Daily Tech News

The  Raspberry Pi  went on sale just hours ago through UK electronics companies vendors Premier Farnell and RS Components, the latter quoting a price of GBP21.60 (US$34.43) for the enhanced-spec, credit card-sized Model B - the only one available for purchase today. I say "available" - unfortunately the websites of both vendors went down due to a high volume of traffic from hopefuls clamoring for their piece of the tiny Linux home computer. "Been trying every 10 minutes from 6 am this morning [UK time] until now," said one disgruntled customer on the element14 forum, a community associated with Premier Farnell. However, not everyone was so unlucky, with users on the same forum reporting success in placing orders at the same website. The vendors are not alone in feeling the launch-day pressure, with the official Raspberry Pi Foundation website switching with a low-bandwidth static website while interest remains high. Though widely reported as a product lau...

At this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced the 808 PureView, a smartphone with an astounding 41-megapixel image sensor. The Nokia 808 will be the first smartphone by Nokia to include its new PureView imaging technology, which combines a high-resolution sensor with Carl Zeiss optics and Nokia-developed algorithms. Typically you might want a high megapixel camera in order to take photos that can be printed larger - what makes the Nokia 808 PureView special, however, it what it does with those pixels. The 808 uses a new pixel oversampling technology, that captures seven pixels of information and then condenses those into one single pixel. This reportedly results in an exceptionally sharp photo, and the ability to zoom in on any portion of a 5-megapixel picture without losing clarity in the image. The technology also works on video, so you can shoot a full HD video at 30fps and 4x zoom. Nokia has made some untouched images taken with the camera available o...

ViewSonic has taken a new range of dual-SIM Android smartphones to Mobile World Congress 2012 in Barcelona, that includes the successor to last year's V350 smartphone - the ViewPhone 3. Two of the brand new phones will run on the latest flavor of Google's Android mobile operating platform, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. The company hasn't given away too much in the way of detail, but read on for what we do know. Having a dual-SIM capable smartphone in your pocket is like having two separate phones in one handset, where each has its own number, can be programmed with its own voice call and message ringtone, and gets its own bill. One can be used strictly for business and the other saved for more personal matters. ViewSonic says that its new dual-SIM Android offerings come with SRS Tru Media audio enhancement, PicSel Smart Office and Ignition Remote Access pre-installed. With PicSel Smart Office, users can edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and view ...

Samsung has officially unveiled an updated version of the Galaxy Beam, a smartphone with its own built-in pico projector. The biggest feature of the phone as you might guess is its ability to project pictures, video, and other media onto walls, ceilings or any other flat surface via a 15 lumens projector that Samsung says can display images up to 50-inches wide.Samsung  originally showed off the Galaxy Beam  at Mobile World Congress in 2010. At the time, the Android handset was only slated to make an appearance in Singapore. This year's announcement brings an updated version of the handset sporting Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and while release details have yet to be announced, the phone will likely be available in a few additional countries. The 2010 version of the Beam came running Android v2.1, had a 3.7-inch screen, and a 9 lumens projector. The updated 2012 version shown off at Mobile World Congress 2011 comes running Android v2.3, has a 4-inch screen, and comes rocking...

At  Mobile World Congress 2012  in Barcelona, HTC announced its new flagship handset, the HTC One X. Like the  Optimus 4X HD  from LG also unveiled at MWC 2012, the phone will be HTC's first quad-core handset.The 4.3-inch One X comes sporting a NVIDIA  Tegra 3  quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM and a 4.3-inch 1,280 x 720 HD display. With an 8-megapixel rear-facing and 1.3-megapixel forward-facing camera, the phone is capable of capturing high-resolution still photos simultaneously while shooting 1080p video that can also be edited directly on the smartphone. Much like other HTC handsets of late (such as the  HTC Sensation XE  and HTC Rezound), the HTC One X comes with built-in Beats Audio, offering the phone a bit of a sound advantage over some of its competition. The phone will also ship running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), and will offer 25GB of free DropBox storage in place of expandable memory. The global version of the HTC One ...

According to  translated report  from  MK News   ( via  TNW ), Samsung is in development on the industry’s first smartphone without a bezel. Referred to in the report as the “Galaxy B,” the device will apparently have no bezel on three sides of the display with just a small bezel at the top to hold the earpiece and camera. The device will apparently pack a large AMOLED display, but there is no specific mention of Android or other specs. We most likely will not see much from Samsung at Mobile World Congress later this month, because the company confirmed it would not hold press events. However, some are speculating the “Galaxy B” codename could eventually be the Galaxy S III. The report said Samsung plans to launch the bezel-free smartphone during the second or third quarter of 2012.

A number of anonymous Google employees are reporting that the company is currently developing Android-powered glasses that can provide a heads-up display to the wearer and connect over wireless data services. The glasses will purportedly work like a wearable version of the  Google Goggles  app, providing real time information on a user's location via GPS and motion sensors. Even more surprising, the same sources are saying these "Google glasses" could be available to the public by the end of this year. The Google glasses have apparently been in production for quite some time at Google's secretive Project X lab, where the company designs its more outlandish projects, such as robots, space elevators, and the like. Anonymous employees have indicated that this is strictly an experimental program from Google, though it may look into future business applications depending on how successful the product is. Aside from a few buttons on the side, the glasses are sai...

