screens

You would think the iPhone's touch screen--the hallmark of the whole dang thing--would last for more than five months. Well, think again.

After a particularly wet bike ride on Saturday here in the Bay Area, my iPhone got somewhat damp. (You know, the type of rain that soaks through a coat but doesn't ruin anything.) After the ride, I wanted to text people and noticed the top row of the text keyboard was not responding. I had to press, no squish, down to get a letter. And the cursor would flip out. And the screen looked bad when … Read more

MONTEREY, Calif.--Here's an entertaining gimmick that looks as if it's from a company called FogScreen.

At the 6Sight digital-imaging show here Thursday, the Portola Plaza Hotel had a machine producing a thin, downwardly flowing curtain of fog backlit with a digital projector.

It was kind of hypnotic to watch the swirling psychedelic graphics, and it was just the thing to kill time while waiting for the audience to sift into the auditorium. Alas, during the speeches later, after it had been turned off, it dripped on one of the speakers, so be careful where you mount it. … Read more

Lately, my daughter has been begging to see the new show iCarly, a spinoff of Drake and Josh.

Now, I'm not a big TV watcher, but I was a huge fan of it when I was a kid, and I do think that iCarly could have all the makings of a 21st century Zoom, given what we have available in the form of consumer technology around the house.… Read more

The Samsung YP-P2 has landed, and we have the photos to prove it. With its 3-inch touch screen, and a 480x272 video resolution capable of DVD-quality and 30 frames per second, the Samsung YP-P2 is a tough contender for the holiday's Flash-based PVP battle royale. Obviously, the P2 is aimed at the iPod Touch audience, but with recent video-worthy releases from SanDisk, Creative, and Microsoft--it's still anybody's game.

We'll have a full review done next week. Until then, you can ogle our Samsung YP-P2 photo gallery. The Samsung YP-P2 is available for $199 (4GB) and $… Read more

A lab at the University of Ghent has come up with electric, elastic wires.

Electric elastic wires-- it sounds like a band Peter Max would have hung out with in the late 60s, doesn?t it? Actually, these are electric interconnects that give consumer electronic devices a greater range of motion, according to the story in EE Times, which always does an admirable job of covering overseas trends. Thus, a manufacturer could build flexible displays or e-paper with greater reliability.

The group embedded 4-micron gold wires in a silicone film. The wire itself is horseshoe shaped, or in other words, … Read more

Our review of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last Thursday lauded its lovely interface innovations but withheld judgment about the operating system's speed until we could put it through its paces.

Tests returned from CNET Labs on Saturday show that Leopard didn't perform noticeably faster than Mac OS 10.4.6 Tiger. (See the chart in CNET's review of Tiger.). Because Leopard's improved speeds of between 1 percent and 3 percent fall within the 5 percent margin of error, it's fair to call Leopard and Tiger even.

Lab tests explored Leopard's boot time, … Read more

I had a great dinner tonight with the Openbravo management team in Barcelona. As we walked up La Rambla from a decadent pre-dinner "meal" of lava-like hot chocolate, we headed into the parking garage to get our car.

The door to the parking payment machine was open as we got into the garage. The computer had malfunctioned and the parking attendant was rebooting it. I got there just in time to notice the operating system (used city-wide) that was causing this parking attendant grief:

Windows.

One can't even park anymore without getting the Blue Screen of Death.… Read more

Am I the only one who feels that this is long overdue for Nokia? Oh well, better late than never: The Symbian Series 60 has finally gone touch!

At the recent Symbian Smartphone Show held in London, the Finnish company showed off its new S60 touch-screen interface that adds several features to the handheld platform. It includes support for tactile feedback, the ability to run existing S60 apps without modification and detection of motion, orientation, proximity and light, as well as the ability to display Flash videos on the S60 browser.

The new technology is expected to be available to … Read more