This is where the Moto X magic happens: a 455,000 square-foot factory in Fort Worth, Texas that formerly manufactured devices for Nokia. From start to finish, these human-manned assembly banks are where your Moto X Moto Maker creations are born, assembled, tested for quality and then shipped off. We'll have more to come from our big Texas excursion, but for now feast your eyes on this bit of mobile Americana. %Gallery-slideshow83719%
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google
The jury's still out on Lockheed Martin's F-35B fighter. The aircraft is expected to cost the US more than $1.5 trillion over its lifetime, and it's been described as being too heavy and too sluggish -- one critic has gone so far as to call the jet a "dog." One thing's for sure, though: the F-35 looks mighty impressive, especially when it's landing vertically on an aircraft carrier. In the dark. Click past the break for a look at Lockheed's trillion-dollar light show, courtesy of Uncle Sam.
Filed under: Transportation
Source: Lockheed Martin (YouTube)
Optical engineering is something that we take for granted these days, with almost every smartphone packing its very own camera for our convenience. But if you take a look at the delicate structure inside a mobile camera module, you may appreciate the technology more every time you snap a shot. Like this cut-out diagram of the Nokia Lumia 1020's camera, for instance: you can see how the six lens elements and other tiny parts are tightly packed together above the 41-megapixel sensor. The elements are actually a combination of five plastic lenses plus one glass lens, with the reason being a taller module would've been made if all the lenses were made of glass.
And to enable optical image stabilization, ball bearings are used to counteract hand movement -- there's one near the bottom right corner of the above image. Luckily, the module is also designed to withstand normal drops, so neither the bearings nor lenses would fall out of place unless you try really hard. One more shot after the break to compare sensor sizes.
Check out all the news from today's Nokia event at our hub!
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Nokia
Source: Twitter Blog
What happens when you take 200 Lumia 820s and pin them to a wall? You get a 12,000 x 6,400-pixel display, natch. This week at Build 2013 in San Francisco, Nokia and Microsoft teamed up to show this tiled monitor made of identical phones each running the same custom-built app. A master handset is used to control what's on the wall by communicating with each phone over WiFi (IP multicast). One demo was showing a massive animated grid of live tiles representing a selection of apps from the Windows Phone store. In another demo, the wall was displaying Bing Maps (using Here data) and being controlled interactively by the master handset. Take a look at our gallery below.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia
We like dry erase whiteboards just as much as the next guy, but $15,000 like? Not so much. Of course, when we're given a chance to check out an 84-inch 4K LED whiteboard for free, we're more than happy to. And that's how we ended up here at Westinghouse's Consumer Electronics Week booth, playing around with an unbelievably expensive toy. Yes, of course the multimillion dollar corporations of the world use stuff like this for work -- we used our time to draw an Engadget symbol. Do you expect any less?
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD
There's plenty to look at around the E3 show floor this year, but few if any of the shiny new products have actually been to space. Pretty sad, if you ask us. Thankfully, SpaceX was on hand, showing off one of its Dragon capsules in the parking lot of the Los Angeles Convention Center. The unit that was on display was the first to reach the ISS, bringing along some sundries for the crew, but nothing particularly vital -- after all, it was a sort of test run.
All went well, and the unit landed in the Pacific Ocean, within five kilometers of the company's calculations. Not too shabby. Of course, the thing burnt to a crisp in the process, with a marshmallow-like blackening of its edges (which is pretty evident in the gallery below). We couldn't get too close, sadly, due to the protective ropes bearing a "Don't Pet the Dragon" sign. After all, we don't want any showgoers turning into the Fantastic Four.
Instead of its typical pre-show E3 press conference, Nintendo opted to open up its exhibition booth to journalists a bit early this year, teasing a few Wii U games, such as Pikmin 3 and the long-awaited Super Mario 3D World. Much to the amusement of attendees, Koichi Hayashida, the director of that latter title, joined journalists "dressed as a cat," as you can see in the image above. There were meows and everything. Such is our reward for an unusually long wait for the abbreviated event to kick off.
We've seen the prototypes that led Google to Glass, but there are many devices that predate Mountain View's smart specs, and Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California was able to gather and display a historic number of such headsets this week. From Steve Mann's handmade WearComp 1 and EyeTap prototypes to Glass-like precursors from Optinvent and Vuzix, it's quite the comprehensive collection -- over thirty devices in all. While they may make their way into a museum some day, we're bringing pictures of them all to your screen right now. Enjoy.
Following some important pricing details, preorder launches and some concrete hardware specs, we've just got to play with the new Jolla phone. Sure, we've already toyed with the software, but today's event is all about the new physical home for the Sailfish OS. It could be a difficult sell in the cutthroat world of smartphones, there's certainly something compelling in Jolla's split design and all those of color options, regardless of what functionality they might add in the future.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
