Gadget Lab Podcast: Droid 2, Voice Search and Carrier-Humping Surrender Monkeys

For a quick download on the top tech stories of the week, check out the latest Gadget Lab podcast — just 12 minutes long this week, yet packed with everything you need to know.

In this week’s podcast, we give you a hands-on look at the BlackBerry Torch that was introduced last week. We finally got our hands on one, posted our review of the Torch, and show you how it looks in the podcast video.

Also this week, Motorola announced its new Droid 2, which looks a lot like the old Droid. We’ve got one of these, too, and we show off its main differences in the video.

In other Android news, Google announced enhancements to Android Voice Search, so you can now use it to compose e-mail messages, text messages, search for music and more.

Special guest Ryan Singel, from Wired.com’s Epicenter and Threat Level blogs, joins us to explain the biggest tech story of the week: How Google turned into a carrier-humping net neutrality surrender monkey.

And finally, we take a quick look at the $80 Looftlighter. I was excited to test this out because the publicist said it was a “flamethrower.” In fact, it’s more like an outsized curling iron. We haven’t tested it for its intended purpose yet (starting charcoal grills and fireplace fires) but we do apply it to a business card in the studio, with disappointing results.

If anyone wants to send me a real flamethrower to test out, I’d be eager to hear from you.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our smiling faces, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds.

Or listen to it here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #85

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Droid 2 Teardown Reveals Beefed-Up Processor, Few Other Changes


The Motorola Droid 2 looks a lot like the original Droid, and a teardown reveals that the similarities go more than skin-deep.

In fact, the internal layout and most of the Droid 2’s components are nearly identical to those of the original Droid, gadget repair site iFixit found.

The most significant upgrade is to the processor, which is probably a Texas Instruments OMAP 3630, iFixit says. Running at 1 GHz, that compares to the 600-MHz processor in the original Droid.

The phone now supports fast 802.11n Wi-Fi.

The keyboard is also different, with a tighter, more durable-seeming slider mechanism and no D-pad, which makes for a more spacious key layout.

But the rest of the specs — and even the circuit boards — look remarkably similar to the first Droid. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, the Motorola engineers must have figured.

It’s got the same 8-megabit NAND flash memory module, and comes with the same 8-GB micro SD card for storing apps, music, photos and other files.

As with the first Droid, there’s a secondary microphone that helps cancel out background noise to make call quality clearer.

A 5-megapixel rear-facing camera has a dual-LED flash. It supports 30 fps video recording, compared to the original Droid’s 24 fps. Otherwise the camera is pretty similar to the original one’s.

The display is the same as the first Droid’s: a 3.7-inch, 854 x 480-pixel WVGA LCD screen.

Story continues with more pictures of the Droid 2.

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Axon Haptic Tablet Lets You Install Any OS

The Axon Haptic is a tabula rasa of a tablet. It comes as an empty, OS-less shell, waiting for you to install your choice of operating-system. The hardware of this ten-inch tablet is designed to work with almost any OS, from various Linux flavors through Windows to OS X. Yes, this little baby is hackintosh-ready.

The trick is the EFI bootloader, which is what lets the machine boot into a Darwin OS (of which OS X is the best known example). This is the tricky part of any hackintosh installation, and it essentially tricks the Mac OS into thinking it is running on Apple hardware.

The machine itself is pretty much a stock netbook, only with a resistive touch-screen and in a tablet form-factor. It packs a 1.6-GHz Atom N270 processor, the ten-inch screen, a 320GB hard drive, 2GB RAM, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a webcam, optional Bluetooth and – yes – a stylus. The is also an optional “3G CDMA Verizon SIM slot”, which is odd because CDMA doesn’t use SIMS.

It’s an interesting take, and will presumably fall outside of Apple’s legal reaches if it actually makes it into stores. Then again, maybe there’s no market for this kind of thing. Remember the Psystar “Mac”? That was hardly a runaway success.

The Haptic is available for pre-order now, for an optimistic $750.

Axon Haptic [Axon Logic via CrunchGear]

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Chiral Coffin Screws Bodies in the Dirt

Inventor Donald Scruggs knows that once you’re dead, you’re pretty much screwed. He also knows that once you’re 6-feet under, you’ll also be 6-feet long and a couple of feet high, taking up precious real estate. Forever.

Scruggs’ has been granted a patent on the last gadget you’ll ever need. It’s a giant, screw-shaped coffin into which are loaded your expired meat and bones, ready to be twisted into the ground. The patent application was filed way back in 2006, and while you probably don’t need to read it to get the idea, it is definitely worth taking a look at the drawings, of which there are many.

