The Red Ferret Journal

The good folk at Peratech have just signed a $1.4 million deal with Nissha, ‘one of the world’s largest manufacturers of touch screen technology’, to license Peratech QTC force sensitive technology in small touchscreens.

If the tech takes off we could see a raft of new phones with pressure sensitive touchscreens, offering new features such as pressure sensitive artistic capabilities on a cell phone, faster scrolling with increased finger pressure or audio loudness control based on the pressure exerted on the screen. 

The trick is done using a screen printed overlay, which is around 75 microns thick, which lowers resistance and passes more current the harder it is pressed. Cool stuff all right.

 With QTC, touch screens can be made feature rich and ultra-thin allowing for the development of even slimmer, lighter weight and lower-power portable devices. Takao Hashimoto, Director, CTO of Nissha and General Manager of Technology Research & Development, added, “QTC will be a disruptive technology for mobile phones enabling thinner phones to be designed with amazing new input interfaces.”

Data Crow is a cross platform freeware database program which is primarily being pitched as a media catalog manager, but which can clearly do much more. The program is Java based, which has its good and bad points – while it should run on any hardware that supports Java, it can also feel a little sluggish in operation, even with an empty database.

The main section deals with managing your collection of anything from movies to music, books and photos. You can also set it up to catalog people (a la CRM software) and software, in fact just about anything that can be grouped together in collections. To say it’s full featured is a bit of an understatement, and in fact using the beginner’s mode is essential to avoid being overwhelmed by the interface.

There’s a full set of import and export functions, which is essential of course, and a very neat feature whereby you can access online services in order to populate your database quickly and easily. For example, select this for movies and you’ll access the Amazon database and be able to select and import movies complete with cover art, detailed descriptions etc. It’s a huge time saver if you’ve got a big collection to set up.

The web server is also a very cool feature, as it instantly and very easily allows you to access your data from any web browser. Just enter in your computer’s IP address and the port you’ve selected and log in. Great for remote access. It’s also useful if you’re a habitual lender of media (or renter?) as there’s a sophisticated loan manager built in to the software, which makes it a cinch to run a library system of any or all of your stuff.

All in all this is a great program, although I’m a little worried that the performance hit on a fully populated database could be a problem. Definitely worth downloading though, especially if you have a desire to put your collection to work in any meaningful way. Neat.

 Data Crow is the ultimate media cataloger and media organiser. Always wanted to manage all your collections in one product? You want a product you can customize to your needs? Your search ends here! Using Data Crow allows you to create a huge database containing all your collected items. You can use the excellent online services to retrieve the information instead of typing all the information yourself.

This BBC report on scientists communicating with brain damaged patients directly via the brain is absolutely astonishing. Apparently the boffins can now recognise patterns of thoughts and treat them as answers to questions using an MRI brain scanner. Stick a patient who is apparently in a vegetative state (i.e. completely non responsive) into a scanner, and you can ask them questions and receive answers based on what they’re thinking about.

Watch the video, it’s mind-blowing. It reminds me of that amazing film where those patients who were severely non-communicative were given some concoction and started to come alive again. Freaky stuff. More here from New Scientist.

 Awareness was detected in three other patients previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. The study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that scans can detect signs of awareness in patients thought to be closed off from the world. Patients in a vegetative state are awake, not in a coma, but have no awareness because of severe brain damage.

Can I say how much I laughed at this DIY USB Hard Drive? Rip the innards out of handy dead hard drive, replace with multiple flash memory drives and presto, you’ve got an icon of the eighties. Or something. Me want.

Sometimes only a printed photo will do. Like you’re at a wedding and Aunt Maude asks you to send her a shot of little Lucy in her bridesmaid outfit. You know you’ll never get round to it, but if you owned this Zink Pandigital Portable Photo Printer you could whip it out of your pocket with a flourish and do the deed there and then. Future guilt banished, problem solved.

The thing produces a 6 x 4 inch image in around a minute, accepts most common digicam memory cards and the prints are waterproof, tearproof and fade resistant. Which is probably more than you can say for Aunt Maude. $149.95. More here.

 You can print directly from your camera’s memory card; its memory card slot supports SD, MS, MS-Pro, MMC, and XD card formats. The 1 1/2″ LCD and simple navigation buttons allow you to preview images before printing. It can also plug into a computer via USB for printing images. The thermal printer generates pictures with vibrant colors, thanks to patented composite paper embedded with yellow, magenta, and cyan dye crystals, eliminating the bother of ink cartridges.

