermen in the Loire, where a legend associates him with a blackthorn bush. The saint is said to have slept beneath it, and when he awoke the next day, Christmas, the bush flowered, and was said to have continued to do so every Christmas until its destruction during the First World War.

4. A regiment of the Mexican army in the 1846 -8 War between Mexico and America was named after St Patrick. Members of the Batellón de San Patricio included Afro-Americans freshly liberated from the slave plantations of the South, and the soldiers were granted Mexican citizenship afterwards.

5. The first St Patrick’s Day parade took place in 1737 in Boston, followed in 1762 by New York. George Washington allowed his soldiers a holiday on March 17, 1780 as “an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”

6. Until the 1970’s, all pubs were shut in Ireland on St Patrick’s Day, and the sole venue selling drink the annual dog show. Lenten fasting – and the obligation to abstain from meat – were lifted on the day, which most families would begin with Mass.

7. St Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in Ireland and also in Monserrat “the Emerald Isle of the Carribean,” so called because it was settled in 1633 by Irish migrants from St Kitts.

8. According to legend, on the day of Judgement, while Christ judges all other nations, St Patrick will be the judge of the Irish.

9. Since 1962, tons of green dye are tipped on St Patrick’s Day into the Chicago river, although the quantity has reduced, for environmental reasons, from 100 to 40.

10. Should you wish to carry on celebrating St Patrick after March 17, in the United States, you might visit the four Shamrocks in the USA including Mount Gay-Shamrock, W.Va or the nine cities named Dublin, including Dublin, Ohio (the largest Dublin in the U.S.) and Dublin, Georgia.

From Yahoo Tech:

Batteries are both the unheralded worker bees and the fatal flaw in every mobile technology product produced today. We can’t do anything without them, but batteries are almost always the reason we can’t do more than plugged-in technology would otherwise allow.

While research has yielded few new advances in squeezing higher capacity into existing battery form factors, there’s one spot of good news on the horizon: Technology that would dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to recharge a battery.

The technology is an update to traditional lithium-ion energy storage and involves using a special iron and phosphorus mix within the battery cell structure which allows the lithium ions to move in and out of storage within the lithium compound much faster than normal.

It’s been part of battery theory for many years, but only recently does it seem that anyone is actually thinking of putting the technology to practical use. But the results, wow, they speak for themselves: With this design in place, you could charge a 1Wh cell phone battery in just 10 seconds — or an entire electric car in about five minutes.

And that, it turns out, creates a whole new problem: Charging your cell phone that fast would draw 360 watts of power. Fine if it’s just one, but not so great for the power grid if everyone on the block plugs in simultaneously. The real problem comes with larger devices: That electric car would pull 180,000 watts, which would pretty much send your electric meter into immediate and complete meltdown.

There’s been a little bit of buzz at CES here about the Iriver Wave Home, which marries a networked mulitmedia device with a communications hub to form a kitchen/home office-friendly gadget.

A 7-inch 800×480 touch screen is built into the unit along with a detachable wireless handset and speakerphone for VoIP calls (you can make calls from the phone or an onscreen virtual keypad and the device supports video calls as well). You can access the Web, photos, music, and videos, and there’s an FM radio that Iriver says can be “enjoyed through Wave Home’s built-in, high-quality stereo speakers.”

“High quality” might be stretching it a bit, but you get the picture: the thing is basically a digital photo frame on steroids, complete with a 1.3-megapixel CMOS camera. Additional features include an Ethernet jack, SD card slot, USB connectivity, and support for digipen input.

Iriver is also touting the device’s intelligent Widget, which “provides instant weather, stock and traffic updates, as well as Web and multimedia services that users can enjoy without a computer since the device is connected to broadband internet.” Wave Home also supports Flash-based games and you can send and receive SMS and MMS texts.

What’s missing? An iPod dock. My God, what were these people thinking?

I’m kidding. Well, sort of. Anyway, there’s no definitive word on pricing or availability, but Iriver is allegedly trying to keep the cost below $400.

wired had this to say:

Like the Chumby, it’s perforated with the usual SD, Ethernet, and USB ports, but this one comes with a 1.3-megapixel CMOS camera. The picture quality of the cam, however, will probably look dated by the end of the year.

When we reviewed the Chumby, we noted that the best part about it was the quality of the streams from internet radio and when music played from our iPod, and part of that was due to its quality speakers. The iRiver is also touting the Wave Home’s speakers as one its integral parts – if they doesn’t work just as good, expect a lot of disappointed ears in the G-Lab when it comes in for a review.

Device could give people with ALS the ability to perform simple functions

Eric Bland from Discovery first reported this recently. What a boon for people who use wheelchairs.

A wheelchair-mounted robotic arm controlled by thought alone has been created by scientists at the University of South Florida.

The device could give people with amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or full body paralysis the ability to perform simple day to day functions that would otherwise be impossible.

