Windows 7 Mobile

Windows Mobile 7 is clearly designed for better media playback, with screenshots indicating a much-improved Media Player and photo gallery application. Mobile Internet Explorer runs full-screen web pages in a minimalist interface, and has "tabbed" browsing, except you can switch tabs by shaking the phone.

Music player and image gallery

Internet Explorer works with shakes

Juggling images

The OS will dynamically resize elements of the user interface, prioritizing them and making them easier to hit. Corners, like the close button, scrollbars, icons and the title bar/status bar, will all be able to grow to make things easier on the user.

Waking up the device

Waking up transition effects

Gestures for scrolling (horizontal and vertical), task and menu access, press and hold controls, list items, press and drag, and launching shortcuts will also be available. The Windows Mobile 7 device will also be able to detect finger velocity, scrolling further if the user's finger moves faster.

When the user flicks to scroll within a list, a scroll handle will appear on the side. If the user touches it, the user can drag the scroll handle up and down for faster scrolling. This replaces the scroll bar. The more the handle is moved, the faster the screen will scroll.

The new Windows Mobile application • scrolling with the scroll handle

When using the keyboard, the letter enlarges and appears above your finger when you hit it, just like on the iPhone. When highlighting text, a zoom/edit box appears above it to show what you are highlighting. When in full page view in IE Mobile, if you hit an area with links it will zoom in with a bubble and help you choose from the links.

Zoom bubble in IE • iPhone-style virtual keyboard • highlighting text in Word

Motion Gestures

There will be various finger motion gestures, used for scrolling vertically and horizontally, task and menu access, pressing and holding on controls, list items, pressing and dragging, and launching shortcuts.

Some UI elements, called Spinner and Pivot, will have a gesture where you swipe them from left to right. In a Spinner, you have a single item with left and right buttons next to it, but instead of hitting the left and right buttons, you can just swipe to change the option.

There will also be motion gestures, where the user moves the device to invoke certain commands. Microsoft Research has a technology concept that uses the device's camera as a motion sensor, enabling motion control while using the device. It will also support changing screen orientation when turning the device sideways, just like the iPhone does, but using the camera, not an accelerometer. These gestures will require the camera to be operating all the time a gesture may be used, which will affect battery life. And we couldn't help but scratch our heads how this will work in pitch dark environment.

There's also a part talking about allowing the user to "doodle" on the screen, letting users draw doodles on the device lock screen, as well as shake the screen to affect the wallpaper (like making water run, or blurring an image). The iPhone's lock screen is an iconic part of the device, and Microsoft wants to have a cool lock screen without copying Apple, so the plan is to give you fun things to do on the lock screen.

"Doodling" on the main unlock screen

There's a list of gestures that are being explored and may or may not make it into Mobile 7, including a gesture to dismiss an on-screen notification by shaking it off the screen, a gesture to automatically take you to a Smart Search notification panel, turning the phone like turning a key to unlock it, Pivoting by gesturing the phone sideways, moving through lists by shaking the phone up or down, switching the camera into black and white or other modes by shaking it down, adjusting camera aperture and shutter speed by rotating the camera, sending a file by "tossing" it to another device.

Pivoting through system tabs with shakes

Applying camera effects with gestures

Microsoft clearly has a lot planned to make Windows Mobile 7 the revolution it needs to be to compete with Apple, and Windows Mobile 7 is going to bring some cool and excitement to Microsoft's smart phones. Too bad we are going to have to wait for it at least a year more

For sale: Your robot clone

Japanese robot maker Kokoro, best known for its Actroid line of ultra-lifelike androids, will make robot clones of people in a special limited-time offer.

The New Year promotion is being offered via select department stores in Japan. People willing to pay about $225,000 can have themselves recreated in robot form, with their robot clone having exactly the same face, hair, eyes, and body.

Kokoro will also model the buyer's voice, facial expressions, and upper-body movements to create the most lifelike doppelganger possible.

The Actroid and Geminoid androids are powered by a quiet air servo system that moves their upper bodies. They cannot walk.

Both are based on real people--one version of Actroid was based on a Japanese newscaster, and Geminoid is based on Osaka University roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro.

Kokoro is only offering to make two robot clones. If more than two orders are received, the lucky buyers will be selected by lottery.

Solar-Powered Radio Headphones

The Solar-Powered Radio Headphones are perfect for people who love listening to the radio rather than listening to their MP3 player. I must admit, I much prefer radio as I enjoy the banter between the radio presenters just as much as a random choice of music. With this radio however, it’s charged via the solar-panel on the top of the headphones.

