From Lifehacker: Make a Super Thin, Portable, and Cheap Boombox for Your Smartphone or Music Player [DIY]

Need a portable boombox for your smartphone or music player? Industrial design student and Instructables user MTriest has a great, minimalist design that’s easy to carry around. It was designed for the iPhone, but you should be able to adapt it to accommodate any similarly-shaped device with a headphone jack. If you want to give it a try, here’s what you’ll need: More »




from Lifehacker

From Engadget: Ubuntu’s full desktop OS coming to multi-core Android devices

What the Atrix 4G first promised, it looks like the folks at Canonical may deliver. Think back to CES 2011, when Motorola showed us a future where our phone was the only computing device we would need — only to leave us wanting when its webtop app didn’t deliver the requisite functionality for such a future. Well, it turns out Ubuntu now runs on multi-core Android devices and your handset can grant a full desktop experience when docked with a display and a keyboard. It’s a customized version of Ubuntu that plays nice with Android, the two OS’s sharing data and services while running simultaneously. So, you can still access telephony and texts from the Ubuntu environment while enjoying all the computing capabilities it has to offer, including: Ubuntu TV, virtualization tools for running Windows applications, desktop web browsers, and Ubuntu apps built for ARM. It isn’t clear exactly what hardware you’ll need to run Ubuntu on a handset, but Canonical has said it works on multi-core devices with HDMI and USB connections. We’ll get more info next week when it’s shown off at MWC, but until then you’ll have to settle for the source below and PR after the break.

Continue reading Ubuntu’s full desktop OS coming to multi-core Android devices

 

from Engadget

From Technology Review RSS Feeds: How Data Storage Cripples Mobile Apps

The storage in your phone has a bigger effect on your apps than you might think.

The latest smart phones and tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month came with an emphasis on faster processors and compatibility with faster wireless networks. But new research shows that the biggest performance bottleneck with popular smart-phone apps such as Facebook and Google Maps is, in fact, how fast they can read and write a device’s data storage. The results suggest that without changing how mobile gadgets store data, the benefits of new networks and processors will be limited.




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From Engadget: LightBeam pico projector turns any surface into a display, any object into a remote

Do you ever stop to think about all those plain, unloved surfaces in the world, which go through life without ever once being used to reflect a Flickr feed or Facebook wall? It amounts to hectares of wasted potential, but there is a solution. It’s called LightBeam and it’s a ‘nomadic’ pico projector that uses a webcam to track and reorient its display to suit any ad hoc surface — the piece of paper in your hand, the cover of a book, or the picture frame on your desk. And just when you think you’ve seen it all before, the guy in the video after the break rotates a coffee mug to flip the channel. Handy, no?

Continue reading LightBeam pico projector turns any surface into a display, any object into a remote (video)

 

from Engadget