Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime

While other tablets are still dualcore, the Prime will be the first tablet with a quad-core processor. It’s also a ‘Transformer’, i.e., it can dock with a full-size keyboard. You have a choice of 32GB/64GB storage (expandable via microSD). Other specs include an 8MP camera, Android 3.2, 10.1-inch super IPS+ LCD (1280 x 800 pixels), 14 hour battery life and a starting price of US$ 500. Epson Moverio BT-100: Unlike other head-mounted displays, the Moverio stands out because it has removable, transparent shades and the glasses connect to the supplied control unit via Wi-Fi. The control unit itself runs Android 2.2, has 1GB internal storage (and a microSD card for expansion) with six hours of battery life. It is expected to launch internationally towards the end of this year for US$ 770.

Electronic wristband like your personal trainer

Jawbone’s new gadget is not a Bluetooth headphone or speaker — it’s an electronic wristband that acts like your personal trainer

    Jawbone, the maker of sleek Bluetooth earpieces and colourful wireless portable speakers, now offers a product that monitors your activity and sleep, and, by confronting you with a visual record of your habits, inspires you to work harder.

This isn't a new idea. The active ingredient is the same one found in gadgets like the Nike+iPod. If you conscientiously wear these devices, they work. The simple act of monitoring your own behavior inevitably encourages you — to climb more stairs, park farther away and bike instead of drive.

WHY IT’S DIFFERENT

The Up bracelet tries to improve on earlier devices in two important ways. First, its textured rubber exterior, available in a variety of colours and wrist sizes, is waterproof up to three feet. You can wear the band 24/7, even when you swim or take a shower.

Second, the Up band uses an iPhone app as its brains and screen. Brilliant! You're already carrying around a computer with a colourful touch screen; why shouldn't it work with your glorified pedometer?

THE INNER WORKINGS

The band contains a metal spine; it's flexible but always returns to its closed oval shape when you let go. On one end, there's a clickable metal button and a couple of tiny indicator lights. On the other, a tiny removable cap conceals the Up's connector to your iPhone: a headphone jack. Yes, that's right: the Up band connects to your iPhone through its headphone jack. That's both its most ingenious idea and its most idiotic.

GENIUS IDEA OR POTENTIAL FLAW?

Relying on the headphone jack means that the Up band can, in theory, communicate with any phone brand. But it's not a wireless connection. Jawbone's earpiece and portable speakers are models for clever use of Bluetooth; why on earth can't your bracelet send its data to your phone wirelessly?

The answer, according to the company, is that Bluetooth would shorten the band's 10-day battery life.

Still, that design is a crushing disappointment. Now, several times a day, you're supposed to take the band off, insert the plug into your phone's headphone jack and sync data with the app. Then, after the sync, put everything back together and back on your arm. The plugging-in business just feels ancient and wrong. It means you have to take off your bracelet. It means you'll lose the tiny cap. And get this: the band doesn't even charge in that manner. To charge the band, you're supposed to connect it to a tiny proprietary USB cable that's plugged into a computer. You'll lose that cable, too.

HOW THE APP SHOWS YOU DATA

If you do manage to sync the band to your phone, you see a graph of your health activity, represented by colourful bars.

One shows physical activity, as measured in steps, distance and calories tallied by the band. (I was disappointed not to get any credit for a 90-minute bike ride. It was certainly exercise, but of course my wrist didn't move much. The company says that the current version is tailored for running and walking, but that you can record other kinds of activity — swimming, yoga, rowing machines, and biking — manually. The app can also record your runs, hikes or bike rides using the GPS function.)

If you need further inspiration, the app also lists Challenges offered by fitness companies: to get an extra hour of sleep, to walk 1,00,000 steps this week and so on.

Maybe the best motivator is the sedentarytime alarm. You can set the band to vibrate, cellphone-style, every time you haven't budged for, let's say, an hour. It's an appalling, visceral reminder of how much time you spend sitting there, motionless.

