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New iPad Launch: Why Everything We Think We Know About Apple’s Events Is Wrong

Tim Cook at iPad event
Reuters
Tim Cook introduces the new iPad
Apple’s product launches may be the most obsessively-covered media events on the planet — presidential press conferences possibly excepted — but that doesn’t mean that people understand them.
Actually, as I mulled over today’s new iPad event and its implications, I’m struck by how little of the conventional wisdom about these rollouts feels like wisdom. Much of it is crude, out of date or just plain wrong. Including some of my own assumptions.
(PHOTOS: Apple Announces New iPad)
So here are seven things that a lot of people seem to believe they know about Apple’s events. The more attention you pay, the less they ring true. I think of them as, well, mythperceptions.
Conventional wisdom: Apple is astoundingly good at keeping its secrets secret. Everybody knows that Apple goes to absurd lengths to prevent anyone from knowing about its product plans until it’s ready to reveal them at an event like today’s bash. Except…it’s now the norm for most of the raw facts about new Apple hardware to leak ahead of time. A rational observer who knows which reporters to trust can usually figure out the gist of the news a day or three ahead of time.
The major points about the new iPad? It’s got a Retina display, LTE, a better camera and a faster chip, and the case design and battery life are holdovers from the iPad 2. All reported by reliable sources in recent days.
I’m not saying that Apple has lost its capacity to startle. As far as I can tell, nobody figured out ahead of time that it was planning to announce OS X Mountain Lion last month. But if you assume that these Apple events are interesting because they’re jam-packed with surprises, you’re not doing your homework.
Conventional wisdom: Apple events are always amazing. The original Mac was amazing. The iPhone was amazing. Possibly the first iPod and the first iPad. And I do recall my eyeballs popping out of my head when I saw the impossibly tiny original iPod Nano.
Most of the new Apple products announced at these events, however, are revisions to existing products. And revisions are rarely amazing — even if they, like the new iPad, sport multiple major improvements. And even if Steve Jobs was prone to treating routine updates as epoch-shifting breakthroughs.
(VIDEO: Five New and Noteworthy iPad Features)
Conventional wisdom: Apple events are always disappointing. I’ve liveblogged or otherwise covered most of Apple’s product events over the last seven years or so, and the emotional curve of liveblog commenters is remarkably consistent: They arrive burbling over with excitement, but when the event is over they declare themselves sorely disappointed. (Disclaimer: One of the few I missed was the original iPhone launch — although even that managed to displease some crabapples.)
When I liveblogged the first iPad unveiling, one commenter said he or she was “horribly underwhelmed.” “$499 for a netbook — no way,” carped another. One made a $100 bet with nobody in particular that the iPad would flop. A well-known analyst who attended my coverage was slightly more upbeat — but he said it would be a “tough sell” and declared it a double, not a home run.
Why do so many people say they’re so unimpressed by Apple events? It’s a combination of several factors. The assumption that every event is going to be awe-inspiring sets the bar impossibly high. The tendency of major details to leak ahead of time eliminates the surprise factor. The fact that Apple never gives every single person every single feature they want ensures that everybody has something to carp about. (Some of our commenters today were up in arms about the absence of Siri on the new iPad.)
Another issue: The way most people learn about these products — through text-and-still-image liveblogs like, um, ours, supplemented by specs and stats on Apple’s site — just isn’t a great way to judge Apple products. More than almost any other tech company, Apple makes things that are hard to judge from a distance. It’s like the company said in the tagline on the invite it sent out to journalists for this event: “We have something you really have to see. And touch.”
Conventional wisdom: Apple events are all about new hardware. No, no, no. Hardware is interesting only to the extent that it’s a container for interesting software. The most impressive thing at today’s event may have been something that’s theoretically a footnote: the inventive new version of iPhoto. And iOS 6, whenever it’s announced — probably at WWDC sometime this summer — will likely be a bigger deal than the new iPad, even though the coverage of it won’t be quite as over-the-top.
(MORE: Apple Announces New iPad with ‘Retina’ Display, Same Old Name)
Conventional wisdom: Apple announces bleeding-edge technology at its events. One of the last-minute rumors about today’s launch was that the new iPad would feature “tactile pixels” using technology from a company called Senseg. But for all of Apple’s creativity, it’s careful and conservative in some ways. The new iPad’s Retina display — an existing technology pushed to its boundaries in service of a more elegant experience — is more typical of the company than anything weird and freaky.
Conventional wisdom: If Apple doesn’t announce radically new products at these events, it’ll collapse. In the first 80 days after the original iPad’s release in April 2010, Apple sold three million units of the radically new device, and it moved 14.8 million iPads by the end of the year. That was enough to startle almost every alleged Apple expert.
So how many iPads did Apple sell in the final quarter of 2011, when the current model was the not-radically-new iPad 2, which had already been on the market for months? 15.4 million.
Every data point I know suggests that when Apple products get comfortably familiar, it doesn’t hurt sales — it helps them. There are a lot of folks out there who get more excited by familiar products than they do by disruptive newcomers.
Conventional wisdom: Without Steve Jobs, these events will stop mattering so much. Sadly, the events once known as Stevenotes will never be called that again. And the moment that one of these non-Stevenotes fails to bowl you over, it’s tempting to wonder if the Reality Distortion Effect has been deactivated, reducing Apple’s product launches to mere press conferences presided over by executives who aren’t Steve Jobs and never will be.
But for an event that didn’t have Steve Jobs, the new iPad event was far more reminiscent of a classic Stevenote than you might expect. All of the presenters onstage made their points clearly and concisely. The demos worked without hitches. The level of polish was high, and I assume that an immense amount of preparation went into every moment. It’s remarkable how rare all of that is at tech-industry events, and how effective it is at promoting a new product such as this one.
For all these reasons and more, I tend not to trust first impressions about Apple events, especially when they involve doom and gloom.