The radio headphones feature a AAA battery that stores the charge from the solar panel. You get between one and three hours of listening from an hour of sunlight. A fully-charged headset will give you a total of 20 hours listening time. So you might want to leave your headphones in the sun to charge up when you’re not using them.

The headset is completely adjustable to suit all head sizes. The Solar-Powered Radio Headphones cost £24.95 plus delivery.

Update 16th Dec 2009 – Unfortunately this product is no longer available to buy.

Neuber Lightweight Solar Panel Bags

Konarka Industries have partnered with German retailer Neuber to create lightweight Energy Sun-Bags, which are fitted with a 1.4W solar panel that can charge most portable gadgets that need a charging power supply up to 5V at 600mA. The Sun-Bags can charge the usual gadgets, such as MP3 players, cameras, phones, games consoles, etc.

The Sun Bags are claimed to be the lightest on the market, weighing only 500 grams (1lb), including the solar panel, battery and all of the charging cables. The bags are available in 37 colors with optional custom printing, which is particularly useful for branding the bags with a company logo.

Prices start at around €120, which is currently around $180 USD due to currency fluctuations.

Eco 7 – Compact Transportable Bike with Folding Wheels

The Eco 7 Folding Bike is the concept design of Victor Aleman in Mexico. The Eco 7 is designed to be taken on planes and other transportation where space is a significant problem. Once you reach you destination, you unfold your bike and enjoy the great outdoors!

Pretty much every part of the bike is collapsible, including the main frame, the handle bars, crank, brakes, wheels and chain! Once the different elements have been removed from the frame, they all just fold together. The wheels are particularly clever, made from a total of 6 modules where the spokes fold into the rim of the wheel.

No mention of a prototype is mentioned, so I have no idea how long it would take to assemble and disassemble the bike in practice. I have a feeling that it would take around 15 minutes to take the bike apart. My only concern is that the bike might fall apart if one element of the bike was a little loose. That could be painful if a wheel gave way!

Eco Button PC Energy Saving Device

The Eco Button is a retro-fit device that you plug into your PC’s USB port that makes it quick and easy to put your computer into an energy saving mode. The button is designed to suspend your computer when you disappear to answer the phone, have some lunch, go to meetings, etc. When you return to your PC, just hit the button to quickly wake the computer up again, right where you left off!

The EcoButton triggers the most eco-friendly energy saving mode available on a PC, which is almost equivalent to the computer being switched off completely! The main benefit of the EcoButton is that it makes it as easy as possible to use this energy saving mode, literally at the press of a button.

Based on an average sized machine of around 200 Watts, and an electricity cost of around £0.16 per kWh, and when the Eco Button is used for 4 hours per day for 1 year, savings are estimated to be around £50 per year ( about $85 USD). Which is roughly equivalent to a saving of 135kg of carbon dioxide emissions a year! The software includes a meter which calculates your actual energy savings and carbon footprint.

The EcoButton is designed to be used with a Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista 32-bit PC, as the EcoButton is not yet compatible with Apple Macs or Windows 7. The button itself measures 5.5cm (L) x 5.5cm (W) x 1.5cm (H) and sits on top of your desk in front of your PC. The idea is that the button is a constant reminder to save energy using your PC.

Go Green With Mobiles

Samsung Blue Earth

Samsung unveiled an incredible eco-friendly phone with a full solar panel installed on its back, able to generate power when exposed to the sun. Besides, for an eco gadget the Blue Earth is quite small and comfortable to use. But Samsung went on with its device, making its body from recycle water bottles, without using brominated flame retardants, beryllium and phthalates. You can use the phone's features to turn on the energy saving mode, use a CO2 calculator, as well as a pedometer. The phone's packaging is made of recycled paper.

LG Solar-Powered Phone

Another solar-powered mobile phone comes from LG. The device includes a solar-powered battery mounted into the back cover. Ten minutes of sunlight exposure allow you to talk for 10 minutes. Logically, the more you expose the phone to the sun the more talk time you get. In future the company hopes to pack its green devices into environmentally-friendly boxes, using recycled paper with cardboard that won't include laminate coating. In addition, the company wants to remove from the phone-manufacturing process such chemicals as brominated flame retardants (BFR), chlorinated flame retardants (CFR) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) by 2010. This model also has the HFB-500 Bluetooth solar car kit that allows you to drive your car while talking on the phone without having to hold the device.

