The Nexus 7 has been one of the smokin' hot tablets of 2012, and unfortunately for one user in China, that was literally the case.
The user posted the photo above to a forum on Baidu (China's home-grown answer to Google), claiming that the device began smoking while plugged in and charging on its original factory charger. In the process, the guts of the tablet seem to have been totally torched.… Read more
SAN FRANCISCO -- It's time to think of Google as much more than just a search engine, and that should both excite and spook you.
Search remains critical to the company's financial and technological future, but Google also is using the search business' cash to transform itself into something much broader than just a place to point your browser when asking for directions on the Internet.
What it's now becoming is an extension of your mind, an omnipresent digital assistant that figures out what you need and supplies it before you even realize you need it.
Think … Read more
SEATTLE -- It was an unseasonably warm June evening, the kind of day locals rave about because they come so rarely. At 6 p.m., I hopped on my bike for an evening spin.
My heart-rate quickly raced up to 157 beats per minute as I picked up my pace to 14 miles per hour up a gradual rise in the road. At the same time, my blood-glucose level dropped to 62 milligrams per deciliter, low, but not dangerously so for a non-diabetic. All in all, pretty solid data, given that the night before I slept six hours and 21 minutes, waking for brief periods 21 times during the night.
Welcome to my cyborg life. Google has generated tons of press in recent days with its Project Glass, computerized glasses that lets users take pictures and find information. But it's hardly the only company pursuing wearable computing. And while Project Glass won't be commercially available for another two years at the earliest, there are plenty of companies selling devices that consumers can slip into and strap on to collect reams of data about their daily lives.
To get a glimpse of that future, I strapped on a bunch of those gadgets. Here's what I learned.… Read more
In today's show, Google takes us for a spin, ultrabooks are no longer ultra-pricey, and the iPad isn't just for humans anymore:
Hewlett-Packard announced several new thin and light laptops under the Envy brand. Some are officially called ultrabooks, equiped with Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processors, while less-expensive ones are called sleekbooks. But regardless of the different labels, it means high-quality thin and light laptops are moving into the $600 to $700 price range. (There's even a rumor that the MacBook Air -- the computer that kickstarted the ultrabook craze -- will drop its price to $… Read more
Sebastian Thrun of Google says that the company's Project Glass glasses are best doing what a smartphone does but in a hands-free way.
The company executive, who works on Project Glass at Google X Labs, wore a prototype of the now-famous glasses during an interview with Charlie Rose which went online today.
He showed how they are operated when he took a photo of Rose by pressing a button, then nodded his head to apparently share the photo with his friends on Google Plus. Two weeks ago, Google founder Sergey Brin was seen at a charity event sporting the … Read more
The Defense Department has reportedly ordered augmented-reality displays from startup Innovega, only a week after Google disclosed its own augmented-reality project.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Innovega has signed a contract to supply the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with a prototype of its iOptik spectacles and accompanying contact lenses, Innovega's CEO Steve Willey told the BBC. The augmented-reality system could improve the awareness of soldiers in the field, he said.
The contact lenses have a filter that allows a person to focus on images at a very close distance and focus on far-away objects at the same time. That … Read more
Google today for the first time acknowledged Project Glass, in which an eyeglass-like frame essentially brings the Internet to a small screen above the right eye. The demonstration video shows, from the perspective of someone wearing the glasses, a person communicating with friends and looking up information just as he might use a smartphone.
Personally, I don't need any more distractions as I move through my … Read more
Google finally acknowledged that it's testing a prototype set of eyeglasses that can stream data to the wearer's eyes in real time.
A video of this augmented-reality experiment was posted by Google on YouTube showing someone wearing the glasses as he made his way around variety of Manhattan venues, receiving up-to-the-minute updates as information streamed into his glasses.
Let's not be too cynical about an idea that, at first blush, seems delightful but not very relevant. Also, given that the authorities take a dim view of driving while texting, you can image how they'll react to … Read more
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