Archive for January, 2007
Iphone is out
There has been a lot of buzz for more than one year about Apple’s mobile phone. Finally it’s now settled, here is the real Apple iPhone was announced today. It is quad-band, WiFI Edge, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, 3,5″ touch screen and includes safari web browser and email client. It also features a really innovative UI along with an accelerometer a proximity sensor and a light sensor… This device is awesome ! Can’t wait to see it on the market… unfortunately not too soon as there is a 6-month Cingular wireless exclusivity… and it will become obly available around june.
[CES] Meccano - Erector Spyke
If you wonder what we’ve been up lately at WaveStorm, here is one of the answers: SPYKE !
Spyke is a WiFi spy robot by Meccano/Erector. You can build it with various shapes (scorpio, robot…). It has a camera in the head and a full WiFi system embedded inside its base so that you can control it locally with your computer or from the other side of the world through Internet.
Have it move inside your house (check the video below), take pictures or videos, play sounds, talk with the guys you ecouter using the VoIP features … It does it all !
It got a huge success here at CES, shipments are scheduled for june at an estimated retail price of 269$.
Off to las vegas!
Last coffee before boarding with franck my cto! We’ll make a stop at chicago and arrive this evening.
Tomorrow will be fun we’ll try to arrange a helicopter tour of the grand canyon, if you know any good tour let me know!
Widows Vista SideShows
Don’t know if you paid any attention to a previous post of mine when I talked about the sideshow devices, but here’s the trick : upcoming Vista enabled PCs will include a small additionnal 2.5″ connected LCD screen that connects to the PC and gives a “side” view of the PC’s functions. The sideshow device acts like kind of a bi-directionnal active wireless remote.
I’ve been daydreaming about the Freescale’s i.MXS Dev. Kit for SideShow which is supporting .NET µFramework (and only costs 500$).
Here is an overview of an Asus prototype with the sideshow device inside:
Two interesting articles
I finally managed to read all the news I had in my newsgator ( two weeks with only a 10€/hour Swisscom connection forced me into a nice break … hate to pay for WiFi). Hopefully, Christmas time was not very intense. I spotted two articles though that are really worth reading.
The first one from Jem Matzan is an in-depth study about the WiFi chipset manufacturers policies regarding their support to the Opensource community. It’s quite appalling to see that most of them just don’t care and are really reluctant to opening their APIs and letting developers use the hardware they paid… just like any Windows users ! At WaveStorm this is sometimes a key issue we are facing when working on demo prototypes partly made with retail hardware pieces stuck into embedded systems.
The second article worth reading is from Jürgen Schmidt and explains how Skype manages to connect two clients hidden between firewalls.