SOME THOUGHTFUL EXTRAS

Like some other products, the Up band also tries to make a graph of your sleep patterns by tracking your unconscious movements: deep sleep, light sleep and lying awake. You have to press the metal button on the end to let it know that you're going to bed, though, which is a little odd. Shouldn't it be able to sense when you've gone to sleep?

The band can also wake you with a vibration. In fact, it's Smart Alarm feature tries to wake you when you're in the lightest phase of your sleep cycle, to avoid the grogginess of waking from a deep sleep. You set an alarm time; if the band senses that you're nearly awake anyway within 30 minutes beforehand, it rouses you early.

It's difficult to believe that you'll actually feel more refreshed with less sleep, but that's the theory; online, a fair number of people say that it works. In any case, there's great value in an alarm that wakes you with a silent vibration. At least whoever's sleeping next to you will certainly find great value in it.

HOW IT KEEPS YOU MOTIVATED

The Up band is also supposed to help you eat better, but its approach is minimalist: you use the phone to take a picture of every meal. That's it. The wristband has no involvement. There's no calorie tracking, no portion control, no guidance whatsoever.

The company suggests that public humiliation is the key. The Up app lets you connect to other Up band owners you may know: your family and friends, for example. Each day, you can compare your own activity, sleep and food records with theirs, side-by-side on a graph on the phone. The idea is that if you're being watched by people whose opinion matters, you'll take better care of yourself.

It's hard to argue with that premise. But how many people do you know who own Up bands, who might become part of your network?

All of this would be much more compelling if the phone software weren't so completely baffling. The graph might say "24%" for food. Percent of what? There are no fewer than three different app screens that show your friends' progress, scrolling like Facebook updates; what's the difference? Why won't the app work in airplane mode? Few people will be able to figure out what the heck is going on with this app.

The Up band is something, but it could be so much more. Fewer bugs. Simpler software. A wireless link. The ability to track other kinds of activity besides walking. A less crude diet manager. Compatibility with other phones.

The company says that improvements will be coming soon. For now, the heart and hardware are in the right place —but the software has nowhere to go but up.

ALTHOUGH JAWBONE does not officially sell the Up wristband in India, it can be purchased online and shipped through various websites. The free iPhone app is required for the functions to work.

ANATOMY OF THE UP WRISTBAND
1. Rechargeable battery
The battery charges using a proprietary USB cable and provides up to 10 days of battery life
2. Vibration motor
This powers the silent alarm that can wake you without disturbing others
3. Precision motion sensor
The sensor determines your movement pattern, tracks steps and also figures out when you go to sleep
4. 3.5mm plug
The 3.5mm plug is what syncs the wristband with the phone app. A wireless version may follow later
5. Flexible spine
The spine secures itself on your wrist and always returns to the oval shape

NO GMAIL FOR BLACKBERRY USERS FROM NOV 22

Blackberry users will not be able to access Google's Gmail application from November 22. The search giant has decided to stop supporting the application for rival Research in Motion's smartphones in a bid to expand its own market. However, there won't be any problem for users who have already downloaded the application.

LG's full HD 3D Cinema projector

H ere's a good news for cinema lovers. LG's full HD 3D Cinema projector -the LG CF3D is the product to watch out for. The single lens projector offers excellent 3D picture quality with a single box set, sans cross talk and cardboard effect. The 3D system uses two projectors combined with only one lens. Priced at R8 lakh, it is available at all leading AV SI partners in India.

RIM BlackBerry OS 7

BlackBerry started out as phones meant for the suits. And executives swore by the gadgets that were, at one point of time, more or less defined by their QWERTY keyboards. But things began changing. Almost every mobile device took on the ‘smart’ tag. BlackBerry’s USP was fading, and RIM found the need to reinvent itself. The QWERTY (in certain models) gave way to touchscreens and the wide candybar form-factor mutated into a slider and even a flip. Still, the changes were mostly cosmetic. The underlying operating system fell short when it came to mainstream uses that included touch navigation, multimedia and digital photography. But, to give credit where it’s due, with BlackBerry OS 7, RIM has made some of its boldest changes.

