According to a Microsoft press release, the Kinect for Xbox 360 has sold over 10 million units, and in its short 4 month history has also sold over 10 million standalone titles. It’s a pretty impressive feat, making it the Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device according to Guinness (the Book of World Records, not the delicious stout).
Read MoreWhen Motorola announced the ATRIX at CES, I was very excited – even more so when they followed up that announcement with news that it was coming to Canada on Bell. Up to that point, as a long-time Milestone (Droid to our US readers) user, though, I had been a little disappointed in Motorola. They had seemed to have forgotten about Canada. Both the Droid X and Droid 2 were released in the US last year, but they never came up north. By year’s end, it was almost like Motorola…
Read MoreWhen we looked at a couple of SteelSeries’ gaming peripherals last year, the Xai mouse and 6GV2 keyboard, we were very impressed by both their quality and the technology inside. We were also impressed by the fact that, compared to most ‘gaming’ gadgets, their design was understated — even elegant. Very Apple-like, you could say. Now SteelSeries has decided to broaden their audio options to ”meet Apple Performance Standards for Music, Mobile, and Gaming”. Updated versions of the 7H and Siberia v2 headsets, already available for PC gamers, are coming…
Read MoreFor all of the recreational paranoids out there- let’s get “pro-active”. What would you do with one of these?
Read MoreMicrosoft Research has put out no shortage of impressive tech demos, some which evolve into consumer products like the Kinect, and others either geared towards institutional use such as the Surface, which in some cases trickles down to consumer tech. In a recent video, Director of Microsoft Applied Sciences Steven Bathiche demonstrates some of their latest research into smart interactive displays, from “capturing light from the user to sending light to the users eyes”. Consider it a sort of mashup of Kinect and Surface, with the ability to display different…
Read MoreThe problem is a simple one, despite being the storehouse for the knowledge of an entire planet sometimes the Internet can be a bore. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter present us with a world of ideas, tiny ideas, iterations of personal data, statements, hopes, curses and bleats amounting to a wall of cozy noise; full of sound and fury. Here are five sites on the web, five oasis in the sometime wasteland, five challenging places that reward the time spent with them. Feynman’s Robb Lectures– Anyone with an internet connection can…
Read MoreEver since its release in the fall, Microsoft’s Kinect has been a popular target for coders everywhere, putting the motion controller to use in applications far beyond the traitional use as a game controller. Now Microsoft has made it official, by announcing that it will be releasing an official Software Development Kit later this spring. This SDK will be for non-commercial use, and there’s no word when a commercial SDK will come out. The Kinect for Windows SDK is being developed and released by Microsoft Research (MSR) in collaboration with…
Read MoreMicrosoft’s Zune HD portable media player, formerly only available in the US and UK, will be coming to Canada in the near future. Although first released in 2009, the hardware has never been available here. It’s curious that Microsoft would choose 2011 to bring their media player here, since they’ve been focusing on Windows Phone for their mobility solution as of late, including integrating many of the Zune features into their new phone platform. While the Zune software on PCs and the Xbox allows for both movie and TV rentals and purchases, it’s been noticably absent of music options here.
Read MoreGraphene Novelties– This week’s edition started off with a simple article from Science Daily: Graphene and ‘Spintronics’ Combo Looks Promising. A group of researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Science and Technology of China presented their work on using graphene as a platform for creating “spintronic” devices. In their scheme, the electromagnetic spin of particles, their “up” or “down” orientation, could be used to encode the ones and zeroes of binary data at incredibly high density (seeing as graphene is one atom thick) and…
Read MoreIt’s no secret that there are Boxee Box fans here at RGB. The coolest looking little media player has proven itself to be a very flexible workhorse. Today, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen posted that the newest update has started rolling out, and with it, the long-awaited Netflix compatibility for both the US and Canada.
Read MoreLast week, Telus announced the arrival of its Dual Cell network, which could bring theoretical speeds of up to 42Mbps to their network, which doubles the HSPA+ technology being used today. The usage of the term 4G elsewhere has been met with some confusion, but with it getting wide use in the US for competing technologies, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing it happen here in Canada as well.
To get some clarification on the use of 4G, and what plans they have for LTE, we fired off some questions to Telus, and present the response below…
Read MoreThe quantum world got weirder, a respected scientist got weirder, the Vikings may have used polarized light to navigate and there’s a comet flyby for Valentine’s Day. Spooky Action in Time– “The greatest significance of our result is almost certainly in some application that is yet to be imagined.” In an interview with PhysOrg, S. Jay Olson of the University of Queensland summed up the implications of his paper with fellow physicist Timothy C. Ralph, “Extraction of Timelike Entanglement from the Quantum Vacuum“. Just as some of us are trying…
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