“We aren’t reading people’s thoughts,” said Redwan Alqasemi, a scientist at the University of South Florida who, along with Rajiv Dubey and Emanuel Donchin of USF, helped develop the software and hardware. “This is the first time a person with severe disabilities like ALS can perform daily activities for themselves.”

In this case, the scientists monitor a particular brain wave called P300, so-called because it lasts about one-third of a second. Reading P300 waves is basically like reading a person’s thoughts, but only in the most coarse kind of way.

Reading P300 brain waves is a good system, argues Walpaw, because it doesn’t take a lot of practice to train the brain. With only one WMRA built so far and no current plans to commercialize the design, not many people will get the chance for their brain to learn the new skill. But when commercial models appear in several years, even slow brain computer interfaces could make the impossible, possible.

“It would allow patients with severe disabilities the ability to control their own environment and have some form of independent mobility,” said William Heetderks, Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. “It would be very valuable to these individuals.”

Google is now offering FREE Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync syncronization for Calendars and Contacts. Mail is not currently supported. iPhone, Windows Mobile, and other various phones are supported.

Google tech specs on their Active Sync:

Features
Synchronize your contacts. Get your Google contacts quickly and easily to your phone. With Sync, you can have access to your address book at anytime and place that you need it.

Get calendar alerts. Using your phone’s native calendar, you can now access your Google calendar, and be alerted for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration.

Always in sync. Your contacts stay synchronized whether you access them from your phone or from your computer. Add or edit contact information right on your device or on your Google account on the web.

Note for iPhone users: During Sync setup, the iPhone will delete your contacts and calendar information. Please back up your data
Your relationship with Google

1.1 Your use of Google’s products, software, services and web sites (referred to collectively as the “Services” in this document and excluding any services provided to you by Google under a separate written agreement) is subject to the terms of a legal agreement between you and Google. “Google” means Google Inc., whose principal place of business is at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States. This document explains how the agreement is made up, and sets out some of the terms of that agreement.

Google has subsidiaries and affiliated legal entities around the world (“Subsidiaries and Affiliates”). Sometimes, these companies will be providing the Services to you on behalf of Google itself. You acknowledge and agree that Subsidiaries and Affiliates will be entitled to provide the Services to you.

When Windows 7 is released later this year or in early 2010, many PC users who upgrade will be coming from Windows XP. Unlike Vista users, they can’t do an “in-place upgrade,” in which the new OS overwrites the old one, preserving their installed applications, preferences, and data. Instead, they’ll have to do a clean install, which means they have to back up their data, install Win 7 (either deleting or XP or installing as a separate environment), reinstall their apps, restore their data, and re-create their preferences.

For Windows XP users who avoided Vista because of its many problems, that upgrade work may seem as adding insult to injury, making it harder for them to finally adopt a new version of Windows. Through its PR agency, Microsoft confirms to InfoWorld that there will be no “in-place upgrade” option for XP users, but it declines to explain why not. “More materials on your question are in the works,” the spokesman says.

Why a clean-install requirement may make sense
But there may be good reason not to support an in-place upgrade, suggests Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst who follows Microsoft technologies. That’s because viruses, registry errors, and other performance-sapping flaws in the user’s Windows environment would be carried over into Windows 7; something that would not happen with a clean install.

Business IT typically does clean installs on user systems to avoid these issues, Silver notes, so the lack of an in-place upgrade will be a nonissue for most enterprises.

Consumers and small businesses are the ones who tend to prefer the in-place upgrade option, Silver notes, and they’re the ones who may be annoyed by the clean-install requirement if coming from XP. “Microsoft is in a bit of a no-win situation here: Support the upgrade and live with whatever bad experiences users have or don???t support the upgrade and make it harder for people to do it,” Silver says.

Doesn’t get more mobile than this!

Poor lil Rovers…They’ve been having the Devil’s own time the past year or so. Thats to be expected, as they’ve produced far beyond their time limit.

They’ve manged to make it to the five-year mark despite a few considerable bumps in the road, but it looks like one of the Mars rovers has once again hit a snag, and NASA is now furiously trying to sort out the problem. Apparently, the issue first arose earlier this week when Spirit reported that it had received its driving commands but didn’t move. Things were then further complicated later in the day when Spirit failed to record its daily activities, and it seems to have been all downhill since, with the rover unable to even locate the sun in order to reorient itself. What’s more, while they’re still trying to run some diagnostics to pinpoint the problem, NASA engineers say that the troubles could possibly be caused by cosmic rays hitting the rover.

Tuesday January 20th
Watch President-elect Barack Obama become the next President of the United States on CNN.com Live. Update your own Facebook status and see status updates from your friends and other Facebook users on CNN.com Live.

Don’t miss out!

Add me on Facebook, Brick ONeil, as we watch this historic day when our Nation Inaugurates our first African American/Black President! What a proud day for the United States, and indeed, the World.

Remember where you were when America’s first chosen African American President was sworn in to bring America back! The entire world waits in eager anticipation, seeing President Elect Obama as the one person who can bring everyone together. What will his first actions, as President, be? How will world leaders welcome him? TIme will tell.

Enjoy history in the making.