User interface: BlackBerry has now begun using what it calls Liquid Graphics technology. The icons are more vibrant and colourful, and the graphics and fonts look crisp. Touch navigation using the device’s screen has also become fluid and results in instant response time. Gone are the teething problems that BB faced when it first flirted with a touch interface in the Storm handset launched in 2008.

The new OS also comes with up to five sliding ‘home’ screens – All, Favorites, Media, Downloads and Frequent – to create ‘easy-to-access’ groupings of apps. Besides, on each screen you can slide ‘up’ to view all the applications, or slide it ‘down’ to hide them. All in all, navigation in the new OS, whether through touchscreen or touchpad, is a definitely better than anything that has been seen on BB devices before.

Browser: There is a marked improvement in browser speeds with BlackBerry 7. According to RIM, with the new browser, pages load 40% faster than Blackberry 6 and 100% faster than OS 5. Other features include pinch-to-zoom, multi-touch support, text autowrap, and even support for HTML5. On HTML5-Test.com, the BB OS 7 notched-up 263 points out of 450, quite decent when you consider that the Google Chrome tops the browser scores with 340, while Internet Explorer 9 scores just 141 points.

Going social: Besides, individual apps for Twitter and Facebook, the new OS is also equipped with a centralised hub called Social Feeds. This app allows you to stay abreast of your social networks and even lets you receive news and information from your favourite blogs and web sites through RSS feeds – all in a single window.

Then there is the new improved BB Messenger 6, which when coupled with BB 7 is tightly integrated with several other apps,including the location-based Foursquare social network and Wikitude – an Augmented Reality application that combines the real and virtual via the device’s camera and GPS to provide relevant data – including BBM friends in the vicinity, and even details drawn from the Internet about your surroundings.

Voice-activated universal search: RIM has added voice-activated universal search that converts speech to text – and not only

Devices: Bold 9900/9930, Torch 9850/ 9860/9810 and Curve
9350/9360/9370

does it scour your entire device for emails, contacts, music, bookmarks, browser history, podcasts, tasks, memopad, etc, but also extends the search to the Internet to include YouTube, BlackBerry Maps, Twitter, and even Wikitude.

Forward-looking technologies: One of the biggest changes incorporated in the BlackBerry 7 is the inclusion of forwardlooking technologies such as (the aforementioned) Augmented Reality and Near Field Communication (NFC) that could let users transfer files, contacts, music and photos between two such enabled devices by merely touching one with the other. NFC could even be used to initiate multiplayer mobile games, stream music to NFCenabled speakers, and even make make monetary payments by merely touching one’s phone to an NFC-enabled payment gateway. And while at present, there aren’t any applications for NFC on BB yet, the future for this technology seems to be extremely promising.

Other features: When it comes to entertainment, some of the features in BB OS 7 include OpenGL graphics for 3D gaming, as well as support for high-definition (720p) video recording. Work horses will appreciate that the devices come pre-installed with ‘Documents to Go’ so you can work on text, spreadsheets and presentation files. Of course, as far as data protection is concerned there’s BlackBerry Protect that allows users to backup their data, including contacts, calendar entries, tasks, memos, text messages and even the password database. And in case the device gets lost or stolen, users can also track it and wipe it using the BlackBerry Protect web site.

Our take: For most part – with the Black-Berry OS 7 – RIM is playing catch up with the rest of the competition. On the other hand, it still retains its position as one of the best devices meant for the executives on the go. With this new OS, the company has add a ‘fun’ element to its devices and has been fairly successful in the venture. Without doubt, this is indeed one of the best upgrades that BB has put out in a long time.

Samsung Latest Smartphone Galaxy Note

Samsung is out with its latest smartphone, the Galaxy Note, in India and boy is it big! The idea is to use it as both a smartphone and a mini-tablet. Note has a 5.3 inch HD SAMOLED display, an ultra-fast 1GHz dual-core processor and runs Android 2.3 and comes with a stylus for quick and easy note-taking. Price: R34,990.