Hitachi has just announced the W61H cell phone, a sleek device that features a 2.7-inch E-Ink display on the backside that can show one of 95 predetermined patterns on it (users can change the pattern shown).

In addition to the ‘Silhouette screen,’ the phone features a 2.8-inch display with a 240×400 resolution, a 1.97 megapixel camera, and a built-in 2GB micro SD card.

The phone has launched in Japan only, with no current plans to release a US version anytime soon.

The inclusion of the E-Ink display is pretty cool, but it’s very unfortunate that it’s only for aesthetics. Would be nice if it would show incoming calls, the time, or something else useful. More pics after the jump. Read more »

Bill Watkins, CEO of hard drive giant Seagate, has said that Blu-ray’s apparent victory over HD DVD doesn’t mean much. His reasoning? Downloads are the future.

Said Watkins, “Blu-Ray versus HD: Well maybe Blu-Ray won, but it’s a meaningless victory. … Because guess what: People are going to download everything.”

Of course, the words are coming from the mouth of the beast himself. It sure would be profitable for huge downloads to replace Blu-ray when it means bigger hard drive sales. And we’re talking much bigger!

Today’s bandwidth is not even close to being able to handle such downloads, but who knows what will come with time. Most likely, Watkins’ prediction will come true. Most analysts and tech watchers agree that movie downloads are in the future.

Designer Bomi Kim has just come out with a new MP3 player referred to as the “Tactile MP3 player”. The player has no screen, and is controlled entirely using a braille-like system. The controls are raised bumps that you can use to perform all the regular interactions one would have with an MP3 player.

It looks pretty cool and it’s perfect as a small, portable, distraction-free mp3 player for use in the same situations when an iPod Shuffle might be useful.

Photo: http://www.yankodesign.com/index.php/2008/01/28/another-simple-mp3-player/

AMD has released the Radeon HD 3870 X2, the company’s first dual-GPU high end graphics card. According to its first reviews it has better performance than nVidia’s 8800 Ultra, putting AMD back on top as far as performance goes.

The card features two 825 MHz Crossfire-linked 3870 GPUs, and a memory clock of 1.8 GHz. The card is almost exactly twice the power of the regular HD 3870 at 1 TFlops. It is expected to be priced at $450.

This is great news coming from AMD, as pushing the industry forward through competition is always a welcome thing.

Psychology researchers at the Glasgow University have been able to eliminate the variable effects of age, hairstyle, expression, lighting, and different camera equipment in a face recognition algorithm, resulting in a “100% success rate“. They achieved this by producing a composite “average face” for a person from 20 different pictures.

From the two researchers:
“We modeled human familiarity by using image averaging to derive stable face representations from naturally varying photographs. This simple procedure increased the accuracy of an industry standard face-recognition algorithm from 54 per cent to 100 per cent, bringing the robust performance of a familiar human to an automated system.”

Of course, there’s a catch. By 100% the researchers really mean that the detection in each one of their tests was correct, not that they are sure it would work 100% of the time in real life.

Although probably not perfect, this is still a valuable increase from the old detection methods and could help in today’s facial recognition applications. Of course, this is provided that 20 photos of the person already exist in some database. An image of John Travolta’s “average” face after the jump. Read more »

Cell phones might soon have the ability to predict when they’ll be plugged in and could even intelligently estimate how many calls a user is likely to make over a period of time, based on findings in a paper[pdf] by researchers at Intel and Rutgers University. They would then use that information to provide better battery life.

The devised system, dubbed CABMAN (for context-aware battery management architecture
for mobile devices*), would be based on three main principles:

- The availability of crucial applications should not be compromised by non-important ones
- Opportunities for charging should be predicted to allow devices to determine how much energy they can expect to have, instead of simply going by the battery level
- Context, such as location information, can be used to predict charging opportunities

CABMAN would predict where it can be charged by learning which towers are nearby when it’s plugged in. Then, by tracking location and processing call logs, the system knows when to alert a user to plug the cell phone in or to stop using battery intensive applications (or not do anything at all if it thinks the phone will be plugged in soon). This, for example, could know when to turn off a phone’s music player on an airplane if the phone won’t be able to make any calls soon.

A prototype was tested using data from another project. The software was on average 12 minutes away from predicting charging opportunities - a great result. The future call time prediction didn’t work as well, so more time is needed to perfect that aspect.

This research is showing us a very interesting future for cell phones, indeed. With this kind of “smarts” our future phones will be all but bulletproof, predicting our behavior perfectly and adapting themselves to suit our needs. Hopefully the wait will not be too long.

* Yes, we know that “mobile devices” doesn’t start with an “N” and have no idea who was responsible for naming this project and why this slipped through.

Starting mid-February, business customers will be able to order HP’s Compaq dc7800 ultra-slim PC with an SSD drive. We aren’t sure what the drive size will be, but 32GB seems to be a good estimate seeing as the price increase is about $500.

This is the beginning of putting SSDs in our computers, with more and more expected to start showing up soon. Hopefully 2008 will turn out to be the year of the solid state disk, as we can’t wait to put these puppies in our laptops.

It seems that Sony has just about put a nail in Toshiba’s HD DVD coffin with their latest announcement. The tech giant has been able to shrink the Blu-ray module to a more compact size, meaning that Blu-ray drives will be getting smaller and, more importantly, cheaper.

The new laser unit is a measly 3mm thick. Sony thinks that the device will make it to 9.5mm laptop drives by the end of the year.

A few more features of the new laser - it can handle dual-layer discs as well as those with organic dye in the recording layers. This is good news as organic discs can be made on current DVD production lines, which probably means cheaper prices.

It’s a good thing that the format war is finally winding down. Both formats are great, and have their separate strengths, but it’s good to finally know which player to buy.