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Future Cars

Along with the development of technology, a variety of everyday appliances will also be enriched with advanced tools. Included for future vehicles that will be enhanced by ‘eye’ to see the condition around.
Dreams are now being knitted by Intel Corp., together with Neusoft, which has just demonstrated a future car application.
Equipped with cameras as eyes, and computer-based multi-core processor as its brain. Future cars will have the ability to identify other vehicles and pedestrians that are too close to be more accurate.
From the written information received detikINET, Saturday (06/21/2008), this car is also claimed to warn drivers or take the wheel for safety measures to prevent accidents.
This type of visual computing would require enormous computational capability, and provide challenges in terms of programming parallel (multiple and simultaneous processor requests).
The car demonstration exploit research Intel’s Ct programming, programming languages C / C + +, developed at Intel’s labs, which allow programs to run seamlessly on the scalability by using 2 to 8 cores, to process the prevention of accidents without requiring any code or compiler enhancements.
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New car technology can stop drunks from driving


Government officials have given a tentative thumbs up to a new technology for cars that would render the concept of driving while drunk a non-starter — literally.
On Friday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, were on hand when researchers publicly demonstrated a car-embeddable sensor system that cleverly locks down the engine if it detects that the driver’s blood alcohol level was above the legal limit.
Through the use of strategically placed sensors in places like the steering wheel and door locks, the North America Driver Alcohol Detection Systems for Safety, created by QinetiQ, a research facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, would analyze a driver’s skin or breath to determine a driver’s level of intoxication.
The system is being promoted as an alternative to alcohol ignition interlock systems that force drivers to blow into a breathalyzer type device before the car can be started. The cumbersome ignition systems are sometimes used by drivers as part of a DUI conviction.
After the demonstration, Strickland and LaHood gave a positive, yet cautious, assessment of the technology:
The technology is “another arrow in our automotive safety quiver,” said LaHood, who emphasized the system was envisioned as optional equipment in future cars and voluntary for auto manufacturers.
David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, also attended the demonstration and estimated the technology could prevent as many as 9,000 fatal alcohol-related crashes a year in the U.S., though he also acknowledged that it was still in its early testing stages and might not be commercially available for 8-10 years. (Associated Press)
And since the system will likely fall under the optional category for automakers, the technology must prove itself to be reliable enough to not mistakenly prevent the more sober folks from starting their cars to have any hope of being adopted by the masses.
The systems would not be employed unless they are “seamless, unobtrusive and unfailingly accurate,” Strickland told the Associated Press.
A test showed that a 20-something year-old woman weighing 120 pounds had a blood alcohol content level of .06, just below the legal limit of .08, after drinking two 1 1/2 ounce glasses of vodka and orange juice about a half hour apart.
Even if the technology is perfected, it’ll still be a tough sell. Freedom and the means to move about freely are cherished American values. So my guess is that there are very few people who would readily embrace the technology because of the off-chance that a slight malfunction would cause them to be late or, at worst, stuck somewhere.
But with an increasingly greater awareness of the dangers of drunk driving, the promise of such a system shows that technological solutions are in place should the tide turn.
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Microsoft Researchers Show Off Interactive, Transparent 3D Desktop



