http://phys.org/electronics-news/ en-us PhysOrg Team Phys.org provides the latest news on electronics, robotics, hardware, electronic gadgets and science technology. Updated daily. The Apple iPad extended its lead in the global market for tablet computers at the start of 2012 while Amazon's Kindle Fire flamed out after a sizzling introduction, a survey showed Monday. http://phys.org/news258046039.html Electronics 2012-06-04T16:27:32-07:00 Microsoft on Monday stepped up its quest to be at the heart of home entertainment by synching Xbox 360 videogame consoles to smartphones and tablets while adding more blockbuster content. http://phys.org/news258043336.html Electronics 2012-06-04T15:42:24-07:00 (AP) — Samsung's new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III, will be launched by all of the Big 4 national U.S. wireless carriers this month, starting at $199, the phone maker said Monday. http://phys.org/news258026054.html Electronics 2012-06-04T11:10:01-07:00 Goggles that trick the wearer into thinking the plain snack in their hand is a chocolate cookie, or make biscuits appear larger have been unveiled in Japan, offering hope to weak-willed dieters everywhere. http://phys.org/news258003812.html Electronics 2012-06-04T04:43:53-07:00 Taiwan PC makers Acer and Asus on Monday took another shot at gaining a foothold in the tablet market, unveiling several new products running on Microsoft's much-anticipated Windows 8 operating system. http://phys.org/news258003136.html Electronics 2012-06-04T04:32:34-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Robotics researchers in Spain and the U.S. are studying bats for their design work on drones. Bat wings are highly articulated, with skeletons similar to those of human arms and hands. The researchers have built a drone that mimics the way a bat changes its wing shape in flight. Bats achieve an “amazing” level of maneuverability, says a researcher, mainly because of their capacity of changing wing morphology during flight. Specifically, the "Batbot" replicates the way a bat changes the profile of its wing between the downstroke and upstroke. By folding wings toward their bodies on the upstroke, bats use 35 percent less energy and reduce aerodynamic drag, according to researchers at Brown. http://phys.org/news257925741.html Electronics 2012-06-03T10:10:01-07:00 (Phys.org) -- A new lineup of 14 Ivy Bridge processors are out of the bag from Intel. Thursday’s announcement by Intel involves new processors for mobile computers and desktops, but special attention is focused on four of those processors, which are destined for the Ultrabooks market. Intel made Ivy Bridge news last month with an announcement of quad-core parts destined for high-end laptops and desktops. The newest crop includes dual-core parts catering to more market segments, http://phys.org/news257830513.html Electronics 2012-06-02T05:10:01-07:00 His kids might commandeer the TV before bedtime, but online game designer John Comes still gets his prime-time fix. Just on a smaller screen. http://phys.org/news257767428.html Electronics 2012-06-01T14:40:06-07:00 Going ... going ... going crazy for the Apple 1. http://phys.org/news257767041.html Electronics 2012-06-01T12:00:01-07:00 When it comes to smartphones, I'm an iPhone guy. But I've long appreciated HTC's Android phones. http://phys.org/news257766940.html Electronics 2012-06-01T11:30:03-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Since he was 12 years old and successfully talked his way onto an underwater robotics club for kids aged 13 and up, Trevor Uptain has been building robots of the kind used by oceanographers and industry. http://phys.org/news257760233.html Electronics 2012-06-01T09:04:13-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu attracted attention at this week’s 2012 Wireless Japan expo, with their transparent, dual-sided smartphone touchscreen. This is a see through 2.4-inch display prototype with touch sensors on both the front and flip sides. The demo showed how the user’s hand can go behind the icons on the screen to use touch, while the full display on the front remains unobstructed. With this display, the user can deploy touch on the front, back, and sides or just on the front panel or just the back or sides, or touch both screens at once, depending on desired actions. http://phys.org/news257746866.html Electronics 2012-06-01T05:21:33-07:00 (AP) — Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp. says it is upgrading its current displays to make them slimmer and clearer. http://phys.org/news257744136.html Electronics 2012-06-01T04:50:01-07:00 (AP) — Taiwan's struggling computer makers will use next week's Computex show to promote a new generation of ultra-thin laptops that might be their last hope of turning back the seemingly unstoppable momentum of Apple's iPad and other hot-selling tablets. http://phys.org/news257744103.html Electronics 2012-06-01T04:40:02-07:00 Cricket Communications said Thursday it would be the first US carrier to offer the iPhone to customers under a prepaid plan, a move expanding the footprint of the wildly popular Apple device. http://phys.org/news257681079.html Electronics 2012-05-31T11:04:47-07:00 Intel Corporation and Lenovo Group today announced the general availability of the Lenovo LePhone K800 in China, Lenovo’s first smartphone with Intel Inside. The LePhone K800 will be available on Lenovo’s official website, 360Buy.com, selected Suning & GOME stores and Lenovo retail stores and is priced at approximately RMB 3,299 ($524 USD). Today’s announcement also marks an important milestone between both companies and a long-standing engagement of collaboration and innovation which spans many facets of mobile computing. http://phys.org/news257670441.html Electronics 2012-05-31T08:20:01-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Nimbus Lab are exploring wireless power transmission as a way to power devices. They have designed and built a custom power-transfer and receiving system optimized for use on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to do the job. Brent Griffin and Carrick Detweiler are the creators of these special "quadrotors" which are designed to wirelessly charge electronics making use of “strongly coupled resonances.” The Nimbus team have made a video showing these wireless quadrotor chargers in action. The video caption says the UAV sends nearly 5 watts at 25 cm. http://phys.org/news257661454.html Electronics 2012-05-31T05:43:04-07:00 