Computing – Page 12

LG Optimus Quantum Hands On: video

October 15, 2010October 21, 2010 Doug Groves Bell, hands-on, LAYAR, LG, Microsoft, Optimus Quantum, Panoramic Shot, Scan Search, slider, sneak peek, video, Windows Phone 7, WP7, Xbox Live4 Comments

We take a look at the LG Optimus Quantum Windows Phone 7 device with a slideout landscape QWERTY keyboard. The slide mechanism, while a bit stiff, also feels very solid, and still doable with one hand. When holding it in landscape mode, LG made sure that the screen portion was nice and light, so that there’s a solid balance while typing. In fact, when we first got our hands on the Optimus Quantum, it barely registered as a slider. The keyboard itself ranks up there with the HTC Touch Pro…

Bell announces HTC Desire Z as coming soon

October 14, 2010October 19, 2010 Doug Groves Bell, Desire Z, HTC, HTC Desire Z, HTC Sense, htcsense.com, press release, QWERTY slider, Sense1 Comment

Although some internal documents leaked to the web a few days back, Bell has now made the launch of the HTC Desire Z official. It will be the exclusive carrier of HTC’s QWERTY keyboard Android pone. The Desire Z, powered by Android 2.2 (Froyo) and an 800MHz Qualcomm chip, will be the first in Canada to offer 14.4 megabits per second downloads. To promote the launch, Bell is running a contest to win a Desire Z, which you can enter here. The Desire Z will also be the first phone…

Google Creative Labs thinks the world is full of interesting things

October 13, 2010October 14, 2010 Danny X Advertising Week, Google Creative Labs, NYC, the world is full of interesting things1 Comment

See the presentation here. Last year at Advertising Week in New York City I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by Andy Berndt, managing director of Google Creative Labs, entitled “87 cool things”. The point of the hour-long session was not to see what Google was doing at the time, but to see how Google sees the world, and its fascination with content creators the world over. This year they’re back with “The World Is Full Of Interesting Things”, basically an updated presentation on the same theme. In it…

Microsoft rebrands XNA Creators Club as App Hub

October 12, 2010October 13, 2010 Doug Groves App Hub, game development, MSDN, PC gaming, Windows Phone 7, WP7, Xbox 360, XNA, XNA Creators Club4 Comments

When Microsoft first launched the XNA toolset, it was aimed at making cross-platform game development easier for independent game designers, and providing a framework to target them towards not only various Windows operating systems, but the Zune and Xbox 360 as well. To target the Xbox 360, one had to pay an annual membership of $99, which made you a part of the community to submit games for sale directly on the console. It’s actually a pretty innovative approach to letting the individual developer a way into console games creation,…

LG Windows Phone 7 – Optimus 7 and Quantum Hands On Video

October 12, 2010October 15, 2010 Doug Groves Bell, hands-on, LAYAR, LG, Microsoft, Optimus 8, Optimus Quantum, Panorama Shot, Scan Search, ScanSearch, slider, sneak peek, Telus, video, Windows Phone 7, WP7, Xbox Live7 Comments

At a recent LG event, we got some hands on time with LG’s two Windows Phone 7 devices headed towards the Canadian market, the LG Optimus 7 slate style phone on Telus, and the LG Optimus Quantum QWERTY slider on Bell. Both phones sport 16GB of RAM and 1GHz processors, with the real differentiator between the two being the choice of keyboard or not. The Optimus 7 has a 3.8″ screen, while the keyboard packing Optimus Quantum has a slightly smaller 3.5″ screen. During our demonstration, Frank Lee of LG…

Windows Phone 7 in Canada: What We Know So Far

October 11, 2010October 15, 2010 drsquid Bell, canada, event, HTC, LG, Microsoft, Omnia 7, Optimus Quantum, Rogers, Samsung, smartphone, superphone, Telus, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 7, WP73 Comments

Today marked the big reveal of Microsoft’s reboot of it’s mobile strategy with Windows Phone 7. At 9.30 AM EST Microsoft finally pulled the covers off for the world to see the initial phones that will be available at launch (November 8th in North America), though much of the OS has already been shown in great detail prior to today. My first reaction was that the handset selection is a little slim, and there is not much innovation beyond the base ‘chassis 1’ specifications. However this is a launch of…

Rogers testing LTE wireless in Ottawa

October 7, 2010October 9, 2010 Doug Groves LTE, Ottawa, press release, Rogers, trial, WiMax1 Comment

Rogers has started running a ‘comprehensive’ trial of it’s LTE wireless network in the nations capital, which could bring download speeds of up to 150 Mbps to mobile devices. LTE is a 4G technology meant to replace existing 3G networks. Both LTE and WiMax, which around for a quite some time now, are just starting to see adoption as standards. At one point there was speculation that LTE would be in Vancouver by the 2010 Olympics, but that never really panned out.

