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Featured Mobile

LG Unveils Optimus 3D At MWC

LG has unveiled its new smartphone –Optimus 3D at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The smartphone which presently runs on Android 2.2 or Froyo would later be upgraded to Android 2.3 or Gingerbread. The phone comes with a first of its kind tri-dual configuration with the duo triplet being dual memory, dual channel and dual core. The other specs of the phone are an impressive 4.3″ wide display, 1GHz dual core processor, 3D viewing without the need of glasses, 5.0 mega pixel camera with a dual lens, high-def video recording and playback at 720p in 3D, high-def recording and playback at 1080 p in 2D, 8GB memory and a 1500mAh battery.

Optimus 3D enables multitasking allowing the user to switch between programs and also enables playing games at a higher frame rate. LG has not yet announced the price and the date of availability of the handset.

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Featured HTC Mobile

HTC Unveils Desire S, Incredible S and Wildfire S Smartphones

HTC along with its tablet, Flyer, has also unveiled three new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today. Along the lines of Flyer, these three smartphones Desire S, Incredible S and the Wildfire S will be running on Google’s Android 2.4 OS. As you can see these three smartphones are the upgraded versions of their respective predecessors, viz. Desire, Incredible and Wildfire. The videos of the phones have also been posted on the HTC website.

As far as the specs of the phones are concerned,

the HTC Desire S comes with a 3.7″ touchscreen display, 5.0 megapixel camera with flash, 1GHz processor, High-Def video recording at 720p and a 1450mAh battery,

the HTC Incredible S comes with a 4″ touchscreen display, 8.0 megapixel camera, 1GHz processor, High-Def video recording at 720p and a 1450mAh battery,

the HTC Wildfire S comes with a 3.2″ touchscreen display, 5.0mega pixel camera, 600mHz processor with flash and autofocus and a 1230mAh battery.

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Featured Gaming HTC

HTC Launches Its Tablet – Flyer

The Mobile World Congress at Barcelona this year is seeing full fledged launches from almost all the mobile giants. After Samsung and Sony Ericsson unveiled their respective smartphones and tablets, it was the Taiwanese giant HTC‘s turn today as it launched its tablet – “Flyer”. Following on the lines of their own smartphones, the HTC Flyer comes with aluminium unibody design and a 7″ touchscreen display. Interestingly, this tablet does not run on Android 3.0 or Honeycomb, but runs on the Android 2.4 more popular as the Ice Cream Sandwich.

Other specs of the HTC tablet include a 1.5 GHz Qaulcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB RAM, 32 GB hard disk space, 5.0 mega pixel camera, a 1.3 mega pixel camera in the front, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and HSPA support. Overall the tablet weighs less than a pound. The UI of the tablet will run on HTC Sense with many more added widgets when compared to the smartphones that use the same UI.

Tha tablet also comes with a stylus.

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Featured

New Hack To Play Super Mario With Kinect

Remember the Kinect hack that let you transform a regular wooden stick into a lightsaber? Now Yankeyan – the YouTube member who brought us the hack is on to it once again. But this one is better. The new proof of concept video lets the user play the popular Super Mario using gesture controls. In a video posted recently that shows us this new hack, Yankeyan explains,

“Proof of concept. Celebrating 25 years of Mario.

I programmed it to recognize my motions and passed the virtual button presses to the NES emulator. I could have placed a simulated keypad right in front of me that I can press with my hands, but I thought full body gestures were more in the spirit of Kinect. Of course, Mario isn’t designed to be played like this, so this is really really hard.

Drivers using OpenKinect, NES emulation using FCEUX.”

Check out the video below. Don’t you feel excited about wanting to play this game yourself?

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Featured

Looking For Extension Cables For Kinect? Read This

If it is not possible for you to place your Kinect right next to your XBox 360 console, you have to go for an extension cable. The official solution provided by Microsoft is the “XBox 360 Kinect Extension Cable” that is available at a price of $49.99 on the Microsoft website but is available for less – $40 – from Amazon.

There is a problem to this. Firstly, the solution is expensive. Also, Microsoft recommends the distance to be less than 10 feet citing performance degradation.

In case you find Microsoft’s option too pricey or if you have to get a longer extension cable, then Kinect customers have now been suggesting quite a few alternatives.

