texas

The iPhone 4 is racking up the superlatives and sales numbers, but the Motorola Droid X is coming, packing one killer feature the iPhone lacks.

Let me begin with a caveat: The Droid X is still untested in the field, so we won't know until after July 15 whether it harbors any serious user issues. That said, it already has me drooling over its impressive feature set and design.

Though the 4.3-inch display (in the case of already-small smartphone displays, bigger is better), the Flash 10.1 support, DLNA streaming, and the Texas Instruments 1GHz ARM processor are … Read more

IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ARM, and others have formed a company to streamline development of products, such as tablets, on ARM processors.

Typically, companies wanting to develop for ARM processors--one of the most prolific chip designs in the world--need to wade through a morass of different operating systems and versions of those operating systems. Those include Google's Android and Chrome OSes, Ubuntu Linux, Palm's WebOS, and MeeGo from Intel and Nokia.

The new company, Linaro, is a non-profit software engineering outfit that intends to simplify the development process and is backed to the tune of "tens of … Read more

Texas is about to become IBM's test subject for a series of telematics transportation technologies with the blessing the U.S. Department of Transportation.

IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano plans to announce the news in Houston on Wednesday at the 20th annual meeting of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITSA 2010), along with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood and Texas Transportation Institute Director Dennis Christiansen. The partnership between IBM and Texas will closely follow the federal intelligent transportation research agenda put forth by Secretary LaHood and the Obama administration.

LaHood announced Tuesday that the Department of Transportation is offering $775 million for transit agencies across the U.S. to upgrade their bus systems, … Read more

I happen to have become somewhat familiar with the campus at the University of Texas. It's a long and somewhat unbelievable story of how that came to pass, but it involves business, pleasure, and dinner at a restaurant called Vespaio.

I have, therefore, several times enjoyed the rather intimate rooms at the Mansion at Judges Hill, just on the campus outskirts. From my window, I have seen and heard drunken, hairy people, all dressed in brown, offering their most interesting and harmonious proclamations about the state of Texas, the world and their personal future, as they returned to their … Read more

Houston, nicknamed the Petro Metro for the profusion of oil and gas companies that dot its skyline, is an unlikely host for an electric-car revolution.

But the fourth-biggest U.S. city, which claims the title of the "Energy Capital of the World," is competing with cities like San Francisco to be the nation's electric car capital.

"We are the Petro Metro but we are also a car city," said newly elected Mayor Annise Parker, speaking at an event on February 5 to promote the Nissan Leaf, an all-electric, five-passenger vehicle that can travel 100 miles … Read more

If you're tired of commuting to the office and telecommuting won't cut it, the Texas Robot lets you scoot around work embodied in a robot platform while chatting with your co-workers.

Willow Garage, a robot start-up in California's Menlo Park specializing in non-military applications, is developing the wheeled bots as tools to research telepresence technologies.

The vid below shows how a Willow Garage employee living in Indiana moves around his office in Silicon Valley in a robot body of sorts.

Hacked together from spare parts for Willow's PR2 platform, Texas Robots basically consist of a screen, … Read more

Ever since someone tried to sell me on the curious notion that Houston was the Manhattan of Texas, I have become fascinated with the place.

So I am blissfully excited that PCWorld has caused my blood to turn my arteries into a NASCAR track with the revelation that police in the Houston-area county of Montgomery have decided to shame drunk drivers in a very modern way.

Yes, if you are caught driving while the special eggnog concoctions are making your nerve endings feel like Christmas lights, you will have your name on an especially festive Twitter page.

This seasonal offer … Read more

NowStat Texas Holdem Poker is a simple but strange game of five-card draw. Its basic play and easy opponents make it a great game for new players, but it might disappoint experienced card handlers. Unless, of course, they're Jessica Simpson fans.

The program's interface is simple to operate but very odd to view. There's a nice poker tutorial that runs through the rules, and all the command buttons were easy to understand. However, the game's theme is based on the "Dukes of Hazzard" movie and features one of the film's stars, Jessica Simpson, … Read more

For every overnight digital success such as Twitter, there's a technology that came up the hard way, clawing every point of market share from bitter rivals and struggling to win over a disinterested public. But quality triumphs in the end. Here are 10 sleeper technologies whose day came at last.

Read more of Sleeper successes: Tech that's taken its time at Crave UK.