FT Chronicle

Skype has made an update to its Mac application to 2.8 that adds a number of new features which have recently been added to the Windows editions.

The update brings Skype Access functionality, allowing you to connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots on a pay-as-you-go system. It has Screen Sharing capabilities, letting you show the person you’re calling exactly what’s going on on your monitor in those “it’s gone funny” situations. Lastly, there’s the usual round of call quality upgrades and bug fixes.

This wild new motorcycle, invented by 19-year-old Ben J. Poss Gulak, is among the latest inventions to capture attention.

Debuting at the National Motorcycle Show in Toronto, the “Uno” uses gyro technology for balance and acceleration.

It is a battery charged machine that accelerates by leaning forward and slowing down by leaning backwards. It weighs approximately 129 pounds (58 kg.) and has a top speed of 25 mph (40 klms).

One of the most exciting products from CES 2010 last month was Notion Ink’s Adam tablet, the Android-based slate using the latest-gen NVIDIA Tegra chipset and Pixel Qi’s innovative low-power display.

The company had brought along a prototype they could exclusively show, and now they’ve sent over renders of what’s likely to be the final Adam design complete with some mockups of a SlashGear digital magazine.

The Notion Ink Tablet will feature the Pixel Qi transflective display, and it will have a 10.1 inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600, and it measures 6.3 inches by 9.8 inches by 0.6 inches thick and weighs in at 1.7lbs.

It has HDMI-out and 3 USB ports, and can output video at 1080p resolution. There’s a 3-megapixel autofocusing camera and Notion Ink reckons it’ll squeeze 16 hours of juice out of its battery. In direct sunlight, with the backlight off, it should shoot up to 160 hours. There’s Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, a pile of sensors and accelerometers, GPS and an SD Card slot.

UK company Pendle Products has introduced a new Laptop Stand, said to be the first of many product releases. This stand lets users raise their laptop up whilst using a full size external mouse and keyboard and is said to be ideal for use alongside an external monitor, thereby increasing your workspace when you are at your desk.

With what’s said to be a unique laser cut design, the stand boasts super thin legs meaning that you can free up the space underneath for accessories such as external hard drives while slim rubber feet protect your desk surface. Plastic stops hold the laptop in place and the stand has holes cut into the sides for cables.

The Pendle range of laptop stands come in a choice of sizes, regular and large, and colours, black or white and can be used with or without an external monitor.

The Pendle regular laptop stand is suitable for 13-inch and 15-inch MacBooks, while the large is best suited for the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

According to the makers, the stands have been designed to be as solid and stable as possible. Wide legs promises great strength and stiffness and create a space for storing accessories such as external drives and mice. Large holes cut into the sides enable you to pass cables through to help keep your desk tidy.

Rubber feet prevent scratching of your desk, while plastic spheres prevent slippage when your MacBook is in use.

Manufactured in the UK from quality materials using precise laser cutting processes, the regular Pendle stand costs £42, the large is £48.

Denon has announced the launch of a new Blu-ray beast, informally dropping the S-5BD model number for a more manageable name – the Cara.

On the technical side, the device incorporates technology from its big brother models. Cara Blu-ray beast, offers 5.1 channel surround sound, two-source, two-room distribution capabilities which allows you to listen to music from two different sources. Besides, it supports BD-Live and HDMI 1.4.

Almost all the popular formats are supported by this device. Facilities like SD card slots as well as iPod/iPhone digital direct playback via the USB port needs special mentioning.

The name might be the only manageable thing about the device – its 7.8 kilogram heft certainly isn’t and it comes with a spec sheet (and no doubt manual) that will give you a headache, while its £1999 price tag will certainly make your wallet hurt.

Once upon a time, Acer gussied up some of its mid-range workhorse computers with hot-red paint jobs and affixed them with the vibrant equine sporting logo from Ferrari.

Now the name has been slapped on to a $600 notebook.

The Acer Ferrari One is essentially a tarted-up notbook*, an 11.6-inch model (with a 1366 x 768-pixel screen) that subs in a 1.2-GHz Athlon X2 for the usual Intel Atom and juices the specs with 4 gigs of RAM and a real (if low-end) video card (ATI’s Radeon 3200).