One of the biggest problems was making a shell that could withstand the twisting forces involved. And while the patent has been granted, Scruggs is still working on prototypes to overcome this. One thing he has worked out, in great detail, is the method for insertion. Depending on the density of the earth, the chiral coffin can be interred by hand using a many-handled assembly much like a horizontal ship’s wheel, or – for tougher dirt – a kind of backhoe with a twisting assembly.

Because the coffins displace dirt as your body is screwed in, no digging is required, and no earth is left over. It even offers a bonus for those who are terrified of being buried alive: The lid could be made with an emergency exit to allow coma victims and deep sleepers to escape their twisting tomb.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still be scared. The image that keeps creeping nightmarishly into my mind is that of a giant, robotic Bugs Bunny, lurching into these now densely packed graveyards and uprooting the giant metallic carrots, one by one.

Easy Inter Burial Container [USPO/Google Patents]

Screw It, You’re Dead Anyway [Discovery News]

Inventor Donald Scruggs and the Screw-in Coffin [Discover]

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CourseSmart Launches E-Textbooks for iPad

Back to schoolers just got another great reason to convince Mom and Dad to buy them an iPad: CourseSmart, the e-textbook provider, just released an iPad app. Now, you can carry all your textbooks with you on the tablet instead of schlepping a backpack full of dead trees round the campus.

If any device was right for taking to lectures, its the iPad. Unlike a laptop, it doesn’t put a barrier between you and the teacher. It also doesn’t clatter when you type (meaning you can sneak in some YouTubing instead of paying attention) and the battery lasts, like forever. Now, with CourseSmart, it looks pretty perfect.

CourseSmart sells e-textbooks which can already be used on your laptop or your iPhone. The texts are typically cheaper than their paper counterparts and CourseSmart claims to have 90% of “core textbooks” in its catalog. The iPad app adds a bookshelf (the thumbnail view used by most e-readers), sticky-notes for scrawling onto pages, and a neat thumbnail navigator for quickly finding the right place.

Best of all, the application is free, although you will of course have to buy the books. And if you do lose the iPad Mom and Dad are going to buy you, you’re just a login away from all your texts and notes when you get a replacement. Try that with a book-bag.

CourseSmart for iPad [CourseSmart. Thanks, Jennifer!]

CourseSmart [iTunes]

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Tank-Tracked Skateboard is ‘Not Dorky’

From the childhood moment when a cop told us kids to take our skateboards and “play on the grass”, I have wondered just what kind of skateboard could ever actually do that. There have been big-wheeled answers over the years, but none so gloriously ridiculous as Bryson Lovett’s Vertrax Skateboard concept.

At its heart, the Vertrax is a two-wheeled platform on which it looks almost impossible to balance. It’s like trying to stand on on single in-line skate, only with both feet. From there, things go downhill fast (presumably literally). A tank-style track loops around the wheels. This is meant to make traveling over rough terrain a little easier, but would do little more than get jammed with twigs and grass within seconds.

There are other oddities, too: Why put a tiny wheel-on-a-stick between board and track to stop the mechanism from jamming when a big rollerblade-wheel would be better and tougher? Still, we like the product-pitch for this powered skateboard. Lovett bills it as “not awkward or dorky-looking [like a] Segway.” So true.

Vertrax Skateboard [Coroflot via Oh Gizmo!]

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Autorewind Power Cable Retracts Own Cord

Causing a bit of pre-weekend excitement in Gadget Lab’s European HQ, an email arrived in my inbox this morning telling me about a brand-new power extension cord. Not only that, but it came with the video below, showing it in action.

Action? Yes. The Designcord Autorewind Cable Reel has a rather neat trick which is certainly video-friendly. If you stomp down on it, the cable is reeled in on a spring, snicker-snack, coiling into the circular body like one of those pop-out peanut-can snakes, only in reverse.

The reel has another trick. When rewinding (or unwinding), the centre doesn’t spin, meaning you can pay out a little extra cord without getting your appliance cables in a twist. The reel, which comes in 10-meter and 7.5-meter flavors, also has a circuit-breaker function to stop surges, and four holes for plugging things in. It currently (sorry) comes only for euro-plugs, but the designer, Michael van der Jagt, tells me that a U.S. version is on the way. The price has not yet been set.

Autorewind [Designcord. Thanks, Michael!]

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Social Networking Meets Apps in New Android App Store

Discovering new apps in the Android market, which now has over 100,000 titles, has become increasingly difficult. So an independent app store is using social networking to help you find what you really want.

AndSpot has introduced social networking features such as activity feed, profiles and recommendations so its customers can find new apps based on what their friends like, instead of trying to find apps by category.

The site is now in private beta and will be launching publicly next month.

“The current paradigm of how marketplaces work isn’t in the favor of users or developers,” says Ash Kheradmand, one of the co-founders of AndSpot. “It works in the favor of apps like Facebook, Twitter and Pandora but not anyone else.”