USB 2.0 Booster extension cable – Priced at $39.99 and can extend up to 39 feet

USB 2.0 Active Extension Repeater Cable – Priced at $14.83 and extends up to 32 feet (10 meters)

So do longer extension cables cause performance degradation? Microsoft says it does. In fact Microsoft does not recommend the use of any of these USB extensions. But then, from I hear from Kinect users who have tried these options above, there does not seem to any lag whatsoever.

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Featured

Kinect Hacked To Create Animated Puppet Show

This is seriously awesome. A new hack developed by hackers Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson has enabled the Kinect to be used for interactive puppet shows. The hack, a video of which you can find below, basically inputs human gestures and makes use of this input to improvise the movements of an animated character.

What’s more impressive than the demonstration itself is the fact that the whole hack was developed in under 24 hours. This just goes to tell you the power of such a tool. Imagine what can be done with Kinect’s technology in a month! And imagine where we would be in a year’s time.

Do you see more such use-cases for Kinect? Why don’t you tell us in the comments.

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Featured

Kinect Used To Enable Robot Understand Human Gestures

Microsoft Kinect is an amazing piece of technology and folks at MIT seem to know that. Their Personal Robots Group has been working on a new iRobot Create platform that will use Kinect to study the robot’s neighborhood for 3D map processing. Additionally, with Kinect’s already sophisticated human gesture tracking system, the robot can now understand human gestures and can navigate accordingly.

Check out the video below. As noted, the iRobot Create platform has been built with an Atom powered embedded computer, a Hokuyo URG-04LX range finder and a Kinect connected to an external Li-Poly battery.

The possibilities for such a system to be developed into more sophisticated systems are endless. Of course, camera based 3D mapping is not entirely a new phenomenon. But with Kinect, Microsoft has just given regular joes an opportunity to hack the system for their own DIY projects.

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Featured Telecom

Tata DoCoMo MySong Pricing – How It Works

Tata DoCoMo has unveiled a comprehensive new MySong functionality – the reverse caller-tune feature that lets users select a song that they would like to hear when they make a particular call. According to the new plans, the MySong offering is now available at a weekly subscription cost of Rs.10. Subscribers will be allowed to change their songs for free and can hold a maximum of up to 50 songs in their library. Also, at an additional monthly subscription of Rs.30, users may choose to set their MySong as a caller tune – that will let other callers hear the song when they make a call.

The latest offering can find a larger appeal considering the existing plan that let users pay Rs.10 per-song that had a 90 day validity. And that is on top of the Rs.15 per month to just sign up to the service.

If you are looking to sign up, just dial 543217 from your Tata DoCoMo mobile phone.

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Featured Gadgets

Samsung Galaxy 5 Price In India Announced

Samsung is launching its new Galaxy 5 Android smartphone in the Indian market. If you love Android and think the Galaxy S is above the budget you can afford, then you should definitely look at the Galaxy 5. This device comes with a 2.8-inches QVGA touchscreen that is supported by a 600MHz processor, 90MB internal memory and a microSD card slot that can take close to 16GB of data. The phone also comes with a 2-megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.1, FM Radio, GPS, 3G, Wi-Fi and a music player.

Of course, the features are highly basic when you consider all that’s on offer on a Galaxy S. But if you are yet to jump on to the smartphone bandwagon, Samsung Galaxy 5 (I5503) will pretty much satisfy your requirements.
Samsung Galaxy 5 in India

Samsung Galaxy 5 is built over TouchWiz 3.0 UI on top of the Android interface and will also support the Layar reality browser, social hub, AllShare and Swype. The device will be priced at Rs. 10,200.

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Featured Gadgets

Wink eReader Price, Features & Video Demo Unveiled

EC Media in India is launching a new eReader device that looks pretty much like the Amazon Kindles of the yesteryears. It looks good, and supposedly carries decent specs. What’s not decent is the price. The eReader is expected to be priced around Rs. 11,500 – that’s close to $248. At that price, you can buy the best of eReaders from Amazon and its rivals. But do note that this price is for the Indian market where the Kindle is yet to launch and hence this could as well be a market skimming strategy.

So what’s on offer at the price? From what is reported, the device will carry a 6-inches e-ink display at a resolution of 800×600 pixels along with a 2GB internal storage, 3.5mm headphone jack and support for 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB 2.0 and GPRS connectivity. The battery is expected to last 10,000 page turns or 10 hours of music playback. Not bad. If only the price was a bit lesser.

Here is a video demo of the device.