Main specs:

Processor and chipset AMD Athlon™ X2 dual-core processor L310, supporting AMD HyperTransport™ 3.0 technology, AMD M780G Chipset

Operating system Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium

Genuine Windows® 7 Home Basic

Memory Up to 4GB of DDR2 667/800 MHZ memory

HDD    160 GB or larger hard disk drive

Storage Multi-in-1 card reader: supporting Secure Digital™ (SD) Card, MultiMediaCard (MMC), Reduced-Size Multimedia Card (RS-MMC), Memory Stick™ (MS), Memory Stick PRO™ (MS PRO), xD-Picture Card™ (xD); supporting storage cards with adapter: miniSD™, microSD™, Memory Stick Duo™, Memory Stick PRO Duo™

Display 11.6” HD 1366 x 768 (WXGA) pixel resolution, high-brightness (200-nit) Acer CineCrystal™ LED-backlit TFT LCD

Graphics ATI Radeon™ HD 3200 Graphics with up to 2047 MB of HyperMemory™ (256+128 MB of dedicated system memory, up to 1663 MB of shared system memory), supporting Unified Video Decoder (UVD), OpenEXR High Dynamic-Range (HDR) technology, Shader Model 4.0, Microsoft® DirectX® 10, Dual independent display support, 16.7 million colors, MPEG-2/DVD decoding, WMV9 (VC-1)1 and H.264 (AVC) decoding

Audio ptimized 3rd Generation Dolby Home Theater® audio enhancement, featuring Dolby® Digital Live, Dolby® Pro Logic® IIx, Dolby® Headphone, Dolby® Natural Bass and Dolby® Sound Space Expander, Dolby® Inverse Filtering, Dolby® High Frequency Enhancer technologies, High-definition audio support, Two Built-in stereo speakers, S/PDIF support for digital speakers, MS-Sound compatible

The touchpad, flush with the palm rest, is curious. Its trapezoidal shape makes it a bit awkward in a world of rectangles, and it’s tricky to intuit where the pad ends and the palm rest begins — causing you to drag your fingertip off the edge a bit too often — but the multitouch implementation works well here. We wish we could say the same for the keyboard, which is a typically cheap affair (with Page Up/Down keys foolishly sandwiched in with the arrow buttons).

Displax, a Portugal-based company, promises to turn any surface — flat or curved — into a touch-sensitive display. The company has created a thinner-than-paper polymer film that can be stuck on glass, plastic or wood to turn it into an interactive input device.

The tech called projective capacitive touchscreen technology can turn virtually any surface into a touchscreen device for users to interact with.

The film, which is currently available in sizes from 7 inches (18cm) diagonal to a whopping 3m in diagonal, means information points, shop windows, and of course tablet computers like the newly announced Apple iPad are all ripe for the touching.

The film, which features a grid of nanowires embedded into it, is able to monitor when and where it is touched and relay those co-ordinates to a controller, which in turn is read by software – making the user believe they have interacted with the specific point in question on the screen.

The film can actually measure lots of disturbances it turns out, with current support for 16-finger multitouch on a 50-inch screen and future support up to 65 fingers at any one time coming in future developments. Furthermore the film can also measure airflow.

“Users could blow on the screen to interact with the interface”, says Miguel Fonseca, chief business officer. “Chances are when you use a tablet PC you’ll have it on your lap or near your face. You could blow on it to close the monitor, or blow out a candle in a game”.

The complete system depending on the customer-selected outer layer can resist impact, scratches, vandalism, heat, rain, snow, and ice or harsh cleaning fluids, making it well-suited for outdoor applications.

A couple of years ago we saw the beginnings of a brief but significant splurge of screenless MP3 players, most notably highlighted by the iPod shuffle. With a focus on portability and convenience, these are designed to be small and light enough to carry while exercising or on the move without having to dig out and lug around a more capable but more cumbersome player.

Cowon, makers of audiophile digital audio players like the D2 and S9, is teasing their new diminutive flash player, the E2. But what to makes of this “circle + square” slogan?