Why be confined to using an archaic mouse and keyboard configuration when all you need to interact with your desktop PC is your own two hands? That’s what researchers at Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group will be hoping to pose to its potential consumer base in the near future, that is if their prototype 3D display – which allows users to manipulate on-screen objects with varying hand gestures - ever sees the light of day. 
Thanks in part to Samsung’s spectacular transparent OLED displays, the research team demonstrated the Minority Report-esque technology in a video published Monday; showing a user interacting with menus, icons and objects in 3D space all with flicks of the wrist or subtle hand movements. Viewing the display from different angles also sees the 3D perspective shifting to give the impression of a 3D overlay. The set-up incorporates a see-though Samsung display (held aloft with the use of a pop-up monitor arm) and Microsoft’s motion-sensing peripheral Kinect – first released for the Xbox 360, and later for PC development - to detect hand movements, gestures and monitor where the user is viewing the display from, making the 3D effect possible - what ASG call “view-dependent, depth-corrected gaze”. The user puts their hands directly behind the screen to interact with the desktop. Placing hands back down onto a hard surface, and out of view of the Kinect, results in the display diverting back to a typical 2D user interface to navigate using mouse and keyboard. 
While the demo shows some interesting if not entirely mind-blowing uses of how users can manipulate objects in 3D space – flicking through digital files and documents, zooming into a screen – the potential is extraordinary, and not only in the context of PC, but gaming too. Imagine an RTS game where your legion of troops can be moved around the battlefield with a simple tap, pinch, drag and drop; and where your view of the war beneath can switch on the fly with subtle head movements. 
Don’t expect to see a Microsoft-patented see-through 3D display in your local PC World store any time soon however, the Applied Sciences Group’s research is still very much a conceptual idea showing what is possible with modern and freely available technology. So, we can’t actually pretend to be Tom Cruise just yet, but we can certainly dream…
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TRANSPARENT LG-GD900

Having introduced a selection of highly acclaimed and stylish phones, LG makes a bold step in the design category by introducing yet another innovative aesthetic concept, transparency. Once imagined but never seen before, the LG-GD900 is expected to make a new fashion statement.

LG Unveils Transparent Mobile Phone: LG-GD900
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When opened, GD900's sliding, translucent keypad illuminates a cool glow that reflects the phone’s sleek and polished silver body. But first-rate design was not the only thing in mind when creating the LG-GD900. It also lives up to the highest level of technical features expected in a premium calibre handset, including its dedicated Bluetooth headset.

The LG-GD900 is scheduled for release during the second quarter of 2009 and the phone’s advanced features will be unveiled at that time. However, visitors at the Mobile World Congress had an exciting opportunity to get a glimpse of LG-GD900 at the Mobile World Congress 2009.
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Transparent Apple Phone

Apple Phone - concept phone On one hand, clear conceptual phones already, so this is not just the first, but on the other, the so-called Window Phone has one impressive feature - its transparent housing varies depending on the weather! Thus, in the sunny days, the screen will be completely transparent, on a rainy day it will show virtual drops on the screen, and on a snowy day it is totally covered with frost, i.e. the translucent screen will look like as well as present a window into a variety of weather. I do not know how practical it will be, but at least, it's a very original idea!

 
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D-ROLL LAPTOP latest Tecnology

D-roll is a next generation concept laptop design which is way distinctive from usual laptops in both shape and function. The long tube shape of this laptop, which was inspired from the storage tubes that artists are using for storing large drawings, eliminates perception of the traditional book looking laptops. This multifunctional laptop has two working modes. When it is operating in full function mode, the laptop is unfolded completely and all peripherals are turned on. The main display is turned off and a smaller screen, attached with main body is turned on allowing the users to check and send mails when D-roll is under email mode. VC is a helpful add-on for capturing pictures or videos and Locking System can provide certain security to the laptop.
d-roll laptop concept
d-roll laptop concept

d-roll laptop concept
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d-roll laptop concept
d-roll laptop concept
d-roll laptop concept
d-roll laptop concept
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