The GameBoy Pocket remains one of the best-designed pieces of mobile gaming kit ever in my opinion, which is why I was intrigued by the BittBoy, a new third-party portable console that clearly owes a lot of inspiration to the GameBoy. The tiny handheld packs a library of “300” games built-in, controls that will feel familiar to any Nintendo fan, a battery you can recharge via… Read More
The Defense Department’s research arm has officially kicked off its effort to create a modular computing framework, with pieces pulled from a mix-‘n-match set of “chiplets.” Producing something this weird will take a village, the agency suggested — in fact, “an enormous village rife with innovators.” DARPA did always have a way with words. Read More
The Essential Phone started arriving in the hands of media and reviewers just last week, and as of today it’s now also shipping out to its first customers. Essential announced the news via its Twitter account, and told early buyers to keep an eye out for tracking info sent out via email. Read More
Everyone who’s flown around a drone (or UAV, or multirotor, or what have you) knows that they’re a lot of fun. But they’re being used all over the world for more serious purposes — after all, an autonomous flying vehicle is a great place to start for all kinds of applications, from delivery to archaeology. Here’s a sampling of what drones are getting up to across… Read More
Analyst Gartner is expecting to see growth of 16.7 per cent, year-over-year, across the global wearables market this year, which encompasses a variety of device types and form factors — from smartwatches to body-worn cameras and even head-mounted displays. Read More
Essential’s Toronto launch party was your standard tech industry launch gathering – with one key exception: Lining one wall was a series of three booths, demonstrating the Essential Phone’s camera tech, design process and hardware engineering respectively, and each was staffed by people who actually did the work. Read More
Wireless displays have always had too many compromises to be practically useful for me: Lag, image quality, consistency of connection, on and on. But new hardware from Astropad, the maker of the popular iPad app that you can use to turn your tablet into a drawing tablet, has finally convinced me that high quality, easy and reliable wireless external display tech is within reach, and actually… Read More
Mark down September 12 in your calendar as Apple could be unveiling the next iPhone at 9 AM on that day. Mac4Ever wrote a report saying that it confirmed with telecom companies that Apple should hold a press event on September 12. This wouldn’t be a big surprise as Apple has been announcing new iPhones every September since 2012. Apple also always holds press conferences on Tuesday for… Read More
Flat-pack furniture made IKEA a global powerhouse, and the same principles may help create a new generation of robots. Interactive Robogami is a project from MIT that lets users create ambulatory robots from a library of pieces that fold and fit together like origami. Read More
It’s not really clear just what “humanoid” robots are actually for. I’ve seen them do all kinds of things, but almost none of them well; at our recent Robotics event in Boston, several leading experts in the field questioned their necessity. But we grew up with Data and Robby and Cylons, and so now we have Pepper. Performing funeral rites for cash-strapped people in Japan. Read More