Since we don’t know anything about this keychain-esque DAP, we’re left to guess based on the interesting ad, with its repetition of the “circle + square” tag. Is it a lost-in-translation attempt at our “square peg in a round hole” idiom? A nod to the design of the gadget itself, which is, in fact, a circle combined with a square? Or a hint at the future aesthetic of Cowon’s players?

Anyway, 1.5 hours charge should get around 10 hours of playback from the E2, and this is controlled by similarly subtle buttons on the left and right. Power, volume adjustment and track search/skip controls are small, but well placed and responsive to the touch.

The E2 also includes a range of preset equalizer settings in the form of Cowon’s BBE+, accessible via a further button that doubles as a shuffle/repeat switch.

n fact the icons – which include a camera, USB thumb-drive, radio, door and coffee mug – are pretty confusing.  The most obvious explanation is that they suggest the iAudio E2 works as a USB memory stick as well as a media player, ideal for storing files and other information.

That’s all speculation, though, and we may have to wait and see exactly what Cowon have up their sleeves whenever they finally announce the curious DAP.

Sound quality, however, is very good, and though it often seems needlessly awkward to skip through a total of nine audio presets to find a setting that best suits the music being played, this gets easier with time. Provided you are prepared to replace the particularly poor pair of in-ear ‘buds supplied, the E2 is capable of performing very well. Audio aficionados will also be pleased to hear that it supports WMA, WAV, OGG and FLAC as well as MP3, and it’s available in a range of colours for those who like to coordinate.

Are you ready to redefine your mobile gaming experience?

Dell surprised many people with its announcement at CES that the next Alienware machine to join the company’s hardcore gaming line-up would be a tiny 11-incher that had more in common with a netbook than a traditional gaming PC, the Alienware M11x.

But despite its diminutive dimensions, the M11x crams rather a lot into its tiny chassis. It packs an Intel SU7300 Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a switchable 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT335M graphics card which can be turned on and off at whim, an 11.6-inch TFT display running at 1366 x 768 resolution, and a 250GB hard drive.

The Alienware M11x, with over 6.5 hours of battery life and weighing less than 4.5 lbs. will start at an amazing $799! Leave it to the folks at Alienware to enable truly mobile performance gaming at an affordable price.

Imagine being able to page through websites, write an email, flick through photos, or watch a movie. All on a big, beautiful, Multi-Touch screen, with just the touch of a finger!

Apple has confirmed that it will be launching the Wi-Fi enabled version of the iPad in the UK in March although has failed to set a price for the new tablet outside of the US.

See and touch your email in ways you never could before. In landscape, you get a split-screen view showing both an opened email and the messages in your inbox. To see the opened email by itself, turn iPad to portrait, and the email automatically rotates and fills the screen. No matter which orientation you use, you can scroll through your mail, compose a new email using the large, onscreen keyboard, or delete messages with nothing more than a tap and a flick.

The large Multi-Touch screen on iPad lets you see web pages as they were meant to be seen — one page at a time, with vibrant color and sharp text. So whether you’re looking at a page in portrait or landscape, you can see everything at a size that’s actually readable.

The large, high-resolution screen makes iPad perfect for watching any kind of video: from HD movies and TV shows to podcasts and music videos. Switch between widescreen and full screen with a double-tap. The YouTube app organizes videos so they’re easy to see and navigate. To watch one, just tap it. When you’re watching in landscape, the video automatically plays in full screen.

With the iPod app, all your music is literally at your fingertips. Browse by album, song, artist, or genre with a simple flick.

iPad has a 9.7-inch, LED-backlit IPS display with a remarkably precise Multi-Touch screen. And yet, at just 1.5 pounds and 0.5 inches thin, it’s easy to carry and use anywhere.

Right now, iPad can run almost 140,000 of the apps on the App Store. It can even run the apps you’ve already downloaded for your iPhone or iPod touch.

With pricing starting from $499 for the 16GB version and moving up through to to $599 for the 32GB model and then $699 for the 64GB in the US, at today’s exchange rates that would equal £309, £371 and £432 it the same prices carried over to Great Britain.