An average user sees less than 99 percent of the apps in the Google Market, says AndSpot. And when users do find apps, they have little beyond basic comments and average ratings to go by.

Users are tired of scrolling through lists of apps to get ones that may be useful to them, says Kheradmand. Bringing social networking to an app store could help solve some of those problems, he says.

Unlike Apple, which has a tightly controlled official distribution for iPhone apps, multiple app stores can exist on the Android phone alongside the official Android app store, which is called Android Market.

For now, Android Market is pre-loaded on all Android phones. Independent app stores such as AndSpot can be downloaded from the Android Market or a browser. These independent app stores could in theory ink distribution deals with handset makers to get on devices, although they have yet to do so. Meanwhile, the number of apps in the Android market continues to grow making it difficult for users to find apps and for developers to market their programs.

That’s where AndSpot comes in, says Kheradmand, who has applied for a patent on the idea. On AndSpot, users first create a profile with an avatar and add friends. As with Facebook, there is an activity feed that highlights what the apps your friends are downloading. The activity feed also integrates with a recommendation engine, which AndSpot says suggests apps based on what you and your friends are using.

AndSpot also has a discussion board so its users can discuss apps. It will also have privacy settings so that users can choose to share apps, or not share them, depending on which category they’re in.

“You can set it so that you show games apps but not productivity apps,” says Faisal Abid, chief technology officer for AndSpot.

AndSpot says it will let developers keep 80 percent of the revenue from their apps sold through its app store and developers don’t have to do anything additional to publish their apps on AndSpot.

It’s an interesting idea and one where I can see social networking helping the process of discovery of apps. The key to its success as with any social networking site is scale. Unless you can get friends in there, you won’t have enough activity in your feeds to make it worth visiting.

Check out screenshots from the new AndSpot market below.

Continue Reading “Social Networking Meets Apps in New Android App Store” »

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Photoshop Crashes onto iPad

Photoshop and the iPad, a pairing as natural as Bert sharing a bed with Ernie. As of today, you can use Adobe’s legendary image-editing app on your tablet. Or maybe not.

Photoshop Express is a reworking of the rather more awkwardly-named Photoshop.com Mobile for the iPhone. It is now a universal app, running on both devices, but there are some iPad-specific features. But before we get to those, we’ll note one giant problem. For many users, Photoshop just won’t launch.

Tap the icon and you get a splash screen, and then you see a dialog box swirl across the iPad’s display. Then the app closes and, somewhat confusingly, launches another picture-editing app. In my case, this is Photogene. This appears to be a common problem, and some people say a reboot will fix it, although that didn’t work for me. And that dialog box? I grabbed a screenshot: It’s a request to send anonymous usage data back to the mother-ship, titled “Help Us Improve”. Oh Adobe. The fix, now posted on the iTunes store page, is to start up the app in portrait orientation.

If you can fire it up, you can now work in both landscape and portrait modes, work on a sequence of photos at the same time and carry out basic editing. Cropping, rotating, flipping and adjustment of exposure, color and contrast are all easily done. From there, you can upload to photoshop.com and Facebook, or just save the files locally.

It’s nowhere near as powerful as the desktop version or even (somewhat ironically) as full-featured as iPad apps like Photogene. It is free, however. It’s also pretty cool to be able to tell your friends that you have Photoshop on your iPad. Available now.

Photoshop Express [iTunes]
Photoshop Express [Adobe]

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Man Scrawls World’s Biggest Message With GPS ‘Pen’

One man drove 12,238 miles across 30 states to scrawl a message that can only be viewed using Google Earth. His big shoutout: “Read Ayn Rand.”

Nick Newcomen did a road trip over 30 days that covered stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. First, he identified on a map the route he would need to drive to spell out the message. He put a GPS device in his car to trace the route he would follow. Then, he hit the road.

“The main reason I did it is because I am an Ayn Rand fan,” he says. “In my opinion if more people would read her books and take her ideas seriously, the country and world would be a better place — freer, more prosperous and we would have a more optimistic view of the future.”

Newcomen, unlike previous GPS artists, actually traveled the lines he traced on the map. He used a GPS logger (Qstarz BT-Q1000X) to “ink” the message. Starting his trip in Marshall, Texas, he turned on the device when he wanted to write a letter and turned off the device between letters. The recorded GPS data was loaded into Google Earth to produce the image above.

“The first word I wrote actually was the word ‘Rand’, then I went up North to do the word ‘Read’ and finished it with ‘Ayn,’” says Newcomen.

And for those who don’t know, Ayn Rand is a Russian-American writer whose books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are among the world’s best-selling novels.

Newcomen’s venture sounds pretty crazy, though he gets points for ambition.

What message would you write using a GPS?

Photo: Nick Newcomen

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