The Ohio Supercomputer Center's newest system would fall within the top half of the list of the world's most powerful supercomputers based purely on speed, but the cluster would rank even higher – ninth in the United States and second among U.S. academic institutions – when comparing benchmarked performances against the maximum theoretical performance of the system. http://phys.org/news257602560.html Electronics 2012-05-30T13:16:10-07:00 Online retail powerhouse Amazon.com on Tuesday announced a collaboration with Microsoft to begin streaming films and television shows to Xbox 360 videogame consoles. http://phys.org/news257574014.html Electronics 2012-05-30T05:20:22-07:00 (AP) — Google will try to win more converts to a computer operating system revolving around its popular Chrome Web browser with a new wave of lightweight laptops built by Samsung Electronics. http://phys.org/news257523178.html Electronics 2012-05-29T15:13:27-07:00 (Phys.org) -- With the introduction of the tablet computer, users of such devices have been forced to make some tradeoffs regarding keyboards. Virtually all tablets make use of image display and finger touching or tapping to create a virtual keyboard, which for many, is not nearly the same as one that provides the tactile feedback of keys being pressed and released. To get around this, many have resorted to purchasing wireless keyboards, which do offer the ease of typing, but detract from the portability that is so critical to the tablet experience. Now, according to Patentbolt, Chinese hardware maker Lenovo has applied for a patent that gives users the best of both worlds. http://phys.org/news257497690.html Electronics 2012-05-29T08:40:01-07:00 (Phys.org) -- LG Display is getting ready to showcase a five-inch smartphone display that turns out to be a full HD LCD panel supporting up to 1080p video, something like having a high-quality TV in your hand. The display will allow smartphone users to view full HD content with ideal viewing as seen on TVs and monitors and will set a high bar for other manufacturers as a result. The Seoul, Korea-based company has announced the new display with 1920x1080 resolution and impressive pixel density of 440ppi. http://phys.org/news257482156.html Electronics 2012-05-29T05:20:02-07:00 Mobile phone operator Softbank on Tuesday unveiled a smartphone that can measure radiation as consumers in Japan clamour for reassurance following last year's Fukushima nuclear disaster. http://phys.org/news257481659.html Electronics 2012-05-29T04:00:01-07:00 Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest maker of mobile phones, said its third-generation Galaxy S smartphone went on sale Tuesday in 28 European and Middle Eastern countries, hoping to cement its lead over Apple's iPhone. http://phys.org/news257481503.html Electronics 2012-05-29T03:50:01-07:00 Imagine a tiny snake robot crawling through your body, helping a surgeon identify diseases and perform operations. http://phys.org/news257481400.html Electronics 2012-05-29T03:36:58-07:00 Facebook hopes to release its own smartphone by next year, as the newly public social networking giant looks to boost its revenue in the mobile Internet market, the New York Times reported Monday. http://phys.org/news257448153.html Electronics 2012-05-28T18:22:44-07:00 (Phys.org) -- NHK this week placed on exhibit a shoulder-mount camera, developed in cooperation with Hitachi, capable of shooting what NHK calls super high vision (SHV) video in 7680×4320 resolution. Super Hi-Vision is NHK's preferred name for ultra high definition television (UHDTV). The powerful prototype was part of NHK Scientific & Technology Research Laboratories (STRL) Open House event in Japan earlier this week. The camera is an innovative development, as a compact Ultra High Definition camera using a single-chip color imaging sensor to produce “closest to being there” video. NHK says that the compact head is compatible with commercially-offered still camera lenses. http://phys.org/news257396706.html Electronics 2012-05-28T05:20:01-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Nvidia’s competitive war paint has a name, Tegra 3. On the heels of Nvidia announcements about lowering costs of its Tegra 3 processors and Nvidia-enabled tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich at $199, Nvidia this week made more Tegra 3 strategy headway, this time issuing announcements for smartphones. The company said that 30 smartphones based on its Tegra 3 system on a chip will be out this year. This is double the number of design wins on Tegra 2 last year. http://phys.org/news257316047.html Electronics 2012-05-27T05:41:12-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Headline after headline talks about vendors’ tablets in the wings as likely number-one contenders for the iPad. Such claims have justifiably been taken with a grain of salt, considering iPad’s continued market success. This week, though, leaked specs on the Dell latitude 10.are convincing many to claims that this may be the one to shake things up in the tablet space. The Dell Latitude 10 will have a 10.1-inch display, HD capacitive and multi-touch screen at 1366 x 768 resolution. As per Neowin, this will be a Dell Latitude 10 Windows 8 tablet. Microsoft is expected to launch its Windows 8 operating system late 2012, and some reports bet on October. http://phys.org/news257274293.html Electronics 2012-05-26T18:05:08-07:00 (Phys.org) -- For several years, roboticists have been working out ways to get a group of robots to perform synchronized activities as demonstrated most often in dance routines. It’s not just about trying to create humanoid machines that can better entertain us though, it’s about getting them to perform simple small scale synchronized activities so that a means can be found to scale up such activities so that robots of the future can work together to autonomously accomplish certain goals that have been defined by their human masters. To that end, MIT researchers Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine have been studying ways to mimic so called quorum sensing, which some organisms use to figure out how many of their own kind are around, and then to perform actions based on it. The two have applied this principal to small dancing robots, to stunning effect. They have written a paper describing what they have learned and posted it on the preprint server arXiv. http://phys.org/news257155711.html Electronics 2012-05-25T09:40:01-07:00