Nokia has decided that touchscreens need a makeover, and a wet one at that. Using water as a membrane in this concept handset, the phone's screen uses the liquid to raise and lower buttons in the relevant places. The main issue with touchscreens is the problem of accuracy when pressing the virtual keys. Haptic feedback, which produces vibration when the right area is hit, helps somewhat, but still doesn't allow for blind typing. Other capacitive options use slightly raised screens in places to help users, but these lose the lovely flush nature of devices like the Nokia 5800 and the Apple iPhone. The new concept can inflate and deflate as needed, which makes this gadget so futuristic it should be covered in foil and live on Mars. source

  AUSTRALIA has become the first Western nation to attempt censoring the internet. The government of the former British Penal Colony has developed an internet filtering system and is refusing to allow its citizens to opt out of it. Apparently the best that an average Australian can hope for is to be placed on a watered-down blacklist. But that means Internet content will be decided by a government department responsible for protecting the minds of all fair dinkum Aussies. The Austrian government is spending $125.8 million on its Plan for Cyber-Safety. When you have an account you can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks “illegal material”. However punters who think that the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether will be sadly mistaken. The Australian government is using he opportunity to delete any sites it thinks are not good for the health of the nation. Apparently this will allow porn, but could rule out sites that the government thinks should not be looked at, including controversial legal issues like legalising Marijuana or Euthanasia. It could also be used to stamp out legitimate protest sites whose members have a beef with the...

  SanDisk on Wednesday unveiled the Sansa slotMusic Player, its new MP3 player for listening to music on the go. According to the company, the plug & play, portable music player was specially designed for use with the new slotMusic cards available today in the United States. The company rolled out both a Sansa-branded player and new personalized, branded slotMusic players for popular artists such as Robin Thicke and ABBA -- both of which are shipping to U.S. stores today, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart and are expected to be available from retailers in Europe and other regions of the world in 2009. The Sansa slotMusic Player ($20) was made to play slotMusic card albums or a self-loaded microSD card full of music (and doesn’t require a PC, internet or any time spent managing music). In addition to slotMusic cards, the MP3 player can play songs from any microSD card with music encoded as MP3 and WMA (DRM-free only) files. The artist-branded slotMusic Player is a stylish, all-in-one player, which includes both the slotMusic card and a trendy player bearing an artist’s name and image. It weighs just over two ounces and measures 2.75” W x 1.4375” H x 1.4375” D. The player comes pre-loaded with an album on a 1GB slotMusic...

  Elephants are text messaging themselves out of trouble, thanks to an SMS system implemented in a Kenyan nature reserve. The gentle-ish giants are outfitted with SIM cards in their collars, which automatically alert wildlife rangers if they get too close to nearby farms. Rangers can then shoo them away before they do damage to interspecies relations by, say, eating the season's harvest. Pachyderm rescue group Save the Elephants started the scheme up after five elephants who refused to stop raiding crops had to be shot by the Kenya Wildlife Service. The project, still in its infancy, is expensive to implement and not without its troubles. But it's already saved the life of one regular crop fiend, a bull named Kimari who's been intercepted 15 times since he was first connected.

  Designer Alex Elias (Aleix Ingles Elias) has developed a concept communicator, which focuses on busynesswoman. This stylish mobile device design recalls vehicles HTC. It is designed in the form factor Slider Retractable bottom QWERTY-keyboard. At the same time, a sense of cumbersome did not create - Communicator looks fine. The characteristics of this concept was not discussed in detail, the designer tells only the existence of a touch screen and built-in camera. He also notes that the device is placed in a metal body, color - golden-brown and black keyboard - Bright.

  KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc prototyped the "Portable Viewer System," which wirelessly transmits an image stored in a mobile phone and displays it on a 13.1-inch color electronic paper display. "This is the first electronic paper that displays images stored in a mobile phone," the company said. The system transmits an image in a handset using infrared and displays it on an electronic paper display. The display only has a power button because a handset is used for all other operations. The company used an electronic paper display that employs Brigdestone Corp's Electronic Liquid Powder technology and renders 4,096 colors. It takes about 12 seconds for the display to redraw the entire image on the screen. In the finance and insurance areas, there has been a strong need for a tool that can display personal information and other data at an appropriate size while ensuring security of the information. The company developed this system, assuming that it would be used to display an almost full-scale A4 size pamphlet, for example, while ensuring high security using mobile phone functions such as remote lock and remote data...

  Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp. and the technology companies that so far have escaped the credit crisis relatively unscathed will lose out on as much as $170 billion in sales next year as the crunch catches up with them. Corporate spending on computers, software and communications equipment may be little changed or fall as much as 5 percent next year as the lending freeze spooks clients, said Jane Snorek, an analyst at First American Funds in Minneapolis who has followed the industry for 13 years. It would be the first decline in the $3.41 trillion market since 2001 after the dot-com bubble burst. ``Business kind of stopped dead in the last two weeks,'' said Snorek, whose firm owns Microsoft and Intel stock among more than $100 billion in assets. ``People are pushing off orders and saying, `I have no idea if we're going to have a global meltdown, so I'm not going to buy anything right now.''' While consumer spending growth slowed this year as the economy slumped, corporate budgets stayed fairly constant until now. Snorek said the collapse of financial-services customers, who account for a quarter of technology outlays, and a subsequent surge in interest rates persuaded clients to pare back. More data will emerge tomorrow when...

  We already knew that LG Prada II, a sequel to the first deisgner LG Prada phone is coming this year. And we also had a pretty good idea of what the LG Prada 2 specs and looks will be. Well, now, in it’s usual pre-announcement/official announcement way LG has pre-announced the new LG KF900 Prada 2 phone. The LG Prada II KF900 specs that LG confirmed so far include 7.2 Mbps HSDPA connectivity, 3″ touchscreen, side-sliding QWERTY keyboard, 5 megapixel camera, full HTML Web browsing and Wi-Fi connectivity. And we also have an official picture of LG KF900 Prada 2 phone, so we won’t have to keep guessing what the thing will look like: Seeing how the official Prada 2 spec list came close to the one we told you about back in April, I think it’s a good time to fill in the missing details: Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900). WCDMA 900/2100, 7.2 Mbps HSDPA connectivity 3″ WQVGA 400×240 px TFT touchscreen 5 megapixel camera front camera for video calls Wi-Fi b/g connectivity USB 2.0, Bluetooth Full HTML browsing FM-Radio TV-out microSDHC memory card slot (up to 8GB) slide-out QWERTY keyboard About the only thing missing in LG Prada II KF900 spec sheet seems to be a GPS sensor. And since there’s no...

  As more phones come with built-in GPS capabilities, importing smartphones into Egypt is proving increasingly difficult - thanks to local laws which restrict the use of GPS without a license. “GPS is allowed in Egypt but you must have a license after getting approval from security authorities,” Sherif Guinena, vice chairman of the National Telecommunication Regulator Agency (NTRA), told the Daily News Egypt newspaper. Anyone importing GPS capable phones - or any device using GPS facilities - faces having not only the unauthorised devices confiscated, but the entire stock belonging to the retailer or wholesaler. “There have been negotiations between us and the authorities to allow GPS commercial use but we didn’t reach anything yet,” added Mr. Guinena. Despite the ban on GPS capable phones, people still smuggle them into the country and use them illegally without a license. The government not only has people ignoring the law, but it also loses the revenues from import taxes on phones. There are also a lot of commercial companies making use of GPS functionality - although they still need to acquire a license from the security authorities. “Officially, any GPS-equipped device from Nokia is [barred] entry into the...

  Everyone has kind of expected this, but it’s surely good to hear an official confirmation: Nokia will soon come up with an Nseries touchscreen smartphone. As reported by Cellpassion, Devinder Kishore, Nokia India’s Director of Marketing, said during an event held in New Delhi: “We will have lots of touchscreen phones coming up, including an N-series device very soon.” This “very soon” might mean that the official unveiling of the full-touch Nseries will happen before the end of 2008. Great news for all Nokia and Symbian fans, indeed. The name of the first Nseries smartphone to come with a touchscreen display is not known for the moment, but it could very well be Nokia N97. A logical successor to N95 and N96. Almost certainly, the touchscreen Nseries device will run on the new Symbian S60 5th Edition OS, announced by Nokia at the same time with the 5800 XpressMusic. Since there is no word yet on how the first touchscreen Nseries looks like, I’ve combined the N96 with the interface of 5800, for a possible preview on the future smartphone: What do you think, could Nokia come up with something like this? :) Well, regardless of its design, the touchscreen Nseries will probably bring extra features when...

Orange has sent an internal memo to employees in the UK noting that they have suspended sales of the BlackBerry Bold due to ’software issues’. The suspension is simply an interim measure that Orange made in the best interests of their customers while RIM works away at a fix for the issues. The internal statement from Orange on the Bold: “Following reports of software issues with the BlackBerry Bold handset across a variety of mobile operators, Orange has decided to act in the interest of its customers by suspending shipments of the device in the UK. We are currently awaiting feed back from RIM as to when an industry wide fix for these issues will be in place, and expect this suspension to be an interim measure. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may cause you. BlackBerry/RIM are doing everything they can to resolve this issue and will be completing full testing and validation to ensure future handsets do not have any quality issues. This may take a couple of weeks so it’s up to us to do what’s best for our customers.” I have to admit, I’ve heard a lot of issues from friends and colleagues regarding the Bold. Spontaneous restarts and OS crashes are not uncommon. Even so, those that have experienced issues...