Engineers from Princeton University have developed power-generating rubber films that could be used to harness natural body movements such as breathing or walking in order to power electronic devices such as pacemakers or mobile phones. The material, which is composed of ceramic nanoribbons embedded onto silicone rubber sheets, generates electricity when flexed and is highly efficient at converting mechanical energy into electrical energy. Its developers say shoes made of the material could harvest the pounding of walking or running to power mobile electrical devices and, when placed against the lungs, sheets of the material could use the raising and falling breathing motions of the chest to power pacemakers. This would negate the current need for surgical replacement of the batteries which power the devices. Plus, because the silicone is biocompatible and is already used for cosmetic implants and medical devices, “the new electricity-harvesting devices could be implanted in t...

Of all the energy-harvesting technologies presently in development, piezoelectric devices offer some of the most intriguing possibilities. They work by converting mechanical stress, which can take the form of movement-caused vibrations, into an electrical charge. This means that things such as  shoes ,  roads ,  keyboards  - or anything else that moves or is subjected to movement - could be outfitted with piezoelectrics, which would produce power. Unfortunately, the range of vibrations that any one device can harness is presently quite limited. Research being conducted at North Carolina's Duke University, however, could change that. Piezoelectric harvesters typically operate in a linear fashion, in that they can only be tuned to a particular frequency of vibration. While that may work well in the lab, where the same vibration can be produced over and over again, the real world tends to be a lot more random. Duke engineer Brian Mann decided that in order to ge...

The growing popularity of 3D printers, such as the  Printbot  or MakerBot's  Thing-o-Matic , testify to the fact that additive manufacturing is slowly entering the mainstream. The devices are now small enough to fit on a desk and they can make all sorts of stuff, such as toys, chess figures, or spare door knobs. But what if you want to make something slightly bigger - say, a house? Then you need to turn to Enrico Dini, the founder of Monolite UK and the inventor of the D-Shape "robotic building system." The D-Shape is potentially capable of printing a two story building - complete with stairs, partition walls, columns, domes, and piping cavities - using only ordinary sand and an inorganic binder. The resulting material is said to be indistinguishable from marble, and exhibits the same physical properties, with durability highly superior to that of masonry and reinforced concrete. The building process is very close to what we'd expect of a huge 3D printer. A nozzl...

With the wait still on for a miniaturization ray to allow some  Fantastic Voyage -style medical procedures by doctors in submarines, tiny electronic implants capable of traveling in the bloodstream show much more promise. While the miniaturization of electronic and mechanical components now makes such devices feasible, the lack of a comparable reduction in battery size has held things back. Now engineers at Stanford University have demonstrated a tiny, self-propelled medical device that would be wirelessly powered from outside the body, enabling devices small enough to move through the bloodstream. While the benefits of medical implants have already been realized with devices such as artificial  pacemakers  and  cochlear  implants, which are stationary within the body, energy storage continues to limit such devices. With half of the volume of implants often consumed by the battery, the locations in which they can be placed are limited. Additionally, bat...

Iranians suffered a wide spread Internet outage today, the second disruption of in the past 10 days to leave millions without access to e-mail and social networks. The latest disruption blocked access to all encrypted International sites outside the country that operate on Secure Sockets Layer protocol, Reuters reports. "E-mail, proxies, and all the secure channels that start with 'https' are not available," a Tehran-based technology expert told Reuters. "The situation regarding accessing these Web sites is even worse than last week because the VPNs are not working." Many Iranians use proxy servers over Virtual Private Networks to circumvent government efforts to block access to foreign news sites and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The latest outage comes less than two weeks before planned parliamentary elections next month and less than two weeks after Iranians lost access to Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo e-mail. As in that instance, the gov...

We’ve already heard about Qualcomm’s latest processor, the Snapdragon S4 , which will be quad-core and utilize LTE. Qualcomm took the time to give us some details ahead of Mobile World Congress. The new SoC now supports up to three cameras (two in the back for 3D and one front-facing), 20-megapixels, and recording video at 1080p (30fps). We can also expect zero shutter lag, 3A processing (autofocus, auto exposure and auto white balance), and improved blink/smile detection, gaze estimation, range finding and image stabilization. Last but not least, it supports gesture detection/control, augmented reality , and computer vision (via Qualcomm’s FastCV). Hit the break for a couple of videos featuring image stabilization and gestures.

Microsoft is in talks with some of the major record companies about creating a new music service. The software maker, which has a spotty record in digital music, has discussed creating a delivery service that would supply tunes to the Xbox as well as an upcoming Windows-based phone, according to sources with knowledge of the talks. It was unclear exactly how this will differ from Microsoft's Zune Music Pass, which is the music service currently available to Xbox subscribers. Negotiations are still in a preliminary stage and the two sides have yet to drill down into all the specifics, the sources said. Nonetheless, Microsoft has roughly outlined a service that it hopes could launch sometime this year and include streaming music as well as downloads, the sources said. They added that the company has also mentioned the possibility of teaming with HTC and Nokia on the proposed phones. A spokeswoman for the company said, "Microsoft does not comment on rumors and speculation....

Researchers were able to make a single-atom transistor with a scanning tunneling microscope that includes the single red phosphorous atom and electrical leads for control gates and electrodes. (Credit: University of New South Wales) Researchers are getting down to the atomic level in the pursuit of smaller and more powerful computers. The University of New South Wales in Australia today announced it has made a single-atom transistor using a repeatable method, a development that could lead to computing devices that use these tiny building blocks. About two years ago, a team of researchers from the Helsinki University of Technology , the University of New South Wales, and the University of Melbourne in Australia announced the creation of a single-atom transistor designed around a single phosphorus atom in silicon. Now a new paper published in the journal "Nature Nanotechnology" describes a technique for making this type of transistor with very precise control. That opens up t...