Toshiba Satellite A660 3D laptop review

October 4, 2010October 11, 2010 Doug Groves 3D Vision, A660-042, BD, blu ray, Blu Ray 3D, BluRay, Core i7, Intel, Laptop, notebook, Nvidia 3D Vision, PC gaming, review, Toshiba, Toshiba A660, Toshiba A660-042, Toshiba Satellite4 Comments

When a review unit of the Toshiba A660-042 arrived at the studio, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The A660-042 is Toshiba’s high end Satellite laptop, and comes complete with NVidia’s 3D Vision technology. I had just come off trying Sony’s 3D in the PS3 and remained unimpressed with 3D in the home. So my expectations were set pretty low. I may have been wrong, but I was also surprised at how much more than a ‘3D laptop’ this was…

The Start Show – Benjamin Rivers interview

October 2, 2010October 7, 2010 Doug Groves Arcadian Renaissance, Dyad, Hand Eye Society, interview, N+, Nidhogg, Nuit Blanche, Retro Sabotage, Show, The Start Show1 Comment

With the Hand Eye Society’s Arcadian Renaissance happening tonight as part of Nuit Blanche, we figured it would be appropriate to post this interview with The Start Show co-organizer Benjamin Rivers. When we first interviewed him, it was at Fan Expo as a comics creator. We actually had no idea about his involvement with Hand Eye at the time. Well, we know better now. The Start Show, which I hope becomes an annual event at the very least, showcased a number of great indie titles, including N+, Dyad and Spooky Squids’s…

Arts Computing Gaming Science video

Minecraft – A First Person Builder

October 2, 2010November 10, 2010 Pete Chapman 16-bit ALU, first person builder, FPB, FPS, Minecraft, open source, PC gaming, sheep, TNT, video, YouTube2 Comments

Two weeks ago my sixteen year old son, Reid, was playing with it. Earlier this week Cory Doctorow was writing about it at Boing Boing. What is this thing called “Minecraft”? If you know about it then you’re probably playing it. If not…then…so you don’t feel out of the loop tonight when the people who hang out in the kitchen talking at parties weigh in on this one: here’s a crash course. Minecraft is an online game which uses the visual conventions of a first person shooter for constructive purposes, literally….

Arts Computing Science

I Have Seen the Future and It is Shared.

September 30, 2010October 4, 2010 Pete Chapman A.I, artificial planet, Orion's Arm, science fiction, Singularity, Turing Test, worldbuilding0 comment

Does science fiction have a future? It’s past as a genre of pulp fiction that came up with the twentieth century leaves it in a precarious position at the beginning of the twenty-first. Once, like the buffalo, it roamed across the wide open spaces of the news stands and now only a handful of those magazines still exist and it’s been a long time since the days when a single short story sale could secure two month’s rent in Greenwich Village. There are novels, truck loads of novels as the…

Ubisoft crossover fever: Assassins Creed, CSI and Pets to have Facebook components

September 30, 2010October 3, 2010 Doug Groves Assassin's Creed, Brotherhood, crossover, CSI, CSI Crime City, facebook, Hamsterz, iPad, iPhone, Nintendo DS, PC gaming, Petz, PS3, Ubisoft, Wii, Xbox2 Comments

Do you like console gaming, but somehow find yourself wasting too much time on Facebook, making you fell guilty for not using your beatiful next gen console to its fullest potential? Depending on how you look at it, maybe Ubisoft is going to give you a reason to fire up the console more often, or maybe they’re just going to suck you all the way into the black (and blue – so much blue) pit that is Fb. At a press conference in San Francisco, they’ve announced that they’ll be…