An intensely granular, gripping look inside Toshiba's Dynario fuel-cell

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/01/an-intensely-granular-gripping-look-inside-toshibas-dynario-fu/

We won't pretend that we weren't excited when Toshiba finally launched its long talked about Dynario fuel-cell -- the first of its kind for consumer electronics. If you don't know already, the direct methanol fuel-cell (DMFC) boasts its own fuel cartridge (which takes approximately 20 seconds to fill) with a concentrated methanol solution, resulting in its ability to charge USB devices on the go. Well, Tech-On's gotten a hold of one of these bad boys, and they've taken plenty of photos of its innards, allowing us a unique opportunity to see what its all about. A few interesting observations they make: the cell itself -- which sells for ¥29,800 (about $328) -- is definitely worth the money. Tech-On claims that the manufacturing and components alone are estimated at costing around ¥30,000. There's a lot more to see, so hit the source link -- and there's also one more interesting shot after the break.

Continue reading An intensely granular, gripping look inside Toshiba's Dynario fuel-cell

An intensely granular, gripping look inside Toshiba's Dynario fuel-cell originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New Form of Touchscreen Displays Pioneered, Extremely Multi-Touch [Touchscreen]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/lm2IZMG0wb4/new-form-of-touchscreen-displays-pioneered-extremely-multi+touch

You've heard of resistive touchscreens, and hopefully you've been fortunate enough to own a capacitive touchscreen phone. But have you heard of Interpolating Force-Sensitive Resistance, or I.F.S.R touchscreen technology? Touchco hopes you soon will.

A bunch of scientists at New York University's Media Research Lab have grouped together to form Touchco, which is working on the aforementioned I.F.S.R technology. They want to create touchscreens which are even more multi-touch enabled than we've seen so far, capable of receiving simultaneous touch inputs. Apparently these touchscreens can be produced very cheaply, with Touchco hoping to sell them for $10 a square foot.

As you can see from the photo above, these touchscreens are very flexible, and don't require much power—making them ideal for ereaders, laptops and netbooks. [NYT Bits blog]

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National Geographic shoves every morsel of its collection onto 160GB HDD

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/30/national-geographic-shoves-every-morsel-of-its-collection-onto-1/

Care to get up close and personal with Niihau? How's about an overview of Tuvalu? Surely you need a helicopter shot of Pakatoa Island to get your morning started right, yeah? If so, and you're too lazy to hit up the World Wide Web, there's a better-than-average chance that an older National Geographic magazine has exactly the elixir you're searching for. Problem is, sifting through every single issue since 1888 takes a fair bit of time -- time you'd rather be spending in an obnoxiously long security line as you await your flight to Ushuaia. Thanks to "modern technology" and "storage innovations," said quandary can now be resolved quite simply. Nat Geo is offering every last piece of information it has ever published on a portable 160GB HDD, and amazingly 100GB is free for you to manually add to the collection. Too bad this $199.95 device wasn't available before Christmas, but hey, at least you've now got something to blow those Santa Bucks on.

National Geographic shoves every morsel of its collection onto 160GB HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GSM call encryption code cracked, published for the whole world to see

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/29/gsm-call-encryption-code-cracked-published-for-the-whole-world/

Did you know that the vast majority of calls carried out on the 3.5 billion GSM connections in the world today are protected by a 21-year old 64-bit encryption algorithm? You should now, given that the A5/1 privacy algorithm, devised in 1988, has been deciphered by German computer engineer Karsten Nohl and published as a torrent for fellow code cracking enthusiasts and less benevolent forces to exploit. Worryingly, Karsten and his crew of merry men obtained the binary codes by simple brute force -- they fed enough random strings of numbers in to effectively guess the password. The GSM Association -- which has had a 128-bit A5/3 key available since 2007, but found little takeup from operators -- has responded by having a whinge about Mr. Nohl's intentions and stating that operators could just modify the existing code to re-secure their networks. Right, only a modified 64-bit code is just as vulnerable to cracking as the one that just got cracked. It's important to note that simply having the code is not in itself enough to eavesdrop on a call, as the cracker would be faced with just a vast stream of digital communications -- but Karsten comes back to reassure us that intercepting software is already available in customizable open source varieties. So don't be like Tiger, keep your truly private conversations off the airwaves, at least for a while.

GSM call encryption code cracked, published for the whole world to see originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 04:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung's Pinetrail-boasting N220 netbook spied in France

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/29/samsungs-pinetrail-boasting-n220-netbook-spied-in-france/

We've been seeing a fair amount of netbooks equipped with Intel's Pinetrail processors since they were announced early last week, and it looks like we're going to be seeing at least one from Samsung in the very near future. This one -- the N220 -- was just spotted in France. The 10.1-incher packs (as you'd expect) an Atom N450 CPU, GMA 3150 graphics, 1GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive, b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth, plus a webcam and a 6 cell battery which should supposedly get around eleven and a half hours of battery life. It comes with Windows 7 installed, and as you can see from the photo, one of the available colors will be glossy green. It's going for 350 euros in France, so, if the price stays comparable when (and if it) hits North American soil, we can expect it to cost somewhere in the realm of $500.

Samsung's Pinetrail-boasting N220 netbook spied in France originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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