Category: Video

Whether you’ve lost the key to your own suitcase and need to get it open in a hurry or you’re trying to plant some contraband in your dodgy roommate’s bag, this clever hack has to be seen to be believed. More »

In this 1994 clip from The Today Show, Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric are completely befuddled by the notion of the internet. We laugh now, but remember that we’ll be the ones immortalized as rubes when psychic data clouds debut. More »

So we’ve just installed Google’s first public-access preview of its tablet-focused Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, an early build of the platform’s SDK that features “non-final” code and APIs; it’s intended primarily for developers who want to get a head start on making their tablet app dreams come true, but naturally, we needed to install it and take it for a test drive ourselves. Here are our quick observations:

• Like Android SDK emulators before it, Honeycomb’s is extremely slow — nearly to the point of uselessness in this case. We’ll give them a mulligan since this is a preview build, but seriously, we wouldn’t recommend installing this unless you enjoy pulling your hair out.
• There appears to be some sort of orientation bug that prevents us from going landscape, which is what we really wanted. Sorry about that! We’ve shot the video sideways and rotated all of our images; if we’re able to figure it out or a newer build is released with orientation properly working, we’ll update.
• The browser looks great — specifically the UI, which is going to make desktop browser users feel right at home perhaps more than any other tablet browsing experience to date. As with the rest of the emulator, it was too slow to really use — and it kept crashing on us — but we’re digging the look.
• The system for adding and managing widgets is a joy to use — it makes your entire desktop accessible from a single screen, and we like the amount of detail you can preview for each widget before deciding whether to use it and where to place it.
• In general, the window animations and screen transitions seem cool, but none were smooth or fast enough in the emulator to know for sure. Jury’s still out until this gets faster or we’re using Honeycomb on actual tablets.
• We’re not in love with the dim, squashed segmented display that Google is using for the time in the lower right; we’re hoping there are plenty of alternative fonts available.

Since the emulator doesn’t provide a “Google experience” build with access to the Android Market, Gmail, or other “branded” Google apps, we weren’t able to deep-dive on how real-world applications are going to look on the platform — but with any luck, Motorola’s Xoom should be shipping within a few weeks. In the meantime, check out a video after the break!

Update: We’ve figured out the orientation trick — you need to uncheck automatic orientation in Settings, then flip the emulator from landscape to portrait (counterintuitive, we know). We’ll be updating the media as soon as we can!

Update 2: Second video (in the correct orientation this time!) added after the break.

Continue reading Android 3.0 Honeycomb preview emulator hands-on

Android 3.0 Honeycomb preview emulator hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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An insane person sets up a camera to film a full-speed train passing over him, as he lies flat on the tracks. Now that we’re all caught up: Please don’t try this at home. Please don’t try this at home. More »

Want to know who the self-confessed “mother of the motherboard” is? Or why every piece of organically farmed, tenderly loved food at your local Trader Joe’s has a barcode on it? Or perhaps you’re curious to learn more about how millions of airline reservations can be made around the world with unfailing reliability? All those queries have their answers in IBM’s self-congratulating videos after the break. Commissioned as a celebration of the company’s upcoming 100th birthday, they chronicle some of its more notable moments in the global spotlight. Our favorite little nugget of discovery was finding out that testing for the IBM Personal Computer included the question, “would it run Pac-Man?” — conclusively proving that the foremost reason for the PC’s existence is, and has always been, gaming.

Continue reading IBM looks back on 100 years of history, finds plenty to be proud of (video)

IBM looks back on 100 years of history, finds plenty to be proud of (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Jan 2011 18:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So, in February IBM’s Watson will be in an official Jeopardy tournament-style competition with titans of trivia Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. That competition will be taped starting tomorrow, but hopefully we’ll get to know if a computer really can take down the greatest Jeopardy players of all time in “real time” as the show airs. It will be a historic event on par with Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov, and we’ll absolutely be glued to our seats. Today IBM and Jeopardy offered a quick teaser of that match, with the three contestants knocking out three categories at lightning speed. Not a single question was answered wrongly, and at the end of the match Watson, who answers questions with a cold computer voice, telegraphing his certainty with simple color changes on his “avatar,” was ahead with $4,400, Ken had $3,400, and Brad had $1,200.

Alright, a “win” for silicon for now, but without any Double Jeopardy or Final Jeopardy it’s hard to tell how well Watson will do in a real match. What’s clear is that he isn’t dumb, and it seems like the best chance the humans will have will be buzzing in before Watson can run through his roughly three second decision process and activate his buzzer mechanically. An extra plus for the audience is a graphic that shows the three answers Watson has rated as most likely to be correct, and how certain he is of the answer he selects — we don’t know if that will make it into the actual TV version, but we certainly hope so. It’s always nice to know the thought processes of your destroyer. Stand by for video of the match, along with an interview with David Gondek, an engineer on the project.

Update: Video of the match is up, check it out after the break!

Update 2: And we have the interview as well, along with a bit more on how Watson actually works.

Continue reading IBM’s Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy practice round (video!)

IBM’s Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy practice round (video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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