Lots of talk currently doing the rounds about a mythical ‘Nirvana Phone’, which is basically the marriage of a mobile phone with thin client and wireless technology . The idea is you do away with laptops, and replace the whole computing thing with a phone hooked up to a Bluetooth keyboard and large screen.

Make no mistake, this IS the future of computing. Now that we’re starting to see cell phones with the processing power needed for the task, it’s inevitable that this idea will take off massively once the economics can be worked out. By that I mean, it all needs to fit together in an affordable package which offers the same kind of utility as a laptop does today. We’re not far off.

When you think about it most people already use their smartphone for the major part of their work needs – email, voice communication and a bit of search browsing. Once the online web app market matures a little (i.e. works reliably) and 3G wireless delivers the soon to launch 40 Mbps everywhere type speeds we’ll start to see new phone computers everywhere. Will they be Citrix/PC thin client type devices? I doubt it. More likely Google will take the lead since it understands the Web-machine interface better than most companies on the planet. And with Android it is learning fast about the needs of the new generation computing platform.

Watch this stuff, it’s going to explode over the next few years.

The Solar powered Charger Case is a mobile charger for a variety of your favorite “toys”, including cell phones, MP3 players and compact digital cameras. With its built in 2500 mAh lithium battery to store absorbed solar energy, it has a back-up AC charger for those periodic overcast days. With its cushy padding, this small blue bag is a great way to protect and charge all those necessary tech gadgets, and portable enough for camping, bicycling or business trips.

You can charge up in one-hour and get up to 100 minutes of cell phone talk time. The case includes a USB cable, a connector to hook into an outlet and 10 different adapters for mobile phones. For $32.99 plus shipping, this is one solar charger worth having.

The solar mobil charger is the device of transferring the sun light power into electrical power,the solar panel transfer the sun energy into electrical energy which is stored in the built in 2500mAh lithium battery,the stored power is then exported to mobile phone,digital camera,mp3,mp4 and other digital products,the AC charge is designed for continual overcast days when there is no sunlight

Tags: gadget, eco+gadget, solar+powered+charger+case

The Red Ferret Product of the Year for 2009 has in some ways been a fairly easy pick. The Google Android operating system platform has literally punched its way out of nowhere into the public consciousness, helped of course by the massive public awareness of the search engine colossus itself.

But what interests us more than just the marketing glam of front row products like the Motorola Droid and Nexus One, is the potential for the platform to really revolutionise the way we consume, process and transmit information around the world. It’s pretty fair to say that this is the first opportunity we’ve seen for the world to break free of the desktop shackles of the PC and start to enjoy real ‘personal’ mobile computing, and that is more than exciting.

It would be easy and cheap to say that the uptake of Android is happening because of the power of Google to meld minds, but in reality there are significant forces at work in the background which are also helping the technology to gain ground at this phenomenal rate. First and probably most importantly, it is based around open standards. The lack of a manufacturer lock in means more enthusiastic adoption by the developers and designers who see opportunity over the horizon.

It’s ironic that as fast as the other modern icon Apple moves towards even more proprietary technology – the iPad is just the latest example of the arrogance of a company swimming against an open tide – the more Google removes the shackles. Linux, Java, the Open Handset Alliance, the Apache open source code license and more, all point to the fact that community involvement is a crucial part of the platform’s development. Ultimately this is great news for the consumer, in the same way that having alternative browsers like Firefox on offer ensures that Web standards remain strong and vibrant.

The second driver for the technology is the rise and rise of the Web ecosystem. Massive advances in browser technology and web server power have created a fertile arena for sophisticated web applications, location based hybrid services and a huge number of other opportunities to leverage the power of the network and its global community. Google knows this ground intimately, and this is one of the reasons why we expect the search giant to extend its reach into the delivery of vital, valuable online and offline services for the individual over the coming few years.

We’re hugely bullish on Android here at Ferret Towers. It feels right, the development momentum has already proved to be stupendous and we suspect that by the end of 2010 we will see the kind of hardware adoption across a huge range of devices and industry sectors that signals a real paradigm shift in global computing.

 Android is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel.[3] It was initially developed by Android Inc., a firm later purchased by Google, and lately by the Open Handset Alliance.[4] It allows developers to write managed code in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries.

eQuake Alert is a free Firefox addon which delivers earthquake alerts direct to your browser. The really clever thing is it shakes your browser screen as it happens, varying in intensity depending on the severity of the quake.