Sharp SH002 Solar Phone

This eco-friendly mobile phone provides a number of useful features like GPS and Bluetooth; besides, it's waterproof. The solar panel incorporated here requires only 30 minutes of sunlight exposure, to give you 140 minutes of standby and 2 minutes of communications. If you expose the phone to the sun for 90 minutes, you'll be able to communicate for 9 minutes or get 560 minutes of standby. The phone also has one interesting feature - Golf Mode, which unfortunately works only in Japan. It includes information on 2300 golf courses throughout the country, thus using the GPS you can get to the desired golf field.

The World Is Just Awesome

‘The World Is Just Awesome’ is a lovely commercial from Discovery Channel. It never gets old, it makes you kind of break into a song I love the mountains, I love the clear blue skies, I love big bridges, I love the whole world and its craziness. Something to make anyone smile.

The Future Gadgets

The Future Is Going To Be AMAZING...These Are Some Cool Future Gadgets.....

WebGL Demo

WebGL is a binding of OpenGL ES 2.0 for Javascript. It lets web pages do fast 3D graphics in the browser. The spec is still a work-in-progress, and support is only starting to appear in browsers. None of the regular releases support it yet, so you may need a nightly build.

Mozilla Minefield For WebGL:
Firefox nightly builds support WebGL. You can download those here

However, you need to turn on WebGL manually in the configuration. Type about:config in the address bar, then search for "webgl" and change the value of webgl.enabled_for_all_sites to true.

Apple MacBook Pro 2009

The good: New aluminum unibody construction comes to the 17-inch model; useful multitouch trackpad gestures; attractive edge-to-edge glass on display; dual graphics provide more power or more battery life.

The bad: All-clicking trackpad is a bit awkward; matte screen option costs extra; switching GPUs is not as seamless as it should be.

The bottom line: A little late to the party, Apple's redesigned 17-inch MacBook Pro joins the 15-inch model with a redesigned aluminum body, new trackpad with expanded functionality, and a dual-graphics setup for either longer battery life or better performance

Google Earth 5.0: The 3D Is Here

Google Earth puts a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop. View exotic locales like Maui and Paris, as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, and schools. Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps, and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips. With Google Earth you can fly from space to your neighborhood--just type in an address and zoom right in, search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions, tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings, save and share your searches and favorites and even add your own annotations.

What's New In This Version:
Improved Startup Time. The improvement is most noticeable when users launch the Earth application multiple times.

Improved overall rendering performance. Changes include faster atmosphere rendering and using compressed textures whenever possible.

Improved Road rendering Performance: Frame rate at places with dense road networks is three times faster than in previous releases.

Improved memory utilization in the application.
Significantly smoother frame-rate and less stuttering in the application compared to previous releases.

Improved performance with large region based network link KML documents. Some of large
KML documents are now processed and rendered at more than twice the speed of earlier releases.

Improved KML document handling performance. Large regionated KML Image overlays are up to 80% faster than previous releases.

Support for KML hint = moon or mars to switch to moon or mars based on kml document.

Availability of one installer that installs both the Google Earth application and browser plugin.

Desktop Application now works on Windows 7.

Users can set the memory cache size up to 1024 MB now.

Google Andriod On PC

Have you used google andriod on your PC??? If not try it now....

Just Try It...Only 190MB
Download Here

Web Closer To 3D Reality

3D graphics became ordinary first in games, then in operating systems, and on Thursday, it took a significant step toward being built into Web browsers as well.
The Khronos Group, which oversees the OpenGL graphics interface, announced that its work with Mozilla to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web has reached draft standard form. The standard, called WebGL, lets programmers who use the Web's JavaScript language take advantage of the fact that video cards can handle 3D graphics with aplomb.
The group now wants commentary from Web developers and others who might be involved with WebGL so it can be finalized. "I anticipate us moving toward a spec that is not provisional, not merely a draft, in early 2010, the first quarter," said Arun Ranganathan, chairman of the WebGL working group and standards evangelist at Mozilla.
Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser in terms of usage, but all four of its main challengers--Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and Opera Software's Opera--are working hard, sometimes in an informal alliance, to get ahead by advancing the Web state of the art.
WebGL fits into that effort, and not just academically. All four of those browser makers have endorsed WebGL, and developer test versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have it built in. Microsoft declined to comment for this story beyond reiterating its general support for standards.
Ultimately, building 3D support into the Web could advance user interfaces of Web applications--including games, the popularity of which can be a powerful incentive for upgrading to the latest technology.
It's not clear exactly how it will play out, though, Ranganathan said. The arrival of Canvas, an advanced 2D interface for browsers, has led to a blossoming of graphics work, and he expects a similar change with 3D graphics.
But don't hold your breath for Web-based first-person shooters that rival native applications. First, even if 3D is accelerated, there are plenty of other processing and user interface constraints on Web applications. Second, even after WebGL is standardized, it must be built into browsers, people must upgrade to those new versions, and programmers must learn how to support the technology.
WebGL isn't the only 3D Web work under way. Google has its own O3D project, which currently is a browser plug-in but that the company also is building directly into Chrome.
O3D is a higher-level interface, though, not a direct competitor. Details are technical, but O3D uses a retained mode approach to WebGL's immediate mode interfaces.
And of course, a decade ago there was VRML--virtual reality modeling language, a file format rather than interface. A VRML successor called X3D, though, can actually make use of WebGL, and indeed a project called X3dom aims to do just that.

Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010, codenamed Office 14, is the successor of Microsoft Office 2007, a productivity suite for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Office 2010 includes extended file compatibility, user interface updates and a refined user experience. It will be available for Windows XP SP3 (32-bit), Windows Vista, and Windows 7. With the introduction of Office 2010, a 64-bit version of Office will be available for the first time, although only for Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems. Office 2010 is not supported on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
Office 2010 will mark the debut of free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, which will work in popular web browsers (Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari) but not in the Opera browser. Microsoft has confirmed that it will be released in the first half of 2010, and a public beta was made available in November 2009. A new edition of Office, Office Starter 2010, will replace the current low-end home productivity software, Microsoft Works.

Google Chrome OS

Google Chrome OS is an open source operating system designed by Google to work exclusively with web applications. Announced on July 7, 2009, Chrome OS is set to have a publicly available stable release during the second half of 2010. The operating system is based on Linux and targets specifically designed hardware. The user interface takes a minimalist approach, resembling that of the Chrome web browser. Because the browser will be the only application residing on the device, Google Chrome OS is aimed at users who spend most of their computer time on the Internet.

Windows 7 security providers

Windows 7 consumer security software providers
We recommend that you install security software to help protect your computer from viruses and other security threats, and that you keep your security software up to date.
Some companies use products that appear to be antivirus programs to install viruses or malware on your computer. When you install the program, you might also be installing the virus or other malware, without knowing it. Many companies, including those listed on this page, distribute antivirus programs. You should carefully investigate the source of antivirus and other products before downloading and installing them.
The companies listed below provide consumer security software that is compatible with Windows 7. Just click the company name to see the Windows 7-compatible product they offer. For business security software that is compatible with Windows 7, please visit the Windows 7 Compatibility Center or contact your security vendor of choice.
Important: Before you install antivirus software, check to make sure you don't already have an antivirus product on your computer. If you do, be sure to remove the product you don't want before you install the new one. It can cause problems on your computer to have two different antivirus products installed at the same time.
Microsoft is actively working with the partners listed on this page and additional security independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide security software solutions tested on Windows 7.

Next Generation: Windows 7

Windows 7 is the latest public release version of Microsoft Windows, a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablet PCs, and media center PCs. Windows 7 was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and reached general retail availability on October 22, 2009, less than three years after the release of its predecessor, Windows Vista. Windows 7's server counterpart, Windows Server 2008 R2, was released at the same time.
Unlike its predecessor, which introduced a large number of new features, Windows 7 was intended to be a more focused, incremental upgrade to the Windows line, with the goal of being fully compatible with applications and hardware with which Windows Vista is already compatible. Presentations given by Microsoft in 2008 focused on multi-touch support, a redesigned Windows Shell with a new taskbar, referred to as the Superbar, a home networking system called HomeGroup, and performance improvements. Some applications that have been included with prior releases of Microsoft Windows, including Windows Calendar, Windows Mail, Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Photo Gallery, are not included in Windows 7;most are instead offered separately as part of the free Windows Live Essentials suite.

Minimum hardware requirements for Windows 7 Architecture 32-bit 64-bit
Processor 1 GHz 32-bit processor 1 GHz 64-bit processor
Memory (RAM) 1 GB of RAM 2 GB of RAM
Graphics Card DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM driver model 1.0 (For Aero)
HDD free space 16 GB of available disk space 20 GB of available disk space
Optical drive

Screenshots