I’ve had it installed for a couple of days and it’s pretty unnerving to realise how many quakes there are every day and how severe some of them can be. As I’m looking at the status bar now, I can see a 3.3 in Southern Cal has just passed. A good way to remind yourself how lucky you are to be sitting in the safe zone.

 eQuake alert is a handy add-on, which alerts you with the basic information (date, location, and magnitude) of each earthquake. By default your browser will shake proportional to the earthquake magnitude. You can configure the alert methods and even you can limit the alerts by the earth quake magnitude.

SUMo is a freeware program which scans the skies and alerts you if your installed software programs need updating. This type of program is very useful if you tend to have a lot of freeware and other small utilities scattered around on your hard disk/s, as they save you time hunting down updates. And updates are very useful sometimes, especially as your Windows installation ‘matures’ (i.e. becomes klunky). Anyway definitely worth a look.

 SUMo, which stands for Software Update Monitor. Thanks to SUMo you’ll be able to keep your PC up-to-date by using the most recent version of your favorite software ! Unlike build-in auto update features, SUMo tells you if updates are available before you need to use your software.

BenQ has debuted their Joybook Lite U121 Eco, an eco-friendly netbook. Made from recyclable materials – 75% of its mechanical elements, and 70% of its packaging – the Joybook Lite’s features include an Intel Atom, an 11.6 inch widescreen with power-saving LED backlit display, 8-hour battery life, 500GB HDD/32GB SSD, WiFi, a webcam and can display an internet page in just 5 seconds. It’s also equipped with QData Eco Trove 3.3, a backup protection system that will keep your information secure during transfer and protection from virus attacks.

The Eco U121 is recognized by environmental organizations, including EPEAT and Energy Star, as a ‘green product’. Available in ocean blue and arctic white, this nifty netbook is sure to be a winner.

More Eco-friendly. Whether it’s the power-saving LED-backlit display, low power consumption Intel Atom CPU, or the massive amount of recycled material incorporated for packaging, the U121 Eco, as globally recognized by EPEAT and Energy Star, is one “seriously green” product!

Tags: gadget, benq, benq+joybook, benq+netbook, benq+joybook+lite+u121+eco+netbook

I’ve been testing out the new Q-Waves Wireless A/V Extender (aka the Warpia Wireless Extender in the US) for a few weeks now, and first impressions are that this new Wireless USB technology stuff shows real promise.

The idea, of course, is to do away with all those nasty unsightly cables in the living room and beam your computer contents to the TV as easily as possible. And it works.

Installation is a breeze. Just plug the main unit into the telly with an HDMI cable and power lead, install the software from the CD and plug the small dongle into the computer. The system will then locate and pair up automatically and you’re set. At least as far as accessing standard PC content goes.

It’s a little bit trickier for video, as you really need to set up the computer for optimised video, and use the DisplayLink utility to set up the TV as an extended screen so as to keep the PC processing drain to a minimum. It also took me a while to discover that you need to switch Windows Vista to the Aero setting to make the thing work properly.

Once that’s done, though, you can sit back and watch movies, listen to music and generally treat your television as an extension of your computer with zero hassle at all. To anyone who’s ever struggled with setting up a reliable and simple computer to television connection, this is nothing short of miraculous, especially when the result is very high definition resolution. It looks glorious, and really makes a laptop a proper partner for the living room environment.

There’s still some work to do on the technology however. Early drivers were prone to drop signal from time to time, which is very annoying when you’re in the middle of a movie or show, and even with the new drivers installed there are times when the signal will drop and you’ll lose audio until you remove and re-insert the dongle – even at short ranges! Luckily the support team seem responsive and I assume they’ll keep working until the glitches disappear altogether.

So is it worth it, and would I recommend it? Well yes. But if you have an HDMI socket in your computer already, it’s probably more reliable to use that and wait for the wireless USB technology to improve somewhat. If you’ve been struggling with standard VGA connections, don’t mind the occasional drop-out and are prepared to deal with a shorter range than it says on the box (where have we heard that before?) then this is about as good as it gets right now. And without a doubt it is this kind of technology that will finally invade the living room and deliver online entertainment to our TVs at a resolution we can live with. Priced at $99.99/£99.99 (yeah!) More here.

 Q-waves products work by simply connecting two USB’s, a Slave and Master. All you need to do is plug the Master USB in to the laptop, Netbook, or PC, and the Slave in to whatever device you wish to wirelessly connect to. The Master and Slave are already synched, meaning there is no need for any complicated configuration. By using Ultrawide Broadband, the products also work independently to your home network, meaning there is no need to alter that either.